09:42 – I have another modest proposal for Obama. Instead of wasting all those Tomahawk missiles on Syria, he should instead employ them where they’d do some real good. I’d be happy to work with Barry to come up with a prioritized list of targets, but off the top of my head I’d suggest targeting the big email and telephone spamming operations, credit card scammers, and of course federal and state government, starting with the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court and working down to all 50 states’ governors’ mansions and legislatures. If there are any Tomahawks left, I have many other worthwhile targets to suggest, including CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, and most particularly Al Jazeera. Come to think of it, Obama may already have FoxNews on his target list.
Saturday, 7 September 2013
21 Comments and discussion on "Saturday, 7 September 2013"
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Amazing is it not (well, really quite predictable). News item today in LA Time about DoJ Civil Rights Division opening up a probe into LA County jails on insufficiently coddling of inmates. Yes, and not one telephone spammer in any jail, anywhere. Last statistic that I saw in the past fortnight was 178,000 complaints per month about telephone spamming. No wonder they don’t have time to prosecute as they are spending all their time on taking complaints.
Definitely a good target selection. The trick is: You have to make certain that Congress is in session, and that all of the important lobbyists, staffers and hangers on are present.
I read today that Congress wants to prohibit the NSA from putting backdoors into encryption algorithms. Congress the clueless: they apparently haven’t notices that the NSA regularly lies to Congress, and generally ignores any sort of laws that would restrict it’s activities. If Congress were actually serious, they would start by having the entire NSA leadership prosecuted, and proceed from there. Of course, Congress hasn’t got the balls to do anything of the sort…
I see your moderate proposal and raise you: add the NYT, WSJ, Boston Glob, Washington Post, etc. And then borrow Mossad and SAS operators to purge our armed forces of the obscene surplus of generals and admirals. Ditto on most police department brass around the country. And we seem to have forgotten banksters, financial speculators and the like, parasites.
Saw Mrs. OFD for about a half-hour just now, back from Florida, and now off for three weeks to northern Kalifornia with her mom. Gorgeous day again here today on the Bay, where, incidentally, I had the great good fortune and honor to meet Nadia Solzhenitsyn, DIL of you-know-who and his three grandchildren, Katya, Ivan and Anna, all of whom live not fah from here in their grandfather’s house. They were learning paddle- and kite-boarding on the Bay here. A fine day for it, too.
Why would you take out FoxNews? They are the only nation wide news service that I can stand other than http://www.drudgereport.com .
The NSA now apparently has a 50+ billion dollar annual budget. That is more than the IRS. I suspect that they have files on all of us with any political figure having a bigger file.
Fox News is Faux Nooz. Neocon rubbish, spewed by eye-candy fluff. Drudge is OK for breaking stuff but way too much National Enquirer junk, which the lefty online rag Salon also does.
Tee-vee and nooz-papers are dying or dead.
FoxNews is the same as Al Jazeera, except that FN is a fundie christian mouthpiece and AJ is an islamic mouthpiece. We don’t need theocratic news organizations.
I can’t imagine why the NSA would have dossiers on any of us.
That’s right; if I, as a Roman Catholic traditionalist, want theocratic news, I go to EWTN or the Vatican site. Frankly, this doesn’t happen often; I’m mainly interested in old news when it comes to this stuff. Although we could be looking at a record turnout in St. Peter’s square against the latest neocon adventure in Syria.
NSA may have files on us but they’re being held in abeyance until the Stalinist regime has consolidated its rule and they’ve gone through all the high roller and bigwig oppositionists they can liquidate. Our turn will come at the hands of Stasi-type neighbors who dime us out, and then we’ll be put against a nearby wall and shot out of hand.
Did you not see where the NRA and ACLU are suing the NSA for creating a national gun registry?
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/320357-nra-claims-nsa-illegally-created-a-gun-database
FoxNews is not Christian. It panders to the Christian audience though. It is all about the money baby!
BTW, I bought a Remington bucket (1400 bullets) of .22 LR at Academy yesterday for $65 + TTL. They had four buckets when I got there limited to one per person.
http://www.gandermountain.com/modperl/product/details.cgi?i=692057
No .44 specials. No .38 +P. Lots of .40 FMJ.
Which reminds me; I had said I’d get out and research the ammo situation here in the Retroville area and I haven’t done it yet; I’ll get on that this next week.
“I can’t imagine why the NSA would have dossiers on any of us.”
Because they can. Makework. Because of what you or OFD might do in the foreseeable.
At least half the people are a danger to civilised society. More than half if you count SteveF.
“$65 + TTL”
TTL? Time To Live?
TTL = Tax, Title and License
It was a joke. When you buy bullets, all you have to pay is state and city sales tax (6.25% + 2.00%). When you buy a car here in Texas, you gotta pay TTL which is state sales tax (6.25%), Title (about $100) and License (about another $100).
At least half the people are a danger to civilised society. More than half if you count SteveF.
We will start the revolution when it hits 2/3rds.
all you have to pay is state and city sales tax (6.25% + 2.00%)
Here in TN we pay 7.75% state plus 2.0% local. Like TX we have no income tax unless you count that nasty Hall Tax on dividends and interest which most of the politicians don’t count as they make their money from graft and kickbacks and that is not taxed.
What is really annoying is that food is taxed at the same rate. Highly annoying and a very regressive tax for lower income brackets. Food is not a luxury and feeding a family of four costs about the same regardless of your income bracket. The poor effectively pay more in taxes.
When I moved here from TX I was shocked when I bought my first gallon of milk. Those three dollar bills I pulled from my pocket were not enough to pay for the $2.99 gallon of milk. The state tax then was 6.25%.
Even food purchased with a state issued debit card (food stamps) is taxed. Thus the state is reducing the amount of money provided to the people by almost 10%. The state is taxing themselves. Amazing stupidity. Although I think, but cannot confirm, that some of that food stamp money comes from the federal government and the state taxing purchases using that money allows the state to claim almost 10% of that federal money for themselves.
Shortly after I arrived the governor got a “temporary” increase in the state tax to 7.25% with the additional money going to the schools. 25 years later that temporary tax is still in place. No tax, or tax increase, is ever temporary.
Lottery here is another issue with the money going to the schools. Well, it does, sort of. The state used funny logic in the process. Say a school had a one million dollar budget with the money coming from the state. Now the state earns enough from the lottery to pay the school $500,000. The state gives that money as they stated they would to the school. But, since the school is now receiving $500,000 from the lottery the state cuts the rest of the funding in half. That little tidbit about not reducing other funding the schools was left out of the lottery proposal. I pointed this out at a local meeting and was promptly told by the state representative that I did not understand how state funding worked. Well, I did, he didn’t.
I think a sales tax is much more fair than income tax if you don’t tax food, utilities and medical. You spend, you pay.
Our Goods and Services Tax was originally meant to cover almost everything, including food. But to get the tax through the Senate deals had to be done, and food was excluded. The feminists wanted tampons and such excluded because they are “essential”, various other things were bargained for. I think it should have been on everything, just to keep it simple and to stop rorts.
I don’t see why food shouldn’t be taxed. It’s somewhat regressive, but it encourages preparing food at home and if you want to go to a fancy restaurant and eat the best food and quaff nice plonk then you will pay more.
I will respond appropriately as soon as I figure out if I have just been insulted.
A knock-on effect of the recent revelations on NSA (and FBI and DEA and a bunch of others) snooping is that some “dissatisfied elements” have shut up, at least on the public forums. None of the specific revelations concerning snooping is a surprise on the security-oriented mailing lists I’m on, though the extent, scope, and pervasiveness were unexpected to all but the most paranoid. They do come as a surprise on the more politically-oriented forums I read, and I’ve noticed an increase in outrage but a decrease in detailed planning.
As I’ve stated here and elsewhere, one man shooting a tyrant or a myrmidon is a criminal. A million is a movement.
One dissatisfied man, thinking he’s alone in his discontentment, will probably just sit and stew. He probably won’t go out and string up a tyrant because it would be pointless One million individual, dissatisfied men, thinking they’re alone, will likely do the same.
One man who can freely voice his opinion will probably find others who think the same. If enough come together, you might have a movement.
One million discontented individuals who are afraid to voice their discontent where others might hear will not form a movement. Brainwashing children to inform on their parents is unreliable. Paying spies to infiltrate meetings is expensive. It’s better to be able to automatically monitor all communications. It’s better yet to let everybody think that you can monitor all communications whether or not you actually can.
The American government has learned pragmatic lessons from the Russian and Chinese Communists. Are you proud of your government yet?
This regime is modeling itself on the Bolsheviks and Barry Soetero is essentially the KGB’s (Putin’s) station chief in the U.S. There was basically a coup in 2008 and more people are beginning to understand this. They love it that there’s a terrible mess developing in Syria, after the previous terrible messes in Libya and Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan. They’re also not too concerned about destroying this country’s economy and having it sustain mass die-offs, especially in the big cities. The huge increase in their ability to monitor all communications and the increased use of drones are just tools in their arsenal. They don’t have to set up trains taking people away to camps and executions by the hundreds of thousands; they can apply repression on an ad-hoc basis to specific regions and groups and let it serve as an example.
But they’re facing potential major catastrophes that may upset their apple-cart at some point, whether a general default, natural disasters, another terrorist attack, whatever, that could tend to collapse the government, especially if there is no more money to pay for anything, although smart economists tell me this will never happen and we have just tons and tons of cash forever.
Interesting times ahead; note that whatever they say, they’ll do the opposite, and that what they say this week? They’ll say the opposite a month from now and no one will notice or care.
No tax, or tax increase, is ever temporary.
Truer words were never said brother.
And yes, raw food is not taxed here in the Great State of Texas. Only prepared food is taxed. And Food Stamps come from the USA government, from the Department of Agriculture, about 4/5 of their budget if I remember correctly.
Occasionally taxes are repealed. In Australia in the Seventies and Eighties most states got rid of their death duties. IIRC Queensland started it – many people from the southern states migrated there to retire, and the then government decided to encourage that trend by getting rid of death duties. I don’t know if every state followed, but at least some of them were forced to to reduce retiree flight.
Unprepared food here is often GST free, for example milk. But flavoured milk gets the GST and is really expensive. I just get flavouring and add it to plain milk at home.
Mass. had the easiest and fairest arrangement, IMO—even though people think of it as a high-tax state: if it goes in your mouth or you wear it, it is not taxed. When I lived there, sales tax was only 5%. In spite of the Mass. reputation, I paid more in tax in Minnesota—on all fronts—than in Mass. Not sure if that would still be true, as it has been awhile.
Actually, I am shocked by how many people around me have EBT cards. Gas stations are now advertising that they accept them. Being semi-retired (not working fulltime, through no desire of my own), I often wonder if I would qualify for the food stamps and assistance.