Carrie:
"And that's precisely the problem--what do we do with the unfortunate insane until a better system comes along?"
Well, step 1 is to be very, very careful not to be blackmailed by the present system.
Frank:
"One possible advantage of the death penalty is the additional scrutiny it brings to the criminal justice system."
IMHO, it tends to be a little scrutiny, which doesn't last long. Almost on a par with somebody being shocked at a botched hanging, and raising humanitarian funds to better train hangmen.
Dave Bell ::: (view all by) ::: December 09, 2005, 07:00 AM:
"Carlos, there's a difference between "income" and whatr money sticks at the end of the day."
"The figures suggest those sweatshop workers earn aroung $10,000 per year, but they buy from a company store to eat -- how do those prices compare -- and are paying off huge fees to employment agencies.
Which is better? $10000 for a year of 70-hour weeks, or $5700 for a year of 40-hour weeks?
The sweatshop makes the per capita figure look better. So what?"
Actually those figures imply nothing of the kind, any more than antebellum USA slave state per capita figures said much about the lives of slaves. And presumably with locked compounds, these workers were not exactly participating in a free market, except as property.
Not to mention how company stores and other trick can make one's paycheck turn negative, when all is said and done.
James, Scott - there is such a scene, but it's not in 'Clear and Present Danger', it's in the SDI novel ('Cardinal of the Kremlin'?).
Charlie, and that the administration's flunkies haven't yet decided that 'writer' falls under 'journalist, terorist, etc.'.
I'd really hate to have a lot of money bet on that
not happening in the next few years.
Thanks, Nancy. And it was so irritating because everybody's had experiences of being deliberately squeezed, or just incompetanted by higher-ups.
Greg, that's good. But do you hassle people in the street in front of your house? Have you burned down the house of a creep with whom you had a previous dispute, because you didn't feel like making the effort to find the guy who *did* burglarize your house? Have you started sucking up to some local gang members, because they'd be 'your SOB's'? et cetera.
BTW - the parts of this thread about controlling the cities are, IMHO, a little bit literal. The whole point of Byrd's reference to the rise of the Nazi Party was that the genius lay in a revolution from within the state apparatus.
You control the cities by controlling the federal and state governments, as always, by controlling the mass media (not totally, that's not needed), with the backing of large-scale economic actors (i.e., multinational corps, some foundations), and with religious leaders (who don't have to be in the majority, but insensely political and committed).
There was a thriller a while back, about Air Force One. At one point a reporter tells the commander of that unit that 'they want to destroy Air Force One'. The commander asks who, and by what method - a bomb? The reporter looks blank for a minute, and replies that 'they' are people in Congress, and the method of destruction would be budget cuts.
And that's where the GOPtists come in. They preach that what is required by the Fed is actually required by God, and that those who oppose it oppose God. They also set up a lot of federally-funded operations, and say that they can take care of things better than the government could. The appointees of the government will agree, and those bureaucrats who disagree will be replaced by more aggreable people.
These operations don't have to perform as well as the federal government, of course - the necessary data will be generated, and (again, of course) those who insist on rigorous data and analysis are probably Latte-Sipping Blue Stater Eviloooshunists.
This gives the GOPtists lots of money, little accountability, and increased social and political power.
"Maybe you meant to type Juden, but maybe not. I'm trying to imagine an organization called the Hitler-Jews. It isn't wokring."
Log Cabin Club.
I thought that the supporters of the 'death tax repeal' had not been able to come up with a single case of a family farm being sold or broken up because of it?
"Apart from Krugman's being being a most notorious partisan on this issue - perhaps no more or less opinionated than others but certainly most notoriously partisan - I'd say the citation is not dealing with the basics but arguing for certain conclusions on the basis of facts not in evidence."
Is 'notorious partisan' anything like 'shrill'?
I find this an interesting phrase.
"Teresa Nielsen Hayden :::
"Oh, dear. Should I apologize for designing all those text-intensive t-shirts? They're pretty much guaranteed to get your chest stared at, especially if you're dealing with a slow or myopic reader."
No, but if you ever come out with those braille t-shirts, much bad karma will head your way :)
"we’re leaving Park Slope and moving three stops south to Sunset Park, trading our dingy cramped apartment in a building held together with paint for a large, light-filled, and freshly renovated row house about ten doors down from the hills and weeping angels of Green-Wood Cemetery."
So it looks like you're moving up in the world. Hopefully, that 'three stops' means closer to work, and not further away.
Now, if your previous lodgings were not so good, should the city building inspector's office be notified, so that they could 'help' the landlord get the building up to code before the sale? After all, it shouldn't cost much :)
Jonathan Vos Post:
"Also, there was discussion over Samuel Adams beers and lobster rolls at the ICCS 2004 about Abu Gharib torture. One government-connected researcher told me:
"On the one hand, everyone held long term at Abu Gharib is, at a minimum, a murderer, as opposed to those rounded up and released soon."
Jonathan, your source made the mistake of assuming high levels of both competancy and efficiency. Remember that the US armed forces are said to be critically short of translators, that many of Saddam's records were destroyed, and others given over to Chalabi. That there was no planning [on the part of the units involved, or the Pentagon] for any post-war situation other than 'rice and flowers and back to the States'. That the sort of on-the-ground-and-in-the-alleys inel needed to sort people is precisely what we don't have. That there are a multitude of reasons for somebody being named as a terrorist (money, revenge, belief in rumors, desire to curry favor, fear of consequences of not naming someboy, actual knowledge). That productivity might very well be measured by prisoner counts, confessions, and names given [under torture].
What that all adds up to is that a reasonable organization could hold a very large number of people for quite a while, while sorting through the mess. And nothing that's come out in the past month or so indicates reasonableness.
Clark, it's not surprising the the Florida Supreme Court wouldn't mention the GOP riot. IMHO, the Florida Supreme Court (and appeals courts in general) are supposed to consider only points of law raised. They aren't to re-judge facts, and in this case charges hadn't even been filed, let alone brought into a lower court.
And as for the '..more inclined to keep my guns...', please note that the Bush administration has successfully imprisoned US citizens on pure executive branch discretion, and is one US Supreme Court decision away from establishing that as unassailble procedure. It has also (IIRC) established Guantanamo, a territory under US government control, as not being under US court jurisdiction. With no problems from the NRA. This is, IMHO, a very uncomfortable situation.
And please note the Attourney General 'down with the Magna Carta!' Ashcroft doesn't seem to be worried about the second amendment getting in the way of an administration which clearly doesn't like the Bill of Rights.
Your guns won't help you.
They probably want to make sure that Saddam is very, very well broken before they put him in front of public cameras.
If he decided to be rebellious during his trial, and took the stand in his own defense, he could cause the administration a lot of trouble. It's known that Cheney did business with Saddam during the 1990's (through a 'condom', a Halliburton subsidiary). I'm sure that there's a large boatload of other ties between Saddam and BushCo, not only during the 1980's, but the 90's as well - these guys are so corrupt that they couldn't pass up some high-profit margin deals.
Clark E Myers:
"There is a distinction between rust belt factory towns and farm towns in where title to means of production (and ownership for the leveraged) traditionally rests - easier to blow away with just your lunch box than leaving your family land with your debts intact and your farm gone. "
Clark, when a factory town goes, most people who leave with just a lunch box (or just a car with a full trunk) do so for the same reason that a farm family would - because they lost everything else.
When a factory town goes, people have houses which aren't worth the property tax, business which go bankrupt. And skills/connections which will now get minimum wage, on a good day.
About 60 miles north of where I live is Flint, Michigan, which was a General Motors town. One industry, one company. It was devastated in the 1970's and 80's. In the early 90's, I worked with people who'd carpool 60 miles for a $5/hr security guard job. Because there was nothing like it available in Flint.
"My mind must not work the way all of yours do: the first thing I thought of was that they'd been tracking book purchases and found a lot of almanacs going to names on lists, or to places where they think terrorists are training. I'm more appalled at the idea they keep track of book purchases (and yes, I know they've been doing it and that good bookstores refuse to let them look at the records) than by the portrayal of agents as so uncreative as to focus on almanacs."
Posted by: Kris Hasson-Jones on December 30, 2003 05:40 PM
If Al Qaida & Co are so naive as to not erase the tracks of retail purchases, then we're pretty much home-free in terms of eliminating them.
Spreading cash purshases across multiple stores (in cities that one doesn't reside in) is a pretty elementary precaution.
"But they aren't acting intelligently, really; they're acting in a way that functions to destroy American security and power."
Posted by: Graydon on October 30, 2003 03:49 PM
Think of it this way, Graydon. They're parasites, to a large degree. In a healthy system, there are limits to what they can do. The present US system hasn't been healthy for a while (somebody made a comment about them tasking twenty years to trash the press for Watergate). The US system ~2000 AD would have let them get away with a lot; 9/11 acted like a shock to an already weakened system.
So we end up with parasites who face a lowered level of resistance from the host.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2006 | 1 |
| 2005 | 9 |
| 2004 | 8 |
| 2003 | 20 |
| 2002 | 1 |
Total: 39 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Barry@yahoo.com:
Show all comments by Barry@yahoo.com.