News from the US : nothing but scandal
Imagine 30 heavily armed federal officers storming into your business, seizing your goods and providing no reason why. A nightmare for any business—and a reality for Gibson Guitars.
“Our business has been injured to the tune of millions of dollars,” Gibson chairman and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz told Heritage in 2011 after $1 million of ebony, rosewood, and finished guitars from the factories were seized.
In September 2011, members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee requested answers from the Departments of Justice and Interior, but the Obama Administration responded with no real information about the raid itself.
Last August, Gibson Guitars ultimately settled on a $300,000 penalty and donated $50,000 to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation because “the alternative was pretty onerous,”
via heritage.org. As the expression goes, начинают иметь проблемыi.
Hundreds of federal employees were given advance word of a Medicare decision worth billions of dollars to private insurers in the weeks before the official announcement, a period when trading in the shares of those firms spiked.
via. The bureaucracy meanwhile acquires fringe benefits. Paralegal at first, outright illegal soon enough.
A bipartisan group of senators is calling on the Environmental Protection Agency to answer for leaking the personal data of about 80,000 farmers and ranchers to left-wing environmental groups.
“The EPA’s disclosure of personal information is not the first time sensitive data has been leaked to outside organizations under the Obama administration,” said South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune.
via. Again, problems.
WASHINGTON (CBSDC) – Uncovered documents show the U.S. State Department may have covered up allegations of illegal behavior ranging from sexual assaults to an underground drug ring.
CBS News reports that is has unearthed documents from the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), an internal watchdog agency, that implicate the State Department in a series of misconducts worldwide.
via. Meanwhile back at the ranch, more advantages.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A contractor at the National Security Agency who leaked details of top-secret U.S. surveillance programs dropped out of sight in Hong Kong on Monday ahead of a likely push by the U.S. government to have him sent back to the United States to face charges.
Edward Snowden, 29, who provided the information for published reports last week that revealed the NSA's broad monitoring of phone call and Internet data from large companies such as Google and Facebook, checked out of his Hong Kong hotel hours after going public in a video released on Sunday by Britain's Guardian newspaper.
The disclosures by Snowden have sent shockwaves across Washington, where several lawmakers called on Monday for the extradition and prosecution of the ex-CIA employee who was behind one of the most significant security leaks in U.S. history.
And on it goes, and on it goes, and on it goes. So make the argument, I'm curious to hear it :
- The US is not a rogue state because < insert answer here ; go into detail >.
- US citizens are not responsible for the malfeasance of their elected government (to a significantly higher degree than peoples who had hostile governments imposed upon them manu militari, such as Nazi Germans, random civillians killed by the US military in Vietnam, random civillians bombed in Serbia etc etc), and will not have to answer for their criminal conduct supporting said government because < insert answer here ; go into detail >.
- The current US president is not in the same situation as famous cleptocrats such as for instance Manuel Noriega, and should not be kidnapped by some foreign power, tried and jailed indefinitely because < insert answer here ; go into detail >.
Really curious to see what could be argued on these. Seriously now. And no, the kidnapping of the IMF chief on manufactured charges has not been forgotten either, nor any of a lengthy list of crimes. So long, in fact, that I doubt any criminal government in the history of the world actually has the length to match.
What now ?
———- "Begin to have problems". [↩]
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
roughly 56 percent of Americans believe it is “acceptable” for the spy agency to secretly collect the telephone call records of millions of Americans
Maybe its the fluoride in the water?
Maybe its the fast food?
Maybe its the high fructose corn syrup?
Maybe people are just stupid?
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
Or maybe it's just easier that way. And if they gas some jews too, hey, what the hell. At least the rents go down.
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
The current US president is not in the same situation as famous cleptocrats such as for instance Manuel Noriega, and should not be kidnapped by some foreign power, tried and jailed indefinitely because he's really fucking stupid, had absolutely no clue what was going on, the real culprits (tm) were just dragging him by his nose catering to his misplaced vanity.
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
Ok Dubya, nucularly speaking you got a point there.
Nobody's ever responsible for anything because fundamentally speaking everyone's an idiot. And if not, anyone can certainly play the idiot should circumstances demand. Solid AAA would do business again.
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
Seems legit.
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
Just because he sounds like Hitler doesn't mean he's Hitler. Did you read that btw or coincidence ?
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
You mean civil war? Us arrested Noriega.
I doubt someone would arrest king of the fools, his highfoolness himself.
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
Orly. Gibson and other guitar brands were some of the major supporters of the PIPA/SOPA crap US politicians were trying to push around a year ago or so. Can't say I feel sorry for them after that.
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
@spyked Kinda besides the point, innit. It's not about feeling sorry for them, sorry dun enter into it. Nobody may brandish guns at merchants. Guns are to be pointed at the poor exclusively.
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
Fair enough -- and, surely you could find more alarming examples of USG bureaucratic hijinks. But we hardly have a monopoly on bad government. http://bit.ly/Pk7Y4c
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
Romania doesn't quite propose itself as either an arbiter of other nation's affairs or some sort of world gendarme. This difference is quite important : a guy who doesn't wash in his own home is quite not comparable to a guy who doesn't wash breaking into people's houses to lecture about hygene, all the while spreading lice and fleas everywhere.
It is a lot more expensive to eliminate infestations once started than to just put the bum in stocks. This public interest is actually the driving force, it appears increasingly evident the current US will simply have to be destroyed in order to contain the spread of the various pestilences they currently exist to represent.
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
>Did you read that
I can't read Sputnik.
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
I'm sure the "current US" will destroy itself eventually, if by destroy you mean transform. Power will devolve back to states and local gov't over time, as the strong forces of local interest overcome the weak gravity of federal policy (and as colonial adventures become increasingly costly). The infection is self-regulating. I just hope that some backward-ass country like Romania does not expand to fill the power vacuum. ;-)
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
Ya well, what appears to the jingoworld as "backward ass" often enough turns out to have been there for thousands of years, living quite harmoniously within its environment. Like Romania, or like the Cherokee nation.
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
My point is, any group of people (if motivated by some collective messianic delusion) are more or less equally obnoxious in proportion to their resources and the strength of the delusion.
As a defense, according to my genome data it is likely that some small part of my ancestry is Romanian.
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
Haha I never heard of a racial defense. But yes, fully agreed : the obnoxiousness of zealots is a function of their zealotry and resourcess and not particulalry related to onomastics.
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
Both groups currently reside in areas distant of their urheimat? Romanians from Dalmatia, Cherokee from Lakes?
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
That's not much more than a [politically relevant] theory. Much like global warming or w/e.
Wednesday, 12 June 2013
The U.S. is moving merrily through Dmitri Orlov's "five stages of collapse" (http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/p/the-five-stages-of-collapse.html).
But, like a schizophrenic with a machine gun, it is likely to enthusiastically share its misfortune with plenty of other people before it fades away into obscurity.
Wednesday, 12 June 2013
Ultimately this is why sane people are putting a lot of distance between themselves and the colapsing anthill.
Wednesday, 12 June 2013
Re: distance: unfortunately, the various mechanisms, large and small, built for generously sharing American misfortune across the oceans still appear to work. For how long - is anyone's guess.
Let's hope the fellows who were paid to keep the tritium boosters (half life ~13 yrs.) fresh had drank through the money instead.
Wednesday, 12 June 2013
Not to be a stick in the mud, but it's quite the proof of... naivite, let's say, to be seriously quoting the deranged stories of that Turnbull character. An anthropologist he was not. (At least that's what the summary seems to imply he's doing).
The cultural breakdown is always the first, never the last stage. The US started, culturally speaking, with Carnegie. I do not mean with his donations, endowments and nonsensical, provincial notions of ethics - that's how the nascent culture was railroaded into irrelevance and inevitable failure. I mean with his bold move to unite all steel production, which while mostly a civilisational progress was nevertheless the flat stone upon which actual culture, local and specific, was beginning to emerge. The abortion of the roughly speaking second trimester fetus was complete by the end of WW2, political corectness being its rigor mortis.
This isn't to say that the geographic area now called "America" will never give rise to culture. Such a statement would be absurd - for one, it had, before the Spanish and English showed up.
Wednesday, 12 June 2013
Orly. Gibson and other guitar brands were some of the major supporters of the PIPA/SOPA crap US politicians were trying to push around a year ago or so. Can’t say I feel sorry for them after that.
This is a prime example of whats wrong. It's perfectly ok to some to do bad things to the 'other'.
But next week the 'other' will be you.
Thursday, 13 June 2013
Daca un cetatean din Tm ar fura un palmier, tu fiind primar, ai da vreun ordin sa caute pulitia in toate ogradele si responsabilul biciut in piata publica, plus amenda?
Friday, 14 June 2013
Bine, problemele mintale ale lui Robu.
Saturday, 15 June 2013
You can't expect much good can happen in country programmed with crap like this for ages:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C27vuLaJ-A4
Saturday, 15 June 2013
Draivin da truck on interstatals, cozy inside with the stripes flag and hamburgers by dozen and running over hitchers doesn't sound like a dystopia but reality.