Monthly Archives: June 2012
Bank of America to Gun Company: Find Another Bank
Frank Zappa on Crossfire 1986
California deficite nearly double its forecast
Wouldn’t it be great if we could tell government that they are incompetent and that they must be privatized “for the greater good.”
California’s budget deficit has swelled to a projected $16 billion — much larger than had been predicted just months ago — and will force severe cuts to schools and public safety if voters fail to approve tax increases in November, Gov. Jerry Brown said Saturday.
The Democratic governor said the shortfall grew from $9.2 billion in January in part because tax collections have not come in as high as expected and the economy isn’t growing as fast as hoped for. The deficit has also risen because lawsuits and federal requirements have blocked billions of dollars in state cuts.
“This means we will have to go much farther and make cuts far greater than I asked for at the beginning of the year,” Brown said in an online video. “But we can’t fill this hole with cuts alone without doing severe damage to our schools. That’s why I’m bypassing the gridlock and asking you, the people of California, to approve a plan that avoids cuts to schools and public safety.”
(Read more)
Pig Tusks Used as Money
I strongly disagree with the title of this video, “How Humans Are Supposed to Live.” But it’s interesting to see one of the most unique commodity monies (i.e. real monies) I have ever heard of.
Illegal Immigrants getting tax refunds
Hindenburg Disaster? The government’s fault.
The Zeppelin company originally preferred the cheaper and more readily obtainable hydrogen, but after 48 of 56 passengers on a British airship were killed in a storm in 1930, Zeppelin’s engineers planned the new design for the safer, nonflammable helium. Unfortunately for Zeppelin, Congress had passed a law in 1927 banning the export of helium because it was a strategic gas with military aviation potential. There was thus no alternative to hydrogen, despite its risks. (Interestingly, the United States lifted the ban on helium after the Hindenburg disaster, although it was reinstated in 1938 after Nazi Germany annexed Austria.) (Read more)
Why France Has So Many 49-Employee Companies
Here’s a curious fact about the French economy: The country has 2.4 times as many companies with 49 employees as with 50. What difference does one employee make? Plenty, according to the French labor code. Once a company has at least 50 employees inside France, management must create three worker councils, introduce profit sharing, and submit restructuring plans to the councils if the company decides to fire workers for economic reasons.
French businesspeople often skirt these restraints by creating new companies rather than expanding existing ones. “I can’t tell you how many times when I was Minister I’d meet an entrepreneur who would tell me about his companies,” Thierry Breton, chief executive officer of consulting firm Atos and Minister of Finance from 2005 to 2007, said at a Paris conference on April 4. “I’d ask, ‘Why companies?’ He’d say, ‘Oh, I have several so that I can keep [the workforce] under 50.’ We have to review our labor code.” (Read more)
9 convicted in racially sensitive U.K. sex ring case
Nine men of Pakistani and Afghan descent were convicted Tuesday of luring girls as young as 13 into sexual encounters using alcohol and drugs, in a case that has heightened racial tensions in Britain and stirred protests among the far right.
The five victims who shared their stories with jurors during the trial were all white. They spoke of being raped, assaulted and traded for sex, sometimes being passed from man to man, and sometimes being too drunk to stop the abuse. One said that by the end of the ordeal, she “had no emotion.”
The trial has been controversial in more than one respect. One of the victims first spoke to police in August 2008, supplying underwear with DNA evidence implicating one of the suspects, but a Crown Prosecution Service lawyer failed to press charges after concerns that the jury might have questioned the girl’s credibility.
An Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating why that decision was made. And police have interviewed more than 40 girls as part of their investigation, raising the possibility that there are other victims who did not come forward to testify.
“We’d get free alcohol, cigarettes, food and free taxis and things,” said the girl who went to the police in 2008. “At first I thought it (was) great because nothing had happened, like nothing sexual. Towards the end it was like, it could be up to five different men in a day, sometimes every day, at least four or five times a week.”
The girl, who was lured in to the sex ring at age 15 and is now 20, escaped the gang after she became pregnant. The ring was based in the town of Rochdale, about 170 miles from London and abused the girls in taxis, kebab shops and apartments.
South Korea finds smuggled capsules contain human flesh
The capsules were made in northeastern China from dead babies whose bodies were chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder, a statement from the Korea Customs Service said.
Customs officials refused to disclose where the babies came from or who made the capsules, citing possible diplomatic friction with Beijing. Chinese officials have been cracking down on the production of such capsules since last year.
The customs office has discovered 35 smuggling attempts since August of about 17,450 capsules disguised as stamina boosters, and some people believe them to be a panacea for disease, the statement said. The capsules of human flesh, however, contained superbacteria and other harmful ingredients.
The smugglers told customs officials they believed the capsules were ordinary stamina boosters and did not know the ingredients or manufacturing process. Fake and altered drug and food items have been a serious problem in China. (Read more)
Obama criticizes Arab countries for spying on citizens, then does exactly the same thing.
CNET‘s excellent technology reporter, Declan McCullagh, reports on ongoing efforts by the Obama administration to force the Internet industry to provide the U.S. Government with “backdoor” access to all forms of Internet communication:
The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance. . . . That included a scheduled trip this month to the West Coast — which was subsequently postponed — to meet with Internet companies’ CEOs and top lawyers. . . .
The FBI general counsel’s office has drafted a proposed law that the bureau claims is the best solution: requiring that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.
“If you create a service, product, or app that allows a user to communicate, you get the privilege of adding that extra coding,” an industry representative who has reviewed the FBI’s draft legislation told CNET.
As for the substance of this policy, I wrote about this back in September, 2010, when it first revealed that the Obama administration was preparing legislation to mandate that “all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct ‘peer to peer’ messaging like Skype” — be designed to ensure government surveillance access. This isn’t about expanding the scope of the government’s legal surveillance powers — numerous legislative changes since 2001 have already accomplished that quite nicely — but is about ensuring the government’s physical ability to intrude into all forms of Internet communication.
What was most amazing to me back when I first wrote about these Obama administration efforts was that a mere six weeks earlier, a major controversy had erupted when Saudi Arabia and the UAE both announced a ban on BlackBerries on the ground that they were physically unable to monitor the communications conducted on those devices. Since Blackberry communication data are sent directly to servers in Canada and the company which operates Blackberry — Research in Motion — refused to turn the data over to those governments, “authorities [in those two tyrannies] decided to ban Blackberry services rather than continue to allow an uncontrolled and unmonitored flow of electronic information within their borders.” As I wrote at the time: “that’s the core mindset of the Omnipotent Surveillance State: above all else, what is strictly prohibited is the ability of citizens to communicate in private; we can’t have any ‘uncontrolled and unmonitored flow of electronic information’.”
In response to that controversy, the Obama administration actually condemned the Saudi and UAE ban, calling it “a dangerous precedent” and a threat to “democracy, human rights and freedom of information.” Yet six weeks later, the very same Obama administration embraced exactly the same rationale — that it is intolerable for any human interaction to take place beyond the prying eyes and ears of the government — when it proposed its mandatory “backdoor access” for all forms of Internet communication. (Read more)
Kelly Thomas calls for his father while 6 cops beat him to death
The city surveillance video that shows a group of Fullerton police officers beating a homeless mentally ill man to death last year was finally released today, laying to rest any argument that Kelly Thomas was a threat to officers.
The shocking video, which was combined with an audio recorder worn by one of the police officers on the night of July 5, 2011, was shown in court today, then later released to the media.
“Now you see my fists?” Fullerton police officer Manny Ramos asked Thomas while slipping on a pair of latex gloves.
“Yeah, what about them?” Thomas responded.
“They are getting ready to fuck you up,” said Ramos, a burly cop who appears to outweigh Thomas by 100 pounds.
“Well, start punching,” Thomas responds, never once displaying any physical aggression towards Ramos.
Moments later, as Thomas is standing while Ramos is ordering him to get on his “fucking knees,” Fullerton cop Joseph Wolfe, who is not charged in the case, walks up and starts beating his legs with a baton.
. . . .
At one point he yells out, “Dad, they are killing me.”
Even after seven minutes into the video, when six cops are on top of him and all Thomas is doing is crying for his father, they keep telling him to “relax.”
Last year, Ron Thomas, a retired Orange County Sheriff’s deputy, said the City of Fullerton offered him $900,000 to just go away, which would have allowed the two cops to remain on the force unpunished for killing his son.
Thomas was pronounced dead on July 10, five days after the beating that left him in a coma. (Read more)
“What About The Hundreds Of Innocent People WE Are Killing With OUR Drone Strikes In Pakistan!”
This guy is such a tool.
‘Vomiting and screaming’ in destroyed waterboarding tapes
Secret CIA video tapes of the waterboarding of Osama Bin Laden’s suspected jihadist travel arranger Abu Zubaydah show him vomiting and screaming, the BBC has learned.
The tapes were destroyed by the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez.
In an exclusive interview for Newsnight, Rodriguez has defended the destruction of the tapes and denied waterboarding and other interrogation techniques amount to torture. (Read more)