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Giant data dump - 15-19 January 2011
Jan. 20th, 2011 10:03 amCheers. When it comes to celebrating the holiday related to Dr. King, remember that it used to be that black motorists needed special guides to get around in the South and find friendly business. Because of the need of those things, Dr. King spoke of a culture of people who had been freed from slavery, but were not actually free. And his words are still important to us today, when we look in and see the neighborhoods where the people have hope, but not necessarily opportunity, the kinds of places where the media is more than happy to portray the residents as criminals, whether during a disaster or not, because they have dark skin. (Not that it's limited to the United States - Haiti has been the victim of this on a grand scale ever since they successfully overthrew their colonial lords, from having to pay reparations to the people they overthrew, to routine coups and aid being given to antidemocratic forces in the country from those colonial powers.) And then, sometimes, the police allegedly act on that assumption or express an alleged racism. And sometimes it's not alleged at all, if you read the material that they pass between themselves. The kinds of areas where the schools have been reverting to segregation because the affluent whites don't want the poor black and Latino kids in their school districts, and there's no policy and enforcement in place to make sure that the rich white kids and the poor black and Latino kids go to school together with excellent teachers and schools and that their parents live together in the same neighborhood and get to know each other. And the philosophies that stem from it claiming the need to return to the belief that people can be integrated, that everyone has the opportunity to be successful, so long as they work hard (and nothing but work ethic matters), and that anyone claiming that the United States is, continues to be, and always has been racist in greater and subtler forms is someone who shouldn't be listened to, because they're not providing hope and the approved narrative to immigrants and the poor. Or the ones that will say schools must be reformed to prevent kids from dropping out, and black people need to get married to raise their kids, or they're going to turn out to be dropouts, criminals, and deviants. Dr. King would have said so.
And then there are the people who plant what look to be explosive devices along parade routes honoring Dr. King.
In addition to those people who have still not achieved their freedom, we still have ways of looking at things that don't celebrate or bless the uniqueness of people. For example, the role that women have played in the Tunisian uprising was basically ignored by the United States media, because the uprising was against someone they could work with, as opposed to Iran, where every whisper of the Green Revolution gets all sorts of press coverage. Not to mention, all of that happened long before the U.S. media decided to pay attention and try and tie in Wikileaks as the cause of the demonstrations, instead of trusting that the people there already knew all of that. Plus, nobody understands what's actually driving the revolution - all they see are Arab men in the streets, and they figure this is going to turn out like Iran's revolution did. The cultural practices that come with immigrants are appropriated, and then the white people claim that they are the experts and all people should have to come through them to be able to teach their culture to others, or claim that it is their "intellectual property" to do with as they like and to stop others from using it. (Occasionally, the law cataches up with them and smites them for it, but not often.) Or an entire other religion is characterized as trying to militantly take over your country and rebuild it in its own image, requiring constant vigilance against the intrusions of their cultural practices. (I'd say something like that used to be applied to the Jews, which makes it all that much more interesting that the columnist suggests that Jews need to join in with these anti-Islam forces or they will be overrun and persecuted again.) That movement has gathered enough steam that someone can choose to devote an entire issue of their publication to advancing its cause.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the Great Equalizer, we're busily in the process of killing funding for those things that can bridge the gap. For example, $1.8 million dollar shortfall closes two libraries, reduces the hours of others. Perhaps appropriately, one of those libraries is the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. branch that contains a component devoted to adult and child literacy. It's one of many libraries being closed across the country, many of them in schools or communities that desperately need them. The public library is one of the places where the people who have not can still get information, entertainment, access to the job market, re-training in new skills that they didn't know they needed until they were RIF'd, and many of the things that the haves take for granted. It's the backstop in case someone lost the school lottery, and even now it's being cut, like other social services, because the demand for lower taxes and more police to make sure the blacks don't get uppity is a very poular thing among the haves, who almost always outnumber the have-nots or arrange politics in such a way that they outnumber the have-nots whenever anyone wants to get to elected office.
The President says that America should live up to the ideal image that a nine year-old girl had of government. I think that not only should we be able to live up to that image, we need to rediscover our inner nine year-old and remember what we wanted to do when we grew up - the big dreams that we think are impractical. Rocketship underpants and Underoos are optional.
Finally, in a time close to when the guide mentioned came out, there was also a guide for aspiring "Space Patrol" astronauts, to remind us of the future that our past saw. They probably didn't envision a long list of books that QUILTBAG readers would find possibly appealing, or that have characters similar to them in the narrative, and they might have foreseen the NBC-Comcast merger that&aops;e been approved, but they dreamt big. Very big.
Out in the world today, the possibility that fundamentalist Christianity might be re-thinking their stances on gay sex as a sin. Which we pair with a method to make nipples for your Barbie dolls mostly because we can. And then remind you that evidence continues to mount that the Catholic Chuch deliberately told bishops to cover up allegations of abuse and not report them to police.
In Canada, a local government claims that dirt and a furnace pipe going to the chimney is evidence of growing pot, and then will fine someone when it turns out to be cucumbers instead, as opposed to arresting them. The government doesn't need actual evidence of pot growing, just that you have to be using what they deem to be unusual amounts of resources. Or that your house smells skunky.
Fear hats on: Medvedev and Ahmadinejad are reportedly strengthening ties between their two countries. But counter with a dose of propaganda - the President is easing travel restrictions to Cuba for groups likely to receive an anti-communism message from the trip, and letting more money be sent to the island for "private economic activity".
Finally, unverified reports indicate that the Stuxnet worm is a join United States-Israel collaboration designed and tested before being released to target Iran's centrifuges. For some people, this is the opportunity to claim the left of the United States must admit to criminal negligence regarding letting Iran get as close as it had to nuclear weapons technology and that the previous administrator was entirely correct in having he worm developed to sabotage them, a claim made without evidence of logic behind it, but I would think the wiser thing to investigate is whether this was a one-off or not.
Domestically: Starbucks introduces a drink size that is slightly bigger than the capacity of the human stomach. At the same time, chart the increase in the use of the food stamp program over the last few years.
Congress and the President can still perform surveillance and gag orders on you, and are planning to renew those odious provisions of USAPATRIOT without anyone noticing. Ah, and for those of you who would like to make a statement about how airport security is handled, Fourth Amendment Wear will ensure that the Constitutions requirement for warrants to search or seize appears on any device that images your body. Should you choose to wear such, or any medically necessary device or prosthesis you like, the TSA guarantees you will be pulled aside and patted down, further compounding the violation. (In that respect, they're not alone - some screeners in Calgary patted down an elderly cancer survivor over a pin and a breast prothesis.) That's assuming they let you fly at all, as 9 year-old boys can be denied visas to enter the country because the government fears that he will overstay.
Elsewhere, it still appears that officers of the law don't make sure they have the right address and that the person they're looking for is actually at that address before raiding.
Governor Palin continues to insist that calls for people to tone down their rhetoric are calls for censorship, and that she refuses to be shut up by anyone.
Open Secrets would like to know how significant donations made to Tea Party groups were made - because the donations are all in the name of a woman who died in 2007.
More about the actual conditions of PFC Manning, far beyond the standard maximum isolation detention, because the Pentagon wants you to beleive he has a high risk of injuring himself. His lawyer thinks this is far too harsh of conditions to ensure that PFC Manning appears for trial and seeks his release.
And speaking of other persons in maximum isolation situations, Despite the Presidential desire to do good and close Guantanamo Bay, delays and hostility from legislators prevent him from making good on that promise. The article wants you to believe that most Americans have no problems with an extralegal detention center around Cuba, but they do point out that the main opposition to closing it is Congresscritters who like the extralegal framework and the detention center where they can put inconvenient people indefinitely.
The Majority Leader, Mr. Reid, indicated he thought Mr. Jintao, of China, was a dictator rather than a democratically-elected President. Considering that he's in charge of a party-run government, saying he's a dictator is impolite, but not necessarily incorrect.
Having suspended their agenda out of respect for Congresswoman Giffords and the other victims of the Tuscon shooting, House Republicans went back to their largely symbolic plans to hold a vote to repeal the health care bill.
And finally, the Democrat who was fairly Republican and then finally made himself into an Independent will be retiring from the Senate in 2012. Joe Lieberman will not seek re-election.
Technology points out: thunderstorms can shoot very strong antimatter rays into space, the attempt to recreate the woolly mammoth, a vending machine that scans for smart technology and makes recommendations on the faces presented to it, so as to know what it can vend to that person that they can use, a controller that allows someone to operate a virtual camera inside a constructed virtual space, meaning that machinima should be easier to do (and not require obscuring HUDs and the like), and how Wikipedia went from being a side project of a more traditional on-line encyclopedia into the second research stop after Google.
And science says listening to music you like makes you emit dopamine, the brain's electric field influences itself, a hornet that manages to convert solar rays into electricity, which will probably have technological applications if they can isolate and synthesize the compound, and then improve upon it to make it more efficient, a border collie that has been taught more than 1,000 words, most of which correspond to discrete objects, and the rest are verbs and modifiers to those objects, and the possibilty that video game ability may be predictable with a brain scan.
Into opinions, where green jobs are not an economic engine, but rntrepreneurship in green technologies can produce jobs - so invest in infrastructure and public research, instead of companies, I guess.
Mr. Peters claims that the Obama Administration has made negative progress in all their foreign policy exercises, where China and Russia walk all over us, Arab dictators thumb their noses at us and then blow us up, we hamper Israel and help Iran, spend far too much money and troops in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and continue to make Africa a bloody mess. And it's entirely this administration's fault, because they try to work with diplomacy instead of sending the troops and the nukes and taking a hard conservative line on everything. He might want to consult with Mr. Mauro, who sees the leaders of Arab states shaking in their boots over revolutions in their countries, and that the United States should keep a close on them to quash any attempts to install an officially-Islamic government in place there, because you don't want to claim that someone is impotent in foreign policy and then demand that they take care of problems in other countries.
Mr. Pendry knows not the magnitude of the foul he commits in claiming that the American people should have someone of common stock and a non-political career be the President of the United States - like Sarah Palin. The first part of his column, a standard anti-intellectual argument with appropriate dismissal of the liberal media and complaints about politicians whose very words are calculated as to how well they will help in re-election would hang together, even as we might argue about the merits of whether putting average people in charge really is a good idea. But using Sarah Palin as the counterexample, as someone who speaks non-politically and without regard to how it makes her look for electability, who is stronger than the liberal media that routinely tries (and fails, says he) to find something really scandalous about her, and who should be supported because she speaks clearly and frankly about her beliefs, well, it falls down flat. Sarah Palin's remarks are a new blend of factless and tactless, certainly, but they are calculated, most certainly, with an eye toward capturing a political office and in riling a base to vote for her and follow her. She's better at appearing plain-folks, perhaps because she's prone to statements that make her look dumb, rather than look like a politician, but she's got just as much of that elite that Mr. Pendry says should be despised. Everyone in the national political game that stays there for any time does.
Mr. Sowell's anti-unionism is showing rather strongly when he blames unions and their pensions as the reason for budget shortfalls in cities and states and then recommends that those same cities and states declare bankruptcy so that they can void their pension contracts, break the political power of the unions, and then hire back public servants and others at non-union rates, which will magically fix their budget problems. Otherwise, the public gets suckered into voting for tax increases, which only furthers the problem. Why not instead look at revenue shortfalls brought on by subsidization and sweetheart deals (of which there is one short nod to in the column) and whether the amount of tax currently collected is actually appropriate for the level of services currently provided. If you're short revenue, cut spending where you can, but ultimately, you just have to sell the population on the idea that they should be willing to pay taxes to get important services, and pay an appropriate amount to get services that actually work. Blaming public-sector unions and their benefits gets you nothing other than ill will.
Mr. Morris seems almost elated at the Scylla-Charybdis choice he envisions President Obama having to make - either stand firm against spending cuts designed to roll back his legislative accomplishments and risk shutting down the government and generating public anger, or give in and sign the cuts, prompting a round in the stocks from his base for capitulating. He further suggests that the Republicans structure things so that President Obama has to give in twice, if he gives in once, so they can taunt him about who holds the power of the purse strings.
And since they've been mentioned twice now, Mr. Armey and Mr. Kibbe, of the Astroturf organization FreedomWorks, detail their plans for what should be cut - spending all the way back to 2007 levels, all of the Affordable Care Act, Congressional staff, making Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac survive in the private sector after everyone else dumped all their toxic assets on them, getting rid of ethanol subsidies and "unproven" energy technology assistance, nixing entirely the Commerce Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Americorps, and the Small Business Administration cutting NASA spending in half, repealing Davis-Bacon labor rules, cutting a little bit out of defense spending, ending urban mass transit grants and rail subsidies, privatize air traffic control, and Amtrak, and then reform the entitlements by forcing people to put their money in private, market-volatile accounts instead of having Social Security, cutting federal worker retirement benefits, and making all Medicare/Medicaid spending be the form of individual checks to people, with the amount paid to them capped. They say all of this will save about $3 trillion in ten years, if all enacted. To the enrichment of private banks and corporations, Wall Street, and the people who are most likely to be predatory on all the people whose retirment income is now at the mercy of their machinations. There may be spots to cut, but this plan sounds remarkably like one to privatize the government and remove as much of its revenues as possible.
Last for tonight, a hotel that continues the practice of washing all the change it acquires before giving it back, and a letter from Steven Spielburg complimenting a film that matched an Indiana Jones film shot-for-shot, 100 logos in 100 days, with 100 minutes to make each one, and some words that do not have English equivalents.
Oh, and Spiders. Lots of spiders.
And then there are the people who plant what look to be explosive devices along parade routes honoring Dr. King.
In addition to those people who have still not achieved their freedom, we still have ways of looking at things that don't celebrate or bless the uniqueness of people. For example, the role that women have played in the Tunisian uprising was basically ignored by the United States media, because the uprising was against someone they could work with, as opposed to Iran, where every whisper of the Green Revolution gets all sorts of press coverage. Not to mention, all of that happened long before the U.S. media decided to pay attention and try and tie in Wikileaks as the cause of the demonstrations, instead of trusting that the people there already knew all of that. Plus, nobody understands what's actually driving the revolution - all they see are Arab men in the streets, and they figure this is going to turn out like Iran's revolution did. The cultural practices that come with immigrants are appropriated, and then the white people claim that they are the experts and all people should have to come through them to be able to teach their culture to others, or claim that it is their "intellectual property" to do with as they like and to stop others from using it. (Occasionally, the law cataches up with them and smites them for it, but not often.) Or an entire other religion is characterized as trying to militantly take over your country and rebuild it in its own image, requiring constant vigilance against the intrusions of their cultural practices. (I'd say something like that used to be applied to the Jews, which makes it all that much more interesting that the columnist suggests that Jews need to join in with these anti-Islam forces or they will be overrun and persecuted again.) That movement has gathered enough steam that someone can choose to devote an entire issue of their publication to advancing its cause.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the Great Equalizer, we're busily in the process of killing funding for those things that can bridge the gap. For example, $1.8 million dollar shortfall closes two libraries, reduces the hours of others. Perhaps appropriately, one of those libraries is the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. branch that contains a component devoted to adult and child literacy. It's one of many libraries being closed across the country, many of them in schools or communities that desperately need them. The public library is one of the places where the people who have not can still get information, entertainment, access to the job market, re-training in new skills that they didn't know they needed until they were RIF'd, and many of the things that the haves take for granted. It's the backstop in case someone lost the school lottery, and even now it's being cut, like other social services, because the demand for lower taxes and more police to make sure the blacks don't get uppity is a very poular thing among the haves, who almost always outnumber the have-nots or arrange politics in such a way that they outnumber the have-nots whenever anyone wants to get to elected office.
The President says that America should live up to the ideal image that a nine year-old girl had of government. I think that not only should we be able to live up to that image, we need to rediscover our inner nine year-old and remember what we wanted to do when we grew up - the big dreams that we think are impractical. Rocketship underpants and Underoos are optional.
Finally, in a time close to when the guide mentioned came out, there was also a guide for aspiring "Space Patrol" astronauts, to remind us of the future that our past saw. They probably didn't envision a long list of books that QUILTBAG readers would find possibly appealing, or that have characters similar to them in the narrative, and they might have foreseen the NBC-Comcast merger that&aops;e been approved, but they dreamt big. Very big.
Out in the world today, the possibility that fundamentalist Christianity might be re-thinking their stances on gay sex as a sin. Which we pair with a method to make nipples for your Barbie dolls mostly because we can. And then remind you that evidence continues to mount that the Catholic Chuch deliberately told bishops to cover up allegations of abuse and not report them to police.
In Canada, a local government claims that dirt and a furnace pipe going to the chimney is evidence of growing pot, and then will fine someone when it turns out to be cucumbers instead, as opposed to arresting them. The government doesn't need actual evidence of pot growing, just that you have to be using what they deem to be unusual amounts of resources. Or that your house smells skunky.
Fear hats on: Medvedev and Ahmadinejad are reportedly strengthening ties between their two countries. But counter with a dose of propaganda - the President is easing travel restrictions to Cuba for groups likely to receive an anti-communism message from the trip, and letting more money be sent to the island for "private economic activity".
Finally, unverified reports indicate that the Stuxnet worm is a join United States-Israel collaboration designed and tested before being released to target Iran's centrifuges. For some people, this is the opportunity to claim the left of the United States must admit to criminal negligence regarding letting Iran get as close as it had to nuclear weapons technology and that the previous administrator was entirely correct in having he worm developed to sabotage them, a claim made without evidence of logic behind it, but I would think the wiser thing to investigate is whether this was a one-off or not.
Domestically: Starbucks introduces a drink size that is slightly bigger than the capacity of the human stomach. At the same time, chart the increase in the use of the food stamp program over the last few years.
Congress and the President can still perform surveillance and gag orders on you, and are planning to renew those odious provisions of USAPATRIOT without anyone noticing. Ah, and for those of you who would like to make a statement about how airport security is handled, Fourth Amendment Wear will ensure that the Constitutions requirement for warrants to search or seize appears on any device that images your body. Should you choose to wear such, or any medically necessary device or prosthesis you like, the TSA guarantees you will be pulled aside and patted down, further compounding the violation. (In that respect, they're not alone - some screeners in Calgary patted down an elderly cancer survivor over a pin and a breast prothesis.) That's assuming they let you fly at all, as 9 year-old boys can be denied visas to enter the country because the government fears that he will overstay.
Elsewhere, it still appears that officers of the law don't make sure they have the right address and that the person they're looking for is actually at that address before raiding.
Governor Palin continues to insist that calls for people to tone down their rhetoric are calls for censorship, and that she refuses to be shut up by anyone.
Open Secrets would like to know how significant donations made to Tea Party groups were made - because the donations are all in the name of a woman who died in 2007.
More about the actual conditions of PFC Manning, far beyond the standard maximum isolation detention, because the Pentagon wants you to beleive he has a high risk of injuring himself. His lawyer thinks this is far too harsh of conditions to ensure that PFC Manning appears for trial and seeks his release.
And speaking of other persons in maximum isolation situations, Despite the Presidential desire to do good and close Guantanamo Bay, delays and hostility from legislators prevent him from making good on that promise. The article wants you to believe that most Americans have no problems with an extralegal detention center around Cuba, but they do point out that the main opposition to closing it is Congresscritters who like the extralegal framework and the detention center where they can put inconvenient people indefinitely.
The Majority Leader, Mr. Reid, indicated he thought Mr. Jintao, of China, was a dictator rather than a democratically-elected President. Considering that he's in charge of a party-run government, saying he's a dictator is impolite, but not necessarily incorrect.
Having suspended their agenda out of respect for Congresswoman Giffords and the other victims of the Tuscon shooting, House Republicans went back to their largely symbolic plans to hold a vote to repeal the health care bill.
And finally, the Democrat who was fairly Republican and then finally made himself into an Independent will be retiring from the Senate in 2012. Joe Lieberman will not seek re-election.
Technology points out: thunderstorms can shoot very strong antimatter rays into space, the attempt to recreate the woolly mammoth, a vending machine that scans for smart technology and makes recommendations on the faces presented to it, so as to know what it can vend to that person that they can use, a controller that allows someone to operate a virtual camera inside a constructed virtual space, meaning that machinima should be easier to do (and not require obscuring HUDs and the like), and how Wikipedia went from being a side project of a more traditional on-line encyclopedia into the second research stop after Google.
And science says listening to music you like makes you emit dopamine, the brain's electric field influences itself, a hornet that manages to convert solar rays into electricity, which will probably have technological applications if they can isolate and synthesize the compound, and then improve upon it to make it more efficient, a border collie that has been taught more than 1,000 words, most of which correspond to discrete objects, and the rest are verbs and modifiers to those objects, and the possibilty that video game ability may be predictable with a brain scan.
Into opinions, where green jobs are not an economic engine, but rntrepreneurship in green technologies can produce jobs - so invest in infrastructure and public research, instead of companies, I guess.
Mr. Peters claims that the Obama Administration has made negative progress in all their foreign policy exercises, where China and Russia walk all over us, Arab dictators thumb their noses at us and then blow us up, we hamper Israel and help Iran, spend far too much money and troops in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and continue to make Africa a bloody mess. And it's entirely this administration's fault, because they try to work with diplomacy instead of sending the troops and the nukes and taking a hard conservative line on everything. He might want to consult with Mr. Mauro, who sees the leaders of Arab states shaking in their boots over revolutions in their countries, and that the United States should keep a close on them to quash any attempts to install an officially-Islamic government in place there, because you don't want to claim that someone is impotent in foreign policy and then demand that they take care of problems in other countries.
Mr. Pendry knows not the magnitude of the foul he commits in claiming that the American people should have someone of common stock and a non-political career be the President of the United States - like Sarah Palin. The first part of his column, a standard anti-intellectual argument with appropriate dismissal of the liberal media and complaints about politicians whose very words are calculated as to how well they will help in re-election would hang together, even as we might argue about the merits of whether putting average people in charge really is a good idea. But using Sarah Palin as the counterexample, as someone who speaks non-politically and without regard to how it makes her look for electability, who is stronger than the liberal media that routinely tries (and fails, says he) to find something really scandalous about her, and who should be supported because she speaks clearly and frankly about her beliefs, well, it falls down flat. Sarah Palin's remarks are a new blend of factless and tactless, certainly, but they are calculated, most certainly, with an eye toward capturing a political office and in riling a base to vote for her and follow her. She's better at appearing plain-folks, perhaps because she's prone to statements that make her look dumb, rather than look like a politician, but she's got just as much of that elite that Mr. Pendry says should be despised. Everyone in the national political game that stays there for any time does.
Mr. Sowell's anti-unionism is showing rather strongly when he blames unions and their pensions as the reason for budget shortfalls in cities and states and then recommends that those same cities and states declare bankruptcy so that they can void their pension contracts, break the political power of the unions, and then hire back public servants and others at non-union rates, which will magically fix their budget problems. Otherwise, the public gets suckered into voting for tax increases, which only furthers the problem. Why not instead look at revenue shortfalls brought on by subsidization and sweetheart deals (of which there is one short nod to in the column) and whether the amount of tax currently collected is actually appropriate for the level of services currently provided. If you're short revenue, cut spending where you can, but ultimately, you just have to sell the population on the idea that they should be willing to pay taxes to get important services, and pay an appropriate amount to get services that actually work. Blaming public-sector unions and their benefits gets you nothing other than ill will.
Mr. Morris seems almost elated at the Scylla-Charybdis choice he envisions President Obama having to make - either stand firm against spending cuts designed to roll back his legislative accomplishments and risk shutting down the government and generating public anger, or give in and sign the cuts, prompting a round in the stocks from his base for capitulating. He further suggests that the Republicans structure things so that President Obama has to give in twice, if he gives in once, so they can taunt him about who holds the power of the purse strings.
And since they've been mentioned twice now, Mr. Armey and Mr. Kibbe, of the Astroturf organization FreedomWorks, detail their plans for what should be cut - spending all the way back to 2007 levels, all of the Affordable Care Act, Congressional staff, making Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac survive in the private sector after everyone else dumped all their toxic assets on them, getting rid of ethanol subsidies and "unproven" energy technology assistance, nixing entirely the Commerce Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Americorps, and the Small Business Administration cutting NASA spending in half, repealing Davis-Bacon labor rules, cutting a little bit out of defense spending, ending urban mass transit grants and rail subsidies, privatize air traffic control, and Amtrak, and then reform the entitlements by forcing people to put their money in private, market-volatile accounts instead of having Social Security, cutting federal worker retirement benefits, and making all Medicare/Medicaid spending be the form of individual checks to people, with the amount paid to them capped. They say all of this will save about $3 trillion in ten years, if all enacted. To the enrichment of private banks and corporations, Wall Street, and the people who are most likely to be predatory on all the people whose retirment income is now at the mercy of their machinations. There may be spots to cut, but this plan sounds remarkably like one to privatize the government and remove as much of its revenues as possible.
Last for tonight, a hotel that continues the practice of washing all the change it acquires before giving it back, and a letter from Steven Spielburg complimenting a film that matched an Indiana Jones film shot-for-shot, 100 logos in 100 days, with 100 minutes to make each one, and some words that do not have English equivalents.
Oh, and Spiders. Lots of spiders.
