boy, do i ever know what he means

[click image]

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Words just DON'T cut it. They're only potent enough when delivered face-to-face and spoken in service of PERFORMING on our responsibilities. That isn't happening on the internet. Can't. There is the hint of real usefulness for this crucial aspect evidenced in, say, Wikileaks or Cryptome, or any of the sites trying to deliver REAL information, the goods, to those who will speak the important words only as the hallmark of ACTUAL performance on the manifestation of positive intent, but that is about the size of it.

The rest is theater.

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love, 99
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i think i understand how they can do it to people

[click image]

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Very early into this debacle, I mentioned about making the bank show the note, and mentioned it a number of times since. I mentioned it before I heard of anyone else mentioning it, and was glad when I began to hear others mentioning it, not many people seemed to be listening, despite everything they owned being dumped in a heap on the curb and the locks changed on their homes.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert E. Grossman in Central Islip, New York, in a decision he said he knew would have a “significant impact,” wrote that the membership rules of the company’s Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or MERS, don’t make it an agent of the banks that own the mortgages.

“MERS’s theory that it can act as a ‘common agent’ for undisclosed principals is not supported by the law,” Grossman wrote in a Feb. 10 opinion. “MERS did not have authority, as ‘nominee’ or agent, to assign the mortgage absent a showing that it was given specific written directions by its principal.”

Merscorp was created in 1995 to improve servicing after county offices couldn’t deal with the flood of mortgage transfers, Karmela Lejarde, a spokeswoman for MERS, said in an interview last year. The company tracks servicing rights and ownership interests in mortgage loans on its electronic registry, allowing banks to buy and sell the loans without having to record the transfer with the county. It played a major role in Wall Street’s ability to quickly bundle mortgages together in securitized trusts.

I mentioned it other places beside cyberspace. People stared at me as though they were vexed cows looking at a cartoon animation running around their pasture.

A jerk would cop an attitude about this sort of thing, begin to feel people were stupid cows and stupid cows are for milking and for herding and for slaughter.

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love, 99
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i wish max would lay off joking about the edge

[click image]

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He can bash the snot out of Bono and Geldoff. They, like, soooo deserve it, but unless I'm gravely mistaken, all The Edge has ever done is play fantastic guitar.

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I think I'm going to die of not finding the nineteen-minute version of With Or Without You that's mostly The Edge. Bono actually shuts up for most of that. I'm beginning to think 86 looped the guitar on that tape he made for me or something. I never find it. I think it would be best if Bono just hummed softly and let The Edge do it.

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love, 99
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feds helping bank smear journalists

[click image]

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Not just WikiLeaks, which is an outrage in itself.

And perhaps most disturbing of all, Hunton & Williams was recommended to Bank of America's General Counsel by the Justice Department — meaning the U.S. Government is aiding Bank of America in its defense against/attacks on WikiLeaks.

That's why this should be taken seriously, despite how ignorant, trite and laughably shallow is the specific leaked anti-WikiLeaks proposal. As creepy and odious as this is, there's nothing unusual about these kinds of smear campaigns. The only unusual aspect here is that we happened to learn about it this time because of Anonymous' hacking. That a similar scheme was quickly discovered by ThinkProgress demonstrates how common this behavior is. The very idea of trying to threaten the careers of journalists and activists to punish and deter their advocacy is self-evidently pernicious; that it's being so freely and casually proposed to groups as powerful as the Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, and the DOJ-recommended Hunton & Williams demonstrates how common this is. These highly experienced firms included such proposals because they assumed those deep-pocket organizations would approve and it would make their hiring more likely.

But the real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power. I've written many times about this issue — the full-scale merger between public and private spheres — because it's easily one of the most critical yet under-discussed political topics. Especially (though by no means only) in the worlds of the Surveillance and National Security State, the powers of the state have become largely privatized. There is very little separation between government power and corporate power. Those who wield the latter intrinsically wield the former. The revolving door between the highest levels of government and corporate offices rotates so fast and continuously that it has basically flown off its track and no longer provides even the minimal barrier it once did. It's not merely that corporate power is unrestrained; it's worse than that: corporations actively exploit the power of the state to further entrench and enhance their power.

That's what this anti-WikiLeaks campaign is generally: it's a concerted, unified effort between government and the most powerful entities in the private sector...

I'm going to have to jump into a vat of health any minute. Then maybe a nice bucket full of nice clattery ice water for my head. I'm hoping the gathering army of truthier alternatives to lies and besmirchment will have a vast array of Out There topics for me to mull when I'm done with those....

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love, 99
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obstinate

[click image]

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The struggle for existence continues.

Egyptian labour unions have gone on a nationwide strike, adding momentum to pro-democracy demonstrations in Cairo and other cities. ...

The government seems to be scrambling under pressure from major powers and pro-democracy supporters, Al Jazeera's Stefanie Dekker reported from the city.

She said people in Tahrir Square were angered by a visit from Tamer Hosni, a famous Arab pop star, on Wednesday morning.

Hosni previously made statements telling the demonstrators to leave the square, saying that Mubarak had offered them concessions. "His comments really did not go down very well," our correspondent said. The crowd reacted angrily and the military had to intervene to keep them away from him.

Even as the most they can hope for is a temporary illusion of existing, they persist....

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love, 99
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dictators rotating in and out

[click image]

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Baby Doc mystically makes his way back to Haiti as Ben Ali rotates out of Tunisa with lotsa scratch.

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love, 99
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they hate him for his staunch antifascist position

[click image]

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And don't mind propagandizing the living snot out of everyone in the Western World to vilify him. I have turned into such a Putin fan, not just because I know it's the opposite of what they want me to think, but because he has shown very real indications that he means business, and will sit on any oligarch who attempts to actually oligarch. It was beyond fair to let them know they could keep their ill-gotten gains if they stayed the hell out of politics, and IF he is having people assassinated for trying to dupe the public, which has not by any means been shown, even if they are dupes themselves, that is clearly in defense of the Russian people, as opposed to The Laureate having people assassinated in furtherance of our terrorization and enslavement.

Cablegate has just occasioned a reiteration of the single thing that helped me out of my media-induced trance:

It refers obliquely to a meeting in 2000 when Vladimir Putin, then still president, met Khodorkovksy and 20 other oligarchs and reportedly warned them to stay out of politics in return for their businesses being left in peace.

One of the most statesmanlike moments in world history. And it contrasts sharply with the filthy collusion, back room deals, in which President Hopey Changey Shit Not Working Out For Us regularly, unerringly, engages.

No. Really. Wipe the sleeping powder off your expanding girth. This is no time to be an all-American jackass.

The truth is: Russia has convicted a couple of their most corrupt sociopathic fucks and the PTB don't want us realizing it because we might get ideas about demanding some of ours suffer similarly.

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love, 99
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K.A.O.S. mole outed at last

[click image]

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I thought I would never be vindicated, but here you will find proof positive... pictures worth thousands of words.

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love, 99
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i should just stop blogging

[click image]

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We got the word to the wise 25 years ago, did not heed it then, are not heeding it now.

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i notice the financial crowd has taken to calling them 'pig fuckers'

[click image]

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I have seen it a bunch of places lately. I beg to differ. They are human-fucker pigs. They take your money and gamble with it. When they lose they charge you for it. They do NOT lend you any of it anymore. Why should they? They have a license to piss away everything you've earned and saved. Our broken government has been making that airtight for the last fifteen years. They just signed into law a "reform" package that pretends they are still banks, while letting them be mobsters and you just fuck off and die. So unless you consider yourself a pig, you should stop calling banksters "pig fuckers". That's just dumb... and too nice.

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this is angel this is angel

[click image]

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"Let Them Eat Cake"
A handful of oligarchs are becoming billionaires while the rest of the country goes down the drain
by Paul Craig Roberts
Global Research, July 31, 2010

It is not unusual for members of the diminishing upper middle class to drop $20,000 or $30,000 on a big wedding. But for celebrities this large sum wouldn’t cover the wedding dress or the flowers.

When country music star Keith Urban married actress Nicole Kidman in 2006, their wedding cost $250,000. This large sum hardly counts as a celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was $1,000,000.

The marriages of Madonna and film director Guy Ritchie, Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones pushed up the cost of celebrity marriages to $1.5 million.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes upped the ante to $2,000,000.

Now comes the politicians’s daughter as celebrity. According to news reports, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to investment banker Mark Mezvinsky on July 31 is costing papa Bill $3,000,000. According to the London Daily Mail, the total price tag will be about $5,000,000. The additional $2,000,000 apparently is being laid off on US Taxpayers as Secret Service costs for protecting former president Clinton and foreign heads of state, such as the presidents of France and Italy and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are among the 500 invited guests along with Barbara Streisand, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Clinton friend and donor Denise Rich, wife of the Clinton-pardoned felon.

Before we attend to the poor political judgment of such an extravagant affair during times of economic distress, let us wonder aloud where a poor boy who became governor of Arkansas and president of the United States got such a fortune that he can blow $3,000,000 on a wedding.

The American people did not take up a collection to reward him for his service to them.

Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving during his eight years in office?

How did Tony Blair and his wife, Cherrie, end up with an annual income of ten million pounds (approximately $15 million dollars) as soon as he left office?

Who was Blair really serving?

These are not polite questions, and they are infrequently asked.

While Chelsea’s wedding guests eat a $11,000 wedding cake and admire $250,000 floral displays, Lisa Roberts in Ohio is struggling to raise contributions for her food pantry in order to feed 3,000 local people, whose financial independence was destroyed by investment bankers, job offshoring, and unaffordable wars. The Americans dependent on Lisa Roberts’ food pantry are living out of vans and cars. Those with a house roof still over their heads are packed in as many as 14 per household according to the Chillicothe Gazette in Ohio.

The Chilicothe Gazette reports that Lisa Roberts’ food pantry has “had to cut back to half rations per person in order to have something for everyone who needed it.”

Theresa DePugh stepped up to the challenge and had the starving Ohioans write messages on their food pantry paper plates to President Obama, who has just obtained another $33 billion to squander on a pointless war in Afghanistan that serves no purpose whatsoever except the enrichment of the military/security complex and its shareholders.

The Guardian (UK) reports that according to US government reports, one million American children go to bed hungry, while the Obama regime squanders hundreds of billions of dollars killing women and children in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The Guardian’s reporting relies on a US government report from the US Department of Agriculture, which concludes that 50 million people in the US--one in six of the population--were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy in 2008.

US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that he expected the number of hungry Americans to worsen when the survey for 2010 is released.

Today in the American Superpower, one of every six Americans is living on food stamps.

The Great American Superpower, which is wasting trillions of dollars in pursuit of world hegemony, has 22% of its population unemployed and almost 17% of its population dependent on welfare in order to stay alive.

The world has not witnessed such total failure of government since the final days of the Roman Empire. A handful of American oligarchs are becoming mega-billionaires while the rest of the country goes down the drain.

And the American sheeple remain acquiescent.

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of course, the aristocracy told the tale of the revolution and of the terror

[click image, The Death of Marat]

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So we only know there's been a LOT of spin put on this stuff for our "benefit", especially for us educated "elitist liberals" and, anyway, I'm wanting to examine my participation in my own downfall and examine the so not-very-well-thought-out maxim about absolute power corrupting absolutely. Yes, the absolutely corrupt seek and defend absolute power as absolutely heartlessly as possible—to the point where even brilliant people become CONVINCED they are shape-shifting reptilian aliens—and any honest person has to agree that this explanation is the ONLY one that fits their behavior well enough to be deemed true, even if it is utterly fantastical poppycock. It is also true that many are unfit for authority, some even for authority over their own persons, but definitely for authority over others. We encounter those every day.

I remember the most thoroughly lovely woman who turned into a monster the moment she was put in charge of a kitchen crew, of all things. I needn't go into detail. If you are older than sixteen, you KNOW what happened to her. Raving egomaniacal fiends who hold any power melt directly back into amity and fellow feeling when it has been taken away. That might even hold for some of the space lizards. The moment they realize their power is gone for good, so is their hate, their hate which was really incarnated fear all along. These people are common, but they are not everyone.

The main problem for humans eluding the grip of those whose greed and self-regard is so strong they develop a will to power that cannot help but propel them where they want to go is that the vast majority of us not only do not suffer those urges to such an extent, but also will not risk ourselves to stop them. When a population has risen up to smack down a tyranny, very, very often it is only those with that same will to power who rush in to fill the void, EVEN when people better-suited to the positions of power are in place. The population immediately sinks back from victory and will not stay mobilized to protect and defend and enforce the positions of the better-suited against the plots and perfidies of the... well... the space lizards.

People don't realize who they are, what they are. For as long as that is true the suffering will continue to become ever more unbearable. Karma demands it. You cannot elude the cosmic force of cause and effect. You cannot elude who you really are, even if you will never realize it.

The part that hurts me the most is that if you would but realize it, everything would immediately turn around.

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It occurs to me I may be being too oblique for some. Perhaps a listen to at least the first part of this would help. We are living under fascism. This is not hyperbole. This is a readily verifiable fact for ANYONE paying attention and willing to look up what they don't understand. If none of the million other signs could awaken you from your slumber, the fact of the government working under BP's direction has to erase every bit of mental conditioning that has kept you asleep against all reason for this long. I thought of Marat while wondering if Max Keiser might be someone fulfilling a similar role... and I do NOT mean the role the revisionists have given to Marat, but what might possibly have been the real one lurking behind their lies, might yet be documented somewhere reliably, despite the job done on this one, one of the most successful revolutions in all history.

Don't doubt its success, even with the return of the aristocracy. To this day, the French government has remained too afraid of their people to mistreat them so badly again. It could well be that the globalists who are NOT afraid of the French people will undo all that, but they bought themselves more than two centuries of a much higher standard of living for those who do the work... as did we... as did we. It's well and truly over for us now, but it does not have to be.

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harvard princeton YALE bullets bombs and banks

[click image]

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Glib SOB.

Clinton speaks to Yale grads about unequal world
(AP) – 3 hours ago

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Former President Bill Clinton told Yale seniors on Sunday to listen to people with whom they disagree.

In a Class Day speech that included points similar to a commencement address he gave a week ago in West Virginia, the Yale Law School alum said today's college graduates will be left to deal with a world that has three major problems.

"It is too unstable; it is too unequal, and it is completely unsustainable," Clinton said.

He urged them to change that, and said that will mean working together.

"One problem we have in the modern world is, we've got access to more information than ever before, but we don't all listen to the same information," he said.

A tidbit of information Clinton didn't give the Yale seniors was that he was involved in a minor traffic accident on the way to the event.

State police Lt. J. Paul Vance said Clinton's secret service van was in a traffic jam that was the result of accident just north of New Haven on the Merritt Parkway when it was hit from behind.

"There was no injury, no endangerment to Clinton," Vance said. "The motorcade continued on to its destination, and we're piecing it all together."

Clinton told WTIC-TV that the accident was a fluke.

"It was one of those deals where everybody in the passing lane slowed down, and we all slowed down, and one person didn't," he said. "It happened to be the person behind us."

During his speech, Clinton told Yale seniors that while the country is less sexist, racist and homophobic than it once was, people today only want to be around those who agree with them.

"In our media habits, we go to the television sites, we go to the radio talk shows, we go to the blog sites that agree with us, and it can have very bizarre consequences" he said, citing the controversy over the origin of President Obama's birth certificate.

He also warned that as information becomes more available, so does the potential for its misuse.

He noted that Faisal Shahzad, the man accused of attempting to bomb Times Square, received a college degree in the United States before flying back to Pakistan to train as a terrorist.

"It shows you that when you tear down all the walls, and you can break through all the barriers of information, that the same things that empower you to get access to more information more quickly than ever before could empower you to build bombs," he said. "It's an unstable world."

Clinton said he believes the mission of every empowered person in the world should be to increase the positive forces and decrease the negative forces of the world's interdependence.

"We have to be relentlessly committed to change," he said. "And change is hard."

The address continued a Yale tradition in which graduation speakers typically don't speak at commencements. The major speech to seniors is instead given the previous day during Class Day festivities, an event that also includes the wearing of silly hats.

The former president said he considered turning a handkerchief he had been given by the class of 2010 into a do-rag so that he would better fit in.

"I wasn't sure I was coming to fashion week," he joked.

Clinton's wife, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was Class Day speaker in 2001, and received an honorary degree last year.

I think they should have bumped him harder.
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sanders trying to recover from bludgeoning by rahmbo

[click image, video, thirteen minutes]

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We ARE an oligarchy, which is the nice word for fascism, politely ignoring the tasers and active denial in the streets, and it IS getting worse.
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Progressive trying to come to his senses.
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reminder

[click image]

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Public service reminder....
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audacity

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The audacity of truth.
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if you keep longing for something

[click image]

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If you keep longing for something,
you become inwardly suffocated
and outwardly emaciated.
If you don't figure out
what to do about this soon,
your life will leave its abode.
—Guanzi
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oligarchy

[click image, zzZzz got a new camera and inspired me]

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Take it from Moyers if you won't take it from me.

Note, even Moyers thinks the Tea Party Movement just needs a little tuning....

And also note that Bill Moyers Journal will continue on the web even after it leaves the air two weeks from now.
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Look. Electronic vote tabulation is not mandatory to the control by this oligarchy. It makes it way easier for them, but it doesn't materially alter their ultimate control. Similarly, this Unitary Executive shit that it looks as though Obama, too, will go after, through putting Kagan on the Supreme Court, simply makes it way easier for them. I remember progressives screeching about how, if for NO other reason, we HAD to have Obama for the Supreme Court nominations alone, that if EVERYTHING else were equal, or even lacking, it HAD to be him to keep the Supremes from turning this into the Fourth Reich....

So. Friends. We have SERIOUS problems on top of us. Voting won't fix them. The Supreme Court won't fix them.

What really is the problem with joining the Tea Parties and bringing them up to speed?
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is the class war over?

[click image]

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Did you just shrug and hold your hands out and let them win?
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i'd go to norquist to fight this

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...

The 150,000-member NNU, the largest union and professional organization of registered nurses in the U.S., condemned Reid's bill ... as a deeply flawed measure that grants too much power to the nation's largest private and for-profit insurers.

Specifically, the union that takes in the powerful California Nurses Association, cited 10 fundamental flaws in the Senate bill:

1. The individual mandate forcing all those without coverage to buy private insurance, with insufficient cost controls on skyrocketing premiums and other insurance costs.

2. No challenge to insurance company monopolies, especially in the top 94 metropolitan areas where one or two companies dominate, severely limiting choice and competition.

3. An affordability mirage. Congressional Budget Office estimates say a family of four with a household income of $54,000 would be expected to pay 17 percent of their income, $9,000, on healthcare exposing too many families to grave financial risk.

4. The excise tax on comprehensive insurance plans which will encourage employers to reduce benefits, shift more costs to employees, promote proliferation of high-deductible plans, and lead to more self-rationing of care and medical bankruptcies, especially as more plans are subject to the tax every year due to the lack of adequate price controls. A Towers-Perrin survey in September found 30 percent of employers said they would reduce employment if their health costs go up, 86 percent said they'd pass the higher costs to their employees.

5. Major loopholes in the insurance reforms that promise bans on exclusion for pre-existing conditions, and no cancellations for sickness. The loopholes include:

· Provisions permitting insurers and companies to more than double charges to employees who fail "wellness" programs because they have diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol readings, or other medical conditions.

· Insurers are permitted to sell policies "across state lines", exempting patient protections passed in other states. Insurers will thus set up in the least regulated states in a race to the bottom threatening public protections won by consumers in various states.

· Insurers can charge four times more based on age plus more for certain conditions, and continue to use marketing techniques to cherry-pick healthier, less costly enrollees.

· Insurers may continue to rescind policies for "fraud or intentional misrepresentation" – the main pretext insurance companies now use to cancel coverage.

6. Minimal oversight on insurance denials of care; a report by the California Nurses Association/NNOC in September found that six of California's largest insurers have rejected more than one-fifth of all claims since 2002.

7. Inadequate limits on drug prices, especially after Senate rejection of an amendment, to protect a White House deal with pharmaceutical giants, allowing pharmacies and wholesalers to import lower-cost drugs.

8. New burdens for our public safety net. With a shortage of primary care physicians and a continuing fiscal crisis at the state and local level, public hospitals and clinics will be a dumping ground for those the private system doesn't want.

9. Reduced reproductive rights for women.

10. No single standard of care. Our multi-tiered system remains with access to care still determined by ability to pay. Nothing changes in basic structure of the system; healthcare remains a privilege, not a right.

In fairness to Reid and his fellow Senate Democrats, most of the flaws in their bill are also present in the House bill. And that's the really depressing part.

...

Yes. That's the part everyone already seems to have forgotten. The House bill was for shit, too. Just less so than the Senate's. And Walking Eagle says, "“I think, right now, that the Senate and the House bills – if you look at their overlap, the 95 percent that they agree on – if that bill was presented to me ... I would sign it.”
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