Power corrupts and you know the rest. Every day we deal with the decisions of people with too much authority and not enough brains.
Which is to ask who thought THIS was a ‘good idea’?
Um, we can only speculate that it is a good thing for the rest of us that the prohibition against videotaping cops was just recently overturned or the mere act of posting this on the web would be a crime!
Clearly, these kids we doing no harm (and you can bet your backside there’s a job opening at the Jefferson Memorial for the position of ‘head of security’…which, disturbingly enough, was probably a political ‘plum’ handed out by some politician’s chief of staff!)
What do you suppose the new Park Service police officers uniforms should look like? Which is to ask how you ‘offset’ the big bulls-eye the asshole in charge just painted on his people?
Understand good citizen, wars are fought over this kind of ‘oppression’, better known as tyranny.
Bizarrely, it wouldn’t be the first time a minor political appointment has gone horribily and disastrously wrong.
But if we consider the powder keg the conservative movement has become, this sort of outcome starts to look inevitable.
How many of you DON’T think the conservatives are just spoiling for a fight?
In the beginning of the video we see the ‘nice’ police officer come and ‘warn’ the kids they will be arrested if they ‘protest’ at this National monument. They aren’t doing anything, none of them has a sign or a placard denouncing anything!
If anything they are guilty of being the correct age to engage in a political protest.
AFTER the cop ‘warns’ them they do exactly what any kid would do, they start doing what the cop told them not to do!
You see, their parents made the common parrental mistake of telling these kids they had rights and one of those rights was due process, that they couldn’t be arrested for nothing.
As we can see in the video, these kids got a reality check.
Guess what, you CAN be arrested for ‘disobeying’ a cop! (A cop who KNOWS he’s perilously close to trampling YOUR rights just to make his boss happy!)
So what did WE learn here today good citizen?
Either you roll over and play dead or you go ‘all in’.
These, er, ‘officers’ have just set a very dangerous precident. The next time people start ‘dancing’ at a public monument, some of them will be armed and ready…and it will turn into a firefight.
Just think good citizen, the revolution will begin when we start dancing in public!
Which is to ask just how far off the deep end have our overlords gone?
Up ‘til now we’ve pretty much let them get away with murder…and that is the very next line to be crossed, murder: personal.
The question good citizen is whether or not (now that you know it is coming) you will stand there and take it or whether or not you are willing to give it right back?
We do have numbers on our side.
They, unfortunately, ARE the law, which is what needs changing.
Speaking of laws and escalation the foolish GOP in Utah has decided to make the already murky issue of money even murkier.
Now, however, Utah has passed a law intended to encourage residents to use gold or silver coins made by the Mint as cash, but with their value based on the weight of the precious metals in them, not the face value — if, that is, they can find a merchant willing to accept the coins on that basis.
You think $2 bills were a flop, watch what happens here, it will be a fiasco!
This is a situation ready and waiting for the greater fool to come along.
Doesn’t this bring us directly to the point I often use, where the merchant first checks the ‘spot price’ before proceeding with the transaction?
How much ‘time and energy’ will be wasted verifying the unknowable? If the quote is off you could be out thousands if the transaction is large enough.
Worse, it is a ‘two-edged’ sword.
Let’s suppose for a moment our merchant uses two quoting services just to be, er, ‘safe’ and he gets two wildly divergent numbers…what does he do? Proceed, hoping the number that benefits him the most is accurate or does he decline the transaction and demand a more ‘stable’ form of payment?
What would the customer do? Go next door to see if that merchant is willing to be more ‘reasonable’?
Talk about a pickle!
Anyway, we arrive at today’s dose of ‘happy talk’ where reality is twisted beyond recognition…
After years of being outgunned by Japanese rivals, the American auto industry has made small cars a central part of its strategy, seeking to capitalize on a fundamental shift in the preferences of consumers in an era of fast-rising gas prices.
By refocusing on small cars and de-emphasizing the gas-guzzlers that had long sustained the industry, General Motors and Ford in particular are preserving jobs and positioning themselves to prosper. Their efforts are already paying off in the marketplace. Ford’s tiny Fiesta is the best-selling subcompact in the United States this year, and G.M.’s Chevrolet Cruze outsold every other compact car in America last month except the segment-leading Honda Civic.
They are selling fewer cars than ever (because ‘working American’ is still an endangered species AND they ARE NOT ‘giving’ the fucking vehicles away!)
Do you suppose the ‘buying public’ (as few of them as there are) is taking comfort from the fact that the ‘New Chevrolet’ has ‘hencho in China’ stamped all over it?
Which is to ask how much of this is being driven by sky-high gas prices combined with the growing danger presented by ‘conspicuous consumption’?
Which is to point out that the people buying these over-priced econo-boxes COULD afford to buy new Hummers but that wouldn’t be ‘prudent’ for reasons that have little to do with ‘frugality’.
Lastly, we arrive at a topic that has been so overshadowed by other horrendous global events as to have ‘disappeared’ from the news cycle now that the campaign season is getting underway.
In pointing out that we could be doing much more about unemployment, I recognize, of course, the political obstacles to actually pursuing any of the policies that might work. In the United States, in particular, any effort to tackle unemployment will run into a stone wall of Republican opposition. Yet that’s not a reason to stop talking about the issue. In fact, looking back at my own writings over the past year or so, it’s clear that I too have sinned: political realism is all very well, but I have said far too little about what we really should be doing to deal with our most important problem.
As I see it, policy makers are sinking into a condition of learned helplessness on the jobs issue: the more they fail to do anything about the problem, the more they convince themselves that there’s nothing they could do. And those of us who know better should be doing all we can to break that vicious circle.
I’d defend Mr. Krugman by pointing to the ‘muzzle’ he wears as a nationally syndicated columnist. He has to be exceptionally careful of what he writes or it won’t get published at all.
The truth be damned, you can only push the advertisers so far!
Which is to once again ask how unfortunate it is for our society to have the dissemination of information rely on a ‘for profit’ business model?
This would not be the case under A Simple Plan and ‘unemployment’ under ASP would be non-existent…because ‘profit’ is calculated differently than it is today.
Yes good citizen, Mr. Krugman is correct in observing that ‘solving’ the capitalist created ‘employment crisis’ has been a ‘low priority’ for the people responsible.
Now that they are arresting people for assembling in groups larger than three, we are all ‘on notice’.
Happy Memorial day good citizen, how ironic is it that the evidence we have been seeking just happens to turn up today?
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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