Does GM deserve help from you and me?
During this sad hour of automaker bailouts let us reflect on how they have squandered their opportunities to create a new world and instead caused their own doom by failing to respond to the people and instead doing business as usual. Very sad. We could be so much further than we are if it weren’t for several units of corruption within the auto companies, interest groups lobbyists and the oil industry. And now, citizens will be paying for it.
You think we’ll be paid back? We won’t unless we require that if we’re not paid back that all assets and patents belong to the public domain if the money isn’t paid back within a specific amount of time. Who the heck would approve a loan without specific requirements, a co-signer and sufficient collateral? Stupid congress in both parties that’s who. Do yourself a favor this holiday season and watch this movie.
Once you see the film in it’s entirety I believe you’ll realize how wrong the industry is, and how very wrong it is to let them keep on truckin’. Companies are not working for the people, neither is the government. Face it, we’ve been burned so bad. And we come back for more.
Here is the film’s wikipedia article. If you like, start there and move onto the references cited.
December 9, 2008 at 3:00 am | conspiracy, design, politics, rants | No comment
Mainstream media shows its maturity and balance again
Here’s how you write a good political headline:
Ron Paul Emerging As More Of A GOP Contender
This is from a CBS Denver Affiliate December 21st 2007. I can agree with it based on my own heavy news reading, although I believe he’s already well “emerged.” Considering he’s done well for months and months of smaller polls and of course all the money he’s earned from a hundred thousand or more individual donations.
Now here’s how you demonstrate your bias and bullshit agenda (from a day earlier than the above):
Will Ron Paul Play Spoiler?
And you know what’s really great? This is CBS national news. So we have an affiliate that must have seen the national headline and editors said, “our program and site is better than that, better than our parent company.” Denver has had a reputation of a good news market in the past. I don’t know if it’s true always, but here it definitely is. CBS national news is also following leads from elsewhere. Yahoo guilty, along with the AP this time, which makes me ready to drop their email all together. Bye Bye Yahoo Mail!
Paul shaping up as spoiler in GOP race
I’m not going to spend time analyzing this. What’s the point? I’ll spend the time writing letters. Let’s just identify something. The Yahoo story is from an AP feed. Who wrote the headline? And why is the headline, not part of the URL? Instead the URL uses a quote from the biased story “news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071220/ap_po/anti_war_asterisk.” In the story, it states that Ron Paul was not long ago, an Anti-War asterisk in the race for republican nomination. What exactly does that mean? Can somebody tell me if this comes from common political jargon? An asterisk. And don’t get me wrong, if you write Hillary Clinton, blah blah “asterisk“, I’m still left wondering if that’s like “special candidate” or footnote? It’s anything but an informational label for someone, we know that. And we know that news is supposed to be facts, not labels and stereotypes. Why is this allowed, and then even worse, tolerated.
Let’s get something straight here. There are no such things as spoilers. People still believe that there are, and stories are manipulated that way. When you have two shitty candidates, you simply have voters in a 3rd, 4th and 5th group that just don’t vote. And they still have something called a write-in vote. Mickey Mouse is still doing well there too. So to say that one candidate has a function of merely pulling votes away from another, is false.
December 22, 2007 at 4:14 pm | media, politics, rants | No comment
Shooting at Ward Parkway: How the media unbalances crime
The wife and I came home this evening from our weekend with my parents in good old St. Louis. After getting settled in, unpacking and checking email, we find that Juri’s brother from Japan sent a concerned note about a Kansas City shooting. Immediately, I’m surprised that he would know about something like that. Shootings are common here. Shooting homicides are also too common. Probably 50 a year in the KC metro area. I’ll have to fact check that statistic though, it fluctuates. Why does he hear about this one though? Apparently, the echoes of another random act of violence in middle America was heard in Japan and China and likely other places. Thanks to the media, everyone in the world can be made to believe that random shootings are the world’s greatest threat.
Juri and I frequent this mall. We probably walk the same path as the shooter did once every two weeks. Starbucks, Target, and several shops in between. We might have been there today if it wasn’t for the trip to see my parents. But I’m not dwelling on that. I’ll be back at that mall in a matter of days. I’ll see Spiderman 3 or stock up on some cotton swabs. I don’t let my perception get too skewed by things like these. Why? Because reality is, there is more to be concerned about in my neighborhood in regards to smaller crime than there is with something random like this. When I went on a ride with the Kansas City Metro Patrol last year, the officers told me that they wouldn’t want to take their family to the plaza because it’s a dangerous place. Crime happens all the time there, in the garages around corners. They said “You know why you don’t hear about it right? Because the city wants you to keep shopping there, so the stories get buried or killed.”
That’s comforting!
Actually, our mall has done an excellent job over the past 24 months. We’ve lost our bookstore there, but we’ve gained several cosmetic upgrades, Old Navy, a big shoe store, several parking lot beatifications and the mall-goers have always been pretty pleasant. Security is also quick on the job there. While shopping on afternoon, I watched a man, having some sort of mental episode, shove a clerk at a kiosk onto the floor. It took about twenty seconds for two guards to show up and check on the guy and the clerk.
*Update*
I met with some public officials in Kurashiki, Japan this past week. We are preparing for a large exchange of close to 500 Japanese later in the summer. We talked about security and ensuring safety of the younger folks going on the trip. They immediately brought up the only scary Kansas City story they had heard about, the Ward Parkway shooting. They wanted to know how far the shopping mall was from the dormitories they are staying in. I assured them that they were safe as long as they didn’t watch the news.
April 30, 2007 at 12:49 am | guns, media, police, politics | 1 comment
Terror in the heartland
Thank goodness. Kansas City has a Anti-terrorism organization in place to help protect us. They are called the Terrorism Early Warning Group. At their site, you can get references as pointless as recognizing suspicious packages.
I suppose we are going to be safer now that this group will be first with the information on terrorist attacks. Hmm, let’s keep reading.
“The TEW is not currently equipped to take direct reports about suspicious activity. In an emergency, please call 9-1-1.”
So basically “terrorism” will be handled as it always has been.
Why is everything that used to be a disturbance, prank, playing music too loud, is now called a terrorist act? War on terror? I encourage anyone who believes this garbage to read Blowback by Chalmers Johnson. Man, back in the day, my friends and I used to blow off soda bottle bombs with a little of The Works and tin foil. I wonder if I was 15 today and doing those sort of things, if I might be on some watch list. We all need to calm down.
Speaking of calm, let’s take it down to the soothing blue color in the Terror Threat Advisory. It means Guarded: General Risk of Terror Attacks. Are we at significant risk here? We’re guarded, things are pretty much handled. By the way, here’s a clue that we are going to be yellow for a long time. If you look on the websites that post this Threat Advisory graphic, they aren’t displaying the Advisory based on live real time data or anything. This is a static .gif file. It ain’t goin nowhere. The country could explode and we’d still be at yellow.
April 10, 2006 at 10:55 am | police, politics, rants | No comment
Charlie Sheen and 911
A couple people at work were talking about the actor Charlie Sheen, because this past week he did a radio interview where he basically states his stance on the 911 attacks. This stance being that there are too many unanswered questions. Buildings came down too fast perhaps.
One of the people who was in my training group said, (referring to Sheen) “I don’t even want to see that guy’s face ever again.”
It was funny that he was so disgusted that Sheen would imply that we weren’t given the whole truth about these incidents. I on the other hand am not trusting of the government. Nor should anyone be in my opinion. Thomas Jefferson wasn’t trusting of the government and that’s why our founding documents were written the way they were. Regarding 911 though, there are plenty of missing materials being witheld from the public. We have Pentagon security camera footage that hasn’t been fully released We have security cameras from a nearby Sheraton hotel that still hasn’t surfaced.
We also have WTC Building 7 which has an extremely suspicious air around it. One being the beneficiary of the insurance policy on WTC says on a PBS documentary referring to the collapse of building 7, said “We had such terrible loss of life and the chief said he was having trouble containing the fire that I made the decision to just ‘pull it.’” Early evening that building came down, after having suffered some fires from debris of the other towers.
I haven’t read the 911 Commission at this moment in time, though it’s on my list. I have heard that the topic of WTC7 was kind of glazed over. This might make sense to some because it didn’t get hit by airplanes, and was certainly a dwarfed by the other destruction. But the statement made by that gentleman who collected the insurance policy is a bit annoying to say the least. That building apparently contained government offices. These are offices that We the people own. A decision to pull, if referring to a demolition, is a huge crime, as it’s destroying government property. Our property, our records. Do you know what was housed in Building 7? What were those offices.
I’ve enjoyed watching a lot of the alternative movies on 911. It’s really fascinating to see points of view that weren’t really available at the time. It is an unarguable fact that there is a coverup of 911. We are missing these videos. We are missing cockpit record data. At that level, there is a cover-up. Uncover these materials, and then more citizens and families of victims can rest easier. Until they uncover it, these government agencies deserve all of the flack, all of the litigation, all of the cries of conspiracy, all of the suspicion they are getting.
Were these buildings demolished by airplanes alone? Built to withstand an airplane hitting them, and both having been built to withstand 2500 degree heat, these buildings came down 30 minutes apart, disintegrated, and at freefall speed. Darn the luck you might say right? These airplanes sure were the magic bullets. Now if some of the building engineers are lying and actually the building was not up to that standard, they are responsible for defects in the building.
As much as I love the adventure of conspiracy, I’m not going to remain unswayed here. I’m looking out for more evidence that proves the official story is correct. I want the official story to be correct for many reasons. Right now though, I think that those buildings came down too fast for logic, faster than melted metal and pancaking of floors should do. They came down so perfect, too impossibly perfect. Building 7 is shrouded in mystery. The pentagon is full of missing pieces.
If the government and the agencies were more transparent you wouldn’t have these questions, you wouldn’t have so many conspiracy theories. It’s the lack of transparency that is our downfall here in the United States. The War on Terror is not a reason to withold the things that we withold.
April 1, 2006 at 11:04 am | 911, conspiracy, media, politics, rants | No comment
Protect your identity says the media
Become a private citizen and consider the list of things you can do to protect your identity. I learned about that website from the EFF.
Or you could learn about your privacy from me and publish to the entire world all about yourself. Steal my identity please. I’ll give YOU a bad reputation.
