Waterboardin’ U.S.A.

 Idiots & Assholes (Politics)
Nov 142010
 

Somebody please tell me again just who is abusing his power as President.  Obama?  What?  Fuck you–Bush actually gave permission for our government to torture people.  He should be brought to trial for this crime, end of story.

WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday joined a growing chorus in the human rights community calling for a special prosecutor to investigate whether former president George W. Bush violated federal statutes prohibiting torture.

In his new memoir and ensuing book tour, Bush has repeatedly admitted that he directly authorized the waterboarding of three terror suspects. Use of the waterboard, which creates the sensation of drowning, has been an iconic and almost universally condemned form of torture since the time of the Spanish Inquisition.

Except for a brief period during which a handful of Bush administration lawyers insisted that the exigencies of interrogating terror suspects justified its use, waterboarding has always been considered illegal by the Justice Department. It is also a clear violation of international torture conventions.

via Huffington Post

Latest Republican dirty trick: hire the homeless to run as 3rd party

 Idiots & Assholes (Politics), Unfuckingbelievable!
Sep 102010
 

The Arizona G.O.P. has officially become King Turd in the toilet of dirty politics.  The Dems have pulled some whoppers in their time, but I’ve never seen anything as slimy as this.  Granted, any left-leaning voter who pays a reasonable amount of attention will see through this and not let it sway their vote, but it’s just the intent behind it that astonishes me.  The fact that this Steve May guy went through all this trouble reveals a lot about his character.  And they wonder why people have such apathy about elections!

Mr. Pearcy and other drifters and homeless people were recruited onto the Green Party ballot by a Republican political operative who freely admits that their candidacies may siphon some support from the Democrats. Arizona’s Democratic Party has filed a formal complaint with local, state and federal prosecutors in an effort to have the candidates removed from the ballot, and the Green Party has urged its supporters to steer clear of the rogue candidates.

And get a load of this shit!  He holds a “media event” at a Starbucks in the hipster part of town to challenge those who say these are fake candidates.  Which they are.

“Did I recruit candidates?  Yes,” said Mr. May, who is himself a candidate for the State Legislature, on the Republican ticket.  “Are they fake candidates?  No way.”

To make his point, Mr. May went by Starbucks, the gathering spot of the Mill Rats, as the frequenters of Mill Avenue are known.

“Are you fake, Benjamin?” he yelled out to Mr. Pearcy, who cried out “No,” with an expletive attached.

“Are you fake, Grandpa?” he said to Anthony Goshorn, 53, a candidate for the State Senate whose bushy white beard and paternal manner have earned him that nickname on the streets. “I’m real,” he replied.

via NYTimes.com

Maybe I’m taking this too seriously, I can’t quite decicde yet.

But wait, there’s more.  My buddy Troy who lives in Phoenix tells me this Steve May guy is–you guessed it–a gay Republican.  Well fuck a duck, isn’t that just the icing on the fat-free Starbucks bran muffin.  I did some Googling, and sure enough, he is indeed a big ol’ homo.  How utterly disappointing.  Is there anything quite so pathetic as a self-hating gay Republican?  I mean, really.  So not only is he that, but he’s pulling these ultra-scummy tricks on the public as well, hoping to cheat himself into getting a few votes.

What.  An.  Asshole.

As if banks needed another way to screw you…

 Unfuckingbelievable!
Feb 222009
 

The only time I was laid off and had to live on unemployment benefits was back in late 2001.  Depositing those checks and filling out those weekly what-jobs-I-applied-for forms for six months was crappy but humbling and necessary to get by.  Nowadays it looks like you can access those funds via a special debit card, which is kind of a nice upgrade to the process.  Less paper, quicker access to your money, and all’s swell, right?

Of course, there’s a big hitch:  it gives the banks yet another opportunity to be greedy, evil fucks.  Apparently most of them are charging fees on unemployment debit cards, allowing them to reap big profits from your misfortune.  So if you’re laid off and surviving on unemployment benefits alone, needing every dollar to stretch as far as it can, you can expect the banks to take a little piece of that every time you use an ATM or check your balance.  From a related story:

The Comerica Bank MasterCard debit card used by the unemployment
benefit program has fees like:  $1.50 every time you make a withdrawal,
after one freebie at Wachovia or PNC, $1.50 each time you transfer $
from the debit card to a checking account, $.40 to check your balance…

Christ!  There may be ways around some of the fees, such as taking cash back with a grocery purchase, but people shouldn’t have to game the system to avoid this kind of thing.  And what about those overdraft fees?  Oh, don’t think for one second that most banks are going to treat your unemployment card any differently from a regular debit card.  If you accidentally charge more than you have in your account, rather than cutting you off when you’re out of money, you’re dinged with a $20+ overdraft fee which puts you further in the hole.  Because, to the banks, having a negative balance ensures that you stay fucked for a loooonnnng time, especially if something else (like one of their stupid balance check fees) chimes in and dings you for another $20.  Bang, $40 of your next unemployment payment goes right into the bank’s pocket because of a $.50 balance check surcharge.  Assholes.

It’s things like this that piss me off about the bank bailout.  They get to survive while still treating their customers like cows to be milked, even the jobless ones.  Maybe some of them deserve to fail…some people seem to think so.  Personally I still have a rarely-used account with a local credit union, and we’re seriously thinking about moving our money there and giving Washington Mutual/JP Morgan Chase the boot.  They already charge for overdraft protection and having less than $300 in your savings account, both of which are fee-free with the credit union, so it’s only a matter of putting it in motion.

Here’s what your Federal bailout money is buying

 Unfuckingbelievable!
Oct 082008
 

AIG just blew $400,000 on a fancy retreat with your money.

Now that AIG has been nationalized, some folks are wondering just how their tax dollars are being spent. If you’re among them, we have some bad news for you from ABC.  They are reporting that papers uncovered by congressional investigators show that “less than a week after the federal government committed $85 billion to bail out AIG, executives of the giant AIG insurance company headed for a week-long retreat at a luxury resort and spa, the St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, California.”  Ouch.

ABC says that the documents show that the company, yes the company, paid more than $400,000 for a week long retreat at the resort.  The bill included $200,000 for rooms, $150,000 for meals and $23,000 in spa charges.

Motherfuckers.  Tell me again…why did our fearless leaders voted to save these scumbags’ hides?

Brown is the color of evildoers

 Unfuckingbelievable!
Sep 252008
 

God(s) help you if you’re flying into or around America nowadays and you have brown skin.  You’re especially fucked if your last name sounds even vagely foreign and your lineage doesn’t meet the U.S. Government’s standards.  These two horror stories spell it out as clearly as any:  America is suffering from a sickness of paranoia and hostility aimed at people who look “foreign.”  Even if you’re sick or pregnant–even if you’re an actual U.S. Citizen, for fuck’s sake!–prepare to spend hours in a questioning room if they don’t like something about you or where you’ve been.

  • At JFK Airport, Denying Basic Rights Is Just Another Day at the Office – This one’s outrageous:  ”I have traveled to many different places, some supposedly repressive, and have never seen people treated with the kind of animosity that Homeland Security showed that night.  In Syria, border control officers were stern but polite.  At other borders there have been bureaucracies to contend with — excruciating for both Americans and other foreign nationals.  I’ve met Russian officials with dead, suspicious looks in their eyes and arms tired from stamping so many visas, but in America, the Homeland Security officials I encountered were very much alive — like vultures waiting to eat.”
  • Doctor Flying Southwest Tries To Go To Bathroom, Ends Up In Jail – This poor guy tried to go to the restroom during his flight and was treated like a potential terrorist, and then he was interrogated by the FBI upon landing because the stewardess said he was “creating a disturbance” and of course they believed her:  ”During 30 years of my stay in America , I never felt so threatened nor my rights so violated as I did that fateful night. ‘You are not guilty until proven otherwise’, the anthem we are made to believe all the time was turned out to be not true; I was guilty until prove my self innocent. I was treated like a guilty person and was never given a chance even to tell my side of the story. Even after the incidence, I am finding it difficult to prove my innocence. I want Southwest Air Lines to realize their mistake and drop charges against me. I did contact Southwest airlines and was informed that they were standing by their stewardess and the issue had no racial profile or bias.”

This makes my blood boil.  And yet, what can we do?  Sue the government?  Sue the airline?  Will it really do any good?

Privacy is becoming the new terrorism

 General Blatherings, Unfuckingbelievable!
Jul 262008
 

The government-waged war on privacy is getting more and more ridiculous.  Turns out you can do pretty much anything you want if you can tie it to the Big Three Threats to civilization:  terrorism, child porn, and music piracy.

F’rinstance, U.S. border guards are now allowed to snoop through your laptop whenever they feel like it, because to them, every laptop is a potential threat to the country.  Their logic is becoming the norm in this Bush-era paranoia state we’re in:  “Why, you might have it loaded with all sorts of un-American things, so how dare you protest!  You’re obviously hiding something if you try to argue that privacy crap with us!  That’s the kind of thing terrorists and child molesters do!”  And if you refuse, they’ll just take your laptop and you’ll likely never see it again.  At the very least they’ll hold you for intense questioning and who knows what else, and it’s all in the name of this false sense of security they’re trying to give us.  They can do this to everyone, not just people visiting the country–doesn’t matter if you were born and raised here, let them sniff your data or else.  It’s the old “treat ‘em all like criminals” thing.  (At one point it was even suggested that these goons could search your iPod for pirated music, but even they know what an impossible task that would be, for many reasons.)

Over in New York, Attorney General Cuomo has decided to wage his own personal war against child porn by trying to force ISPs to stop carrying newsgroups.  If you’re not familiar with Usenet newsgroups, they’ve been around for nearly 15 years (if not more) and are a place where people discuss/argue/ponder a zillion different topics.  Some of the newsgroups carry binary files like photos, music, movies, and software (though they’re posted as giant text messages, so you have to download and convert them into their intended form).  Out of the 100,000+ newsgroups in existence, a small handful of the binary ones have been found to carry the occasional bit of unsavory illegal material posted by unknown creepos.  Yes, this is bad…but Cuomo wants to make ISPs shut off access to ALL newsgroups, which means an entire universe of free and open discussion will be silenced.  Obviously this doesn’t raise any red flags to him, because people on a Moral Quest (especially politicians) will stop at nothing to look like they’re doing something about a problem, no matter how stupid their solutions are.  Cutting off all newsgroups is like ripping off someone’s arm to remove a hangnail.  Or, as the linked story puts it:  “By that standard of responsibility, an entire library should be burned down if a single obscene book happens to be found on its shelves.”  He’s already convinced a few big ISPs in New York to cut off Usenet access to their customers for these bullshit reasons, and now he’s going after Comcast.  You should be outraged even if you don’t access Usenet, because this is a government-sponsored attack on freedom of speech and it’s a dangerous path to take.

Across the pond, the battle against music piracy is reaching ludicrous levels of its own.  Those poor Brits are already being spied on by their government in every possible way (while crime levels seem unaffected), and now it looks like six of their biggest ISPs have decided to collude with the government and sniff their customers’ internet traffic for file sharing.  Looks like they haven’t decided on how to punish their file-sharing customers yet, but it could include bandwidth throttling (slowing it way down), filtering their access, or just kicking their asses off the Net altogether.  But why stop there?  Send squads of Network Legality Enforcers into their homes to root through their computers, DVD collections, and iPods!  Tap their phone calls for blasphemous talk of piracy!  Install microphones in their homes and monitor all conversations!  Why not?  Anyone against such measures is obviously a filthy, copyright-breaking, music-swapping terrorist scumbag.

There is already very little true privacy to be found on line, if any at all, but at this rate I think the idea of privacy of any kind is going to be just a quaint memory in a few short years.  And for what?  Fake security, control of information, and protecting the bloated salaries of media executives.  I don’t know about you, but this makes me want to learn more about encryption.

Is nowhere safe? (Revisited)

 Marketing Scumbags
Jul 012008
 

A short follow-up to the original post…

According to a post on Wired, back in 2006 British Telecom was secretly infecting its customers’ PCs with spyware which injected targeted advertising into every website they surfed.  That means even mundane things like checking your bank account balance was disrupted by flashing banners for dating services and hot new car deals.  This apparently made life hell for customers in more ways than that:  BT “inserted JavaScript code into every web page downloaded by the users” which ended up causing flickering screens, slowed connections, and crashed browsers.  All this so that BT could snarf a little more money from the advertising companies?  Motherfuckers.

Oh yeah, and let’s not forget about that new camera system which tracks the eye movements of shoppers. That way they can see what you look at, from the moment you set eyes on that billboard for Disney’s new and improved Mickey Mouse Shaped Cheese Slices (a real product, I might add).  You gotta admit, evil and technology make a great team!

Check those credit card statements!

 General Blatherings
Jan 282008
 

The other night I was checking my credit card balance to make sure that my latest payment went through.  I then noticed that the monthly minimum payment had increased by more than $50.  WTF?  So I checked out my latest statement, and was horrified to discover that earlier this month, some asshole had pilfered my credit card number and gone on an internet shopping spree for several days.  The charges were all in the UK:  Bournemouth, Kingston, Birmingham, Sheffield, etc. and they were buying all sorts of crap like beauty care produts, pet products, candy (!), and all sorts of electronics.  All told, they charged $900 to my card.  It could have been much worse, but still…!

I have no idea how this happened, because this card never leaves my sight and I don’t fall for phishing emails or other scams.  How did they get my info?  I then headed over to Consumerist.com and saw a story about a recent surge in credit card fraud–they’re speculating that it’s because data from over half a million people has gone “missing” from hundreds of retail stores across the country.  But that’s only one possibility–data thieves are getting increasingly clever with how they operate.  I do use the card for online shopping occasionally, so who knows.  I may switch to using a temporary credit card for online purchases in the future.  (Also, the fact that my eBay account was hacked a few months ago makes me even more leery…what’s next??)

Anyway, I called the credit card company and had them close the account, and they’re mailing me an affadavit so I can dispute the charges.  I’d recommend that everybody out there check those credit card statements and scour them for anything that looks suspicious.  Check your debit account too, while you’re at it.  I try to remember to do this, but it’s been a couple of months since I last looked and luckily I caught it fairly recently after it happened.

It’s not about winning or losing…it’s about poppin’ a cap in someone’s ass.

 General Blatherings
Feb 232007
 

Obviously my heart is filled with evil glee is whenever some overpaid sports celebrity makes a national ass of himself, but it’s even better when an overhyped sports event goes insanely awry.  I’m talking about last weekend’s NBA All-Star Weekend in Vegas, which turned out to be little more than an excuse for these “professionals” (worshipped as role models by many young ‘uns) to run around and act like animals and criminals.  AOL’s Jason Whitlock was there and wrote a great commentary on this mind-boggling assholery.  I’ll paste in some of the juicier bits:

The game is a sloppy, boring, half-hearted mess.  The dunk contest is contrived and pointless.  The celebrity contest is unintended comedy.  And, worst of all, All-Star Weekend revelers have transformed the league’s midseason exhibition into the new millennium Freaknik, an out-of-control street party that features gunplay, violence, non-stop weed smoke and general mayhem.

All weekend, people, especially cab drivers, gossiped about brawls and shootings.  You didn’t know what to believe because the local newspaper was filled with stories about what a raging success All-Star Weekend was.

There were so many fights and so many gangbangers and one parking-lot shootout at the MGM Grand that people literally fled the hotel in fear for their safety.  I talked with a woman who moved from the MGM to the Luxor because “I couldn’t take it.  I’ll never come back to another All-Star Game.”

I was there.  Walking The Strip this weekend must be what it feels like to walk the yard at a maximum security prison.  You couldn’t relax.  You avoided eye contact.  The heavy police presence only reminded you of the danger.

Wow, sounds like a great place to be for all those basketball fans!  But is anyone surprised this happened?  These celebrity players make tons of money and think they’re above the law, and bringing them to a flashy place like Vegas is bound to dissolve whatever self-control they might have left.  And isn’t it just typical for the pricks in the Vegas media to downplay this stuff and pump out bullshit about what a success the event was?  But for someone like me who gets a perverse kick out of seeing sports cultists reveal their true nature, it’s entertainment gold. I’d expect the same exact thing from a football or baseball event, by the way…none of them are above this. (Oddly enough, this is the same event that a certain bigot was recently barred from.  Looks like he might have been right at home there.)

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