Children In Charge

Just in case anybody had any respect left for the office of the President, a pathetic child's Rocky fantasy was posted this past week. And he didn't even have the decency to use the one where the Russian beats Rocky around for the source of the pic.

Well, i got the desktop system running for an hour, and here's what i think of the sad silly postings.
I captioned one, and left the other blank for you to caption.

Can we PLEASE get some adults back into the mix?

Yes, feel free to circulate them since you know i don't do that social stuff.

Rocky Trump Trump As Rocky Deluded Trump Fantasy Fat Boy Rocky Fat Trump Delusional Donald Infant President Trump Fat Baby

Paul Termann - A Name That Should Live In Infamy

On December 13th of 1981, on the yacht Apollonia sailing in the Caribbean, two week's of sullen resentment came to a murderous peak. Paul Termann decided to hijack the yacht at gunpoint and declared that Herbert Klein, the owner, had 10 minutes to live. Klein attempted to rescue the party aboard the Apollonia, but only managed to wound Termann, who shot and killed Klein's girlfriend, Gabriele Humpert, and wounded a man named Munsch working on the boat. 
Termann then hunted down Klein and finally murdered him.
He was caught, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1982, but released 20 years later. If you want to know more about what happened, try reading Off The Deep End: A History Of Madness At Sea by Nic Compton. 
 
Not so much a "Live In Infamy" kind of guy - more like a villain from a Travis McGee novel. Likely to be forgotten over time as just another crazy asshole with a gun.

However, that was just his origin story. The birth and source of his True Villainy.

You see, Paul Termann is ashamed to be a convicted double-murderer, so he decided to murder history to hide his crimes. The German high court has ruled that he, and others like him, can force their crimes to be scrubbed from news and historic records so they won't be reminded of their shame.

They call it the Right To Be Forgotten.


Let's call it what it is - the Right To Edit History For Personal Convenience.

No wonder the UK wants out of the EU. They can hear George Orwell's anguished screams echoing through the ground. What was once considered Orwellian Nightmare is now a Personal Right in the EU. Not just governments, but any criminal can now erase the past.

In more normal times if a law was passed allowing criminals to hide their crimes, we'd point out the horrible possibility of murderers using it to cover up their crimes and hide their past from the potential victims around them. And, perhaps even more disturbingly, erase all memory of their victims in the process.

But that's where we're starting from these days.

So, how soon can we expect it to be used to cover up war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity carried out by governments and corporations?

Remember - in our twisted laws, corporations - entities founded to escape personal responsibility - are considered human beings, entitled to the same rights and protections. But, as noted, without being bound by all the same responsibilities. They already routinely get away with murder, now they're being handed a tool to wipe it from the public memory.

It's hard to decide if this ruling is epicly stupid or actively evil.

Either way, it certainly leaves me wondering what those who made the ruling must want erased from their pasts?

Or was it simply a matter of being bought by those who want to use the law?

Sorry - no joke today.

Just the joke that Paul Termann played on Truth.

Hey! Look Behind The Curtain

A brief follow-up before we continue.

An overview of the Social Security situation.
When you hear politicians in Washington talking about Social Security as an "Entitlement Program", you are listening to criminals trying to cover up their crimes, or the crimes of their colleagues/predecessors. Social Security is a mandatory insurance program in which we were all forced to participate. As usual, our  government doesn't like the idea of living up to their deals once it's no longer profitable for them.

Some may want to talk about how much of the budget gets eaten up by that obligation, but the real question is Why is so much of the budget going towards those payments?
In the 1980s, it was clear where we were headed, and so the withholdings for Social Security were dramatically increased to build a massive trust fund to finance the deal. Last time i looked, it was between 2.5-3 Trillion dollars. That's 15 zeroes. How much interest do you suppose that much capital in a trust fund generates?

How about none.

In the 90s the government got to looking at all that cash just sitting there doing nothing. (Serving the needs of the citizenry counts as "doing nothing," of course) So they decided to embezzle it. They raided the fund and replaced the cash with Treasury Notes. They called it an "Economic Miracle" and claimed the budget was balanced. And all they had to do was steal the future from the citizens whom they had conned into trusting their money to them. As near as i can tell, this raiding of the actual cash has continued, because - money.

So now, not only does the budget have to cover cashing out those Treasury Notes to pay back our money they stole, but they also have to pay for the interest generated on said notes. So instead of our money earning interest or dividends to fund what we were promised, it generates more debt for our budget.
Instead of cash generating earnings to pay for the program, we have debit statements racking up more debt to be paid out. It's the theft that keeps on thieving.

The government STOLE the money, replaced it with IOUs, and is trying to punish the public for wanting the government to deliver on their promises, promises that we already paid for.

When you hear politicians in DC talking about the Social Security "Entitlement Program", call bullshit and demand they return our stolen funds.

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Okay. I'll lighten up now.
I know just the hero to call for help, and we'll be back in a short while.

How It Works In The USA

I'd like to continue on the topic from this morning, but today seems to be one of those all too frequent occasions when my internet access provider is testing their slow lane or something. Once or twice a month i have a day when any websites without corporate backing enter a connecting/loading loop from which they never break out.

I miss Qwest, the old company. But when the US government went hogwild grabbing up new power in the last decade, the owner of Qwest was one of the few who stood up for Rule Of Law and refused to illegally just hand over what the government wanted. So he was rapidly set up, prosecuted and destroyed, breaking the company and allowing a more compliant organization to take over. As is usually the case these days when one doesn't cooperate with a criminal government order.

Not surprisingly, things went down hill, and we now have very low expectations for the future when it comes to having our rights and access protected.  The funny thing is, they think i'll still pay full price for half access - and typically the half that holds no interest for me. Jack the costs up and drop the service and a whole lot of us are going to start doubling and tripling up, sharing service to cut price.

When the Soviet Union was a going concern, people used to talk about how Communism works on paper, but once you get people involved the inherent corruption always manifests to destroy the potential. Of course, the very same holds true for Capitalism which is how you wind up with what we have under the label of "capitalism" these days. (More often called "American Style Capitalism" elsewhere) We have corporations that operate as admitted terrorists and extortionists while buying laws to prevent prosecution, or even civil suits. Our high courts have declared the government officially for sale. We have jails that rent better facilities to prisoners who have money. We have debtors prisons making a resurgence as a profit mechanism for our current corrupted style of crony capitalism. We have pathetic medical care that costs almost much as the other 9 in the top ten list combined while providing inferior care, and our solution to the problem is to let the profiteers write new laws to move the costs around instead of fixing the corruption. We've gone from politicians working to avoid the mere "Appearance of Impropriety" to the point that felony convictions are no longer necessarily an issue. On some international freedom scales we don't even rank in the top 30 while idiots run around asking "How Free Are You On A Scale Of 1 To America?" Social inequality is reaching Dickensian heights, with corporate leaders making 500-1000 times what their workers earn. (For reference, in the middle of the last century the ratio was about 50 to 1) We have self-labelled "Christians" who worship Money so hard that they've started a branch of the religion that teaches that Christ was a bit of a twat who didn't know what he was talking about, and his Daddy really wants you to be rich and rule over the filthy masses. (Yes, this is the church to which our current Executive Tweeter belongs) We debate what is or is not torture now, while only a couple generations back we executed foreign soldiers for using the exact same practices on our soldiers which we now embrace as "tools of freedom," even though anyone who isn't an idiot or evil will understand that torture doesn't make people tell the truth, it makes them tell whatever the torturer wants to hear to make the torture stop. And then they can't figure out why people think they're evil idiots, reinforcing both notions.

Let's not even start on the bad joke of the "Freedom Lite"* two party system choking our politics. The current state of politics is akin to watching a couple of gangs fighting a bloody turf war and being told to pick one and pretend they're the good guys. Such is the binary nature of our ingrained cultural thinking.

Three pages of information to which i seek access have continued to attempt to load for the duration of this typing. The NY Times obituary loaded in seconds. The personal sites run by fans are all access blocked at the moment. Perhaps it's nothing more than a system glitch. But, as i said, this is a regular ongoing occurrence, and that leaves a great deal of trepidation for the future as our current greedy governors grab for more money and control.  Again. Yet again.

It's funny when we hear the FCC talk about how the rules and restrictions they keep changing are no longer a reflection of modern business.
Of course not! They were set up as protections. Protections from business interests trumping social needs and from information distortion. Protections for the citizenry, and for the proper functioning of a free society. NONE of those are a concern today, in fact - they're considered liabilities, impediments to acquisition and consolidation of power (as they were intended to be) so they've got to go. When the majority of the information media outlets are concentrated into a half dozen corporations, you don't even need conspiracies to skew information. With numbers that small, mere common interest with bias reporting, or the lack thereof. (It's probably worth noting that they all have major "defense" industry interests)

And while they might spout some very nice sounding reasons at times, it's important to remember that they take hundreds of millions of dollars from the public to spend on research to learn what to say to make us give more, accept more, and bend over more readily.


Some day soon we should talk about identity. How many people even know who they are? Are you more than just an echo?


No wonder i'm a hermit, eh?
And i just wanted to look at Cats.


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* (Here's how the two party system works, and why it's considered to be "Freedom Lite":
You want to go out for dinner and you're given two choices - Did you want a Big Mac or a Whopper?
Pizza, chicken, steak, fish, lobster, salad, or anything else is not up for discussion. It's been decided you're going to have hamburger, now you have the "freedom" to choose between char broiling or frying, and to pick your condiments.
That, in essence, is the two party system of politics.)