L'AG è un liar

How long, how fucking long can this go on??? The people of the US are either woefully disinterested in the health and wellbeing of their nation, or so overwhelmingly consumed with their own day-to-day surivival, that they just cannot possibly care that:

The President of the US has been proven to be a liar
The Vice President of the US has been proven to be a liar
The Attorney General of the US has been proven to be a liar
The Republican Senate leadership has been proven to be liars
The Republican House leadership has been proven to be liars
The Secretary of State has been proven to be a liar
The Secretary of the Interior has been proven to be a liar
The Secretary of Education has been proven to be a liar
The head of the EPA has been proven to be a liar
The head of NASA has been proven to be a liar

When we this end?? When will the people say enough?? When will these vile, evil, horrible human beings be held accountable?

On a side note, at least eight times during his interview with Jon Stewart, former ambassador to the UN John Bolton explicitly lied. He lied so authoritatively and dictatorially that his arrogance at doing so was all the more insane and socio-pathic. Bolton is no different than those others listed above. They have no compulsion to be honest and forthright; they make Goebbels look like an advertising executive.

GNF--GooglebombingNowForpeace

Cut and paste this:

From tigtog:

This is a crosspost to effect a Googlebomb, correcting an injustice against a fellow feminist blogger.

Jill Filipovic, who blogs at Feministe and Ms. JD, is a NYU law student who has been the subject of cyber-obsession on a discussion board allegedly populated by law students. The discussions regarding Jill Filipovic (and many other female law students) are sexist and sexual in nature, rating the women’s physical attractiveness and fantasising about sexual contact, both consensual and non-consensual. Neither Jill Filipovic or any other of these women contributed, or gave their permission to be discussed, to the discussion board in question.

Jill Filopovic’s name and class routines etc have been regularly posted to this board, and at least one of the pseudonymous board-members claims to be Jill Filipovic’s classmate. Photos that Jill Filipovic posted (with full rights reserved) to an internet photo-storing and sharing site have also been posted to the sleazy discussion board without her permission. This is a horrendous invasion of Jill Filipovic’s privacy, a violation of copyright law, and calls the ethics and character of the alleged law-students participating in these discussions on the discussion board into question.

A major side-effect of an already nasty situation is that the sexist, objectifying cyber-obsession threads come up on the first page of internet search results on Jill Filipovic’s name. To an inexperienced user of the internet, it may even look as if Jill Filipovic and other female law students chose to compete in these Hot or Not rating competitions, instead of having their pictures posted without permission.

This post is an attempt to balance those internet results to point to the significant writings of Jill Filipovic instead, using the Googlebomb tactic and also linking this post to social networking sites (eg. del.ici.ous, Stumbleupon). Please feel free to copy any or all of what I’ve written here to your own blog in order to help change the top-ranked search engine results for Jill Filipovic. If you don’t have your own blog then please at least link to one of Jill’s this post[s] listed below at your preferred social networking site and give it the tag “Filipovic" (as well as any others you think appropriate).

I have linked to these sites in this post:
Jill Filipovic’s bio page at Feministe
Jill Filipovic’s blog posts at the Ms. JD blog
Jill Filipovic’s article about these scummy lawschool sleazebags at Feministe
Jill Filipovic’s article at Ms. JD: When Law Students Attack

If any of the other female law students stalked by the same sleazy site wish to copy this text with names altered, you hereby have my full permission to do so. All other rights reserved. (C) 2007 tigtog

Si hoc memenum legere potes

as the blogsphere goes; books read appear in bold.

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Dune, Frank Herbert
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer
The Shockwave Rider, John Brunner
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
The Cyberiad or Solaris, Stanislaw Lem
Illuminatus!, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
Colossus, D.F. Jones
Planet of the Apes, Pierre Boulle
War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells
Jack of Shadows, Roger Zelazny
The Lathe of Heaven. Ursala LeGuin

Interesting subtexts for TV dramas...

Last friday evening, two different TV dramas, on two different networks, from two different corporate producers, each had a similar subtextual construct as the bases for the episodes. And in neither case was this construct mentioned in any media whatsoever, as evidenced by the two following summaries.

http://www.tv.com/las-vegas/heroes/episode/958574/summary.html?tag=ep_list;ep_title;16
http://www.tv.com/numb3rs/democracy/episode/985690/summary.html?tag=ep_list;ep_title;17

So why would i use my blogspace-time to mention this??? Well, quite frankly, it rather blew my mind. You see, this subtextual construct was that very rich people with extraordinary economic and political power are literally free to do whatever they desire to further their goals and intentions. On the episode of Las Vegas, the wealthy sociopath drugged and kidnapped a female for his personal sex slave, alluding to the fact that he had been doing this for a very long time, and that no one could really stop him from doing so. On the episode of Numb3rs, another billionaire manipulated and controlled an election through electronic hacking of central tabulators ostensibly to dominate CA election results and insure that he determined the future of national and international policy (with his fellow plutocrats). To accomplish this he used pawns, puppets, and syncophants, then had them killed, and then bragged that he was essentially untouchable.

Plutocrats and oligarchs are beginning to exert their political control and will over much of the planet. As neo-feudal lords of capital they are beyond the scope of laws and consequential forms of justice as retribution for their heinous actions against all species. Flaunting this on tv, as part of dramatic series, only further serves their agendas, brazenly challenging the norms by which national and international societies conduct themselves. Political power in Russia, for example, is being consolidated in aligning plutocrats and oligarchs under one single strand of feudal authority. Those that step out of line, and especially those that try to report on the processes, are being marginalized, imprisoned, and killed. The US plutocrats are firmly supportive of abhorrent totalitarian regimes in the Middle East, to further purge discontent and threats to their power. The US is engaging Iran because of the dependency of the oligarchy on super light, and light crude oil traded in US dollars. Ever onward is the push to privatize the services of government from prisons to education, from social services to healthcare, from public works to military. Privatizing these systems imbues the corporate lords with immense power and removes the threat of consequence and justice.

Update: News today reports that Halliburton is moving its corporate headquarters from Houston to Dubai. Essentially this puts the company, and its board, in an extradition free zone, where Cheney and his cronies can go hide out the rest of their lives in the most stupendously outrageous region of conspicuous overconsumption on the planet. Of the 900+ billionaires in the world a full 46% of them have personal properties in Dubai, a nation protected by huge private security forces armed with the latest and most sophisticated of military technologies. Go figure.

Update #2:Time’s Karen Tumulty comments on Halliburton’s plan to move its headquarters from Houston to Dubai: “Is this about tax breaks? Getting beyond the reach of congressional subpoenas? And what about all that sensitive information that Halliburton has had access to? At a minimum, reincorporating in Dubai would mean that Halliburton will be paying less taxes to the U.S. Treasury, even as it collects billions from government contracts.” She also reports, “Henry Waxman is already planning to hold a hearing on this, an aide tells me.”

just a thought

A couple of months ago, i read an essay by a medical doctor describing the heart disease issues with VP Dickhead. I can't remember where on the web i read it, perhaps Smirking Chimp (a great site even if the essay wasn't on there), but essentially the doctor predicted this latest bit of health issue news. The VP's body cannot continue to withstand the impact of long flights, long periods of sitting, and being away from dialysis and other therapeutic treatment regimens. He is a very ill and sick man, with congestive heart failure disease and related fluid retention issues. It is one of the reasons he is kept from the press for much of the time. It is why he makes these attack and run photo-op talking head babbling moments.

So what does this bode for Bushco? Well, the most likely scenario--that would potentially revive the White House, inspire Congress to back down, and whitewash Iraq and the related economic downturn--would be for Cheney to resign for health reasons. This will provide cover for what is really a veiled sacrificial offering of Cheney for all that has gone wrong with this administration's policies, made all the more evident from the Libby trial verdict. With Cheney quietly going off into his megamansions, Bush can appoint a new Veep who would become the major contender in the 2008 race. Now that CA has moved their primary up to February, the race has really officially started. Boosting Romney or McCain to Veep pushes that person into the most powerful position for shielding Bush from threat of impeachment as well as helping the GOP keep power in the White House. Will it happen???

this needs to create outrage!!!!

The following passage is from a group that claims to be progressive, but it clearly is not so. The same text could just as easily have been written by the folks that bring us Straussian and Randian elitist neo-libertarian conservatism, as well as most of the so-called Lierberman-Clinton DLC centrists. Hell the AEI and Heritage could have written this screed.

For the United States to succeed in a new era of global competitiveness, the next generation needs to be equipped for the intellectual demands of the modern workplace. An alarming new state-by-state assessment of our nation's education system indicates that the United States is failing to prepare a 21st century workforce. The new report card, produced by the Chamber of Commerce with assistance from the Center for American Progress, finds that there is not a single state in the country where a majority of 4th and 8th graders are proficient in math and reading. The report's aim is to identify both "leaders and laggards in the tough business of school performance" and to highlight the many areas needed for education improvement. The report card's conclusion is unambiguous: states need to do a far better job of monitoring and delivering quality schooling. As Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings noted recently, “The consensus for strengthening our high schools has never been stronger.” Progressives and conservatives are united around common goals for our education system -- better teaching, more innovation, better data, and better management. The report is one step in building the political will needed to upend familiar arrangements and comfortable routines" and achieve much-needed reform.

The first two sentences reveal the vile and horrendous agenda (i would even go so far as suggesting "fascist") for furthering the attack on the planet resources, the failure of global capitalism to control its desired empire, and the lack of any substantive visions regarding how best humans can live on this fragile and dying planet. Curtis White, professor of English published his latest book: The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work late last year, making the point that the notion of "workforce" and capitalized labor, funded by the endless globalizing consumption of the planet's mineral and species (including human) resources is a process that is both insane and self-destructive. It is our on-going behaviors that are killing the Earth. Arguing to continue along that plane of this event horizon will only result in more and greater disparity, increased and exponential collapse of the biosphere, and more and bitter wars. But hey, self-styled progressives think that the answer is more of the same. This is about empire and colonialism; it is about maintaining a failing economic system against all hope that it is worthy of being sustained.

Right up there with this, and obviously overlooked yet part of that "common goal" of centrists and conservatives (real true progressives have much healthier and appropriate visions thank you) is the following quote from the Israeli funded ubermensch neo-conservative John Podhoretz:

"What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarf any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests? ... And as for the United States, what if we have every tool at our disposal to win a war--every weapons system we could want manned by the most superbly trained military in history--except the ability to match our exceed our antagonists in ruthlessness?"

One might add "the will" to demand that those not part of the educated elite (for without the feeder system complex as proposed by the faux-progressives and their conservative bedfellows, we wouldn't have a ruling elite) be coerced and forced into fighting the wars for them. Failed educational visions are so much more damaging to our planet than war. Programming children to enlist in expansion of their own institutionalization from early ages, for longer periods of time, to be "mined" for their intellectual energies, discarded as tailings of residues of toxic and hazardous beings--is a vision that ignores the Earth and all of its species.

For the record, i just spent the last two months visiting nearly all of the schools in my region, interviewing teachers, administrators, students, at all grade levels. The proposals by pseudo-progressive, DLC-supported, veiled fascists are exactly the opposite of what is needed in order for a positive, healthy, and harmonious future for all seven generations. Creating a workforce for global capitalism is no different than enslaving massive populations. Forcing small young children into institutionalization for six to eight hours a day just to sit rigidly being told what to absorb and how to act, all under the threat of the most coercive fear based motivators, is nothing short of post-modern whippings and beatings of the future slaves of the elitists.

Something i post from time to time... as a reminder

I have been actively engaged in a series of trilogues discussing the singular importance of protecting the wisdom and knowledge of planetary survival that is embedded in indigenous tribal languages. We are losing these languages, this wealth of information required for sustainability, the tribes themselves, and most of our co-dependent species each and every day. If we do not actively and aggressive assert their huge importance, we will, as a species, lose our own capability to survive on a damaged and dying planet. One of the outgrowths of this effort is to remind those attending our panels that if we keep insisting that our children and grandchildren are our future energy resources (we live in an information age and the US is the fount of all informational wealth, and we must make our next generations successful and productive, yada yada) we will kill them. John Trudell, the outstanding and singularly important American Indian native poet, recited the following several years ago at the Watershed Poetry Festival in Berkeley, CA (used w/ permission). Please give him credit, but do pass it on.

WE ARE BEING MINED
By John Trudell

See I think --Of the things that are going on
See I think --We are being mined
See and I think--That the whole objective of life
Is to come through it with some type of understanding, about life
And to leave it—no more disturbed than it was,
As when we got here
And they’re your own ethics
And that takes care of the future --And that takes care of the past
And our relationship to power is connected in this kind of understanding
About what life is

But we live in a technologic perception of reality
And this technologic perception of reality is very real, because it’s here
But I think in this technologic perception of reality we have been turned into fuel
See sometimes I feel I live in a reality with nobody people nobody recognizes,
They don’t know who they are, they don’t know where they are, and they don’t understand
The language they’re speaking
They can say the words, they know many answers
But they understand very little of what they know
They have knowledge without understanding
It is like we are being mined
So we need to recognize who we are
We are human beings, that’s who we are
We are human beings
Human, bone, flesh, blood, metal, mineral, liquid
The DNA, the physical reality
The physical aspect of the human being
The physical aspect of our reality
The human form
The visible aspect
Is made up of the metals, minerals, liquids of the Earth
So we are shapes and forms and parts of the Earth
This is our shape our form--we have being

All the things of the Earth are made up of the same DNA
The same metal, mineral, liquid
And they have their shape and their form and they have their purpose
And they have being

And we live in a technologic perception of reality
Where we understand they can take the other shapes and forms of the Earth
And put them through mining processes
And as a result of them, we take the uranium from the Earth
Put it through a mining refinement process
And convert the being part of that DNA
Convert the being part of that Earth, into a form of energy
A mutation of power, but a form of energy that they tell us is power
But it is really a different thing

And we know they can do it with fossil fuel
They can take the DNA of the Earth and put it through the mining refinement process
and convert the being
The Being part of that physical DNA into a form of energy to run their electrical systems

So I think it would be in our best interests and the best interests of future generations
And the best interest of any type of understanding with Life
To consider the possibility that the human is being put through a mining refinement process
And that the being part is being converted into a form of energy
to run these authoritarian systems
We are being turned into fuel

Feel like something is missing from your life and as we understand
You take the uranium, the DNA of the Earth that is the shape of uranium
And put it through this mining refinement process
And covert it into a form of energy
We understand that leaves behind a toxic waste, a pollution
We understand this with all the fossil fuels

So we need to understand that as part of this process
of being part of the human being that’s mined
That the toxic waste that is left
These are the fears, and the doubts, and the insecurities that dominate
Most human beings’ lives, these days
And it keeps them from understanding what it means to be a human being
And the slight of mined is to convince us that it is all our fault

Hidden in the beauties of Babylon
The civilized behavioral notoriety
The more evil the empire
The more paranoid the society
Building to the new world order
We’re expected to carry the stone

Emperors and the feeding Class
Human beings being used up fast
The miners keep on mining
Intelligence is the mother-load
Imagination as an energy source
In this predators way of dining

Defining how and what we think
As we’re led to the way to believe
Conditioned reaction
We call thought
Our reality rides
In how we perceive

In the ways of being lost and alone
Who runs from their doubt and fear
In the mask of everything’s normal
Who’s not feeling or seeing too clear

Could be we’re being programmed
Anyway our spirit bleeds
All over our lives.
Our lives become fuel
For predator needs

Hidden in the beauties of Babylon
The civilized behavioral notoriety
The more evil the empire
The more paranoid the society

And about this mining process--Everything that ever happens to us, that has ever happened to us
What we have in common because of this DNA
We literally are children of the Earth--We are all descendents of tribes
Each and every one of us is a descendent of a tribe
At some point in the evolution of our DNA and within the evolution of our DNA
We all have a genetic memory, we carry the experience of our evolution
So we have this in common, we all come from tribes

And what happened to the tribes of this hemisphere happened to the tribes of Europe
and the descendents of the tribes of Europe over,
the two to three thousand years period of time before they got here
And by the time the tribes of Europe got here, they no longer knew they were human beings
Because they had been serfs and peasants, and they were owned by the landlords and the royalty
And all these wars for the possession of their souls, all this shit had taken place

So they no longer knew they were human beings, they didn’t understand
It was not a perceptional reality of theirs anymore, in any living practice
They did not know they were not human beings
They were subjects to something other

So all the things that ever happened to the tribes of Europe
and to the descendents of the tribes of Europe
and then their behavior when they got here
Had to do to affect and disconnect our perception of reality
It had to change our perceptional realities
And all of these things had to take place within our intelligence
Because, as human beings,
We were given protection, we were given medicine, we were given self-defense
And that’s our intelligence and we all have it
And this is what we are given

In order for this to be self-defense, and for it to be protection, and for it to be medicine
It must be clear and it must be coherent
But we have had programmed into us these fears, and these doubts, and these insecurities
As a part of the mining process, to keep us from being clear and coherent
Because a clear coherent human being, and a society of clear coherent human beings
Would not live the way that this society lives
No matter what it says
All of these things took place to our intelligence
That is the protection that we were given, is our intelligence
Our imagination, our creativity, our thoughts and our action upon these things
And this is where our access as human beings to power is
Is to clear, coherent use of our intelligence

This is our access to power
Everything else is an access to an illusion of power, authority systems
Do not confuse authority systems and electrical energy systems created by man as power
These are imitations of power
Power is another reality
And our true access to it is in our earthly connection and coherent use of our intelligence
This is our true access to power

And how powerful this is—
everyone just go into their own reality
Go inside their own reality, how much time
Do the fears, doubts, and darksides
How much time, do these things consume, in the individual realities
And how do they affect the others that you are close to, in the individual realities
This is power, it is—incoherently used
No offense, I mean that in a positive way

As a part of this reality check, we should always be honest with ourselves
No matter what it is
If we can’t be real to ourselves,
We can never synchronize the reality of our intentions
And all our good intentions and good motives
If we can’t be real to ourselves—are lost
It is the first step
We must be real to ourselves
Whether our reality is glorious or shameful
It doesn’t matter what it is, what it is
Is it must be recognized
We must be real to ourselves

two stories: common theme... we're screwed

Newsweek on The Hidden War With Iran.

At least one former White House official contends that some Bush advisers secretly want an excuse to attack Iran. “They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something we would be forced to retaliate for,” says Hillary Mann, the administration’s former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs. …

A second Navy carrier group is steaming toward the Persian Gulf, and NEWSWEEK has learned that a third carrier will likely follow. Iran shot off a few missiles in those same tense waters last week, in a highly publicized test. With Americans and Iranians jousting on the chaotic battleground of Iraq, the chances of a small incident’s spiraling into a crisis are higher than they’ve been in years.

and this one:

Yesterday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) announced his candidacy for president in Springfield, IL, where Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous “House Divided” address. In his speech, Obama reiterated his call to redeploy U.S. forces out of Iraq by March 2008.

This morning on Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol attacked Obama’s Iraq policy, saying he wants to appease terrorists like pro-slavery politician Stephen Douglas tried to appease slave-owners. Kristol said, “Obama’s speech is a ‘can’t we get along’ speech — sort of the opposite of Lincoln. He would have been with Stephen Douglas in 1858.

Well, you figure it out yet?? Maybe this will help: it is the same thang that puts the neo-cons, AIPAC, the furthest-right Straussian/Randian objectivist libertarians, expansively large US energy corporations, and the military/security state industrial economy all in bed together. Still don't see it?

Given the near-exponentially expanding problems created by global climate change, the profusion of treatment resistant bacteria and viral agents, the dessimation and desertization of huge tracts of necessary arable and fertile land, and the collapse of the oceans, the reality that the planet can no longer sustain billions of human beings, requires those completely void of ethical responsibility (the Randian call of the selfish) and swathed in amorality to demand that the US military take any action necessary (including nuclear war) to secure control of the earth's energy and water resources. These people realize that only through direct confrontation will they themselves be able to hold onto power, to survive with most of their assets, property, and lifestyles intact, while millions upon millions suffer and die.

This 5% of the population is controlling every aspect of US governance at this moment. They know that a US economic collapse is potentially imminent if other than US dollars are demonstrated to be the currency of preference for the rest of the planet. To keep USD in the flow, and to artificially maintain the economy for themselves and their own selfish greed, these folks are willing to unleash the full dogs of war, not only against Iran and the rest of the middle-East, but also threaten and demand obediance from Russia and China. The oil of the middle east is the most efficient to refine, a light crude easy to pump, easy to transport, and easy to convert to products. The rest of the world's reserves are heavy and super heavy; they require nearly as much energy to refine as they produce at enormous expense. The other than US powers of the planet want middle-eastern crude now and are willing to pay for it not using USD, but Euros and Yuan. This is a huge problem.

Congress will do nothing, knowing as they do, that their own lives are part and parcel of the group that will enjoy the outcome of US control of planetary resources. This is, and will never be, about the citizens. This war, these ongoing efforts to expand and increase the war, is for control of the future in their views. When all is said and done, the US will be a nation of two groups. A few million extraordinarily wealthy people living in superb luxury, free to do anything as they please, and hundreds of millions living in environmental collapse, abject poverty, deep depressive pandemics of diseases and hazardous/toxic ravages. The rich and powerful are asking the rest of us to keep them that way at our own expense, as long as we don't know why.

Canis eus id comedit

Consider the following:

Three giant pallets each loaded with cash amounting to more than $4 billion and weighing a total of 363 tons were sent to Baghdad aboard military planes shortly before the United States gave control back to Iraqis, it has been revealed to Congress.

Of the more than $12 billion sent to Iraq, $8.8 billion remains unaccounted, without any paper trail that would lead to a successful audit. Is this a problem?? Apparently not for most of the GOP House members. Their litany of excuses ran from the mundane "war is war," to the more esoteric "it was Saddam's oil money so why would we care?" Perhaps the most heinous of the vile attitudes expressed was from a GOP idiot who suggested that $8.8 billion wasn't really all that much money.

What an asshole. But just for the record, what could $8.8 billion do for our economy at this point. Well, let's start with the original premise that the Iraq war was going to be paid for by Iraq. Thus the billions shipped in US dollars (non-exchangeable in Iraq by the way, by CPA regulations and laws) were allegedly supposed to have been turned over to the Secretary of the Treasury to reimburse the citizens of the US for expenses in Iraq. That clearly didn't happen.

The Iraq billions would cover the shortfall in the US education budget to pay for mandatory and compulsury programs such as NCLB. They could have paid for doubling the Pell and other higher education student loan programs, or covered all of the costs of Title I for one year. There are several states whose combined operating budgets could have been paid for by the billions. Perhaps the most useful of all possible choices would have been to invest the money into levee rebuilding after the Iraq invasion; an effort that would have prevented the damage of Katrina.

Oh well, it wasn't ours, right??

Si hoc signum legere potes, run away, run away

How much more will the people take before the incompetency of the US government forces them to stand up and take it down???? I suspect that Jefferson's suggestion "all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed" is almost too representative of US citizens. The insanity of people who (for the most part are reasonably attentive and intelligent), continue to blithely accept the ever-increasing entropy of their own lives collapsing into depressive chaos, demonstrates the effectiveness of the mind virus that is capitalism.

This week i have read dispatches from people who are all too willing to complete ignore reality, substituting the talking points of Exxon for the actual text of the IPCC report on global climate change. Why they are doing so is beyond me, unless we ascribe the value of disassociative cognition to their thought processes. They know that our way of life is killing the planet, but see no other alternative they can accept other than using whatever means necessary (war) to maintain their levels of convenience and personal consumer habits. And i am not talking about people who are conservatives nor fundamentalists. No, i am describing relatively enlightened liberals, who feel completely justified in promoting classic liberal values through massive capitalization of their lives and "property" at the expense of the planet and most of its living populations. The "me first" fight or flight paradigm is obscuring the impending real collapse of the human life sustaining ecosystems, encouraging people to look at cheaper gasoline prices as a sign of good things rather than the intentional deception of the energy giants to hide their gargantuan 2006 record breaking profits.

If you can't see the forest for the trees, these folks seem to accept cutting down all the trees. Then they won't have to look for the forest at all, but rather stay in their greenhouse gas emitting sealed environments and watch the world go by on the telly. Well, the only good news in this regard is that the planet will make the choice, sooner rather than later, that the homo sapiens experiment wasn't all that successful. Better to dump one whole species than sacrifice the other 97%.

a week we wish hadn't been??

The following pretty much sums up the output of the White House this week:

Have some highlights from last Wednesday’s Grover Norquist breakfast meeting:
* Tony Snow: “The Iranian people are more pro American than any American university faculty.”

Spinning more war rather than acknowledging that the US is in serious trouble, Bushco moves forward with plans to support an Israeli nuclear strike against Iran. Then, when the protests erupt, they will send troops into US cities, using "non-lethal" weapons to increase fear and vile coercion to oppress and repress dissent and opposition. Finally, they will cancel 2008 elections as the entire US economy goes into the toilet.

Yes i am making this up, sort of. Most serious political critics of Bushco acknowledge that what i suggest is all too entirely possible, and therein lies the tragedy and travesty of Snow's offhand stupid comment. Are we really to believe that the entire 68 million Iranians are loving the US more than the entire US demographic of faculty at this nation's 2500 four year universities and colleges??? Of course not. This is pure bullshit hyperbole, but for what purpose.

The Iranians certainly don't care. US university students and faculty know this is pure falsehood and lies. The vast majority of media reporting understands Snow is fabricating. Yet no one is holding him accountable for why he is doing so. The remark on its face is polarizing and partisan. It reeks of a hideous and vile anti-intellectualism, reducing academics to the status of un-american sub-humans, lesser than even the despicable hezbollah and hamas revolutionary classes of Iran. So why was Tony saying this??

Because he's an asshole!

faggot faggot faggot, nigger nigger nigger, kyke kyke kyke

What the fuck happened to the First amendment? I remember when they took down the Fourth, and pretty much raked over the Fifth and Sixth along with the Ninth (can you say no-fly list). I even remember the last couple of campaigns where the clause in the First about peaceable assembly was denuded by the ambiguous and arbitrary reduction of that civil liberty to a small specific zone of a locality only. But I do not remember when they took away my right and liberty to use my speech freely.

Words do not have any power. Words are words, they are not weapons, nor clubs, nor bombs, nor flames, nor good, nor evil. Words are symbols and signs, semioticities awash with use and meanings that are ascribed to both the communicator and communicatee. The responsibility of our Constitution places the burden of protecting our rights and liberties upon those who would choose to deny them or diminsh them. Those that are offended by an utterance (Faggot, for example) do not have the right to stop people from using the word. They have the right to be offended if they so choose, and they have the right to speak out about their offense, but not about the word nor the use of the word. They only have the right to express their own displeasure during the experience of listening or reading the word. This is particularly true when one class of persons feels a certain word "belongs" to them, and can only be used by them, and that others who choose to use their word need to have their rights violated. This is also particularly true for people who rally around their own identity politics placards hosting all sorts of rights demeaning defamation claims against words being uttered by someone not of their particular identity.

Fuck being offended by words, you assholes. Be offended by the war, be offended by the poverty, be offended by the violence, be offended by the lack of basic necessities for healthy and safe survival. But stop behaving like the spoiled rich little children you are about the use of words. Reducing my right to free and unfettered speech, by coercing employers and corporations to punish people who use words that for some carry connotations that seem too much to bear (it is a fucking "word" dipshit), only further increases the depths to which our national police/security state has been made manifest. Give me my liberty back you bastards. How dare you claim words are powerful and dangerous? How dare you impose arbitrary and harsh punishments on people who use words to which you choose to take offense (loss of income, blacklisting, restraints on free trade)? Words are just textual signifiers for the holy shit's sake.

And speaking of Fuck, use it correctly for homo's sake

In the mean time watch this little video and think about how not to be like the FCC!

Ventis secundis, tene cursum as i hit the ___60?

So, fifteen minutes before the idiot monkey spews on about this or that escalation of troops that will lead to thousands of more dying, and inevitably provide Israel to nuke Iran, and Iran to organize massive retaliation for which these new troops will be the defense of the precious oil... i am taking off to see the desert. It is cold here, and getting colder. Minus Celsius is not all that bad, but negative Farenheit temperatures totally suck. I'll be back when it warms up enough to snow or some such thing. And i will do my very best to have no idea whatsoever what that batshit public employee who lives in the big White House has to say.

Ciao fo now...

Noli me vocare, Magister Mundi sum!

I was going to make a number of observations about the execution of Saddam and the apologetics and revisionist history of Ford, but better writers have made these points much more succinctly than i. Thus i will try to complete my thoughts on why our economy will be our ruin in the near future. Several post-holiday stories reveal that the overall retail sales were down, and did not even meet the lowered expectations proposed by financial analysts and corporate fiduciary spokespeople. This is not good news, but more than that, it hints at some serious miscalculations by the general population concerning their own well being.

First, we must realize, that no matter how much we all want to feel good about the way we live, our lifestyles are inordinately excessive in terms of planetary resources and the production of streams of human waste products. These wastes are beginning to extract a deadly toll on the planet. The lists are numerous and constantly in the news, and thus i don't need to go into that litany right now. What has been hidden, by our own choosing is the increasing costs of the infrastructure that our way of life requires. Our economy is structured in such a way that currency is exchanged for ever-increasing value (artificially induced) from which is extracted ostensibly miniscule percentages to provide direct development and maintenance of the infrastructure. In toto, we pay a remarkably large percent of our daily value to maintain our system itself, without regard for anything other than that system. This value is transfered directly to corporate accounts and further removed from the cycle as in any hierarchical rentier system.

Every aspect of our lives requires this extraction and capitulation of our own personal value to the system itself. We are paying and paying to just barely maintain that system, at the massive overwhelming personal benefit of a core group of human beings at the top of the hierarchy. When less than 1% of the citizens of the US are extracting and removing value from the other 300 million, each and every single day, we are living in an empire, a top down totalitarian state, mediated and hidden by our own paid for media. Look at everything in your immediate environment, calculate the cost and value of all that matter, how it got to you, how you acquired it, why you chose it, what it does, how it works, and realize that somewhere along the line an incredible stream of taxes, fees, excises, adjustments, etc are taken out and handed over to the corporations.

Our roads alone, upon which each and every one of these material products must travel demonstrate the hellish nightmare that is the economic ruin of our lives and the unsustainable destruction of the earth. How they are created, how they are maintained, how they are funded and paid for, how they are changed and altered--at each step of the process our own personal values are diminished and extracted. And if we simply no longer have any more value to give?? Well, fewer and fewer material resources will be available in the stream. The roads will degrade, the infrastructure that thrives from the use of those roads (food, energy, products, waste removal) will diminish, and the detritus of our failing economy will be expanding literally in our front yards. We cannot expect to continue to have our value extracted from us, mined from our beings in both physical and mental assets, and not become tailings and refuse ourselves. Look at the people of New Orleans. The hundreds of thousands of already poor who are now completely neglected at the expense of a few making whatever remaining efforts to extract the last vestiges of value from them (corporate contracts to provide: substandard housing, commodity foods that are toxic and unhealthy, and grossly mismanaged healthcare). As there becomes fewer and fewer chunks of value to extract from our cities and communities, the infrastructures will collapse.

This has all happened before, many times in human history. Often such precipitous collapses are linked to massive die-offs of people and their livestock. But now we have compounded the problem to such an extent that the causalities of collapse, the failing planetary economy and the inability to safely utilize the remaining available resources, are running smack into the most terrible of all proverbial walls: worldwide environmental collapse. The planet itself is reaching its threshold of sustaining complex lifeforms. Massive species extinctions are occurring at increasingly alarming rates. The list of new pathogens that can eradicate human beings has grown faster than research can fend them off. The death of the oceans is imminent, in terms of pollution, carbon changes, methane releases, and the melting of planetary ice. Dramatic weather and climate extremes will increase, placing even more demands on the artificial infrastructure to adapt, which it will not be capable of doing, given the failing economy.

And what i realize right now is that this isn't even the worst case scenario. NO, that involves that 1% of the population utilizing its remaining capacity to extract value to intentionally destroy wholesale infrastructures to keep for themselves the last resources. Can you say nuclear war???

I have only one small point to make

about the death of Gerald Ford. Okay, maybe more than one, but these are simple straightforward wonderings.

For instance, he was not elected to the office of Vice President, nor that of President. He was appointed, as directed by the recently passed 25th Amendment. Thus Nixon, and his cabal of venal henchmen chose the successor knowing that he was a functioning puppet who could be controlled to the end of his days.

We are treating our dead Presidents as if they were kings, holding rituals and ceremonies for them, ignoring the Constitution's Article I, Section Nine which forbids these acts of nobility and aristocracy. What makes this one public servant so much more worthy than a Senator who has served this great nation for 24 years? Nothing except the pomp and ceremony given over to Kennedy when he was killed. Nixon jumped all over this, raising the imperial standard over the White House, claiming his emperorship and the mantle of all mighty power. Ford is a loser and glaringly unworthy of this puff and consequence.

Ford committed the unforgiveable pardon of Nixon, the hideous Kissinger approved destruction of East Timor, the invasion of Cambodia and Laos, and silly post- Vietnam proclamations. Ford was the puppet under which the first major robberies of the US Treasury were instituted by corporations led by the cabal. Ford was directed to allow the big oil companies to make billions in profit while preparing a second fake crisis. Ford is a loser and glaringly unworthy of any attention whatsoever.

essential economic problems

The richest 2 percent of adults in the world own more than half the world's wealth, according to a new study released by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University. The study's authors say their work is the most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken. They found the richest 1 percent of adults owned 40 percent of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10 percent of adults accounted for 85 percent of the world's total. In contrast, the assets of half of the world's adult population account for barely 1 percent of global wealth.

<>"It reflects the extreme nature of inequality around the world," one of the study's authors, New York University Professor Edward Wolff, told OneWorld. "Yes, we are richer than Africa and Latin America and most of Asia, but how much richer is what hadn't really been established until our study came out," Wolff added. According to the report, the average American's wealth amounted to $144,000 in the year 2000, more than 100 times higher than the average Indian or Indonesian, whose assets totaled $1,100 and $1,400, respectively. The study defined wealth as physical and financial assets--like personal savings and home, land, and stock ownership--less debts. Besides the United States, only Canada, Western Europe, Japan, and Israel showed average personal wealth of more than $50,000.

These are powerful statistics, especially when viewed through the haze of how citizens in the US use the planet's natural resources to provide the infrastructure necessary to maintain such a dysfunctional unsustainable lifestyle. The nature of this economic disparity is rooted in the acceptance of three fundamental flaws in the basic philosophical principles that form the base for the US. Each of these alone would be sufficient to demonstrate the insanity of the attempts to keep it functioning, yet the irrational faith the public has in living these lies, further erodes the capacity of the earth to sustain life.

The most egregious of these flaws is that the economy is predicated on forcing US citizens to pay for basic life sustaining resources. All human beings require earth resources to effectively function in the environment of the planet. The capitalistic system demands that these resources be marketed rather than provided, although the planet itself provides. In essence, some humans beings, who have no direct connection to the process of extracting the resources and the humans using them to nurture their physiological needs, have inserted themselves into the flow, diverting not only resources, but also increasing the destructive processes of waste, toxicity, and unsustainability, as well as forcing an economic rentier taking from this. It is the ultimate in selfish greed. And yet no one complains, because everyone has faith that this is the only way to do it. No one questions the authority of why this must be so. No one challenges the flawed principles that are used to frame the constructs that allow immense human suffering to be increase in direct proportion to the apparent virtual increase in non-existent values. No one can eat money, or gold, or houses, or cars; no one can drink oil, or vinegars, or alkalais, etc. No, only food and water are useful, and in most of the populations of the planet, access to these essentials for life are free. But not here in the US, nope, we can't have that, because otherwise our unnecessary and earth destroying economic system would collapse.

The second flaw is one that libertarians find particularly attractive to promote. At the core of their demands for hierarchical wealth accumulation and private property, is the idea that a human being owns their personhood. While this is attractive, and justifies an incredible array of behaviors, all of which lead to the destruction of the planet at the expense of selfish affluence, the flaw is in the necessary separation of humans from all other species of life. The ownership principle must accept a distinct qualitative and quantitative difference between human dna and that of all other species, so that the hierarchical construct provides the argument that human consciousness is something authoritative and deserving. This of course must deny the functional necessary dependence of humans on other species to survive, including the species within their own physical bodies, without which humans could not survive. We cannot casually toss of the mantle of dependent interconnectedness in order to justify extracting virtual value from exploiting the earth and even other humans. Yet onward it goes, demanding more and more obedience and subservience of the masses of all species, including humans, to satisfy the greed and selfish behavior of those who have the audacity to suggest they are superior to others and deserve the plentitude of resources they take from everything else.

Takings are part of the third flaw, in that profit is nothing other than taking something for nothing. It is a form of theft, stealing value from others, from the earth, using portions of that profit to purchase the labor of some for security to increase the takings. The staunchest advocates for private property (owning parts of the earth) must take from others to sustain their way of life. No matter how they disguise it, they are nothing other than theives of the wellbeing, despoilers of the common good, and damagers of the planet. Profit is theft of labor and utility, theft of resources, generated on the toxification of environments, and so far forth. Profit is a legal construct that protects this form of robbery within the system, in order to maintain the system, designed solely to protect itself even up to the point of destroying the earth rather than acknowledge its own flaws and failures. We citizens in the US must begin to reject the authority of a system that allows some to steal so much from us and from the earth. We must reject, condemn, deny, and throw out the infrastructural constructs that allow some to claim they are better than others in order to use more of the planet for their own desires, and therefore increase planet wide suffering.

a lazy day blog away...

The instructions i received to facilitate the playing of this game:

1. Grab the book closest to you.
2. Open to page 123, go down to the fifth sentence.
3. Post the text of next 3 sentences on your blog.
4. Name of the book and the author.
5. Tag three people.

I: Well damn, i sit next to a bookshelf with a few hundred books, and by closest to me, i can only infer they are referencing a measure of differing distances which are not at all easily discernible given the size and shape of the bookcase. I wonder if i should get up and get a tape measure and start with that problem. mmmmm okay, that narrows it down to three four choices all within a millimeter of difference in distance. We have Journeys in Microspace; The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, an Intimate History of Humanity, and Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. I therefore arbitrarly select the last volume for the thrill of the game.

II: the page heading is James Joyce and features a variety of entrees from "In Flanders Fields" to Joyce, James.

III:
Irving, Washington An American author of the nineteenth century; "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle" are two of his best known works.
it is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done A sentence from the end of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
The Character who says this is about to die in place of another man.

IV: Hirsch, E.D., Kett, Joseph, Trefil, James: The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.

V: I never tag other people

This is not good... and won't be for a long time

So here are some stories that have a great deal to do with one another, and almost nothing to do with any good or beneficial direction in the state of the planet. Consider three distinct areas of operations in which the money is flowing: military expenditures, energy resource costs, transportation of necessities. All of these are huge burdens on the mass of the population of the Earth, yet there are those that extract the financial rent from the system, who are under no illusions about their desparate need to keep the status quo in order to insulate themselves from the coming global depression.

With labor under attack the "share of American workers carrying union cards has plunged from over 20 percent in 1980 to under 13 percent in 2005, and almost half of those are government employees." In a report on the recent boom in corporate profits, economists at Goldman Sachs wrote plainly, “The most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor’s share of national income." Cornell University researcher Kate Bronfenbrenner writes, at least 5 percent of workers involved in unionization campaigns are fired, which is both quite illegal and quite routine: Companies would rather pay the nominal fines than pay their workers higher wages and lose the absolute control they hold over the work lives of their employees." Today's labor movement faces union-busting law firms and consulting agencies which are increasingly enlisted by union-wary employers to keep labor from organizing. Today, the vast majority of union members -- 84 percent -- live in only 12 states, leaving workers with little organized power in much of the country.

Dare we say that most citizens of the US, 95% of them, are not experiencing the best possible potential future, given the current state of their lives, their access to healthcare, their costs for energy, and their costs for food??

Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs will set a record this year when it comes to paying bonuses. It is giving out $16.5 billion. Some top executives are expected to get a whopping $100 million dollars. They are the highest paid people in one of the world's richest cities, and they're about to make even more. After a year of record profits on Wall Street, investment banks are dividing up the winnings. Goldman Sachs is reportedly leading the way:

Average worker at Goldman will take home $622,000 this year

Senior administrators will get $5 to 10 million dollars

Senior executives and traders get $10 to 20 million each

Company CEO and department heads get $25 million

Top traders will get $50 million and more

"The reason they're making so much money for themselves is because they're making so much money for their firms ... You can debate all day whether it's fair or unfair but they're being compensated as a portion of what they're making," Neil Weinberg, of Forbes Magazine, said. The bonuses help fuel the city's economy through income taxes and sales taxes. Everyone from luxury car dealers to jewelers will feel it. But economists say Wall Street's richest drive up the cost of living in New York and widen the gap between the rich and everyone else.

But that is not all, by any stretch of the imagination

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., led by its strength in bond trading, reported a 22 percent increase in fourth-quarter profit and ended the year with a record $4 billion in earnings. Lehman, the fourth-largest U.S. securities firm by market value, increased earnings at a slower pace than competitors Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos. Growth was led by a 31 percent gain in revenue from fixed-income sales and trading. Fees from investment banking rose 5 percent, reversing a third- quarter decline

So we live in a country that is now so glaringly dysfunctional that those that are reaping the direct benefits from it all are demanding and requiring the rest of us to keep ponying up so that they won't begin to slide down. They need us to believe that because as long as we do, they "promise" to protect us from the depression that will happen anyway.

Why this isn't a problem, but a solution--Totum dependeat

Dark economic clouds are gathering ahead. After six years of booming home prices, the great American housing bubble has finally popped, and the market is now on the verge of collapse. Tens of millions of families who bought homes at bubble-inflated prices "now face the prospect of seeing their life savings disappear." This development will have wide-ranging effects on the American economy. "Over the last few years," writes Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, "most good U.S. economic news has been the result of soaring home prices." With this engine of economic growth now broken down, America faces a potential future of rapidly falling house prices, rising default and bankruptcy rates," lost jobs, fewer consumption, even a possible recession." The dark clouds ahead may be a perfect storm hitting the U.S. economy.

So, what is good about this?? Well it is really quite simple, though a bit abstract. Our entire national economic engine functions solely because people buy stuff. And by "stuff" i refer to the extraneous, unnecessary consumer items upon which a vast assortment of taxes, fees, tariffs, etc. are generated for local, state, and federal governments. Sales taxes and excise taxes, road user fees, transportation levies--all manner of funding of our infrastructure and services to just simply survive is predicated on convincing the majority of the population to keep purchasing things they do not need, that damage the planet, that corrupt governments, and create massive suffering. Without a home mortgage deduction on income taxes, without the capacity to pass on property taxes exemptions and deductions on other taxes, consumer would not be sufficiently financed to help the capitalists keep the economic system operating. And therein lies the direct benefit of the next global depression.

We have chance, a real and serious opportunity, to end the cycle of carnage and damage to our planet, to increase sustainability and social justice, to empower and use redistributive justice to enact participational parity, to reduce and constrain greenhouse gas emissions and so forth, simply by rooting for the depression. People will stop having money to spend on useless junk, and focus solely on providing for their families. They will be forced to travel less, reduce their use of fossil fuels, seek solutions to growing and producing local foods, design more cooperative and collaborative localized relations to function in the place of bankrupt governments. Our dependency on foreign oil, on products from outside the US, on maintaining this militarized empire to supply itself will be cast aside as more and more people find it absolutely necessary to reprioritize the very core of their survival, basing decisions on their real needs, and not on their whims and wants. TV's will turn off, when cable bills are unpaid in exchange for buying food. Cars will stop being driven so that people can access healthcare and cheaper mass transit.

These will have egalitarian benefits, as the rich and powerful realize that without a functioning economic engine, their peasant-serf workforces, who are supposed to protect them and their precious property, will have other, much more visceral and meaningful priorities. Gone will be the capability and capacity of the systems to evict folks from their foreclosed homes. Local governments will find it better to simply ignore orders from national and international financial operations, and focus their diminishing resources on providing as best they can for the people for whom they have allegiance (and a serous survival stake). We can foresee the end of recreational vehicle toys and use, we can envision the end of large scale movement of crappy GE and GMO foods around the planet and country, we can finally take a breath from the onslaught of capitalists demanding we keep them happy.

Depression or planetary salvation? You make the call.

November wrap up and then sum..

A case that best represents the imperial centristic conceit of the US would be the take on hurricanes this year. We have arrived at the official end of the season and our own press suggests the following:

Hurricane Season A Breeze... This Time The Ledger - Nov 30, 2006
Hurricane season bows out quietly CNN International
The calm instead of the storm NATURE.com

The irony of this cannot be lost however, since in the same round up of the season we find the following stories:

Official: Typhoon casualties in Philippines could attain 200 MANILA, Dec. 1 (Xinhua) -- Over 200 people are feared dead as typhoon Durian battered Albay province, central Philippines, with heavy downpour that caused mudslides from Mount Mayon volcano, a top government official said Friday.
Death toll rises to nearly 200 in Philippine typhoon, 260 missing Canada.com
Death Toll In Philippine Typhoon Rises To 147 Playfuls.com

Opps, did someone forget to tell the billions of people living in Asia that their experience of eight super-typhoons (and twelve other ones), killing thousands, destroying billions of dollars of property and infrastructure was just a quiet calm breeze of a season???? But that also fails to mention our nearest neighbor as well, Mexico. I guess they don't count either, what with the four Cat 3+ storms that wasted the Pacific Coast and thrashed Cabo San Lucas three of those times. No, of course the only substantive measure of a bad hurricane season is the Gulf Coast. Hell these idiots didn't even bother to reference the massive rains and flooding that the Mexican hurricanes created in the Southwest. The mindnumbing provincialism of this should help people realize that the rest of the world sees us for what we truly are: selfish arrogant conceited mindless bigots.

I have a problem with the supposed hit TV show: HOUSE. This season they introduced the most unrealistic and bizarre character portrayl ever, of an overzealous, self-righteous police detective. The role has this minder of virtue acting like one of Stalin's or Beria's private thugs, pursuing House with vicious unconstitutional illegal due process behaviors; behaviors that even an inept and incompetent attorney would have stopped a while ago. To continue down this idiotic and stupid script plot only destroys all that is best about the show. This guy must die, and soon too. No police detective would ever be free to act as this guy; that is why we have district attorneys, special investigators, layers of evidenciary and rights protections, and courts with skilled and knowledgeable judges. If the idea is to suggest to the American people that this is how we want our government to behave, then we are indeed headed for a fascist hell that is beyond measure. Kill the guy off and save America.