Making a Mark

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A big time under the little top

Let’s say you you lived in a small town, a very small town.  It’s Friday night, and you drive by the fairgrounds.

 

 

A ‘little’ big top is erected, some campers, wandering roustabouts, and the occasional animal

Isn’t it time to get to the CIRCUS…well of course it is.

You can see more pictures by clicking on the picture here->

Tax Day: A meditation

Honestly I don't mind paying my share, I really don't.  I'll tell you a couple of things that really burn my ass though...in no special order:

• More than 38,000 foreign corporations had no tax liability in 2005 and ...

Mind numbing numbers

Between the costs of the war, and the "bailout", the numbers thrown around are simply unreal.  To give you an idea of what a trillion is...consider this:

How tall would a stack of a trillion $1 bills be?
500 sheets of copy paper is about 2 inches.
A foot stack of paper is about 3,000 sheets.
Therefore, a mile high stack of paper is 15,840,000 sheets.
And a trillion sheet stack is over 60 miles high. Plus interest.
Plus an extra $400 Billion debt GwB has run up during his Presidency.
.
Do the math. Wall Street Bankers did. That's why they want a BAILOUT immediately, before you have time to figure it out.
[BTW: if dollar paper is half as thick as copy paper, we're off the hook. The stack is only 30 miles high. Plus the National Debt. Plus interest. ]

Food as a basic human right

Brazil has brought us Bosa Nova, the bikini wax, and a more important concept we should all be aware of...food as a basic human right!

Brazilian City Makes Food A Basic Right And Ends Hunger : TreeHugger

Back in 1993, the newly elected city government of Belo Horizonte, Brazil declared that food was a right of citizenship. At that time, the city of 2.5 million had 275,000 people living in absolute poverty, and close to 20 percent of its children were going hungry. Since the declaration the city has all but wiped out hunger and only spends 2% of the city budget to do so.

Now here are some dangerous folks

Raid on Family's Home and Organic Food Co-Op Challenged - The Buckeye Institute

The Stowers operate an organic food cooperative called Manna Storehouse. ODA and Lorain County Health Department agents forcefully raided their home and unlawfully seized the family's personal food supply, cell phones and personal computers. The legal center seeks to halt future similar raids. The complaint was filed in Lorain County Court of Common Pleas.

Did you pay taxes last year?

When it's convenient, corporations position themselves as "persons" under the law.  When it comes to paying taxes, evidently it's a horse of a different color.


Study says most corporations pay no U.S. income taxes | U.S. | Reuters

The Government Accountability Office said 72 percent of all foreign corporations and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005.

More than half of foreign companies and about 42 percent of U.S. companies paid no U.S. income taxes for two or more years in that period, the report said.

The Army at Home::: This scares me

Why is a U.S. Army brigade being assigned to the "Homeland"?

Several bloggers today have pointed to this obviously disturbing article from Army Times, which announces that "beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the [1st Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division] will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North" -- "the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities." The article details:

They'll learn new skills, use some of the ones they acquired in the war zone and more than likely will not be shot at while doing any of it.

They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack. . . .

The 1st BCT's soldiers also will learn how to use "the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded," 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.

"It's a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they're fielding. They've been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we’re undertaking we were the first to get it."

The package includes equipment to stand up a hasty road block; spike strips for slowing, stopping or controlling traffic; shields and batons; and, beanbag bullets.

"I was the first guy in the brigade to get Tasered," said Cloutier, describing the experience as "your worst muscle cramp ever -- times 10 throughout your whole body". . . .

The brigade will not change its name, but the force will be known for the next year as a CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF (pronounced "sea-smurf")

People Get Ready...There's a Train A Coming

John Gray: A shattering moment in America's fall from power | Comment is free | The Observer

The fate of empires is very often sealed by the interaction of war and debt. That was true of the British Empire, whose finances deteriorated from the First World War onwards, and of the Soviet Union. Defeat in Afghanistan and the economic burden of trying to respond to Reagan's technically flawed but politically extremely effective Star Wars programme were vital factors in triggering the Soviet collapse. Despite its insistent exceptionalism, America is no different. The Iraq War and the credit bubble have fatally undermined America's economic primacy. The US will continue to be the world's largest economy for a while longer, but it will be the new rising powers that, once the crisis is over, buy up what remains intact in the wreckage of America's financial system.

Greenspan, Greed....golly

Europeans on left and right ridicule U.S. money meltdown - Los Angeles Times

"Greenspan was considered a master," Tremonti declared. "Now we must ask ourselves whether he is not, after [Osama] bin Laden, the man who hurt America the most. . . . It is clear that what is happening is a disease. It is not the failure of a bank, but the failure of a system. Until a few days ago, very few were willing to realize the intensity and the dramatic nature of the crisis."

Don't believe the hype

Capitalism on trial | SocialistWorker.org

The claim will echo around the corporate media that this was the inevitable consequence of all Americans "living beyond their means." Don't believe it. The vast majority of people who will have to pay the price for this disaster are blameless. They did nothing wrong.

The crisis was caused by an irrational free-market system and the insatiable greed of a small class of rulers who continually seek greater wealth and power, without regard for the costs.

I'm so mad I could spit

From the greedy mortgage brokers, to the local bank, regional bank, and New York bank.  Everyone made their 30 pieces of silver off the poor who hoped for a better life.  Now, AIG, the company who guaranteed all of these stupid and unsound financial instruments (and ultimately made it all possible since no one in their right mind would have bought them uninsured) wants you and I to bail them out?

I say give the trillion dollars or so to the homeowners, and let the corporate dogs eat one another!

Joseph A. Palermo: Socialism for Wall Street, Capitalism for Main Street

It's Socialism for the rich and laissez-faire capitalism for everybody else.

What Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and now American International Group Corporation have in common is that they all hired Washington lobbyists and lavished campaign donations on politicians to push through with no public support the radical deregulation of the financial sector

Google's Chrome -- My first impressions

Image by EJeffson via Flickr

I happened to be at my computer just as Chrome became available, and installed it as soon as it was available.  Since then, I've been using it almost exclusively, and have been impressed with the results.

Firefox has been my main browser for many years now, and I've been pretty happy over all.  With all of the addins I use though, it now loads like hulking elephant.  Chrome on the other hand, loads and is ready with the speed of a gazelle.  For me, that is a big plus.  The other thing I've noticed, is that the memory useage for Chrome is lower by an order of magnitude, another sure enough good thing!

Beyond the low hanging fruit though, Chrome is a joy to use and is opening my eyes to possibilities for the future.  I can envision Google taking a strong position in the browser market very quickly...any bad news?

Well, any serious Firefox user probably has half a dozen plugins that they rely on every day, I know that I do.  As a matter of fact, I closed Chrome and opened Firefox to do this post because I wanted to use the Zemanta plug in.  I suspect that this problem will disappear quite quickly, but for now it is my biggest issue with Chrome.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Chrome: 1% Market Share In Less Than a Day
• So Is Chrome The Fastest Or What?
• Google Chrome is Gold on My Computer: Less Slack for a Slacker
• Chrome May Be Shiny & New But....

Read it and weep...the U.S. has asked for this

No matter who you are, or how big and tough, there are consequences to your actions. The U.S. has acted like a spoiled bully for twenty years now, and we're about to reap what we've sown.


Seumas Milne: Georgia is the graveyard of America's unipolar world | Comment is free | The Guardian

Why that should be so isn't hard to understand. It's not only that the US and its
camp followers have trampled on international law and the UN to bring death and destruction to the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the early 1990s, the Pentagon warned that to ensure no global rival emerged, the US would need to "account for the interests of advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership". But when it came to Russia, all that was forgotten in a fog of imperial hubris that has left the US overstretched and unable to prevent the return of a multipolar world.