Don't mind me, I'm just talking to myself

In an article about internet service from Cox at Cox Claims It Can Reduce Your Gaming Lag, but Only If You Pony Up the Cash , Joel Hruska said: Would I try it? Personally, no. Cox sucker-punched its customers recently when it declared  it would throttle entire neighborhoods  if it decided one person was using too much bandwidth. There is no option to appeal and no way for other affected customers to even determine what happened to their internet service. The idea of paying the company $7-$15 more per month,  per account  when Cox literally just declared it has no obligation to provide the internet service people are actually paying for is… unappealing. Cox isn’t to be trusted. After all, like the article says, Cox see no reason to provide service to their subscribers. I don’t know about anyone else, but that’s fraud in my book. But trying to appeal to government authorities is a hopeless cause. After all, taxes are extortion, you either pay them, or the governmen...

In today’s New York Times opinion “page”, Paul krugman says: The coronavirus led to a plunge in output and employment. This plunge, however, was a feature, not a bug. As I’ve been saying for a while, we deliberately put the economy into the equivalent of a medically induced coma, suppressing activity to give ourselves a chance to get the pandemic under control. If we had stayed the course, this period of pain could have set the stage for a rapid recovery. But it was obvious early on that mishandling the situation — failing to stay the course on social distancing, failing to use the time to develop enough testing and contact tracing to gradually resume normal life while keeping a lid on new outbreaks — could extend the pain, turning a short, sharp recession into a prolonged depression, a long period of very high unemployment. Here’s how I  described  the nightmare scenario more than six weeks ago: “Over the next few weeks, many red states abandon social-dista...

In an article on fff.org, it says in part: There have been U.S. invasions of foreign countries. There have been U.S. regime-change operations against foreign regimes. There have been U.S. state-sponsored assassinations. There have been kidnappings, torture, and indefinite detention. There has been a judicially created “state secrets doctrine.” There have been all sorts of assaults on the civil liberties and privacy of the American people. All under the name of “national security.” And then there have been the criminal indictments of people like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Daniel Ellsberg, and Chelsea Manning on grounds of “national security.” The allegation is that the information they divulged to the public constituted a grave threat to “national security.” Yet, the information was divulged and none of those bad things happened to the United States. The American government is a rogue state, American exceptionalism, entitling it to break every international law with impunity...

The citizen is sovereign only when he can retain and enjoy the fruits of his labor. If the government has first claim on his property he must learn to genuflect before it. When the right of property is abrogated, all the other rights of the individual are undermined, and to speak of the sovereign citizen who has no absolute right to property is to talk nonsense. It is like saying that the slave is free because he is allowed to do    --   Plato ,  The Republic, VII  [c. 370 B.C.]

Well here’s a chart which outlines the bungled response to the pandemic: With 4% of the world’s population, the USA is winning the title of the most incompetent government, with about 1/4 of cases and deaths. That’s 6 times worse performance than the average. I’m not sure of the placement on a measure with other countries, but the USA is definitely an outlier. And that’s not a good thing, especially since the Trump Administration is now trying to say there’s no pandemic. Trump sure loves “winning”.

In an Opinion Piece  in the New York Times Paul Krugman says: Look, I can understand why Donald Trump and his minions turned a blind eye to the coronavirus back in February. There were already good reasons to believe that a serious pandemic was on its way, and minimizing the risk was deeply irresponsible. But at the time there was at least a possibility that things wouldn’t be too bad, and from a cynical point of view it made some sense for an administration that wanted to tout a growing economy to engage in happy talk rather than deal with the problem. But that was four months and 120,000 dead Americans ago. What’s the point of keeping up the pretense? I mean, what was the purpose of having Vice President Mike Pence put his name to an  Op-Ed article  declaring that there won’t be a second wave of infections? Nobody in their right mind imagines that Pence is an objective source of epidemiological information. And Larry Kudlow, the administration’s top e...

From the Thursday briefing from the New York Times: Appearing on Fox News, Trump defended Rolfe and blamed Brooks: “You can’t resist a police officer, and if you have a disagreement, you have to take it up after the fact.” Yeah right. The government protects crooked cops, just like it protects other crooked government employees. And to expect the government legal system to give you relief is delusional, if not completely insane. The government is composed of unregulated and unsupervised deviants. Fuck The Pigs!

In the New York Times Wednesday briefing: Trump  signed an executive order yesterday to encourage, but not mandate, changes in policing . It restricted chokeholds and gave police departments financial incentives to train officers on the use of physical force. The order omitted any mention of race, however, and activists and Democrats criticized it as weak. “I strongly oppose the radical and dangerous efforts to defund, dismantle and dissolve our police departments,” Trump said. “Americans want law and order. They demand law and order.” The only people that want “Law and Order” are the Nazis that support Trump, and that’s 25-30% of the electorate. The rest want real police reform or to defund the police. Personally, I think, only a radical reform will do. 90% of the police force is bad cops or their enablers. Police unions need to go. They’re protectors of really bad cops, and until the populace gets real reforms, the police shouldn’t be trusted to do the job they’v...

This morning’s Monday briefing From the New York Times said in part: Chris Magnus, the police chief in Tucson, Ariz., told the Marshall Project: “If I had my way, officers who lie wouldn’t just be put on a list, they’d be fired, and also not allowed to work in any other jurisdiction as a police officer ever again.” Often, though, police-union contracts prevent firing even officers with a record of brutality and dishonesty — which then casts a shadow over the many police officers who tell the truth. Face it, cops who protect crooked cops are crooked themselves. They usually have no regard for the Constitution and should be charged with felony conspiracy. Maybe jail time will reform them, along with prohibiting them from becoming a police officer again.

In the New York Times newsletter On Tech a writer said: I have to assume that Zuckerberg saying that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth is either a stunningly simplistic comment from one of the world’s most powerful people, or a blatant attempt to win over politicians and political conservatives who have proposed regulatory crackdowns. Either way, it’s not good. Zuckerberg is a right-wing terrorist. Pure and simple; his hands off attitude About Trump’s unconstitutional rankings is a treasonable offense. Both men are trying to destroy the United States.