The “grassroots” movement “reclaiming” America’s “honored” past turns out to be nothing but a front for fascism. In a most excellent piece of investigative journalism by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, it is revealed the Koch brothers have been funding the Tea Party the entire time.
The Koch brothers have a long standing history of self-serving agendas. The Tea Party is but the latest attempt by these ultra-rich businessmen – in the US their wealth is only eclipsed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett – to change political environment of the country to favor the ultra rich.
It really is amazing how the Tea Party has been branded to stand against special interests and the “Washington politics” while at the same time being held together by funds from the very people the party is supposedly against. This has to be one of the greatest branding successes ever. It’s truly amazing that these are the same people who accuse Barack Obama for having some sort of a hidden agenda.
The Koch family history is a history of racism, disregard for the environment to enrich the family, communist witch hunts and behind the scenes political dealings. Its agenda is total abolition of all consumer protections, taxes, unnecessary Government agencies (incl. FBI and CIA) and all regulations that regulate businesses in the US.
-TPP
This summer’s blackout count stands at 6 on 8/20/2010.
We’ve had two neighborhood wide blackouts in the past few days. They’re so awesome.
Let’s see how high can we get by the time the summer’s out.
Go Con Edison! You guys rock!
Update 8/17: We had another one! Yippee! Two days in a row! Let’s go for three!
Update 8/18: We had another one! AWESOME! Three days in a row! Let’s keep the streak going!
Update 8/20: Well, we didn’t manage to maintain the streak, but we’re up to six today. Well done Con Edison! Can we break 10 before next week??
-TPP
Looks like it’s open season in the US for anyone who has anything to do with WikiLeaks.
Jacob Appelbaum (of TOR) was detained in the US border after returning to the US from The Netherlands earlier today. He was detained for three hours while the stormtroopers from the US Army and ICE questioned him about WikiLeaks (he’s a WikiLeaks contributor), searched his belongings (incl. his computer) and seized three cellphones.
This is what it’s become? Anyone even remotely involved with the organization is now subject to “random” searches and having their belongings seized for no good reason.
It’ll be curious to know, if the US Army really thought Mr. Appelbaum had anything to do with the Afghanistan war documents leak or were they just harrassing him for being associated with their new Public Enemy Number One.
Fuck this.
WikiLeaks.org is accepting donations at its website.
-TPP
Last week I got an invitation to OnLive cloud based gaming service. Today I finally had time to check it out.
OnLive is giving “founding members” a free 12-month subscription to the service, so I decided to give it a go.
I’ve been quite skeptical of the service prior to its launch thinking it can’t possibly work with the lag introduced by having to connect to their servers over the Internet.
I was wrong.
My initial impressions of the service are very positive. The user interface is easy to use and it’s quick. Spectating other users’ games is really cool. All the games can be played for free for 30 minutes. The service has friends lists, achievements and brag clips (I assume video captures of your “greatest moments”.
The only negative thing I could say about the service is that my old gaming laptop is showing its age. It froze for a few seconds at a time multiple times. It felt like the CPU was getting overstressed. That’s not really the service’s fault, however.
I did not test a multiplayer game yet, but the single-player game demos I played worked flawlessly.
This thing is gonna be big.
-TPP
There’s poo in my butt
eeww, yuck
Everyone seems to be quite pleased with themselves right now about “preventing” a new terror attack on New York City.
I do hope someone in an authoritative position in the Department of Homeland Security realizes soon that the bomb failed to detonate and it was only spotted after it was triggered.
Someone’s been planning the attack for some time, and nobody noticed. Someone loaded a car with gasoline and other explosives, drove it to mid-manhattan, and nobody noticed. Assuming the perpetrator(s) was/were foreign, they had to travel to US, and none of the lists and other security measures at the borders caught them.
What a great success this was.
-TPP
The Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator is soliciting comments from organizations regarding forming a strategic plan for intellectual property enforcement in the US.
RIAA, MPAA and other organizations have submitted their joint comment.
The EFF is calling out some of the most “interesting” aspects of that comment.
RIAA/MPAA want consumers to install anti-copyright infringement on their home computers. Think of it as a sort of virus scanner, but for illegal files instead.
They also want all network providers to scan their network traffic and prevent copyright infringement happening on their networks. At least they’re only asking for reasonable measures.
They want increased searches on US borders, and add declarations in the US customs forms for intellectual property. What this would mean is that next time you come into the US from abroad, and your iPod has ripped music on it, you’d have to disclose that to the US Customs officers and most likely have the iPod confiscated (and face possible sanctions).
They want the US Government to pressure other Governments to adopt more copyright friendly policies.
And finally they want the DOJ and DHS to hunt down pirates at the tax-payers’ expense.
Fascism is well and alive in our entertainment industry.
-TPP
Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com writes about the escalating war against WikiLeaks.org by the United States Government.
WikiLeaks.org is a non-profit organization devoted to exposing Government and corporate corruption around the world. It’s published a number of embarrassing documents about CIA, The Pentagon and other branches of the US Government. As a result they’ve found themselves a target of around the clock surveillance and their at least on one occasion a WikiLeaks volunteer, who is underaged, was detained and questioned by (allegedly) US State Department and CIA personnel in Iceland.
You gotta wonder when exactly did the US Government forget the reason the United States was formed.
-TPP
Alberto Gonzales has been sentenced for 20 years in the slammer for stealing credit and debit card information from an unsecured wireless network of T.J. Maxx and then pilfering the accounts for millions of dollars at ATMs around the country.
Hopefully this is a first of many hard sentences against credit card scammers.
-TPP
The Y2Gay problem is similar to the Y2K problem; databases have been designed with certain assumptions that no longer hold true.
In this case the databases assume that marriage is between one man and one woman.
The author of the article discusses in a pretty entertaining way on how to design a database that supports other types of marriages (incl. polygamy).
-TPP
