Dreams Of Noise

Breaking news this morning: Five dead in Illinois shooting.

ENOUGH!

Enough with the goddamn guns.

Enough enough enough.

I haven't even had my fucking Egg McMuffin yet, and a half-dozen people have been shot.

Y'know what, gun-rights-über-alles folks? You're correct. Guns don't kill people. PEOPLE WITH GUNS KILL PEOPLE. A lot more easily than they do with pretty much any other method short of WMD.

When I can't get through my freakin' morning web pages without a bunch of people being shot, that's fuckin' it.

If you're in the market for a web site design and content management suite, one of the biggies is FREE, today only. Image-Line's EZGenerator can be had for the download and registration at Giveaway of the Day. (Yes, Image-Line is the same company that has FL Studio, the former Fruity Loops.)

(Note that when I say "registration", I mean you have to create an account at Image-Line and download a small registry file, which you activate by double-clicking it. A number of the ungrateful children in comments at GAOTD seem to think this is a problem, and I suppose in their own way they are Sticking It To The Man or something. GAOTD comments are nearly as bad as Yahoo comments, honestly -- people complaining about free commercial software is never pretty, especially when it's too complex for them. One guy honestly recommends that, rather than download this web site software, people should learn to code HTML with a text editor. Which is a useful thing, but I can only assume he also likes assembling toothpick Taj Mahals. But I'm not cranky.)

Any other cool freebies we should know about?

This is the state things have degenerated to in our country:

A 59-year-old man has been jailed in Gastonia, N.C., on charges of larceny after allegedly robbing an RBC Bank for $1 so he could get health care in prison. Richard James Verone handed a female teller a note demanding the money and claiming that he had a gun, according to the police report.

He then sat down and waited for police to arrive. "… I say, 'I'll be sitting right over here, on the chair, waiting for the police,'" Verone told reporters, recalling the June 9 robbery in an interview from Gaston County Jail.

And wait for the police, he did.

"He's sitting on the sofa as you walk in the front door," the bank teller said in a 911 call.

Police arrested Verone where he sat. He was unarmed.

Bankers have obscene profits and golden parachutes.

Members of Congress and their cronies have superb health care, paid for by us.

The insurance companies make money hand over fist.

And the rest of us are just fuckin' hosed.

To the point where it seems like a very reasonable, even responsible, choice to get yourself arrested for armed robbery, if only you can get the care you need.

THIS HAS GOT TO STOP.

We need single payer, and we need it NOW. We need the insurance companies, leeching off the country and doing nothing except taking money as middlemen, to go away NOW. We need the motherfuckers who broke our economy in prison, and we need it NOW. We need their too-big-to-fail banks to fuckin' FAIL, because if we can then by FSM they can.

Yeah, I know none of it's practical, and none of it will happen.

Fuck that.

If it doesn't happen eventually, our nation is doomed.

I have no idea what the hell's happened to my country.

A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of “justifiable homicide” to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus—a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state’s GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.

The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Phil Jensen, a committed foe of abortion rights, alters the state’s legal definition of justifiable homicide by adding language stating that a homicide is permissible if committed by a person “while resisting an attempt to harm” that person’s unborn child or the unborn child of that person’s spouse, partner, parent, or child. If the bill passes, it could in theory allow a woman’s father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion—even if she wanted one.

I bet this ratbastard wants smaller government, too.

What the fuck is wrong with these insane assholes who have to control women's bodies and sexuality, force people to alter their lives, save fetuses they don't give a shit about once the kid is born, and stick their noses in everyone else's business? Because their God tells them to? That little First Amendment thing just doesn't mean what it says, after all.

It doesn't even matter that this is as unconstitutional as it gets. It's that the nutbars are so thoroughly in charge of the asylum, the rational is so thoroughly divorced from the actual conversation, that this foul creature feels he can comfortably submit a bill like this, one that would make it legal to kill someone performing, or possibly even getting, a legal medical procedure. Oh, yeah, that's "pro-life".

Jayzus fucking fuck.

Sarah Palin's phrase that pays. (A different write-up at dKos, with different links.)

The other day, I swore to not get into any violent rhetoric, not that I ever got into much besides wanting to smack a few people in the heads. And I shall continue that. But I think a few choice insults are applicable here.

To wit: Sarah Palin is a grotesque, offensive, attention-grabbing fool with delusions of competence. I would not trust her to handle any more responsibility than that of a diner waitress, and not a senior one. She is shallow and fatuous on her best days, violence-prone and violent-minded on her worst. Yet now that she's being called on her unique contributions to our national discourse she's doing her best to not only scrub the evidence but to make herself out to somehow be a victim.

The victims were the people shot and killed Saturday. The victims are the dead and wounded and their families.

And to invoke "blood libel" in the attempted murder of a Jew is obscene.

Andy Warhol was, unfortunately, wrong. Sarah Palin's fifteen minutes were up long ago. But, as the saying goes, "How can I miss you if you won't go away?"

On the tax "compromise" that was announced today. You really do have to watch this one.

[Sorry for the length of this, but a few people have said I really should take out the cut-tags so everyone will see this. I appreciate the sentiment, guys.]

It is worth remembering that, no matter how idiotic and clumsy some of our leaders are, how stupid the things they say, how insane the things they do, you can always count on Faux News to up the ante.

They really are a divine little propaganda organ. Their view of the world is perfectly in sync with the oligarchy that's imposed itself upon America. And their fiercely loyal viewers are told, over and over again, that We Report, You Decide.

If only.

Regarding the matter of Park 51, the prospective Islamic community center in a former Burlington Coat Factory store a couple of blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center -- I'm sorry, the mosque near Ground Zero -- Peter J. Johnson of Faux News lets us know in no uncertain terms his standards for citizenship:

"I look for the day when this is no longer about politicians or pain or protest, but about neighbors becoming good neighbors," he said.

"Thank god and our founders for the First Amendment, but God help us if it all comes down to the need to rely upon it," he continued.

"Any American can assert a right. Great Americans give up their rights to help those they share nothing else with but a love of this country," he concluded.

[Emphasis mine.]

As you'll see if you read from the link, the lead-in to this was a swipe at Fred Phelps, the despicable bastard whose extended family calls itself the Westboro Baptist Church, and protests whatever their particular agenda is at various funerals across the country. Johnson conflates both Phelps's tired tirades and the planned Park 51 -- in other words, Phelps's little stunts are the exact same thing as the construction of a community center near the WTC site. Or at least that's what Faux would have you believe.

I loathe Phelps, and have invoked him on my LJ numerous times, and I wish there was a simple public decency law against him disrupting a funeral. But he can say whatever the fuck he wants to say. I disagree with him on every level, but by damn he can say it.

That's what the First Amendment does.

And it does so because governmental stifling of opposing views is the first, most odious, and most effective way to suppress a people.

And I think that if somehow the Founding Fathers and all those who have bled and died over the past 234 years defending our rights could hear Peter J. Johnson's smarmy assertion that "Great Americans" give up their rights, Mr. Johnson would get the biggest historical ectoplasmic bitch-slapping in the history of the world.

But, again, he has the right to say it. I bet he even believes it, on some level. Although he may not apply it to himself.

But he says it, and some people watching Faux will hear it, and take it to heart.

The first intention of it, obviously, is to build public sentiment against the not-a-mosque. And it's another step on the path of the attempt to, at least in public opinion, make Muslims Not As Good As Us. Different. As Stephen King says, Fear Thou The Mutant.

But it works in the same way on the people it tries to rile up against the Muslims.

It says, in essence, "Good citizens -- no, Great Americans -- need to set aside their freedoms when necessary. We'll tell you when it's necessary."

And it becomes that small little bit easier for the oligarchy to control more people, to make the intolerable seem normal, to bludgeon people into shrugging and lowering their heads and not calling attention to themselves.

And the worst thing is, the first instinct for protecting yourself is to not trust anybody. Which also is a great way of making people malleable: divide and conquer, y'know?

You have to trust yourself. You have to trust your friends. You have to cultivate your own information sources, and that can take awhile. The idea is not to mistrust, or even to trust-but-verify, but to get as much truth as you can, and then work out what you can do for yourself, your friends, your community, your country with the truth. No matter what it may be.

And one of my truths is: You do not give up a right.

The Bill of Rights is a pretty cool document. It tries to cover everything, and, given the context of 1775-1789, largely succeeds. (And many of its problems, such as voting rights for minorities and women, have been ironed out over the years.) The most important things is that it does not enshrine spurious things as "rights". It says people should expect a certain amount of goodness in their lives, and these are the rules by which others are not allowed to interfere with that. It sets up very basic rules, largely intended to prevent governmental suppression.

They also work against what has become known as "the tyranny of the majority" -- circumstances where a larger segment of the population approves of something which would oppress or harm a smaller segment.

We see this a lot lately with gay rights, with women's reproductive rights. But it can apply to anything. And lately it's been a backlash against all things Muslim, fostered by talk radio and the Tea Party and Faux News and unfortunately reinforced by such people as Howard Dean who should bloody well know better.

As long as it doesn't violate local codes, as long as the people running it follow the laws, what Park 51 is really doesn't matter. It is the right of the people who want to build it to do so.

And they damn well shouldn't give that up because some xenophobic liars want to scare them into becoming their twisted, docile, head-down, know-your-role-and-shut-your-mouth version of Great Americans.

As you have doubtless heard, a coal mine in West Virginia blew up yesterday. Twenty-five miners are dead, and four more are still missing. Good thoughts and condolences to the families of those killed or missing.

Of course, the parent company, Massey Energy, seems to have a little problem with violations at that mine. Like, 3,000 of them. Since 1995. In other words, an average of 200 safety violations a year for the past fifteen years.

And what does Massey CEO Don Blankenship have to say about that number?

At the time, when asked about how it was that Massey had chalked up more safety violations in two years than its three biggest rivals, Blankenship said Massey was unfairly targeted by regulators and that,"We don't pay much attention to the violation count."

Mother. Fucker.

If it isn't money in your bank account, you don't notice it, is that it?

This isn't a bill collection notice or advertising insert or plaintive note from your mom saying you never call anymore. This isn't something you just toss on the table behind you, shitwit. This is dangerous stuff in your job environment that can kill people. And now it has. Dozens.

I'm sure you thought you were saving money by ignoring all those violations, not keeping count of 'em. Well, I have a suspicion that you're gonna end up paying out a hell of a lot more to the families of the people who died digging rocks out of the ground for you.

Who knows, maybe you'll even have to close your business. Wouldn't that be a tragedy. Oh, wait. Massey Energy is a big stumbling block on the path to green tech, not to mention you personally have proved yourself irresponsible with other peoples' lives. It wouldn't be a tragedy at all.

I hope coal-darkened faces with wide, sightless eyes haunt your dreams.