You go, Democrats:

A half-dozen senators friendly to labor have decided to drop a central provision of a bill that would have made it easier to organize workers.

Whew, it's a good thing that unions didn't spend millions of dollars and mobilize millions of people in the last election. That would have been a total waste of resources.




via joshr

1) That Obama is better than Bush is irrelevant. If Bush becomes the standard, that means Bush wins.

In fact: Bush has won.

2) In a world-historical crisis caused by American financiers and American "policy"-makers, the American president has an obligation to do something. If he does nothing, he deserves reproach and more.

3) Obama is working for Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is not just "bad" or "part of the problem." Goldman Sachs is a perpetrator of crimes on a world-historical scale. What they do is not acceptable. Working for Goldman Sachs is wrong. See substantiation here.

4) More sharp comments from Eliot Spitzer here. I wonder what role Goldman Sachs played in his demise.

5) Note: in the above, the names "Goldman Sachs" refer not only to the Wall Street corporation, but also to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, the United States Department of the Treasury, the United States Federal Reserve Bank, and the relevant sections of the United States Department of Justice (all of them).

Great Moments in Capitalism:

A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.

Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that's right, "EATR" — "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment...

...

That "biomass" and "other organically-based energy sources" wouldn't necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they'd be plentiful in a war zone.

...

The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.

Upon the EATR platform, the Pentagon could build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a mobile gunship.

A mobile gun that fuels itself by eating the people it kills.

Once more, for fun: A mobile GUN that FUELS ITSELF by EATING the PEOPLE it KILLS.


Well, I for one can't imagine what kind of a sick individual would find pleasure in apocalyptic fantasies about the destruction of a society that would create such a thing.

It ain't xenophobia, the late-capitalist world is just fucking boring and we're sick of it. There's a lot to be said for productive nihilism.

From the website of the new Discovery Channel reality show The Colony:

What would you do in the wake of a global catastrophe? How would you find food? Water? Shelter?

The Colony is a controlled experiment to see exactly what it would take to survive and rebuild under these circumstances. For 10 weeks, a group of 10 volunteers, whose backgrounds and expertise represent a cross-section of modern society, are isolated in an urban environment outside Los Angeles and tasked with creating a livable society.

With no electricity from the grid, no running water and no communication with the outside world, all the volunteers have to work with are their skills and whatever tools and supplies they can scavenge from their surroundings. Experts from the fields of homeland security, engineering and psychology have helped design the world of The Colony to reflect elements from both real life disasters and models of what the future could look like after a global viral outbreak.

Over the course of the 10-week experiment, the Colonists must work together to build the necessities of survival, such as a water-filtration system, a battery bank that powered their electricity, a solar cooker, a shower system and a greenhouse – and even some niceties (a coffee maker!).

I really hope they get an army of extras in zombie makeup to attack during sweeps.

Who knew he was an anarchist at heart?:

"No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves, or if police can be bought off by drug traffickers.

No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top, or the head of the Port Authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery.

That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there," he said, "and now is the time for that style of governance to end."