Perpetual World Revolution Begins

An ongoing and probably perpetual global revolution by the world against its tyrants has begun.

Tonight the United Nations Security Council voted to let UN member nations intercede militarily on the Libyan peoples' behalf in the Libyan civil war, a war in which Libyan President Khaddafi has been militarily attacking the people of his own nation just for opposing him. The only restriction is that foreign nations place no boots on the ground.

Many UN member nations are ruled by tyrants. But peaceful protests must be allowed. Peaceful protests that are met with force can now be met with counterforce.

This is not the same as the UN sending UN Security Forces into the country. This is, however, the UN formally making war against one's own people indefensible.

Bravo.

Daddy Was A Union Man

Wisconsin is having a Woodstock. A gathering of the tribes. It expects to overthrow and expel those who promised jobs and are instead destroying labor unions.

Back in the old days, farmers organized the Grange to fight the rail monopolies which paid them a small part of what their produce brought in the cities. Denial of product brought the prices around.

Daddy was a farmer, but a machinist at heart. Late in life he worked as a steel scraper at Baker Brothers in Toledo. Union, I believe. I remember hearing talk of strikes.

Lots of people's daddies and mommies and grandparents and great-grandparents were able to do what they did because the union made them strong.

This writer himself was once a painters union apprentice and later in the transit workers union.

Solidarity forever.

For the union makes us strong.

Torture In America Today

Forced nudity is torture. For a jailor to order a prisoner to strip and then to deprive them of their clothes for hours, to embarrass them by forcing them to stand naked outside their cell at parade rest, is torture.

This is especially heinous when it is done to a prisoner awaiting trial, unconvicted and unsentenced. Pre-trial punishment is not an American tradition.

This torture is being done daily to Bradley Manning, a prisoner awaiting trial at Quantico. This treatment is supposedly part of his suicide prevention program.

Manning is being forced to sleep naked every night, in view of a video monitor and of a guard directly outside his cell. Guys get erections in their sleep. It is only a matter of time before pictures will surface, and America will discover its own Abu Ghraib scandal.

Manning has been awakened every five minutes during the night for months to ensure that he isn't harming himself. This is also a part of his "suicide watch". Military psychiatrists keep ruling, though, that he is nowhere near suicide. But his jailors keep trying...

So he is forced to strip before bedtime. His clothes are returned after morning review. He sleeps naked under a camera.

What if he goes to trial? His best defense may soon be that he simply doesn't remember anything. Given the hard time that he is now serving pre-trial before he has even been proven guilty, any testimony he gives at trial will be tainted and suspect.

In the meantime, his jailors are practically ensuring a debacle when the inevitable photos of a nude, aroused, Manning surface in the press.

- - - a further note - - -

The New York Times of 3/12/11, the day after this posting, reports on

"...Philip J. Crowley, the top State Department spokesman, about Private Manning’s treatment. In a talk at M.I.T., Mr. Crowley called the treatment “ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid,” and he said he did not understand Defense Department officials’ reasons for imposing it, according to people present. Mr. Crowley later said he was expressing his personal views."

Asked about Crowley's remarks at a press conference President Obama then said,

" “With respect to Private Manning, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference. “They assure me that they are.”

“I can’t go into details about some of their concerns,” he added, “but some of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety as well.” He appeared to be referring to fears that Private Manning might harm himself, though the private, his friends and his lawyer have all denied that he is suicidal. "

The full story is at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/12/us/12manning.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha23

The fact that Obama let himself be told pablum is irrelevent. He knows he's got a problem there, and he's apparently preparing to have been terribly deceived. Bradley Manning's enforced nakedness is happening because Bradley gently teased his guards about the silliness of his protocols. According to a letter from Bradley just now released by Bradley's lawyer.

His enforced nakedness is also happening because at night Bradley sleeps under a light and a camera. A camera that records to tape.

The question remains open of who decided that it was a bright idea to film Bradley Manning's weiner. And how soon we will see the closeups - jewels blocked out, of course - at the supermarket on the cover of the National Enquirer?

Total Shock

Wisconsinites woke up this morning to discover that their state assembly had just abolished their government unions. This writer woke up to discover that yesterday afternoon the House technology subcommittee voted to give the telephone and cable companies absolute, unrestricted power over the Internet. They plan to take away regulation of the Internet from the FCC.

Here's the Op Ed News article:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/House-Runs-Amok-on-FCC-by-the-web-110309-277.html

Also, both houses of the Michigan legislature have just passed legislation that would let the governor declare any town or city broken and appoint a state monitor to run the town, firing the elected officials. Ohio has just rammed through union-busting legislation by replacing members on two committees who voted against it. Koch brothers money, supporting "Big Government Republicanism" (a new Rachel Maddow phrase) is trying to kill the last major American unions. These unions are the largest donors to the Democratic Party.

This is "shock doctrine" politics. Naomi Klein wrote a book of this title to describe how we have been shocked into war, shocked into giving banks back the money that others had stolen.

And now we have been given the story that teachers and policemen are overpaid, and they are being shocked out of their unions. Lies are told and no one counters them. Then evil is done. This can't last long. As Michael Moore says, "Wisconsin isn't broke". It's all fraud and sham, and it's bound to collapse.

Every shock is wakening. A slap in the face doesn't destroy unions, it wakens them. The unions make us strong, and the Koch brothers may have reignited the union movement. The "shock doctrine" may be about to meet the "rock doctrine".

If this develops as it probably will, then Obama's re-election is assured. He will not face serious opposition in the primaries. This means that cross-over Democratic primary voters whose vote isn't needed may then be the ones who choose which Republican candidate will oppose him. A moderate Republican who could never possibly win the presidency would be an ideal candidate. Somebody sufficiently fettered by his past that his future chances are limited.

As a former lobbyist, Barbour may be the closest fit. He sits on a big pile of money, as leader of one of the three main Repub organizations. He could re-define Republicanism away from the radical. Word has it that he's working on his talking points.

I read that Obama may be coming to Jackson in May during the Freedom Rider reunion. That could coincide with Barbour's elevation to national stature.

Last December 10th, just as Mercury went retrograde, appearing from Earth to move backwards in space as it does three times yearly, Senator Bernie Sanders brought Senate progress on the tax bill to a halt with an eight and a half hour filibuster. The following 20 days while Mercury was retrograde were the Senate's most productive days of the year as legislation that had been on hold moved quickly into law.

This year, from March 30th until April 23rd, Mercury goes retrograde once again. It is slowing now. Recall petitions are in motion. Unions are wakening. Facebook is spreading the flames. These forces may seriously converge at the end of this month. Maybe good will come of it.

Return of the unions may mean return of a living wage.

Do Government Regulations Create Jobs?

One did for me.

In the fall of 2001, I was working as a mainframe dbms contract programmer for a major brokerage house client in Weehawken, New Jersey. You 'had a friend' there, if you remember their ads. They are long gone, absorbed into a Swiss bank.

Shortly after 9/11/2001, the government issued a new regulation. Every brokerage house needed to provide the government every week with a list of new clients, showing their names and their Social Security numbers or other ID numbers. The government was "worried about large-scale money laundering". So another programmer set up a retrieval that spanned several systems. It created a file every week.

I kept an eye on his program as it ran every week, and then I ran a program that copied this file to tape and saw that the tape got sent out to an outside vendor. Two programmers got work from this, as well as the vendor. I did need to repair his system once a year because it didn't delete his intermediate files and ran out of space. But other than that, overseeing compliance with this government regulation was trivial and earned me about a half hour's billing every week.

Industry-wide, that regulation must have created hundreds of jobs.

Many government regulations require inspections, reporting, changes and adjustments, special equipment or programs, corporate oversight, and all of these take human time to complete.

Government regulations create jobs.