And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.
– Nietzsche
Whatever.
– Tata
Category Archives: Kill the Poor
Not I Said the Swan
Nothing in common but psychopathy.
This parade of crazy people, desperate to out-do one another at hurting people they should be trying to protect, reminded me of something, but I couldn’t remember what it was.
Yes, that’s it.
In My Heart None Of the Rules
Even if you decided to mull it over and missed Bank Transfer Day, it’s not too late to find a credit union and move your money.
What It Don’t Get I Can’t Use
Loseriffic comments from YouTube:
If you run up unnecessary costs on banks, they’ll pass them on to consumers. They won’t stop lobbying congress. They’ll cut jobs before that, they’ll raise fees before that. I would have thought this was a super cool stick-it-to-the-man move in high school. But it’s not. It’s a waste of resources and time.
tinybones
In this case, the back of the cave is decorated up right purty, has nice curtains with really cute fringe. tinybones is a prisoner of tinybones, not the banks.
Yeah, like a CEO is gonna worry about this. All they’ll do is get rid of the envelopes making poor people pay an extra $.050 or so to mail their bills. Do you really think banks are that stupid? If you want to get a executives attention, this won’t do it. Any action that adds costs to consumer items in the end only punishes the 99%.
guipiwan
Aparently guipiwan has never heard of credit unions, community banks and electronic billpay. The system’s rigged, man! Let’s go serfing now! Everybody’s learning how!
Idiot.
The guy is telling people to commit mail fraud and pretty much has screwed himself as now he’s posted evidence to have him charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and other charges. Not smart as its a felony.
Mail fraud: Reach any fraudulent scheme or artifice to intentionally deprive another of property or honest services with a nexus to mail or wire communication.
While I think the banks are dirty and that there is a need for OWS to continue to grow, this isnt the way.
bhonthar
No. This is not mail fraud. This is simple business reply mail. It says that in the envelope’s upper right hand corner. The business has asked you a question. You are sending an answer. Thanks for the gumball, Mickey!
Booo. While initially funny, the underlying message is scary and sad. People like this need to stop playing the victim and get a life. You think the mail clerk is gonna do shit with a shingle? He’s gonna throw it in the trash. Stop protesting things that have already happened (lets do a protest against past wars, why don’t we) and propose some solutions. Most of the people protesting have no business doing so anyway.
jeg1015
Injustice bugging you? Oligarchs up your ass? Get over it! You weren’t using your ass anyway, were ya, whiner?
Omigod, morons are EVERYWHERE. Meanwhile, I stopped at the little old man’s cramped but homey hardware store and bought my new set of tools. I’ve been sending back envelopes to the women’s orgs with nine pennies and a note that says I WILL NEVER GIVE YOU ANOTHER DIME, and to the DCCC I’ve sent testy manifestos, but from now on, it’s shims and shiny words.
Crime-fighting kit and critical thinker Topaz.
A little direct action is good for what ails us.
And Some You Can’t Disguise
Well, it’s happened again: the New Brunswick Police shot and killed an unarmed Black man.
Investigators recovered a bullet from scene[sic] where New Brunswick police fatally shot a man last week, and relatives are cooperating in the investigation authorities said today.
In a statement released late today, Middlesex County Prosecutor Bruce Kaplan said two dozen investigators from his office have interviewed 37 people about the fatal shooting of 47-year-old city resident Barry Deloatch.
“Many of these witnesses who were identified and-or[sic] came forward did so because of the assistance and encouragement of community leaders, and because of some of Mr. Deloatch’s relatives, who are cooperating with law enforcement,” Kaplan said in the statement.
Relatives of Deloatch have participated in several rallies protesting the shooting and demanding an investigation by an agency outside Middlesex County.
Relatives have said a witness told them Deloatch was shot as he ran from police. Residents have said they will continue demonstrations.
Note the prosecutor’s emphasis on the word cooperation. In early accounts, the police would not talk to the family, leading to understandable and familiar community outrage.
“Let’s face it, New Brunswick has had a troubled police department for a very long time,” Deborah Jacobs, a local representative from the American Civil Liberties Union, said at the meeting. She asked people to sign a letter by ACLU urging the federal government to probe the shooting.
Jacobs also showed the crowd a “bust card,” detailing the rights a civilian has when stopped by police.
The New Brunswick-area branch of NAACP organized the meeting Wednesday. “NAACP has been involved with this from the outset and will continue to be involved until justice has been served for Barry Deloatch and processes are in place to stop these wanton killings in our community,” NAACP president Bruce Morgan said in an email announcing the meeting.
The call for an investigating agency outside Middlesex County is a smart one.
A Lifetime Run Over And Over
Sometimes when I’m out on the bicycle in traffic, I see things I have to file away to think about later. One of those things has been NJ Transit bus signs in English and Spanish asking women not to abandon their babies.
Last night, I looked up the New Jersey Safe Haven Infant Protection Act site because I was curious about how big a problem abandoned babies might be in the state that has certainly seen highly publicized abandoned baby disasters.
Yeah. That happened here in New Jersey. Twice. In general, though, an abandoned baby anywhere is not the kind of news that penetrates my carefully-constructed cocoon of self-absorption, so this morning, I called the number for further information and asked for just that. Seriously: how big a problem is this? Does it happen every year or just often enough to drive Seth MacFarlane tastelessly up a wall? The woman answering the phone directed me to a series of statistics pages.
Well then. This is certainly a different problem than I imagined. Every year for the last ten, at least four babies have been abandoned in the state, at least one in unsafe circumstances, though the chart does not describe those circumstances or the outcomes. As much as I would like to let the rational mind handle thinking about this matter, I can’t get past knowing what it feels like to have a baby you can’t take care of and not knowing what to do. These numbers hint at a lot of suffering and, strangely in my opinion, that news of Safe Haven protections hasn’t reached everyone. The agencies involved are asking for help.
I Won’t Get Any Older Now
This OpEd covers many of the right points on the subject of J-1 visa exploitation, but it omits one truly important point: imagine the situation reversed. Imagine American medical students on a summer work/study vacation in an ostensibly friendly country – let’s say France – being forced to work for $1 an hour. You can’t imagine it because it would not happen without an international incident. The reason we heard about it at all was that those students were middle class kids insisting on being treated like middle class people.
We treat poor people all over the world this way every day, all the time.
Outrun My Bullet
Yesterday, I wrote a blog post while people were talking to me. I may or may not have written in complete sentences, but I can’t say because people are currently talking to me and some of them are cats. You may have differences of opinion with cats but on matters of grammar and punctuation, cats will not engage in disputes. They are right and you are made of meat.
This morning, I cross-posted yesterday’s sputtering hodge-podge to Brilliant@breakfast when I noticed the other writers have real lives and I don’t. Anyhoo, thing is I was at work at the time and if you can believe it people were talking to me about work and personal disasters and glaring at me because my bicycle was parked in the reading room and did anyone know where Tabby’s student worker went? Naturally, my syntax did not improve as I tacked on an ending that did not in any way show up the earlier writing. I am having this problem often these days: people are talking to me. What the hell am I doing wrong?
Yesterday, one of my co-workers casually remarked that Borders was going out of business so I could pick up a pile of books for my adorable grandchildren. This reminded me that the unnamed university’s anti-hunger project will call for presents for children and Toys For Tots will be asking in just a few months for unwrapped gifts, but these requests will come at a time when money will be tight. I don’t have children in school, but back-to-school sales will start in a matter of minutes. It dawned on me that if the anti-hunger project asked people to plan ahead and buy one sale item now for the project’s future maybe it would be easier to collect stuff later. So I called up the anti-hunger project’s new leader and expressed the unusual opinion that I had a wild idea. Get this: she called me back and talked for about half an hour straight. I’m not sure she took more than two or three breaths.
Maybe it was stupid of me, but I volunteered to put up posters and keep track of the unnamed university’s main library’s food collection bin. Today, I discovered the reason food hasn’t been collected from the bin all summer is that the two people who used to drag the bin down the street both retired. With a sinking feeling about the dozens of other donation boxes all over campus, I reported this to the project leader. You will not be surprised to hear that she did not answer me. I was, as you might suspect, surprised by the quiet.
Remember That No One Can Breathe Under Water
Despite the noise coming out of Washington about this day as the beginning of a new era, I cannot see it as anything but the end of the American Dream.
There is nothing to celebrate. At this very moment, six million people in the United States live with no other income other than food stamps. Picture that. Food stamps pay for little more than just enough food to keep a person alive. That’s it. We have rules and regulations with which we guarantee that a certain segment of the population is too physically weak to speak up and shame us.
And now we are watching the shredding of the safety net for no good reason – as if there could be a good reason to punish our neighbors for being poor. If we have the government we deserve then we are real assholes.
You Running To Jump In
I do not actually have a giant hand. UNLESS I DO!
Yogurt-making is prop-intensive.
Poor Impulse Control 