Oh, those poor "retirees". Note that they're not the rank-and-file worker bees who have been shafted out of their retirement savings by Enron and now face the possibility of working till the day they die.
No, these "retirees" are the PGE bosses that kissed Enron's ass and help made the whole mess happen. And the worst that their lost retirement monies will do is to make them sell off the yacht and two vacation homes, and possibly move from the multi-million dollar West Hills mansion into a $750K Northwest District Victorian to liquidate enough assets to fund their retirement.
Oh, the humanity! How my heart bleeds for the suffering bourgeoisie.
In no case does it appear that a wanted criminal was apprehended.It would be entirely in keeping with the drunken-frat-boy mentality of Emperor George II for the whole thing to have been designed from the get-go as strictly a tool of harassment.
The question that comes to my mind is: Were Uday and Qusay deliberately killed instead of captured for similar reasons?
An article in the Sunday Oregonian, which unfortunately I can't locate on the web, carries the title "Iraqis' Property 'lost' by U.S." One excerpt:
On any given day, Iraqis can be found pleading at the gates of the military bases or in civil affairs offices: an old woman who laments that her savings were taken from her son on the road to Baghdad; a young man who says he gave a Thuraya phone to a soldier for a call and did not get it back; a cigarette merchant who says he returned to a checkpoint to recover his car after it was confiscated, only to find that both car and checkpoint vanished.
It could be worse, I suppose. I could be a straight white male, the Rush Limbaugh demographic. Not to mention that the whole complaint is pretty petty in comparison to the billions in the third world that have neither enough to eat, clean water to drink, or adequate shelter.
Now to can the self-pity and get back to working on that latter to the Sacramento DA about RedRed.
There's really not much I can dig up on the Web aside from what's on this site, but the site seems completely consistent and believable: even as much as touching a police officer opens you up to assault charges. So if unarmed Hernandez did simply knock the gun out of the cop's hand, that's assault as far as the State is concerned.
And who can blame the guy? Backwater redneck Texas towns are notoriously racist. If I was Alvaro, I would have feared for my life, too! And probably done just what he did, even if I knew the charges it would open me to. Better incarcerated than dead.
Best of all neither of course. Free Alvaro!
In a 41-page affidavit released in April, the U.S. Attorney's Office accused Hawash, a naturalized U.S.citizen, of growing angry with the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks, then conspiring with at least five other Muslim men to join the fight in Afghanistan against U.S. troops.Well, we were of course putting civilians at risk to pursue our goals there. Or, reworded:
News accounts show that the United States Government, growing angry with the Afghan Government after the Sept. 11 attacks, conspired with at least five other national governments to join the fight in Afghanistan against Taliban troops.
Not that I want to, mind you. Just found a US political prisoner (well, he's not technically a prisoner yet, as his sentence doesn't start until next month) case more egregious than that of Alvaro Hernandez I mentioned a few days ago: Sherman Austin.
His crime? Running a web site that lets anyone post articles to it. Either Austin or a visitor to his site posted an article that included links (that's right, links, not actual information) to information about bombs and explosives. Oh, that and his anarchist political views. The judge explicitly gave him three times the sentence the FBI recommended specifically to serve as an example to "future revolutionaries."
With logic like that, I could be convicted as an accessory to drug trafficking by simply mentioning that there's lots of pushers hanging out in Holladay Park. Oops. Maybe I shouldn't have said that.
Austin's site is here. His own account of the debacle is here.
On the one hand, nobody can deny that women usually don't choose to become prostitutes; they are forced into it by economic circumstances, aided in many cases by internalized male chauvinism absorbed as a result of living in a patriarchical society. In that light, who wouldn't want to support a center helping women trapped in that occupation escape from it? It's certainly better than proclaiming it a 'crime' and arresting and prosecuting prostitutes.
On the other hand, a look at their time line and some of their propaganda makes it clear that they are in favor of keeping it illegal, and also that they have a number of prudish hangups about sex in general (just look at their screed against kinky sex, totally ignoring the possibility of consensual kink).
I mean, come on now. If making prostitution illegal would stop it, shouldn't it have been stopped by now? How about addressing our society's deification of the greed-and-profit motive, the social inequality, and the patriarchy that makes such exploitation possible in the first place? Deal with that, and yes, maybe some women will still choose to become prostitutes to make a living (my guess it that the number won't be very high and prostitution will end up being a pretty pricey business transaction).
Maybe the response to that "problem" is to conclude that women are rational and intelligent people who can make their own life decisions. The problem, in other words, is the people who want to micromanage other's career choices. Isn't any other response essentially concluding that women are a "weaker sex" that needs to live under the protection of men, i.e. the same kind of crap that feminists claim to be opposing in the first place?
Then again, the cynic in me wonders what else to expect from a foundation named after a cop.
I'm definitely headed back after I attend to a few necessary city things, as I've fallen quite in love with the place in the few days I was there.
As to today's Bush protest, I'll confess to a little disappointment that it wasn't more disruptive to the Emperor and his supporters.
Right as I was collecting my bicycle from where I locked it in Columbia Park, I noticed an altercation between a lingering crowd of protesters and the police. A poor substitute for pushing the limits earlier in the day when it might have actually disrupted someone other than residents attempting to use Lombard St., thought I. Then later I heard rumors about blocking a bus full of attendees leaving the event. But even that's a poor substitute for attempting to stop them from attending in the first place.
There's a time when you need to realize that your goal wasn't accomplished, the window in which to attempt it has passed, and to move on. Failing to do so just makes one look silly and confrontational for no good reason.
Note to employers: maybe you'd be better put making sysadmin jobs more worth having (provision for on-call compensation, the ability to take vacations like everybody else does, the ability to move on to other positions within the company) than simply trying to hide the fact that it's a shit job by thinking of new, imaginative, and deceptive job titles for it.
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