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My Computer's Faster Than Your Computer

A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too.

I spent about $1,300 on some of the fastest computer parts on the market.On my new computer, I can have hundreds of tabs open simultaneously—I know I've had at least 200 open at one point—and still play high-definition Flash videos without any trouble at all. There must be some theoretical limit to the number of tabs I can keep open on this computer, but I've yet to hit it, and I don't think I ever will. For the first time, I've got a machine that can process more tabs than my brain can keep straight.

( What I need. I installed Tabitis - which is a workaround, not a solution. Dr. John v. Kampen already had me looking at what I was using. This rather rubs it in. Not this week, I'm afraid. )

The Psychopathic Criminal Enterprise Called America

The Government uses the Law to Harm People and Shield the Establishment - John Kozy

Most Americans know that politicians make promises they never fulfill; few know that politicians make promises they lack the means to fulfill.

The people who receive regulatory positions always have ties to the industries they oversee and can look forward to lucrative jobs in those industries when they leave governmental service. As long as corporate money is allowed to influence governmental action, neither the Congress nor regulators can be expected to change the laws or regulatory practices in ways that make them effective, and there is nothing any president can do about it. Even the Congress' attempt to raise the corporate liability limit for oil spills from $75 million to $10 billion has already hit a snag.

Government in America consists of law. Legislators write it, executives apply it, and courts adjudicate it. But the law is a lie. Relying on the law is a fool's errand. It's enacted, enforced, and adjudicated by liars. The law is a great crime, far greater than the activities it outlaws, and there's no way you can protect yourself from it. The establishment protects itself. The law does not protect people. It is merely an instrument of retribution. It can only be used, often ineffectively, to get back at the malefactor. It never un-dos the crime. Executing the murderer doesn't bring back the dead. Putting Ponzi schemers in jail doesn't get your money back.

Jim Kouri, citing FBI studies, writes that "some of the character traits exhibited by serial killers or criminals may be observed in many within the political arena.;" they share the traits of psychopaths who are not sensitive to altruistic appeals, such as sympathy for their victims or remorse or guilt over their crimes. They possess the personality traits of lying, narcissism, selfishness, and vanity. These are the people to whom we have entrusted our fate. Is it any wonder that America is failing at home and world-wide?

In the vernacular, harming people is considered a crime. It is just as much a crime when done by governments, legal systems, or corporations. The government uses the law to harm people or shield the establishment from the consequences of harming people all the time. Watch as no one from the Massey Energy Co. is ever prosecuted for the disaster at the Upper Big Branch coal mine. When corporations are accused of wrongdoing, they often reply that what they did was legal, but legal is not a synonym for right. When criminals gain control, they legalize criminality.

An Al Quds Day letter to Tony Blair

Congratulations on your political memoir becoming an instant bestseller. I’m in Iran and have the only copy in the country. I can tell you, its so fiercely fought over, it’s worth its weight in WMD’s. Note to Random House; have ‘A Journey’ translated into Farsi and Arabic asap, it’ll fly off the shelves in this part of the world.
Tony, yesterday I went the Al Quds day protest in Tehran. You may have heard of it? It’s the rally where Iranians gather to protest against Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, including the Holy city of Jerusalem.
I’m being sarcastic by asking if you’ve heard of Al Quds day, because I know you have. It is after all your very worst nightmare right? It must be horrifying with the ‘world view,’ you express in your memoirs to watch scenes on the BBC news showing the precise meeting point of politics and Islam.
Personally I’ve never understood this fear of ‘political Islam’ it seems to me that religious people should always be educated on world events rather than kept in ignorance like say, Mid West Christian Zionists in the US who can’t even find their home city on a map of their state.

TIMELINE: Nine months of the right's anti-Muslim bigotry

Specie, Script, and War: The Contradictory Practices of the Global Economic System -John Kozy

People assume that the economy is a system. But it isn't. How the world-wide economy works has developed mostly by happenstance over millennia. It embodies contradictory practices and produces horrific consequences.

Primitive peoples extracted from nature what they needed or fashioned it into things they could use. When they produced more than they needed, they bartered the excess for what they could not produce themselves. It's called trading. Commodities are traded for commodities, and over time some commodities became media of exchange, the most prevalent of which are precious metals that are converted into specie (coin). But this system works only when the commodities traded have equal value. When they don't, trade becomes a form of theft, which leads to unfairness and conflict.

Trade implies that all nations can be neither net exporters nor net importers. Net exporters amass huge amounts of specie while net importers relinquish theirs. Net exporters become rich while net importers are bankrupted. To keep this system working, colonial wars were fought, peoples were subjugated, and their lands were plundered. Theft became a global practice.

Scrip functions as a medium of exchange only because people believe it can be traded for commodities. The entire world-wide economy functions merely on faith. But the world is too complex, too dangerous, to rely on an economy based on faith.
People are sacrificed to fulfill the needs of the economy, and the economy exists for no purpose whatsoever. It just is. The current attempt by the European Union and the IMF to resolve the sovereign debt crisis by sacrificing the well being of people to preserve the European economy demonstrates this topsy-turviness. The European Union, which is nothing but a trading association, has made the economy more important than the welfare of its people.
Wars will continue to be fought for the economy as long as this economy is not abandoned. War is a logical consequence of it, not, as most seem to believe, a means utilized by it. No attempt to eliminate war and preserve the economy can succeed. A globalized economy leads only to a global disaster, as everyone should have now seen.

Knowledge, Truth and Human Action: America Hits the Wall-John Kozy

"Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true." [paraphrased Buddhist saying]

Americans have a problem with the truth. They seem to be unable to accept it, which is difficult to understand at a time in history when knowledge plays a larger and larger role in determining human action. Recognition of this problem is widespread. Beliefs and lies somehow always overwhelm truth, even when they are so contradictory that any effective action becomes impossible. A kind of national, psychological paralysis occurs. Nothing can be done because one belief contradicts another, and for some unknown reason, the facts don't matter. Even during those times when an overwhelming belief does compel action, Americans rush headlong into it neglecting the adage that headlong often means wrong.

The number of programs enacted by the Congress that don't work is huge. The war on drugs which began in 1969 has shown no measurable results; yet it continues unabated and has resulted in destabilizing other nations, especially

Mexico

. Various immigration reforms have proven so ineffective that the people are turning to their own solutions. Tough on crime programs have been enacted numerous times without any measurable reduction in criminal behavior. Educational reforms have proven to be illusionary. Inconclusive wars have been and continue to be fought. No one, it appears, ever wants to measure anything by its results. The nation continues to do the same things over and over again expecting different results, an activity Einstein described as insanity.

Paul Craig Roberts writes, "Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it. Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded 'anti-American,' 'anti-semite' or 'conspiracy theorist.' Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government. Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt. Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.

The United States of Inequality

Berkeley economist David Card calculated in a 2001 paper that the decline in union membership among men explained about 15 percent to 20 percent of the Great Divergence among men.

2007 paper, "Inequality and Institutions in 20^th Century America," Levy and Temin

"If our interpretation is correct, no rebalancing of the labor force can restore a more equal distribution of productivity gains without government intervention and changes in private sector behavior."

In his 1991 book Which Side Are You On?: Trying To Be For Labor When It's Flat On Its Back, Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago-based labor lawyer, argues that Taft-Hartley was the principal cause of the American labor movement's eventual steep decline:First, it ended organizing on the grand, 1930s scale. It outlawed mass picketing, secondary strikes of neutral employers, sit downs: in short, everything [Congress of Industrial Organizations founder John L.] Lewis did in the 1930s.

Taft-Hartley led to the "union-busting" that started in the late 1960s and continues today. It started when a new "profession" of labor consultants began to convince employers that they could violate the [pro-labor 1935] Wagner Act, fire workers at will, fire them deliberately for exercising their legal rights, and nothing would happen. The Wagner Act had never had any real sanctions.

U.S. military wants influence over private Cyberstructure

The U.S. military wants to exert more influence over the protection of power grids, transportation networks and financial network systems, a Pentagon official says in a broad-ranging essay published in Foreign Affairs.
In cyberwar, who's in charge?
To do so the Pentagon is urging that its defense expertise be put in play beyond the .mil domain to include .gov and .com and wants policy makers to figure out how best to do that.
The reasons are that the military relies on these networks to deal with suppliers and that these networks could become military targets, says William J. Lynn III, undersecretary of defense, in the essay called "Defending a New Domain."
"Protecting those networks and the networks that undergird critical U.S. infrastructure must be part of Washington's national security and homeland defense missions," Lynn says.
Because the military relies on these networks, the expertise it has developed should be made available to them, he says, but he doesn't describe exactly how that would happen in practice.