Category: Evil

More IP Insanity

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In the latest case, we have patent trolls trying to extort money from small businesses for using scanners:

When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.

If he’d paid up, the IT services provider that Vicinanza founded, BlueWave Computing, would have owed $130,000.

………

“[Hill] was very cordial and very nice,” he told Ars. “He said, if you hook up a scanner and e-mail a PDF document—we have a patent that covers that as a process.”

t didn’t seem credible that Hill was demanding money for just using basic office equipment exactly the way it was intended to be used. So Vicinanza clarified:

“So you’re claiming anyone on a network with a scanner owes you a license?” asked Vicinanza. “He said, ‘Yes, that’s correct.’ And at that point, I just lost it.”

The kicker is that the these folks were using newspapers’ “best places to work” lists to send out dunning letters.

Seriously, we need to just stop issuing patents until the system is fixed.

H/t Kevin Drum.

History Repeats Itself………

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They’re Back!!  Yes, the symbol looks very familiar

The Golden Dawn, the resurgent Greek Fascist party.

Rather surprisingly, their increasing popularity in Greece, along with the increasing violence associated with their actions, along with evidence that Greek police are increasingly directly colluding with them.

When you consider the fact EU measures have produced an economic collapse that has women in labor refused admission to hospital, and a descent to a barter economy, you would think that the Greek ruling elite, as well as the Eurocrats in Brussels, along with the Germans who pull their chain, would be running around like their hair was on fire about this.

It’s not happening, because the however uncomfortable the corrupt Greek elites are with Fascists, they hate the Greek left as manifested by SYRIZA, the Greek party of the left, because if they win, they threaten to undermine the kleptocratic duopoly of the PASOK New Democracy party.

On the European Union side, however uncomfortable they are with Fascism, they hate the Greek left as manifested by SYRIZA, and more generally they hate the underlying ideas that the EU bureaucracy should serve the will of the people (witness the gyrations to prevent votes on EU expansion once the referenda started to fail), and that neoliberal bank coddling policies are a bad.

So, why is there the studious ignorance regarding the rise of Fascism in Greece (and in a number of other EU nations)?

Well, when you look at the attitudes of the Eurocrats toward SYRIZA, or the Left Party in Germany, or similar, you see a hell of a lot more alarm at them, but they are not xenophobic violent antidemocratic groups.

I would argue that what we are seeing is a tacit endorsement of the rise in Fascism in Europe, because they are seen as “useful idiots” who can serve to counteract the threat of a resurgent left, either by providing an outlet for nationalist sentiments, or through violence.

Does this sound familiar to you?  It does to me.

In the late 1920s and the early 1930s, industrialists funded Fascists all over Europe, most notably in Germany, because of concerns about potential gains of leftists parties as a result of the economic collapse. (Yes, I know, Godwin’s Law)

I’m wondering when we are going to see the blond boy singing Tomorrow Belongs to Me.

My brother is pessimist.  He expects there to be a collapse the EU and war in the near future.

I am an optimist.  I expect there to be a collapse the EU and cold war in the near future.

Until the Eurocrats are put back under public control, and until Germany realizes that their morality play wet dreams do nothing but kill people, I do not see a better outcome in the next couple of decades.

Best Reason for Britain to Leave the EU

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The Banksters are terrified of the idea:

Senior banking and business figures spoken to by The Sunday Telegraph have revealed growing disquiet at Government plans for a referendum where one option could be an exit from the EU.

One senior banking executive said: “The whole issue has the potential to be very destabilising for the City.

“It risks playing with the future of the British economy for the next 30 years.”

We need to understand that big finance is not about what should be its primary function, getting capital to from those who want to invest it to those who need it, but it is about sitting athwart the economy and extracting rents.

Any economy that prioritizes shrinking and stigmatizing the big bankers will do better than one (like ours, see Obama/Geithner) that prioritizes the the “health of the existing financial system.”

The banksters are a cancer than need to be excised from our economy.

Why We Need to Kill Big Pharma, Part LVXXI

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So, a company buys the rights to a drug for 100 Grand, and takes the price of a vial from $50 to $28,000:

THE doctor was dumbfounded: a drug that used to cost $50 was now selling for $28,000 for a 5-milliliter vial.

The physician, Dr. Ladislas Lazaro IV, remembered occasionally prescribing this anti-inflammatory, named H.P. Acthar Gel, for gout back in the early 1990s. Then the drug seemed to fade from view. Dr. Lazaro had all but forgotten about it, until a sales representative from a company called Questcor Pharmaceuticals appeared at his office and suggested that he try it for various rheumatologic conditions.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Dr. Lazaro, a rheumatologist in Lafayette, La., says of the price increase.

How the price of this drug rose so far, so fast is a story for these troubled times in American health care — a tale of aggressive marketing, questionable medicine and, not least, out-of-control costs. At the center of it is Questcor, which turned the once-obscure Acthar into a hugely profitable wonder drug and itself into one of Wall Street’s highest fliers.

At least until recently, that is. Now some doctors, insurance companies and investors are beginning to have doubts about whether the drug is really any better than much cheaper alternatives. Short-sellers have written scathing criticisms of the company, questioning its marketing tactics and predicting that its shareholders are highly vulnerable.

………

But Questcor did almost no research or development to bring Acthar to market, merely buying the rights to the drug from its previous owner for $100,000 in 2001. And while the manufacturing of Acthar is complex, it accounts for only about 1 cent of every dollar that Questcor charges for the drug.

Moreover, the tiny “orphan” market soon became much bigger. Before long, Questcor began marketing the drug for multiple sclerosis, nephrotic syndrome and rheumatologic conditions, even though there is little evidence that Acthar is more effective for those other conditions than alternatives that are far cheaper. And the company did so without being required to prove that the drug actually works. That is because Acthar was approved for use in 1952, before the Food and Drug Administration required clinical trials to show a drug is effective for a particular disease. Acthar is essentially grandfathered in.

How the F%$# does a drug that was approved for use in 1952 remain under IP protection?

I’m increasingly convinced that our current IP regime is an iron triangle between rent-seekers who produce nothing of value, politicians who take their campaign donations, and the the rest of us, who provide the ill-gotten gains that the rent-seekers use to protect their business models.

More Equal than Others

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The latest investment dodge, leveraging green cards for investment capital:

At this remote outpost by the Canadian border, Bill Stenger is overseeing what he says is the biggest economic development project that Vermont has ever seen.

He is expanding the Jay Peak ski resort, which he co-owns, but he is also building a biomedical research firm and a window manufacturing plant, extending the runway at the local airport and rehabilitating much of the nearby town of Newport, where he lives. There, he is developing the waterfront, adding the town’s first hotel and a conference center and rebuilding an entire downtown block. He is also creating what he says is the largest indoor mountain bike park in the world and a state-of-the art tennis center.

The price tag for the entire project, which Mr. Stenger says will create 10,000 direct and indirect jobs over several years, is $865 million.

But even more unusual than the size of the undertaking is the method by which Mr. Stenger and his business partner, Ariel Quiros, are financing it. They have tapped into a federal program that gives green cards, or permanent residency, to foreigners who invest at least $500,000 in an American business — the reward for the investment is a chance at United States citizenship.

(emphasis mine)

It inevitable that any government program that “incentivises” the wealthy is an invitation to corruption and abuse.

Let’s be clear here:  People who are investing are not interested in the return that they can get, they are buying a green card.

The whole Calvinist dichotomy that wealth is synonymous with virtue that the Pilgrims brought over is really completely unbounded in reality.

A New Year, More Caving

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Your Obama Hat. Useful for Caving

Well, it’s not surprising.

New year, same old Obama. He caved, permanent tax cut, permanent reduction on the AMT, permanent reduction of the inheritance tax, and temporary continuation of extended unemployment benefits and a few other social programs, and 3 months on the debt ceiling.

Obama wants his grand bargain, where he guts Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and he’ll continue to subvert his own bargaining position so that he can have granny eating cat food.*

*In the interest of health, I would suggest that people eat dog food, and not cat food. Cats because they are one of the few true carnivores, do not need the complex carbohydrates and fats that people, and dogs do. As such, dog food is better for you than cat food because it provides carbs and essential fatty acids. A dog can go blind if it is fed on cat food, but a cat lives just fine on dog food. The phenomenon is known as rabbit starvation.

Why We Need to Destroy Big Pharma

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Well, the first answer is a utilitarian answer, we do not need them.

If the government spends 5 out of every 6 dollars spent on medical research, then there is no reason to pay the excessive monopoly rents that they extract from out economy.

But there is also a moral argument, and it is that the large pharmaceutical firms are ineluctably evil.

We have yet another example of this when we discover that they colluded with the government of East Germany to turn their citizenry into unwilling Guinea Pigs:

Major Western pharmaceutical companies carried out tests of medications in the 1980s on patients in communist East Germany, in some cases without the subjects’ knowledge, a media report said Friday.

 “We have documents showing there were contracts between Western drug companies and East German institutions for medical tests,” a staff member at the German national archive told AFP, partially confirming a report in the daily Der Tagesspiegel.

 The newspaper, which examined the documents, reported that more than 50 Western firms had contracts with East Germany’s Health Ministry to carry out a total of 165 medical tests between 1983 and 1989.

 In exchange, the communist authorities were paid up to 860,000 deutschmarks (around 430,000 euros today or $567,000), according to the report, at a time when East Germany was desperate for hard currency.

 Der Tagesspiegel said the companies involved included Bayer, Schering, Hoechst (now Sanofi), Boehringer Ingelheim and Goedecke (today owned by Pfizer).

 It said the test subjects often were not informed, citing seven specific cases in which patients said later they had been unaware they were involved in testing. The national archive said it could not confirm this.

The taxpayers front ⅚ of the money to do the research, but out of some sort of need to “set the free market loose, we give away the property rights so that they can extract monopoly rents.

Enough.

This is an industry that exists only through the grant of exclusive rights by the government.  This is not free enterprise.

We need to make sure that if the taxpayers pay for the research, then the taxpayers own the research.

I Miss Madame La Guillotine

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Roll Stewart!

Jerry Della Femina, who made his fortune on Madison Avenue, is whining like a baby about taxes, and claims that he is selling his posh Hamptons estate as a result:

He got taxed out of town.

 Legendary advertising guru Jerry Della Femina is the latest Hamptons fat cat to unload his East End spread at the precipice of the dreaded fiscal cliff, The Post has learned.

 The flamboyant Madison Avenue guru has sold his 8,500-square-foot estate — the host of many legendary Hamptons bashes — for $25 million, and blames his flight squarely on President Obama’s fiscal policies.

 “I want the proceeds of this sale to go to my kids and my grandkids,” said the man behind iconic ad campaigns for Meow Mix and Absolut Vodka. “I don’t want my money going to Obama, and that’s what’s going to happen in the New Year. That’s why I sold right now, that’s why I wanted to get this done.”

Seriously.

This sort of sh%$ has me wishing for the return Maximilien de Robespierre.

I’ll leave it to Jon Stewart to express how I feel, though he was actually directing it to hack journo Bernie Goldberg.

Just When You Thought the NRA Could not be Any More Contemptible………

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While the NRA was condemning violent video games, it was also bankrolling the same games:

As Electronic Arts prepared to market Medal of Honor Warfighter, the latest version of its top-selling video game released in October, it created a Web site that promoted the manufacturers of the guns, knives and combat-style gear depicted in the game.

Among the video game giant’s marketing partners on the Web site were the McMillan Group, the maker of a high-powered sniper’s rifle, and Magpul, which sells high-capacity magazines and other accessories for assault-style weapons.

Links on the Medal of Honor site allowed visitors to click through on the Web sites of the game’s partners and peruse their catalogs.

“It was almost like a virtual showroom for guns,” said Ryan Smith, who contributes to the Gameological Society, an online gaming magazine. After Mr. Smith and other gaming enthusiasts criticized the site, Electronic Arts disabled the links, saying it had been unaware of them.

The video game industry was drawn into the national debate about gun violence last week when the National Rifle Association accused producers of violent games and movies of helping to incite the type of mass shooting that recently left 20 children and six adults dead at a school in Newtown, Conn.

While studies have found no connection between video games and gun violence, the case of Medal of Honor Warfighter illustrates how the firearms and video game industries have quietly forged a mutually beneficial marketing relationship.

Many of the same producers of firearms and related equipment are also financial backers of the N.R.A. McMillan, for example, is a corporate donor to the group, and Magpul recently joined forces with it in a product giveaway featured on Facebook. The gun group also lists Glock, Browning and Remington as corporate sponsors.

Seriously, these f%$#s make Dick Cheney look like Mother Theresa.*

*FWIW, I’m not a big fan of Mother Theresa, though I am not has extreme about this as Christopher Hitchens was.

Talk About Irony

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Over at the Stellar Parthenon BBS, JR was discussing banging his head against a wall a discussion with his right-wing father over gun control.

In describing the discussion, he wrote the following:

I do think its a complicated question and gun control is only part of it. We have other nations with high gun ownership and not as many rampages. I do think that we need to approach the mental health angle, the question of how our society makes people crazy in the first place, etc.

It’s kind of like fire-fighting. Having firemen is a good thing but building places like tinderboxes is also a big problem. Having no building codes is a problem. There are a lot of ways to mitigate against fire before it ever happens. But the f%$#ing NRA is like any other industry advocacy group trying to prevent reform because it costs money. The f%$#ing car companies said we couldn’t afford safety equipment in cars. Manufacturers said OSHA standards would be too expensive to comply with. Maimed workers are the cost of doing business.

(%$# mine)

It’s a valid point.

Today though, it’s fraught with irony, because earlier today, some whack-job set a fire in Webster, NY and ambushed the firefighters who responded, shooting two of them dead.

Seriously, f%$# the NRA.

Better yet, don’t f%$# the NRA, or more specifically don’t f%$# NRA members.  Take the example of Lysistrata.

Thank You CIA, for Preserving Polio

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You see, the Taliban is targeting workers on the UN Polio eradication program, because they claim that they are CIA spies.

The problem here is that the CIA has, and has probably continued, to use vaccination programs as a part of the intelligence gathering process:

Back in 2000 I shared a train cabin from Amsterdam to Munich with an Afghan man who, when he learned I was a journalist, pleaded with me to communicate to the American public that the CIA had to stop destroying his country and rebuild it instead. “They have so much power,” I recall him saying. I reacted with the tolerant and condescending attitude of the Western liberal. The real sources of Afghan misery, obviously, were tribal, political and religious rivalry, and while it was tempting for people with lower levels of political understanding to blame a foreign mastermind for their troubles, such conspiratorial thinking was actually part of the problem in the Mideast, as in Eastern Europe. Right?

Afghanistan and Pakistan are where liberalism goes to die. In the years since, it’s become increasingly clear that my traveling companion was at least partially right: when trying to explain a social or political event in Afghanistan or Pakistan, it’s entirely rational to assume that it stems from a plot by an intelligence agency, quite likely the CIA. The sickest confirmation of this point was the recent revelation that the CIA ran an operation to verify Osama bin Laden’s location by gathering DNA samples through a false-flag hepatitis B vaccination programme. As James Fallows notes, American officials are defending this operation, not denying it.

This is despicable and stupid.

I would use the term evil, a term that I have increasingly applied to various actors in the United States state security apparatus, though one could also use the quote from (probably) Tallyrand, “It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake.”

2 Manny Guns, Sulushen iz Moar Gunz

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So, the NRA has finally made a statement about how to prevent more gun deaths, at schools, and their solution is lots of people with high powered weapons, and if that gets too expensive, they are suggesting amateur volunteers with guns:

After a weeklong silence, the National Rifle Association announced Friday that it wants to arm security officers at every school in the country, implicating violent video games, the news media and lax law enforcement as being far more to blame for the recent rash of mass shootings than guns.

 “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A. vice president, said at a media event that was interrupted by protesters. One held up a banner saying, “N.R.A. Killing Our Kids.”

 The N.R.A.’s plan for countering school shootings, coming a week after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was met with widespread derision from school administrators, law enforcement officials and politicians, with some critics calling it “delusional” and “paranoid.” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican, said arming schools would not make them safer.

 Even conservative politicians who had voiced support this week for arming more school officers did not rush to embrace the N.R.A.’s plan.

………

 Mr. LaPierre said his organization would fund and develop a program called the National Model School Shield Program, to work with schools to arm and train school guards, including retired police officers and volunteers. The gun rights group named Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas who has been a strong supporter, to lead a task force to develop the program.

………

 But what the N.R.A. proposed would expand the use of armed officers nationwide and make greater use of not just police officers, but armed volunteers — including retired police officers and reservists — to patrol school grounds. The organization offered no estimates of the cost.

(emphasis mine)

Seriously, you want any Johnny off the street and hang out with MY children?  I don’t think so.

Tell you what, how we levy a tax on gun and ammunition sales to cover all this sh%$?

BTW, the Universe is having nothing of Mr. LaPierre’s bullshit. As they were giving their non-press conference (no questions allowed), another mass shooting was happening in Pennsylvania, and it happened despite the presence in the area of peace officers with guns:

The National Rifle Association today held its first press conference since last week’s deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, and the takeaway was clear: We need more guns.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre.

He went on to call for an armed police officer to be stationed in “every single school” across America to prevent further mass shootings, as critics tried to point out that armed law enforcement officials might not be the panacea the NRA thinks it is.

But before they could finish their sentence, the counterargument made itself as news broke of a mass shooting event in Pennsylvania with multiple casualties, including state troopers.

According to local reports out of Blair County, at least four people were killed and five more were injured in a shooting spree near Altoona. The gunman is said to be among the dead, and at least two state troopers were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.

WPXI’s Courtney Brennan says she was told by emergency officials that the shooting suspect “was ‘mobile’ at one point and went up and down a rural road and shot victims.”

No additional information is available at this time, but a spokeswoman told the Altoona Mirror it was “a relatively large crime scene.”

Seriously, The Onion needs to shut down and lay off all of its own staff, because they have been trumped by the world we actually have.

What a Surprise, US Style Hyper-Capitalism Kills

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The shock treatment liberalization of the USSR and the former Warsaw Pact Nations, led by largely Larry Summers, and looted extensively by Summers protege Andrei Shleifer, resulted in over a million deaths:

As many as one million working-age men died due to the economic shock of mass privatisation policies followed by post-communist countries in the 1990s, according to a new study published in The Lancet.

The Oxford-led study measured the relationship between death rates and the pace and scale of privatisation in 25 countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, dating back to the early 1990s. They found that mass privatisation came at a human cost: with an average surge in the number of deaths of 13 per cent or the equivalent of about one million lives.

The rapid privatisation programme, part of a plan known by economists as ‘shock therapy’, led to a 56 per cent increase in unemployment, which the study says played an important role in explaining why privatisation claimed so many lives. Many employers provided extensive health and social care for their employees, so through privatisation workers experienced the ‘double whammy’ of losing not only their livelihood but also their means of surviving the crisis.

Yes, this is a 3½ year old story, but I just found out about this today, and I thought that I should comment.

Running an economy by, and for the banksters, and the privitization of government assets during the breakup of the USSR and WarPac was an invitation for the finance types to steal as much as they could carry, does more than impoverish people.

It kills people.

If you look at these numbers, and see this, plus the arbitrage in world food markets that had prices (and malnutrition) rising, the dismantling of the Greek healthcare system, etc. it could be argued that the extreme free market policies espoused by the US since at least the Carter administration have killed more people than all the wars over that period.

The refrain of the free market mousketeers out there  is not about freedom or free markets, it rather about a kleptocratic and parasitic society whose primary purpose is to impoverish the rest of us to their benefit.

As If Facebook Did Not Suck Enough

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I’m sure you have heard of the Instagram thing, where they came out with new terms of service which said that they could sell your photographs, and you did not get anything.

It’s a classic Facebook move, but it really does not bother me, because I don’t “get” instagram.

If I want to funky things to photos I snap with my camera phone, I’ll do it on my PC on an old copy of Paint Shop Pro.*

That being said, I really don’t get Facebook either.  I appreciate its huge user base, and I signed up so that I could mirror my blog there, boosting eyeballs.

In the process I did reconnect with a bunch of old friends, but again, that’s largely a function of the user base, not the site.

One of the problems is that it appears that every upgrade makes the totality of the experience worse.

The latest innovation is that Facebook will be adding auto start videos to its video feed:

Get ready for video ads in your news feed.

 Facebook is set to unveil a new video-ad product in the first half of next year in its largest attempt to date to attract big swaths of ad dollars from TV advertisers, according to several industry executives who have been briefed on the company’s plans over the past few weeks.

 ………

 In what’s sure to be a controversial move, the visual component of the Facebook video ads will start playing automatically — a dynamic known as “autoplay” — according to two of the executives. Facebook is still debating whether to have the audio component of the ads activated automatically as well, one of these people said.

 On the desktop version of Facebook, the video ads are expected to grab a user’s attention by expanding out of the news feed into webpage real estate in both the left and right columns — or rails — of the screen. Facebook is also working on a way to ensure that the video ads stand out on the mobile apps as well, though it is unclear how exactly the company will accomplish this.

I guess that they decided that the whole anal probe ad server thing just wasn’t evil enough.

I do not get it. Are already running their server farms on power generated by incinerating harp seal pups, and claiming that it was “green” energy.

Isn’t that evil enough for them?

Damn, he needs to buy a white Persian cat and a bond villain lair, and be done with it.

*BTW, a big f%$# you to the folks Adobe® who bought the makers of the program, JASC, and shut them down a couple of years later, because they did not want the product, a fairly capable and easy to use image editor, they just wanted to shut down a competitor.

Megan “Math is Hard” McArdle is the Most Horrible Person in Punditry

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In her latest spewing (no direct link, ever) she suggests that we need to train school children to gang rush gunmen:

I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.

Ummm ……… You ignorant Randroid sociopath, you are are unaware of the physical capabilities of a 6 year-old child.

Let me illustrate this with pictures.

This is 8-12 6 year old children:

This is the worst ranked defense in the NFL, the New Orleans Saints:

While I could concede that the Saints (What is with those pink shoes and gloves) might be able to take down an adult armed with a wet noodle, those kids could not take down a llama, or for that matter, the Dali Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet.

Repeating for the benefit of the terminally stupid:

Children with llama
New Orleans Saints:
Dali Lama

And the Dali Lama, and the aforementioned 2 “l” llama,  are both more likely to take down a gunman armed with an assault rifle than are the children.

Why does this child or privilege and political patronage have a job?

We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us

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Our Military is now objectively pro bombing children:

“It kind of opens our aperture,” said Army Lt. Col. Marion “Ced” Carrington, whose unit, 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, was assisting the Afghan police. “In addition to looking for military-age males, it’s looking for children with potential hostile intent.”

So targeting children, “Opens our aperture?”

So not only are you going to target children, you are going to be ecstatic about it.  It’s like the original Deathrace 2000 movie, the one with David Carradine, where points were awarded not for skill, but for the helplessness of the victim and the brutality of the killing.

Colonel Carrington, you had better hope that there is no God, and no afterlife, because if there is either, your eternity is not going to be pleasant.