Grateful Dead

Anna, please tell me this is a joke. Do you have a link to an article or something I can read regarding this nonsense?

With a speech by Obama to the largely unemployed youth of Ireland and Europe saying "We in America had a different approach to austerity that has not involved so much suffering for the working and middle class. It is laughable. The American view is always short term. If we bail out investment banks and every company "too big to fail" while printing vast quantities of paper money that other countries continue to believe has worth and concentrate that useless paper in the hands of corporate treasuries they will indeed continue to grow jobs as long as the huge pile of surplus cash is spent slowly and wisely enough not to create inflation and bring in reasonable profits, quarter to quarter, as far as the eye can see (and the dollar and bond market remain afloat. Give the money to the rich elites. They know what to do with it. Until they don't. And what we could have done? Well, let's not talk about infrastructure and arts and social programs and health care and the environment. They aren't important. Fracturing and raping the Earth to employ the American working class outweighs all else. Immigration reform? NSA omni-surveillance? Please, don't bother me. I have to check the box to put 10% of my paycheck into a 401k from which I'll draw a .05% profit from, after the tax break and company match. Medicare? A fading memory after Obama gives tax dollars to health care corporations. So listen up 56% of unemplyed youth in Europe, WE'VE got it fright! I mean right! Err - ughh, we see the light!

In states where registered Republicans outweigh registered Democrats and Independents, the industrialist group ALEC and LE are sponsoring and supporting laws to force those identified as "deadheads" to giver up their driver's licenses at age 65, despite meeting all other legal criteria. Citing such facts as their former and current self-admitted use of psychotropic drugs; their ticket purchases to any Grateful Dead related events; purchase and trading of Grateful Dead music; past criminal history for use and possession of psychedelic drugs, even within the Native American Church, and trolling for like information on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, ALEC has asserted that there is enough research to prove that "flashbacks" and current use of psychotropic drugs by this category of people creates a risk magnitudes of order higher regarding the incidence of serious road accidents than those who simply use all the current devices available as options in the most expensive latest model of car (including voice activated phone and internet) such as GPS and texting, to name just a few. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is quoted as saying that "It is time to round up all the known and suspected deadheads as menaces to the public safety by their current and past drug use. We don't need to know anything more than how Art Linkletter's daughter died or Leary's last request for 500 super-humans to take off from Earth in a spaceship to star-seed the universe to know what a public safety risk we are facing from this segment of the population now turning 65. If they don't voluntarily give up their privilege to drive it is time to take it from them and lock them up! Although it is expected that the ACLU will take up the deadheads cause there will be little opposition to the laws in red state legislatures or, ultimately, the Supreme Court. These assemblies expect their LE to make wide-ranging requests for information from the Utah Data Center that will lead to arrests using tag-data scanning software programs loaded into LE car computers when Grateful Dead related events come to towns in their states as well as confiscation of vehicles belonging to this class of drivers. An ALEC spokesperson smiled as he said his group could use the funding wisely to expand it's outreach to other areas of drug-induced music. Grateful Dead spokespersons were not immediately available for comment as they were out "clubbing" for the night.

The Obama Administration today announced it has concluded that Syria is using chemical weapons. The next logical step is arming moderates fighting Assad. The following logical steps involve a lot of people being killed... McCain is going to take the karma for this one. How do people, like him, angrily accept responsibility for leading the charge? I guess, for McCain, it's easy after he tells a mother whose child has died of gun violence that there will be no ban on assault weapons - not in His Senate, not on His watch! Brutal, just brutal.

still got the t-shirt, though it's pretty threadbare...

Anna, I think the majority of America has absolutely no idea what their Senators--much less their Congress(wo)men--do or what power they have. After the last twelve years, they appear to be under the assumption that all decisions lie in the lap of the President. The Senators and Congress(wo)men merely comment as to whether or not they like the ideas. I want to smash my head through a stack of bricks whenever I hear people complaining about the state of the nation and blaming it all on Obama when he's just one part of the trifecta. Chances are it's their other elected officials that are to blame, but they're too stupid to make the connection. I mean, what happened to the generation who actually paid attention to what was happening in this country? The bra-burners and the proud hippies who stood out in the streets to fight for the rights of others? This country has become a Shakespearean comedy; those who pounded their chests and said, "I will not become a sheep like my parents' generation!" have gone and done just that.

They will tell you whatever you want to hear, except for the reality of how they voted. They'll have a reason why "the senator backed your position but all his amendments were shot down". Most of the time young staffers are reading from scripts. It is so obvious. This is especially true for written responses. It makes them look like complete idiots but most people don't care. They don't even know they are being hoodwinked. They really believe that the Senator backs their opinion and blithely vote for that same person again in the next election. Senators do many other things for their constituents besides legislate. They help with all manner of bureaucratic drivel having to do with the Federal Government from war veteran claims to appointments to the military academies and everything in between. But then they go so far as to say "Our office deals with many matters pertaining to the Federal government and your relationship to it. Please don't ask us to intervene in anything having to do with the matters of the state (we all reside in)." In other words, go deal with another nightmare bureaucracy at the state capital. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont recently got burned badly when people in town hall meetings started to vote against power producing windmills for various reasons. He rushed out a statement saying it was "very important that Vermonters support wind power generation stations to pave the way for more production of that same kind and legislation he was backing had to have the support of his home state. Many, many Vermonters responded to him in kind -- "Sorry Bernie, you have nothing to do with the state of Vermont. You just stay down there in Washington and help us with the Federal matters and we'll take care of ourselves, thank you very much." (Ouch! Burn!) All of the preceding was to say that I called Senator Pat Leahy's office in Burlington yesterday (Senator Leahy is the only Senator Deadhead in Congress and big on civil liberties). I asked that if prosecution of Ed Snowden is forthcoming from the Feds for him to ask Obama to pardon Snowden. The young staffer said that, yes indeed, many people were messaging Leahy's office with the same sentiment. I got the very distinct impression that if I had said "We need to hang Snowden as a traitor and make an example of him the staffer would have replied in the same vein -- Yes indeed, many people were messaging the Senator with that same sentiment and he supported the immediate funding of building a gallows for that very purpose. We live in a Republic, not a democracy. The Electoral College elects the president, though those 535 people are supposed to vote the public's will on the first ballot. All subsequent ballots are their prerogative. We put all our trust in these people to create legislation of the nature that the majority of us support. But when it comes to legislating funds for Federal programs like Prism or sweeping orders to tap all cell phones from the FISA Court, unless they sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee and are of the few select on that committee who receive regular briefings on the subject, they don't have a clue what is going or what they are voting for. By now we know that that the Patriot Act passed in the aftermath of 9/11 was anything but patriotic. It was more like the Tyranny Act pre-written by some committee that meets every year at Davos to decide what amount of freedom the serfs really have. I was disappointed to learn that Senator Deadhead (Leahy of VT), who originally sponsored sunset amendments for that Act, last December voted in favor of renewing the Patriot Act (and all his amendments were shot down). Well, I said to the young staffer from Leahy's office, it seems like the Senator has considerably weakened on his stances in favor of civil liberties. "Yes indeed!" he replied enthusiastically, forgetting momentarily which side of the argument I was on... Senator Deadhead's head is dead and the remaining appendages work with less and less grey matter every day. It's no wonder Jerry always said (paraphrasing) Politics is their bag man, not ours. Let them play their games. But, uhh, Jer? The stakes in the game are getting a lot higher these days.

Is collecting digital information from EVERYBODY. I don't know about the mid and big-sized cities where you live, but in the ones near me everybody is walking around glued to their smart phones and not speaking to one another. For a rube like me from a rural area it feels like being a stranger in a strange land. These poor people are giving up their social skills and ignoring beauty and miracles all around them and the government is gleefully shadowing and vacuuming up every digital crumb, including a map of where you've been all day and storing it in a mega-zeta-byte facility in Utah. Turn off your smartphone unless you need the damn thing! You're giving up your freedom for it, not to mention losing your humanity for it. Ask yourself, how far away are you from becoming a cyborg (and I don't mean owing to health conditions)? Most people are running from reality and a very few are seeking to merge with it. I'm starting to feel like Keenau Reeves in The Matrix.

...They don't want to know my sperm count? T_T

The Stickers on Edward Snowden’s LaptopBy JOHN SCHWARTZ For online activists around the world, one thing stood out in a photograph published on Sunday by The Guardian: Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked information about the scope of United States government surveillance, adorned his laptop with stickers showing support for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project. John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, proudly drew attention on Twitter to the Guardian image of Mr. Snowden’s laptop. (full story at above link)