Barely More Sentient than a Parrot
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 28 Dec 2004 13:00:00 GMT
#
From a
comment in Sierra's
Today post at
Fish or Man:
All cops are Thieves, of which there are two sub-sets: Bullies and Dumbasses.
All cops are thieves because they are paid by taxes; taxes being defined as assets stolen by government under threat of duress. THE OVERRIDING PRIORITY of ALL police-officers, everywhere, is protection of the source of their paycheck, and, more importantly, the *means* by which that paycheck is collected.
Moral hypocrisy is thus a *requirement* for engagement of the profession -- the cop is hired (with your stolen property) to "defend" you. Either a given cop possesses the rudimentary intelligence to understand the ethical incongruity of this and doesn't care (which makes him *evil*), or he doesn't (in which case he's a moron).
The bullies are, simply put, Baathist Nazi scum; they are cops expressly for the reason that the avocation enables them to legally steal other peoples' property and boss them around. Dumbass cops are the typical jocks, cops' sons, and Army one-hitchers who make up the bulk of every country's police forces; distinguishing characteristic is exceptionally marginal intelligence -- barely more sentient than a parrot; they receive orders from their superiors and carry them out without the briefest contemplation of ethics.
Every single cop is the sworn enemy of every single free man, and any particular cop accomplishes good only via irony, happenstance, and that fact that a legitimate market exists for "protection" regardless of the government nationalizing the industry.
Mike Schneider
# Stephen Baker and Chad Mirkin at Business Week - Rebuilding Things "Atom by Atom" - Mr. Mirkin does nanotechnology at Northwestern University. Mr. Baker interviews him in this article. [clairefiles]
Q: What about hype? Are there areas where investors risk being sold a bill of goods?
A: Robotics. I'd love to see an article [saying] that nanotech is not about nanobots. There are almost no credible efforts that focus on that goal. There are certainly no credible business efforts. This [topic] is dominated by Hollywood and by some folks that aren't very informed.
...
Q: Where should we expect to see big breakthroughs in nanotechnology?
A: One area is medical diagnostics. Consider nanoparticle diagnostics. These are materials, products, systems that will be on the market in the very short term, some of them this year. This is for accurate and immediate detection and diagnosis of disease.
When you go to a doctor now, they take blood or urine, send it to a lab. Days go by. In many respects, we're still in the Stone Ages. We need diagnostic systems that let you go to the point of care and get results immediately.
That's where nanomaterials are having a big impact. Say you want to screen the blood supply for HIV. We have tests that are six-orders of magnitude better than the current systems. It's a quantum leap. It really will change the way blood screening is done.
# George Paine at Warblogging - The Smoking Gun - on the evidence that Bushnev himself penned a secret executive order authorizing torture in his war for terror. [warblogging]
The Washington Post minced no words on its op/ed page. It wrote that "There is no justification, legal or moral, for the judgements made by Mr. Bush's political appointees... Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes, of dictatorships around the world that sanction torture on the grounds of 'national security'."
This goes straight to the top. President George W. Bush himself is responsible for the torture of numerous prisoners. The torture of numerous prisoners. The FBI papers are but the latest smoking gun.
Indeed, there is no justification, legal or moral. The actions of this administration are illegal and immoral. The Bush Administration has violated the Principles of the Nuremburg Tribunal, they have violated the Charter of the United Nations, the Geneva Conventions, the United States Constitution, the War Crimes Act and numerous other laws both American and international.
They have, most tragically, forfeited the moral high ground on behalf of all Americans.
It is time for a new Woodward and a new Bernstein to grab the torch of true investigative journalism and follow this to the top. It is time to investigate this administration and show them to the world as who they are.
It is time, dare I say it, for impeachment. President Bush has committed high crimes.
