oh ho ho
United Steelworkers and UNITE, a two-milion-member UK union, merge:"We're dealing with global companies that can move capital - and employment - around the world, at will in many cases," he said. "While big business is global, and labor is national, we're going to be at a disadvantage."
Murray said the new super-union's structure was still being worked on. He said its two component parts would maintain their separate identities, at least at first. He added that the new grouping hoped to enlist other foreign unions.
While we're on international issues, Canada is working towards joining the nacient Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which includes the kind of so-caled intellectual property border actions that the RIAA could only dream of for Christmas. The Post says:The deal would create an international regulator that could turn border guards and other public security personnel into copyright police. The security officials would be charged with checking laptops, iPods and even cellular phones for content that "infringes" on copyright laws, such as ripped CDs and movies.
The guards would also be responsible for determining what is infringing content and what is not.
The agreement also proposes that any content that may have been copied from a DVD or digital video recorder would be open for scrutiny by officials -- even if the content was copied legally. ...
Anyone found with infringing content in their possession would be open to a fine. They also may have their device confiscated or destroyed, according to the four-page document.
There's lots of more, including handoffs of customer data by ISPs without court order, and so on. If this article is accurate, it really is bad.
Unrelatedly, except in being bad, mortgage fraud has re-emerged in a new and more fucked up form, in part as banks are desperate to move bad funds off their books and don't care what happens. Other people care, though, but it's going to be extremely difficult to stop; I'm hearing things from individual people - anecdotal - describing lots and lots of increasingly blatant misrepresentation of fund content and mortgage conditions, too.
And also in category bad, FoxNews contributor Liz Trotta jokes about how it'd be funny if "someone knock[ed] off Osama, umm, Obama, well, both if we could" in a discussion of the recent flap involving Senator Clinton's reference to Robert Kennedy's presidential run in 1968. A longer clip has reappeared here (courtesy urbaniak). This comes right against her condemnation of Senator Clinton's remarks, and apparently without irony. Ms. Trotta's bio is here, at least for the moment, and copied here for record-keeping:FOXNEWS.COM HOME > BIO
Liz Trotta
Monday, October 04, 2004
Liz Trotta is the former New York bureau chief of The Washington Times and is a contributor for FOX News Channel.
The author of Fighting for Air: In the Trenches with Television News, Trotta was the first woman to cover a war for broadcast news.
She began her career in journalism in 1965 working for the NBC affiliate in New York and won network recognition by taking on tough assignments including covering the Vietnam War and 1984 presidential candidate, George McGovern.
Trotta has worked for Hillman Periodicals; Inter-Catholic Press Agency; Long Island Press; Chicago Tribune; Newsday; NBC and CBS. She has taught Journalism at Stern College of Yeshiva University.
The winner of three Emmy awards and two Overseas Press Club awards, Trotta is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
So that's fun. The flap over Senator Clinton's remarks has struck me as a tad overblown, because frankly, I think it's stupid to pretend that Senator Obama isn't a higher-than-average target for crazies. I think it's also desperately stupid to suggest that this is a reason to nominate Senator Clinton instead, but whatever. This, however, is much worse, in that it's a Fox News employee actively wishing for someone to assassinate Senator Obama, while engaging in what must be official Fox News policy at this point of attempting to confuse Osama Bin Laden and Senator Barak Obama in their viewers' minds.
This Wall Street Journal Story about a college student expelled and temporarily involuntarily committed for a short-story he wrote is particularly spectacular in that the instructor is, as nihilistic-kid points out, Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia's son, and utterly unqualified to either teach English or psychoanalyse students.
Finally, I'm elevating a link from agrumer in previous comments to this excerpt from a book condemning the "9/11 Truth" movement for the whackjob clowncar it is. I particularly like these two paragraphs, one of which agrumer quoted:The truly sad thing about the 9/11 Truth movement is that it's based upon the wildly erroneous proposition that our leaders would ever be frightened enough of public opinion to feel the need to pull off this kind of stunt before acting in a place like Afghanistan or Iraq. At its heart, 9/11 Truth is a conceit, a narcissistic pipe dream for a dingbat, sheeplike population that is pleased to imagine itself dangerous and ungovernable. Rather than admit to their own powerlessness and irrelevance, or admit that they've spent the last fifty years or so electing leaders who openly handed their tax money to business cronies and golfed in Scotland while middle America's jobs were being sent overseas, the adherents to 9/11 Truth instead flatter themselves with fantasies about a ruling class obsessed with keeping the terrible truth from the watchful, exacting eye of The People.
Whereas the real conspiracy of power in America is right out in the open and always has been, only nobody cares, so long as Fear Factor and Baseball Tonight come on a the right times. A conspiracy like the one described by 9/11 Truth would only be necessary in a country where the people are a threat to actually govern themselves effectively.
Murray said the new super-union's structure was still being worked on. He said its two component parts would maintain their separate identities, at least at first. He added that the new grouping hoped to enlist other foreign unions.
While we're on international issues, Canada is working towards joining the nacient Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which includes the kind of so-caled intellectual property border actions that the RIAA could only dream of for Christmas. The Post says:The deal would create an international regulator that could turn border guards and other public security personnel into copyright police. The security officials would be charged with checking laptops, iPods and even cellular phones for content that "infringes" on copyright laws, such as ripped CDs and movies.
The guards would also be responsible for determining what is infringing content and what is not.
The agreement also proposes that any content that may have been copied from a DVD or digital video recorder would be open for scrutiny by officials -- even if the content was copied legally. ...
Anyone found with infringing content in their possession would be open to a fine. They also may have their device confiscated or destroyed, according to the four-page document.
There's lots of more, including handoffs of customer data by ISPs without court order, and so on. If this article is accurate, it really is bad.
Unrelatedly, except in being bad, mortgage fraud has re-emerged in a new and more fucked up form, in part as banks are desperate to move bad funds off their books and don't care what happens. Other people care, though, but it's going to be extremely difficult to stop; I'm hearing things from individual people - anecdotal - describing lots and lots of increasingly blatant misrepresentation of fund content and mortgage conditions, too.
And also in category bad, FoxNews contributor Liz Trotta jokes about how it'd be funny if "someone knock[ed] off Osama, umm, Obama, well, both if we could" in a discussion of the recent flap involving Senator Clinton's reference to Robert Kennedy's presidential run in 1968. A longer clip has reappeared here (courtesy urbaniak). This comes right against her condemnation of Senator Clinton's remarks, and apparently without irony. Ms. Trotta's bio is here, at least for the moment, and copied here for record-keeping:FOXNEWS.COM HOME > BIO
Liz Trotta
Monday, October 04, 2004
Liz Trotta is the former New York bureau chief of The Washington Times and is a contributor for FOX News Channel.
The author of Fighting for Air: In the Trenches with Television News, Trotta was the first woman to cover a war for broadcast news.
She began her career in journalism in 1965 working for the NBC affiliate in New York and won network recognition by taking on tough assignments including covering the Vietnam War and 1984 presidential candidate, George McGovern.
Trotta has worked for Hillman Periodicals; Inter-Catholic Press Agency; Long Island Press; Chicago Tribune; Newsday; NBC and CBS. She has taught Journalism at Stern College of Yeshiva University.
The winner of three Emmy awards and two Overseas Press Club awards, Trotta is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
So that's fun. The flap over Senator Clinton's remarks has struck me as a tad overblown, because frankly, I think it's stupid to pretend that Senator Obama isn't a higher-than-average target for crazies. I think it's also desperately stupid to suggest that this is a reason to nominate Senator Clinton instead, but whatever. This, however, is much worse, in that it's a Fox News employee actively wishing for someone to assassinate Senator Obama, while engaging in what must be official Fox News policy at this point of attempting to confuse Osama Bin Laden and Senator Barak Obama in their viewers' minds.
This Wall Street Journal Story about a college student expelled and temporarily involuntarily committed for a short-story he wrote is particularly spectacular in that the instructor is, as nihilistic-kid points out, Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia's son, and utterly unqualified to either teach English or psychoanalyse students.
Finally, I'm elevating a link from agrumer in previous comments to this excerpt from a book condemning the "9/11 Truth" movement for the whackjob clowncar it is. I particularly like these two paragraphs, one of which agrumer quoted:The truly sad thing about the 9/11 Truth movement is that it's based upon the wildly erroneous proposition that our leaders would ever be frightened enough of public opinion to feel the need to pull off this kind of stunt before acting in a place like Afghanistan or Iraq. At its heart, 9/11 Truth is a conceit, a narcissistic pipe dream for a dingbat, sheeplike population that is pleased to imagine itself dangerous and ungovernable. Rather than admit to their own powerlessness and irrelevance, or admit that they've spent the last fifty years or so electing leaders who openly handed their tax money to business cronies and golfed in Scotland while middle America's jobs were being sent overseas, the adherents to 9/11 Truth instead flatter themselves with fantasies about a ruling class obsessed with keeping the terrible truth from the watchful, exacting eye of The People.
Whereas the real conspiracy of power in America is right out in the open and always has been, only nobody cares, so long as Fear Factor and Baseball Tonight come on a the right times. A conspiracy like the one described by 9/11 Truth would only be necessary in a country where the people are a threat to actually govern themselves effectively.