Month: June 2012

The New Feudalism

What I get from the recent fight to recall Wisconsin governor Scott Walker (or, in the words of Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce, “the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage its midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin”) is that the battle may have been over public sector unions but the war is over public services and the kind of society that values them.

In the New Feudalism, it will no longer be possible to work at a job where the work is its own reward, like public safety or education or wildlife management. Everything and everyone is for sale. I can’t tell if Roe v Wade or the federal minim wage will come under attack first. After all, wage regulations kill jobs: let the market decide what a job (as a proxy for an unrepresented fellow citizen) is worth. Politicians and pundits can talk all they want about the Dignity of Labor but they never talk to the laborers themselves.

In the Alastair Sim “Scrooge” of 1951 (based on Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”), a young Scrooge and Marley take over a warehouse business and one of the workers has the temerity to ask if he is to kept on. The response? Not “what’s your name” or “what do you do” but “what’s your present salary?”
“Five shillings a week, sir.”
“You can stay for four shillings a week.”
“Well, yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

This foreshadows the New Feudalism: break the unions, slash the workforce, close the factories, and re-open under new rules. We’re seeing it in the new centralized shipping warehouses, where worker toil under Dickensian conditions for scarce jobs at lousy pay. We see it in WalMart’s hiring practices: keep as many as possible to part-time hours to keep them off insurance, let them go to the ER for care.

I’m recalling a conversation with some local parents, both Chinese doctors, who came to America for a better opportunity for their son. They were no longer sure that was the right bet to have made, that the future they worked for on his behalf wasn’t coming. When did America stop being the Land of Opportunity?

Replies to a 9/11 Truther

A tedious run-in with a 9/11 truther caused me to look up some answers to his questions.

Why were some of core columns of the WTC bld found diagonally cut (as in demolition)?

I found a photograph of 1 column, not some, not several, and several articles that point to the same picture. I don’t see any there there. This is building a complex theory that requires a lot of details not in evidence.

Pls explain how a hijackers passport magically evaded the fireball & landed on floor

Landed on the ground, you mean? Stranger things have happened:

[C]onsider this story from the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster. The craft broke up on re-entry, 40 miles about the earth, and debris fell over a wide area. Amongst this was one of the experiments involving tiny worms.

The worms and moss were in the same nine-pound locker located in the mid-deck of the space shuttle. The worms were placed in six canisters, each holding eight petri dishes.

The worms, which are about the size of the tip of a pencil, were part of an experiment testing a new synthetic nutrient solution. The worms, which have a life cycle of between seven and 10 days, were four or five generations removed from the original worms placed on Columbia in January.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/sts107_worms_030501.html

Pls explain why not a single drop of blood or body was recovered from Shanksville?

United Airlines Flight 93 slammed into the earth Sept. 11 near Shanksville, Somerset County, at more than 500 mph, with a ferocity that disintegrated metal, bone and flesh. It took more than three months to identify the remains of the 40 passengers and crew, and, by process of elimination, the four hijackers…

But searchers also gathered surprisingly intact mementos of lives lost.

Those items, such as a wedding ring and other jewelry, photos, credit cards, purses and their contents, shoes, a wallet and currency, are among seven boxes of identified personal effects salvaged from the site. http://www.post-gazette.com/headlines/20011230flight931230p3.asp [source]

So most of the wreckage was incinerated after being torn apart by the impact. Is that really so hard to believe or understand?

ls explain why George Bush was meeting w/ Bin Laden’s brother on the morning of 9/11?

You mean George H W Bush, father of the 43rd president? We all know that President Bush was in New Orleans reading to school children. Or is there a theory that he wasn’t really in New Orleans at all?

An investor, Shafig bin Laden (Arabic: ???? ?? ?????) is a half-brother to Osama bin Laden,[1] and was in attendance at the Carlyle Group’s Washington, DC conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on September 11, 2001, which George H. W. Bush also attended. [source]

Pls explain how Dick Cheney got @NORAD to stand down on 9/11 enabling the attacks?

Because he was the vice president of the United States? Is this asking about the power of the VP to do that or questioning his reasons for doing so? What would be the alternative? On the morning of 9/11, no one knew what was planned. Do you suppose the passengers and crew would have allowed 19 men armed with box cutters to take over 4 airliners? Now that the lessons of 9/11 have been learned, how successful have new attack attempts gone? Not very. Who has stopped them? Passengers. The passengers of flight 93 realized the odd were in their favor of preventing the planned attack and they did.

How do you explain the apparent demolition of World Trade Center building 7?

This all seems reasonable to me: unchecked fire, something the building wasn’t designed for, as well as structural damage from the two larger towers shedding debris onto it.

See also: Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report or Debunking 9/11 Conspiracy theories and Controlled Demolition Myths

And thermite is not an explosive and has never been used in controlled demolition. Thermite is easily made from iron oxide (like what you find in the structural members of a large building), aluminum (as used in airliners), and high intense heat, as you might get from a sudden ignition of several tons of jet fuel. I wonder how one could combine those elements in a big way?

Anyone who has watched a controlled demolition (YouTube has plenty of them) will note the differences between a controlled demolition and what happened on 9/11.