"What’s it like to write inside the head of a killer?
Notably simple. It’s really an easy thing. There is no such thing, I believe, as a killer who sees themselves as the villain of their own story. Sometimes the victim of their own story, sure, but never the villain. Once you take the entirely reasonable step of deciding that the erasure of human life is unremarkable, and applying basic logic to the provision of that service, you’re off to the races. It’s really not that hard to adopt the sort of personality and mindset that sees human life as unspecial. It’s actually quite calming, in many ways.
All of the above, of course, makes me sound demented. But seriously. Imagine a world in which people will die every day regardless of your own actions. Too many to count. If you elect to kill one person today, your actions will not skew the numbers. “One murder is statistically utterly unimportant." And if you’re removing the body from sight, what does it matter anyway? What made that one person more special than all the others who died today? Nothing at all. Purely in terms of the mathematics, any possible pain and suffering you are causing is in fact within the statistical margin of error for today’s body count. Which, from a certain perspective, means it doesn’t exist.
I spent four days thinking like that."
Best TKD Ever.
"A warrant is supposed to be the last word in gathering evidence in criminal cases, right? The court speaketh and we jumpeth. But what if the warrant requires evidence to be gathered in a way that necessitates the skills of trained professionals? And what if those conscripted professionals find the ordered procedures unethical and abhorrent? And then they...refuse?
...The subject of compelling suspects to provide body fluids or stomach contents has received plenty of attention from a Fourth Amendment perspective, but conscripting medical personnel to do the honors is relatively untested territory. Many medical facilities, like the Aurora Sinai Medical Center, have policies requiring patient consent before doctors and nurses will start working as police proxies. but that sometimes annoys the authorities."
""I wanna stop that car load of dumb sh*** in the car, I wanna stop it, but they are not going to do anything wrong. Hell, I'll get behind or the other lane and I'd start crowding them. Kinda dirty pool but i got two or three arrests out of it.""
"Did we, mate? Fucking amazing." - Welsh language, sports, cooking, death metal and straight as the new gay. Hilarious.
"In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about a new collection method until it had been in operation for many months. The court ruled it unconstitutional. So the NSA was not always informing the court of its actions. And yes, they improperly accessed content of communications..."
"We live in a surreal world in which a “transparent” government insists on the need for secret courts; our President prosecutes whistle-blowers and maintains a secret “kill list”; and private information is collected in secret and stored indefinitely by intelligence agencies."
"It turns out that the NSA's domestic and world-wide surveillance apparatus is even more extensive than we thought. Bluntly: The government has commandeered the Internet. Most of the largest Internet companies provide information to the NSA, betraying their users. Some, as we've learned, fight and lose. Others cooperate, either out of patriotism or because they believe it's easier that way. I have one message to the executives of those companies: fight.
Do you remember those old spy movies, when the higher ups in government decide that the mission is more important than the spy's life? It's going to be the same way with you. You might think that your friendly relationship with the government means that they're going to protect you, but they won't. The NSA doesn't care about you or your customers, and will burn you the moment it's convenient to do so. We're already starting to see that. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others are pleading with the government to allow them to explain details of what information they provided in response to National Security Letters and other government demands. They've lost the trust of their customers, and explaining what they do -- and don't do -- is how to get it back. The government has refused; they don't care. It will be the same with you."
"It’s been two months since President Barack Obama first said that he welcomes a debate about NSA surveillance, which he once again reiterated last week at his press conference. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to have a real debate about a subject when the administration constantly and intentionally misleads Americans about the NSA’s capabilities and supposed legal powers. Infamously, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper was forced to apologize for lying to Congress about whether the government was collecting information on millions of Americans, but that was merely the tip of the administration’s iceberg of mendacity and misdirection. At this point, it seems nothing the government says about the NSA can be taken at face value...
When government officials can’t directly answer a question with a secret definition, officials will often answer a different question than they were asked. For example, if asked, “can you read Americans’ email without a warrant,” officials will answer: “we cannot target Americans’ email without a warrant.” As we explained last week, the NSA’s warped definition of word “target” is full of so many holes that it allows the NSA to reach into untold number of Americans’ emails, some which can be purely domestic...
Another tried and true technique in the NSA obfuscation playbook is to deny it does one invasive thing or another “under this program.” When it’s later revealed the NSA actually does do the spying it said it didn’t, officials can claim it was just part of another program not referred to in the initial answer."
The bitter, ironic relationship pill of 21st century America.
"Recently, the New York Times treated us to another epic hagiography of the American career woman. The problem is familiar, and dire: women with degrees from prestigious universities and six-figure incomes feel vaguely unhappy. The article begins with the story of Sheilah, a wife who starts working fewer hours to cope with the demands of motherhood. Even though she was working much less than her husband, she balked at doing her new domestic duties, even as a nanny did much of the work anyway...
In the hopes of improving her marriage, she quit her job entirely. “A sense of personal dislocation set in,” we are told. ”Without a salary or an independent work identity, her self-confidence plummeted.” The author of the piece, Judith Warner, begins to weave her thesis: traditional sex roles beget personal and marital failure...
Sheilah starts volunteering. Her husband Mark’s words about her volunteering are damning, if not surprising: “I look back on it as the beginning of the end of our marriage…Once she started to work, she started to place more value in herself, and because she put more value in herself, she put herself in front of a lot of things — family, and ultimately, her marriage.” The Times informs us that Sheilah and Mark “agree the job drove a destructive wedge between them.”
Her aim to realize herself destroys her marriage and her family. And Sheilah isn’t exactly cutting her own path – her family supports her divorce. Her father is complicit in the destruction of her family; he commended her for her independence as a child, and that’s now bearing bitter fruit. In America, these fathers are the rule, not the exception, saying they only want ‘what’s best for my daughter.’ Parenthetically, Sheilah refused to take Mark’s last name – let that be an omen to any man contending with a woman who insists on keeping her name...
In truth, tradition was set to fail. Tradition had little chance of succeeding with a woman bred to believe her worth lay in making money and dominating others. Even in the most traditional of eras, some are pariahs, and are simply not suited for marriage or motherhood. Sheilah is a suggestive example...
Carrie chafed at her husband’s expectation of a clean house; she would blab on inanely at the dinner table, boring her husband. Foolishly, he suggested she go back to work to become interesting again. Carrie takes his advice, and soon enough, packs her schedule with attending to the children and a full-time job. She has little time to enjoy her husband, or catch her breath. “I think a big issue is that we both want to be taken care of at the end of the day, and neither of us has any energy to take care of the other,” Carrie said. “It’s the proverbial ‘meet me at the door with a martini and slippers.’ Don’t we all want that? A clean house and someone at the door? I think when I wasn’t working I had some guilt that that wasn’t me, but now I want to be that other person. . . . When you’re absolutely exhausted, it’s hard to be emotionally generous.”
The irony is sweet, and tragic. The American career woman, in all her glory, vindicates the modest demands of the traditional father: a clean home, an attentive wife and her warm dinner after a long day’s work to provide for the family. Carrie admits that given her strenuous obligations, she wants that now. Implicitly, it’s not all that much to ask. The feminist harangues about the oppressiveness of domestic life start to ring hollow."
"The country is sinking fast under mounds of debt, unemployment, and alienation. The government pushes propaganda and policies that undermine the very concept of a nation, so no wonder growing numbers of Americans are jettisoning any feeling of duty toward their homeland like so much gassy ballast. Social atomization and the sheer massive scale of a bloated 300+ million population of competing races, ethnicities, behaviors, and temperaments herded like cats under ever-tightening rules and regulations and surveillance drones doomed to fail are splintering hard-earned loyalty and severing bonhomie. Obscene inequality of wealth and the total abandonment of noblesse oblige by the ruling classes has emboldened the leeches and parasites and sociopaths and hedonists and nihilists and clear thinkers. In the land of the left-behind, the poolsider is king.
...the interviewer asks RattLife Surfer if he feels guilty for taking advantage of Obama’s removal of restrictions on qualifying for food stamps, and helping himself to $200 of “free” money every month. He says no, and I believe him. It would be strange to feel guilt for sucking a pittance of Danegeld from fat cats helping themselves to ungodly profits from arcane financial transactions abetted by a cognitive firewall between the masses and the gated 0.1%ers on the hunt for ever-cheaper labor imported from shitholes. RattLife has made a very rational decision regarding his well-being: He has looked at the world he inherited, at the immense chasm between the haves and (relative) have-nots, and has figured that slaving away in a cube farm or a grimy sweatshop on a stagnating wage to serve a smaller and smaller cadre of super wealthy and femcunt HR schoolmarms is no life at all. What is the point of busting your hump when the brass ring has moved from your fingertips to Alpha Centauri?"
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