Greed is God

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi takes down Wall Street yet again with an entertaining and easy-to-understand explanation of what when wrong.

A shorter version: a group of borderline sociopaths exploited weak regulations to ensure that the playing field is so tilted that your average mom-and-pop investor never stood a chance.

And when they ran out of innocent victims this pack of jackals began to eat each other last fall, with the unintended consequence of consuming all our pension plans.

Why am I losing respect for cops and the justice system?

Let me count the ways...

Twenty-one lousy days! And some sort of conditional suspended sentence at that? Are you friggin' serious?

If I went on this sort of a rampage, they'd be piping the sunshine in to me for many a long day, I feel quite certain of that. But apparently this asshat of a cop gets some sort of a special deal?

Let's recap, shall we?

He downs a couple dozen drinks. Commandeers a car, while lying about being a Vancouver cop. Threatens to "destroy" the driver -- who has since died, though the circumstances of that death are never explained in the article -- though based on this asshole's conduct I'm more than prepared to believe he killed the poor son of a bitch to keep him quiet.

Then he instructs the driver to take him to another nightclub, where he meets two other cops -- one of which is a "use of force" instructor at the local police academy, for the love of friggin' Mike.

Too drunk to control himself, he gets into a fight with a hapless friggin' newspaper seller that doesn't snap to quite quickly enough for this little nascent brownshirt -- so he and said instructor assault the newsie so savagely his doctor still won't clear him to drive months later? An assault, I should add, that a number of bystanders said was racially motivated?

And when the real on duty police show up, what do these three pricks do? Try to pin it on the victim, naturally.

Thus confirming what I've always known. That when it's called a police state, it's NEVER a good thing. Why didn't they just taser him already? Dead men don't talk, after all.

These pricks should remember that their ability to police ALWAYS depends on their perceived legitimacy.

The second the citizens they're purporting to defend start to believe they're just being preyed on... well, then it's a whole new violent bloody mess of a ball game.

After all, when they kick out your front door, how you gonna go? With your hands on your head or on the trigger of your gun?

More Wishful Thinking

This is something else I'd kind of hoped would've disappeared once Obama became president. Oh well, Rome wasn't built in a day. (Fashionism)