Recent comments
ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer's World
Thom Hartmann has written a dozen books covering ADD / ADHD - Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder.
Join Thom for his new twice-weekly email newsletters on ADHD, whether it affects you or a member of your family.
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
And when great Empires are seemingly at their strongest, and things are bleakest for us all, an unexpected turn of events can be triggered by the smallest of things which can overthrow those who thought they were invincible. Viruses are tiny...and they have even been manufactured by those in power. All it takes is for them to get loose, as has the viruses (ex: Duqu, Stuxnet, and Flamer) the US and Israel created to wreck the Iranian nuclear programs. Those with all of the technology, who have farmed it out to China may be sorry they did one day. What if "the internet" did come to a screeching halt? Impossible? What if instead of just stopping...all the financial transactions got totally screwed up? How many people know that a sizable amount of our currency is actually counterfeit? Even if you get counterfeit money from your ATMs, and you later get caught with it, you are stuck with the problem. The banks won't make good on your loss and you may even be threatened with legal proceedings. If your bank account is wiped out by electronic transfers, especially if you bank on-line, you may just be totally out of luck. The courts have already ruled in favor of the banks on this one. Re: Patco Construction Co. vs Ocean Bank. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/09/construction_firm_s...
The court eventually ruled against the company from being able to recover the hundreds of thousands of dollars from the bank.
Sadly, Mr. Hartmann, there is absolutely nothing we can do to reverse this trend. We might be able to slow it (though only with the fiercest forms of resistance), but the technological superiority of the One Percent -- the Ruling Class -- is now far too great to be nullified by any known revolutionary method. Gone forever are the days when angry Parisians or militant Bolsheviks can overthrow a government by seizure of its arsenals and agencies.
From the perspective of the Ruling Class, one of the greatest benefits of privatization is its decentralization of authority: the fact there is no Winter Palace or Bastille to be seized. But even if government had remained centralized, today's technologies of oppression are as far beyond the common grasp as firearms were beyond the understanding of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa.
While a Parisian of 1789 could within minutes learn the use of a musket, the use of an F-22 requires literally years of training. The technology gap between government and people is now truly an unbridgeable moat. Thus we are to the Ruling Class what First Nations peoples were to the Conquistadors: we are naught but prey. Verily, it is as if we have been conquered by the (fictional?) Borg: "resistance is futile."
The one lesson to be learned from the unspeakable horror of our circumstances is that the defeat of the Soviet Union was also the defeat -- probably forever -- of all our species' democratic and humanitarian aspirations. Though the U.S.S.R. was never the "workers' paradise" it claimed to be, it nevertheless was the only major power on this planet officially committed to agitating and spreading economic democracy.
And make no mistake: economic democracy is the sole wellspring of all other forms of democracy. Without economic democracy, all other forms of democracy are meaningless -- precisely as we are now learning everywhere on Earth as its rulers turn it into the slave planet they have consciously sought at least since the time of Adolf Hitler.
What oppresses us now is a de facto Fourth Reich, but this time there is no Red Army to save us. And unless Chinese capitalism is an ultimate application of Sun Tzu's "Art of War" -- long-term conversion of an enemy's greatest strength into his fatal weakness -- there will be no People's Liberation Army to rescue us either.
Yet this hideous truth does not mean we should surrender. Instead we should realize what John Paul Sartre and Albert Camus realized during the darkest days of the French Resistance, when it appeared the Third Reich was forever: that the individual act of rebellion, when seemingly doomed, is our ultimate experience of freedom.
And who can say where such experience might lead -- especially when conjoined with Mother Nature's rising fury?
Solutions: Expand natural individual rights, and curtail artificial individuals' rights. Make genetic code open source and non-patentable. Do away with the Electoral College and have more direct democracy, like Switzerland.
Absolutely correct!
Gov. Snyder was the C.E.O. of Gateway Computers. He dismantled Gateway piece by piece as he sent the parts to Taiwan along with 19,000 American jobs as outsourced work to China. In the process, Rick Snyder made many, many million dollars before selling what was left of Gateway to a Chinese company. Now with his experience as a dismantler, he is dismantling Michigan and selling the parts to the highest bidder. His main dismantling tool is the Emergency Financial Manager, authorized by the law rammed through the Legislature in violation of the Michigan Constitution. Michigan Republicans have illegally passed over 96% of their bills under “immediate effect” without getting the required two-thirds majority.
Benton Harbor Michigan is a prime example of Gov Snyder’s cruelty in support of the Rich. Benton Harbor is a beautiful community on Lake Michigan who’s residents are mostly Afro-American and economically poor but rich in community spirit. Gov Snyder appointed one of his cronies as Emergency Financial Manger, and gave the Financial Emergency Manger a 6-figure salary to dismantle Benton Harbor. The EFM then suspended the democratically elected City Council and Mayor and sold off the City assets to the highest bidder. The selling of the Children’s Park to the wealthy was especially cruel. How low can you go?
Now it is lost. The Children’s Park now belongs to the affluent property adjacent to their golf course and condominiums where you have to pay a rich person’s fee to enter. Gov. Snyder stole from the Klock’s gift to the commons “who do not own a foot of ground” but had a chance. This act of stealing is cruel. How low will the Republicans go?
President John F. Kennedy said, “Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.” But, how low can the Republicans go?
How exactly does this procedure of purging names work?
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/florida-gov-rick-scott-defends-voter...
"The Justice Department's action was a direct response to Detzner's announcement earlier Monday that Florida would sue the Department of Homeland Security to gain access to the federal citizenship database (SAVE) to help carry out their voter purge. Scott said Monday that Florida has found nearly 100 non-citizens on state voter rolls."
What is the "federal citizenship database?"
Am I on it? I was born in California, I have a birth certificate, I have a Social Security Card, I registered for Selective Service when I turned 17, I've had several passports and used them to exit and enter the US.
My wife likewise has a birth certificate being born in California, she has a marriage certificate with my name, she notified Social Security about her name change and got a new card, she has had passports in her maiden name and in my name and has likewise used them.
Florida identified 100 non-citizens? How? Are these incarcerated felons released and their names and addresses upon release (does Florida demand an address upon release?)
If I move from California to Florida, and I register to vote in Florida, does DHS have this info in their database? Do I automatically get purged?
You are good at thinking reasonable information and this material seems to be ground-breakinig. Like http://www.essaylib.com/proposal.php provided me when I wrote for my college. We all know that these assignments are extremely time-consuming.
Private schools and charter schools expect and demand extra donations and extraordinary amounts of volunteer work from parents. They cannot possibly work for families with two working parents. One parent must be free to accommodate the school and to sit with their children for hours after school doing homework or driving to activities.
Educating a child in Florida is a living hell and a mess of lies. Parents ubiquitously use alternate address schemes to have their child placed in the public school they like best. Some church schools teach "creation science," the largest theological contradiction of all.
I have known teachers in poorer schools who have little more than contempt for their students, starting with grade one. They scorn mothers who are drug addicts, prostitutes, illiterate, deciding there is nothing they can do for the children to overcome the bad influences at home.
The husband of one such teacher remarked, " Someone has to grow up and clean toilets and work the McDonald's for the rest of us."
A public high school science teacher I know was commanded by his principal to stop giving failing grades and to hand out more B's.
To answer the question, what has to be done to reverse this trend? Sleepers, WAKE UP! Isn't it obvious we are spiraling into CHAOS?
Oh BA BA WA WA.
The approach in question isn't truly Libertarian: it is fascist by bank shot. Here's roughly how it's done:
1) Manipulate an economy into crisis by declaring hugely expensive discretionary wars that serve oil or other resource corporations, or else take advantage of a "shock" sort of situation, such as the failure of a large financial institution (several of which are still too big to fail, and must be dissolved), or by having a (privately owned) central bank play games with the money supply.
2) Declare that the country is now broke and that "we" (the Fascists) must "balance the budget" (but NEVER by raising taxes on fascists)
3) Put public assets up for sale at bargain basement prices to fascists.
The Republicans have shown how to deal with this sort of thing: they criminalize, or at least make difficult and complex, everything they don't like (and send to victims to the military/industrial/intelligence/incarceration complex to provide slave labor).
The US must:
1) Eliminate or chip away at the power of the Federal Reserve, a privately owned central bank that plays games with the money supply for political purposes. Criminalize, "out", spy upon, protest, or in other ways expose the ABA (which hobbles all banking reform), the NAB (which profits handsomely from increased expenditures on elections), the US Chamber of Commerce (which is, simply, fascist), the Business Roundtable (offshores jobs, inflates CEO compensation, does much fascist planning), participation in the World Economic (Corporate Fascism) Forum, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Friends of Bilderberg (now headed by Bill Gates, who is also a regular at the WEF), ALEC and every other fascist, anti-democratic, anti-constitutional organization, including the most-fascists corporations, such as AT&T. These organizations are all conspiratorial in nature, are all anti-constitutional, all commit treason routinely, and all aim to create an American fascist state. It's time they were treated as the criminal organizations that they are.
2) Require Congress alone to declare war of any kind, and ONLY fight declared and pre-budgeted wars. Require the children of all members of Congress and all individuals with a net worth of $1 million or more to register for the draft upon declaration of war. Criminalize presidential conduct to the contrary. (Wishful thinking, of course, but even the attempt would start interesting discussions.)
3) Cap ALL profits off of military/intelligence purchases at 4%. Include "defense" contractors in the monopoly break-ups. Tax all such profits heavily, to reduce incentives for war and immense war budgets.
4) Enforce anti-monopoly laws and break up or otherwise hobble the most fascist of the largest transnational corporations
5) Put back in place the "Fairness Doctrine" for the media, and prioritize the breakup of ALL of the media empires for the corporate break-up process
6) Make use of the corporate charter laws still on the books to whatever extent possible.
7) By Federal mandate, eliminate corporate chartering in rubber-stamp states.
8) Criminalize the sale of state assets, at least at firesale prices. Limit all sales of such assets to small businesses or consortia of private individuals.
9) Criminalize imposition of Emergency Financial Management.
10) Criminalize ALL trade accord negotiations conducted in secrecy.
11) Put estate taxes back in place. (There is no need for generational fascist dynasties, such as that of the Rockefeller and Bush families.)
12) Move the corporate and wealthy tax rates back to 1950s levels.
13) Continue to move money from all large banks.
I only voted yes because I'm hoping the GOP also want to be able to sell themselves to the middle class as having extended this break, but I suspect they'd want the democrats to pay a price for it, or more likely they will hold it hostage in order to also extend the cuts for those earning above the $250K.
Vote the bums out... the Republican bums.
Obama and the Attorney General, Holder MUST start prosecuting ALL of them. Look, if we are smart enough to figure out what's going on (i.e. TPP, New Right, ALEC, Paul Weyrich) - then, WHEN are they going to stop them - legally? There is Plenty of evidence and proof to convict them on many issues. What we Can stop now, we Must! If a takeover of the Democratic Republic of America by the New Right/Bilderberg Group/TPP is not enough to form a Special Team to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law - then, what is? History repeats itself and we have witnessed what has happened in other countries (Germany) when an extreme party is allowed to rule. Obama may have to watch his back - Big Time - these people are not to be played with and obviously can get away with everything. I'll take to the streets in support as I have been; but, the Feds must pursue, detain, imprison those that are destroying our Country. I Want My Country BACK!!
HI Thom
I LOVE your show...YOu and i met in Estes Park Colorado several years ago when you were in the Life coach Training I sponsored with Erickson College founder, Marilyn ATkinson
I had just read your Last Days of Ancient Sunlight and your ADD book...what a varied career you have had!! i would love to speak to you if you are avaialibe for a conversation, I am a progressive, watch MSNBC and CNN and listen to you and BERNIE... how do i hear from you for a private conversation?
Patrick Williams
Founder of Insti for Life Coach Training and founder and CEO of Coaching The Global Village
Well, that's what they're going to do to the whole country and the world when theTrans Pacific Partnership gets approved.....after the elections, of course.
What with the damage these unrestricted corpse are doing to the planet, we may not have TIME for a revolution. The UniParty strikes again. The TPP is gonna make NAFTA look like a cakewalk. then, there's KORUS which Obama pushed thru which will take all the auto jobs we saved and the banks will probably fail again with all thier shennanigans and I don't see how we'll save them from themsleves this time....we're "broke" remember?
Oh yeah, and states are trying to dump Medicaid after the wonderful John Roberts jumped the rope and ruled that they could. Isn't he cute?
You should wake up, Thom. Just becasue Obama calls himself a Dem doesn't mean he is one. They're all fascists now
The old adage, "privatization is theft", applies here. We are all simply shocked to realize that the financial manager laws were a Republican ruse to thinly disguise theft of the people's resources and general kleptocratic government that is the Republican preferred model.
The Libertarian ideal is to put up toll road booths on every street...instead of taxes to pave these streets you have to pay some private sector corporation which has obscenely overpaid CEOs, other top execs, and of course the wealthy stock holders must get their ever increasing cut. Of course even the taxation way of doing things is often corrupted by the businesses that overcharge and the bought off politicians who let them get away with it. But the problem is not "the government", per se, but a corrupt and inefficient government that is bought off by those who exploit the system. The problem is not "the government"..the problem is the avaricious greed and conniving of those businesses that corrupts the government officials.
You want to walk on the side-walk in front of your house...."pay me". You want to breathe the air?..."pay me". Drink the water? "pay me" Yes, we still have to "pay me" when we pay our taxes but it is being run by a non-profit organization...one who doesn't have to make a bundle to pay off the worthless sinecure CEOs and other corporate heads. The only reason why our government doesn't work effectively for the people anymore is because they are owned by the profiteers. These profiteers want to destroy any part of the government that doesn't play ball with them. They use the government to get what they want but then turn right around and belittles the government. Buy a "whore"...then belittle and besmirch her while ignoring just who the hell "YOU" are in the process. How many people think very highly of the "Johns" when they buy a "whore"? Just as most people don't think very highly of them, they should put businesses, who buy off politicians, in the same light as a "John" who buys a "whore" (the politician who gets bought). And Fox Snooze would be like the pimps.
Many smart economist believe that even if you tax the rich at 90 percent you will never get revenues of more than 20 percent of GDP. All you will succeed in doing is killing the work ethic and driving the economy underground to avoid the taxes. What scares me is that with this crap economy we still have a president and his policies that is favored to win re-election, the tipping point into European socialism is here. Deficit spending means nothing to these liberal radicals, they just become pawns to the central banks. The middle class and the poor suffer the slow death of inflation as the printing presses drone on. Self inflicted inflation will be the shackles of the middle class. The silent killer. Not to mention the damage it is causing to the baby boomers as they retire. Think about retirement when interest rates are lower than inflation. It won't work. He who controls the money (central banks) controls the people. We are the frogs in the pot of water.
What is destroying Europe, and even the rest of the world, is not socialism. What is destroying us all is the games that heartless and greedy capitalists have been playing around the world. Greedy and conniving capitalist bullies that set up governments to sell out their own people to get them locked into a death spiral. Greece was fine, relatively speaking until Goldman Sachs went in with a financial scheme that ended up wrecking their country. Same thing with Russia...
It used to take sending in troops and heavy artillery in order to invade and take over other countries. Now they do it on the sly by financial trickery. And, of course, if after they ruin themselves financially, and are weakened militarily, then if they fail to pay up...we can send in the Jackals...target heads of state that refuse to obey. Maybe that is what some would-be US politicians are afraid of? They sent in the Jackals to take care of JFK and a number of foreign leaders that made waves. Of course the US Military Industrial Complex has unmanned drones, and satellites, and all the technology (all-be-it "Made in China") to bully their way into these countries to impose their will.
Most of our computers are either manufactured in China...or at least many of the Integrated Circuit (IC) chips are. I used to work in the industry and saw, first hand, how advanced these foreign companies were. (Korea, Taiwan, and even China was starting to get advanced equipment..and that was about 8-9 years ago. Some of those Korean IC plants were even more modern and advanced than many plants I went to in the US...at the time.) The US often designs the chips, but has many parts of the manufacturing process of those chips done in China. And China has reverse engineered these chips and could easily have made modifications, back-doors. So much of our technology is really suspect.
There are many terms that can help describe what is going on between "the government" and those with enough money to influence them. Crony capitalism is one usually meant to describe the collusion of those in government with those with the money that can buy influence in government. Big business can say "Here's some money for your campaign funds...now, here is what we expect in return"..and usually, it doesn't even need to be said..But, I think that some use the term in an attempt to disparage only the government and not the capitalist wolves. This would be like buying a cheap whore, then besmirching her for being a whore....overlooking the fact that you are just as much a whore...or even a bigger whore...even though the strict definition of the word would not fit.
Only the wealthy can do this and so therefore only the wealthy can effectively influence government. Therefore, it is a government "by the rich, and for the rich". It should be the rich that we tax the most, and proportional to the profits that they rake in, and not those who can least afford it. If "taxation without representation" has any meaning at all it should describe what is happening against those at the bottom 90%.
Just as the wealthy French Nobility refused to pay their taxes, the Capitalists refuse to pay their fair share of the taxes. And that would mean a Progressive tax. They SHOULD pay more...they have reaped the benefits...and most especially since the Bush tax cuts for the rich. It is time to stop coddling these greedsters, who profit by shipping our jobs overseas, and chop off a lot of our "Nobility's" heads (figuratively speaking, of course)...or make them pay a progressive tax that equals what they had to pay in Eisenhower's days....a whole whopping lot more than a mere return to pre-Bush days.
As I watched CNN, this morning, I hear them say that Obama is trying to give 90% of the population tax breaks while not giving the top 10% the same tax breaks that they have been enjoying since the Bush years. They said something like... "Obama's new proposed bill would make anyone earning less that $250K a year get the breaks and anyone above would have to continue with the pre-Bush years tax breaks". And then they turned right around...like they are in a "Republican Bubble"...and said that if someone earning a combined income of $80K a year, they would have to pay something like $1800 more in taxes. I don't know, maybe I was watching Fox Snooze by mistake.
CNN is turning out more and more like Fox Snooze every day. They said that Obama knows that the bill doesn't stand a chance and that it is merely a political ploy. Yes, that could very well be true...I don't believe much in what Obama says anymore because I believe he is really a Republican in disguise. But, it does highlight that the rich are getting away with murder...and it is murder...because of their rampant greed...people will (or are) starving and dying for lack of affordable health care. It is a war that these greedy corporations have started which are killing people...and will kill many more.
I agree that we have to stop electing these idiots who are influenced by money...but who are we gonna trust? Ghost Busters? I think it is insane to keep voting for people that we believe are going to finally work in OUR best interest just to be surprised that they were either lying to us or they find out how insurmountable and useless their pre-election sloganeering was in the face of the entrenched corrupt system in place now. Right now, the ones with all the gold...rule. They were able to amass all the gold through the Reagan and Bush years of favorable tax breaks to the rich. There is only one solution now...and it ain't pretty. But it is necessary...unless a whole lot of wealthy people straighten up and unlock the shackles that are now imprisoning us. I think a jail-break is necessary...because the prison guards are not going to let us go. And we're all in for life...and due to our ineffective and unfair healthcare system....death!
That is crony capitalism, to my point, quit electing these idiots that are influenced by the power. Capitalism is still the best overall system in the world. You can't cut the head off just to cure some of the human weakness of greed. The problem is crony capitalism, especially the ones that say on the outside "please don't regulate me" but inside the smoke filled rooms they say regulate this and that so my competition can't keep up. Tell me what would pounding the so called rich with more and more taxes do for any of us? would that help create any jobs other than government jobs and continue to feed this beast that is dragging us over the financial cliff. Look at the death spiral that is Europe, is that our future?
Few men can demonstrate similar ways in thinking, and even less can assure its originality. Your http://www.essaylib.com/persuasive-speech.php is a profound one. I swear it was a major brain attempt.
"The Government" are the lowly paid (compared to the private sector CEOs and other top execs) representatives. Granted, politicians know, and we know, that the system is corrupted by the private-sector's big money and the only way to get reelected is to pander to these greedy wolves. I'd say that the capitalist private-sector wolves are the ones to whom we are enslaved...not the government. Over the last 30-some years our wages and benefits have been reduced way more than our taxes have risen...and it has been the capitalist wolves who have made this happen...not the government...although the government could have done a better job of protecting us from the wolves. Although we often see the government as being very wasteful..it is the government that has been bought and paid for by wealthy capitalist wolves...who force them to spend money on seemingly wasteful projects. We need to get the government to stop being puppets of the wealthy private sector corporateers. Aye, me bucko, the corporateers are robbing us blind and trying to blame it all on their useful idiots...the government.
We need the government to raise taxes on the wealthy, to get them to pay their fair share of the taxes in a truly accelerated progressive tax...not a flat tax. The capitalist wolves would love a flat tax. Even with an accelerated progressive tax (with no loopholes) the wealthy can live quite comfortably and would not even really miss the extra taxes they would have to pay. The only thing that might take a really tiny hit would be a little bit of their foreign, off-shore bank accounts...which they could never hope to spend anyway. And some of that they gamble away in very risky (discounting eventual government bailouts) derivatives and other high-risk Wall Street Casino bets. They are just being overly greedy and heartless and even unpatriotic. They sure don't care a whit about the well-being of their fellow countrymen/women. And anyone who sees things THEIR way are either one of them or useful idiots working against their best interests and are too dumb to know it yet. As you get older and more destitute and hurting for health care you may wish you had not been on the side of the capitalist pigs (I mean wolves).
Capitalist pigs may have a finger pointing at the government but they have 3 fingers pointing right back at themselves. But the prominent finger they are pointing at all of us is the middle finger. We need to bite it off!
Bring some fairness to the tax code and go to a flat tax. People are getting tired of the whiners that vote in these idiots that spend taxpayer money in every give away safety net program they can devise to capture more and more slaves to the government. Wake up and try a little personal freedom for a change.
Higg's Bossom? Oh, Higg's Boson! Oh, FSM, Never mind!
And speaking of internet outages...has anyone else experienced an internet outage yet? I had one this morning/noonish that made me wonder if I was seeing an early occurrence of the DNSChanger Virus that is supposed to hit us tomorrow, Monday 7/9/12.
I tried all the usual troubleshooting things..power off/on my modem/router..(didn't do a modem/router reset..too many things to set up again)...ping to my router/modem..ok..ping to web sites..not ok...ping to known good ip numbers...still not ok. Phone (audio) line up ok. Checked all connections. Using Wireshark to catch and analyze all the packets. Guess I should have run a Noise Margin/Attenuation/power DSL line check but didn't. Was getting ready to try another modem/router, and a network card, when my internet connection came back. Must have scared it into submission!
Are you scared yet? Scared enough to participate in the "FBI sting operation(?)" when you go to their web site to have your computer "scanned" for the "DNSChanger virus"..and anything else they can find..pirated music, videos, or other things?
But, I guess the reason why they say it will happen tomorrow is because they are going to pull a server that they had been using to circumvent the effects of the virus which has been around for some number of years now. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if they didn't create the DNSChanger virus themselves to redirect suspect targets to their server for "honeypot" monitoring. Remember Duqu, Stuxnet, and Flame virus they launched on Iran and it got out and infected the world?
I had already done the manual checks for the virus and did not find anything. The virus is supposed to be so elusive, however, that virus checker programs are ineffective (what else is new?).
There are some things to check in the registry and I was ok there. Another indication was supposed to be to look at your DNS ip number in ipconfig /all (ifconfig for Linux) and they gave about a dozen, or so, ip numbers that if you had them (as your DNS ip in ipconfig) it would be an indication that you had the virus.
Problem is that most people use 192.168.1.1 which is the default access point (their router/modems) ip number for defaulting to their ISP DNS. Some people, like myself, like to use various optimal DNS ip numbers sometimes.(Go to grc.com and run Steve Gibson's Service called DNS Spoofability Test and his test will show you a list of the results showing the best DNSs to use...which you enter into your ipv4 properties.)
Seems to me that if the virus is "changing the DNS ip in your computer" which redirects you to an undesired web site (the rogue dns which provides ip numbers to direct you to an unwanted web site)...and if you see only the default DNS ip of the ISP DNS (eg:192.168.1.1) on your computer then any problems with redirections or even outages would have to be at the ISP or elsewhere. ie: they have the DNSChanger virus redirecting at their level...not mine. At any rate..you can change your DNS ip to any one you want...it doesn't have to be your ISP. But no mattter what DNS ip number you have you should still be able to ping to some ip address on the internet. And, so far, my ISP has not owned up to an outage.
Yes, it could still have been just me, or my equipment, but I'm paranoid. And why shouldn't we all be? And not just because our kitchen appliances will be monitoring us in the future...maybe even now. And if that sounds really odd or paranoid, or even crazy, then you don't know much about our current technology and what these people are capable of.
And in the event I can't get on to the internet tomorrow..."Good afternoon, good evening, and good night".
The Right always appropriates the language of the left for their fraudulent campaigns. In the '80s, after two decades of popularity for "bleeding heart" "victimology" from the Left, the Right decided it would be clever if they characterized themselves, the rich and powerful, the dominators of society, as the "victims of society" for whom all our hearts should bleed because they had to pay taxes or abide by regulations.
There was a time not long ago when the rich and powerful were considered - and literally referred to as - parasites for profitting so greatly from the labor of working people. Today the right has appropriated that language and now calls the people "parasites" for wanting universal, free healthcare and the like that the rich and powerful will have to pay taxes for when it, in fact, is the just compensation of the working people for performing the labor of society and in the employ of the rich and powerful.