Houston? We have a problem...

This is a very corny but excellent view of what it can be like trying to get over the barriers to innovation in any government agency, massive global corporation or any other job where the thinking has become too inside the box:

Astronaut’s video slams NASA attitudes
Film takes harsh look at tendencies that stifle innovation

"homemade film shot by a NASA astronaut takes a harsh look at the agency's sometimes impersonal bureaucracy in hopes of encouraging employees to keep a more open mind when confronted with dissenting opinions or new ideas.

Written and produced by four-time spaceflier Andrew Thomas, the 10-minute satirical video was posted to YouTube — with NASA's approval — after being screened at an agency leadership retreat last month. The film follows a young engineer who attempts to present an innovative idea for a spacecraft design only to be stymied at every turn by program managers."

"The point about the video is it's not fiction," Thomas told Space.com Monday. "All of those scenes are real. They've actually happened to people to various degrees."

People are so compartmentalized in their thinking that they are afraid to take a fresh look at new ideas that might actually be a better way to solve a problem.

A good example of that today would be the way the government and the media refuses to take a serious look at single payer health care. Even though, by every metric that we could possibly analyze, it is a far superior way to provide medical care to Americans... Politicians and the media refuse to even compare its very real advantages to the broken health care system we have.

"We can't rock the boat!"

"It isn't the American way of doing things!"

Ok... So, now, the American way is to shut your eyes to the real solutions out there while the economy tanks? Instead of building a better way of doing things so the entire economy has a chance to rebuild itself on solid footings?

Get out of that stupid box that is clouding your thinking and take a look around you.

Whether it is energy policy, health care reform or almost any way you thought the government should be doing things "the good old fashioned American way..."

It has got to change because America is seriously broken right now.

It is that old fashioned way of thinking that broke it. The way some want to keep going, we may as well be trying to patch up the Appolo 13 capsule and sending it to Mars. A new paint job, a sling shot and a lube job won't cut it. Not a hope nor a prayer in that.

Just like the little changes, patches and tweaks to energy, health care and other government programs and policies are not going to solve these HUGE problems. They will just prolong the agony and make the next generation's mess even bigger and costlier to fix.

Take a look at our bloated national debt...

The Outstanding Public Debt as of 11 Feb 2009 at 05:19:14 AM GMT is:

The estimated population of the United States is 305,625,144
so each citizen's share of this debt is $35,082.81.

Can we really afford to make these fixes even costlier for our future leaders and pioneers than they will already be?

Cross Dressing Cult Leader Gives BJs to GOP Members

The Neo-Fascist monotheist cult leader, Janet Porter, gave Barrack Junk to every single one of'em. He may be post-op now. But he is still the same man under all of that makeup and those clothes. The cult leader that was foreseen by a pedophile fortune teller at a republican orgy in '89.

Hey... I get email too!

There are a whole Lott-a nuts out there these days. How can anyone take these people seriously? Oh, wait! We don't...

Why Geithner Sucks

In the corporatist scumbag selling out the American taxpayer kind of way:

The New York Times reports that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner “prevailed” against several top Obama aides in “opposing tougher conditions on financial institutions” in the debate on the bailout. Geithner successfully blocked “more severe limits on executive pay for companies receiving government aid” and replacing top bank executives and wiping out “shareholders at institutions receiving aid.”

There has to be more oversight. Those failed, incompetent and corrupt executive banking windbags stealing our money, right now, should be replaced. And the banks should be nationalized.

I am guessing it is going to get worse than this before the elites in this country start paying attention:

Wearing bright yellow hats and t-shirts with pictures of sharks and the words "Stop Loan Sharks," protesters had already targeted the home of John Mack, CEO of Morgan Stanley, at 6 Club Road, Rye, N.Y. earlier in the day.

At Frey's house, 10 Glenville Road, Greenwich, they chanted slogans such as "Fix our loans, save our homes." They placed furniture on the lawn to symbolize the dislocation felt by people who have had their homes foreclosed upon and been evicted, their belongings tossed outside by state marshals.

"We did it to make them feel what it must be like for someone to have their home foreclosed upon," NACA mortgage counselor Carmen Orta said.

Called the "Predators Tour" these actions were the start of NACA's "accountability campaign," an aggressive, confrontational protest aimed at several top executives of companies that refuse to allow NACA to renegotiate the terms of loans on behalf of members, according to NACA CEO Bruce Marks.

This is a fight over how to solve what is the 2nd Great Depression.

And the haves are already uncomfortable at giving up the 3rd vacation palace, the corporate jets, corporate paid and government subsidized vacation junkets and cutting back on their nannies time to save a few bucks. Just imagine what will have to be done to get them to pay attention to little people all around them - for no other reason than the fact that it is the right thing to do?

From Land of Enchantment...

MODERN DAY HOOVERVILLES

In the last year, the housing situation has deteriorated precipitously, from an already bad situation. Christopher Leinberger in an article called The Next Slum? (Atlantic, March 2008):

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, "I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen."

In the Franklin Reserve neighborhood of Elk Grove, California, south of Sacramento, the houses are nicer than those at Windy Ridge—many once sold for well over $500,000—but the phenomenon is the same. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, and other markers of decay have multiplied. Susan McDonald, president of the local residents’ association and an executive at a local bank, told the Associated Press, "There’s been gang activity. Things have really been changing, the last few years."

So, houses are empty, and falling to ruin. It's as senseless as destroying crops while people are hungry - the sign of a completely deranged kind of economy. And more and more Americans are finding themselves in squatter tent cities. This is Ontario, CA:

And this Reno, Nevada:

In Miami last week, over a thousand applicants lined up, some camping for two nights in line, to apply for 35 fire fighter jobs with starting pay of $47,000 a year.

Back in the Depression, things got pretty rough. And it's arguably part of why the New Deal did as much as it did for the have-nots - something we've not seen a whole lot of for many years here in the U.S. I've not heard of the website Bits of News before. The food part of this diary is drawn from there. The article, "Hunger on the March" by Garrett Johnson a year ago, has such a good closer, that I'm not going to try to better it.

Some people may be under the impression that FDR's election and the New Deal was simply a logical reaction to extreme hardships. That democracy naturally corrected itself. That wasn't the case. It took a grassroots movement, working against all odds, to push the government into action. It's a lesson we should remember in 2009, even if a Democrat wins the White House.

It's gonna be getting worse before it gets better. And consulting that above-the-fold graphic, the longer the delay, the worse it's gonna get. It's hard to see any way around that.

Hooverville, Central Park, New York City

Frankly and honestly, the have nots have a whole hell of a lot more to worry about -life, death, shelter and food - than the haves minor inconveniences to their pampered lives and stock portfolios in a Depression that they caused.

Some previous pieces from Land of Enchantment for those of you that might not get it:

• Bread and Roses (New Deal TRAP Murals)
• Time for a Little Class Warfare (music and pix)
• Class Warfare: The So-Called Death Tax (w/pix)
• Class Warfare: Heroic Labor (pictorial)

Brutal Torture at GITMO

Waterboarding was way down the list of disgusting and criminal acts that prisoners were subjected to:

But The Daily Telegraph reported over the weekend that the documents actually “contained details of how British intelligence officers supplied information to [Mohamed’s] captors and contributed questions while he was brutally tortured.” In fact, it was British officials, not the Americans, who pressured Foreign Secretary David Miliband “to do nothing that would leave serving MI6 officers open to prosecution.” According to the Telegraph’s sources, the documents describe particularly gruesome interrogation tactics:

The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed’s genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, “is very far down the list of things they did,” the official said.

Another source familiar with the case said: “British intelligence officers knew about the torture and didn’t do anything about it.”

“It is very clear who stands to be embarrassed by this and who is being protected by this secrecy. It is not the Americans, it is Labour ministers,” former shadow home secretary David Davis said. But one unnamed U.S. House Judiciary Committee member told the Telegraph that if President Obama “doesn’t act we could hold a hearing or write to subpoena the documents. We need to know what’s in those documents.”

And the British are just as complicit in these sick criminal acts perpetrated by many in the Bush administration. Will there be any real justice in the USA ever again?

And if the USA will not uphold the Constitution and the rule of law, which nation will have the moral compass and fortitude to prosecute these brutal and heinous crimes against humanity?

[update] Earth-Bound Misfit points out thast these particular crimes do not appear to have happened at GITMO. Either Morocco or Afghanistan would be the likely places:

"Mr Mohamed, 30, an Ethiopian, was granted refugee status in Britain in 1994. He was picked up in Pakistan in 2002 on suspicion of involvement in terrorism, rendered to Morocco and Afghanistan, tortured and then sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2004. All terror charges against him were dropped last year."

Sicko Airs On TV Tonight

In case you have not seen it yet...

Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, that lightning rod of sociopolitical controversy, continues his provocative cinematic crusade with this incendiary, highly critical examination of the greed fueling America's private enterprise health care system.



Rating - PG13
Duration - 123 Mins

Showtime Advisories
Brief Nudity, Adult Language, Adult Content
Audio Format

Stereo / CC

On Showtime Showcase
02/07/09 at 8:00 PM More Airings
On Demand
Available from 02/06/09 to 03/05/09

[update] It airs again tonight: 02/09/09 at 5:55 PM

A: The "best little whorehouse on Wall Street"

Q: Where did some of these incompetent and corrupt bankers spend their time and the banks' money last year?

• an investment banker from Lehman Brothers who saw "Kelsey and Keely together" and later saw "Aria and Skyler at the same time"
• an investment banker at JP Morgan Securities who "loves Brooke" and spent $41,600
• an investment banker at Goldman Sachs who "only wanted all-American girls" and spent $27,000
• a managing director from Merrill Lynch who saw "Lana" using the name "Nataly"
• a managing director from Deutsche Bank "who called about seeing Nataly again"

Oh yeah... I guess these "corporate expenses" are very likely getting covered by "US" now.

"Some of these guys, I was invoicing on corporate credit cards," she said. "I was writing up monthly bills for computer consulting, construction expenses, all of these things, I was invoicing them monthly so they could get it by their accountants," Davis said.

C'mon an' say it with me: "FRAUD"

Of course, Kristen Davis was prosecuted, jailed and fined for her part... As for the nearly 10,000 high powered clients committing fraud to cover up their misdemeanor crimes, making these crimes a felony? Typically, the men remain untouched by these scandals.

How do you feel about bailing these people out?

Note to ABC news: We want names! All 10,000 of them.

Note to the White House Dress Code Police:

The Emperor Wears No Clothes...

More feigned outrage from the fake conservative side of the aisle.

One day after President Bush's former Chief of Staff Andrew Card blasted President Obama for breaking the Bush dress code, which reportedly required that a jacket be worn by anyone entering the Oval Office, we've unearthed a photo of, well, a jacketless President Bush in the Oval Office.

We have had our laugh... The GOP talking-pointy-heads can go back to getting Cheetos' crumbs on their PJs in their mama's basement now.

Ginsburg Hospitalized for Cancer...

NY Times has it...

The court announcement said the cancer is apparently in the early stages.

In 1999, Ginsburg had surgery for colon cancer and had chemotherapy and radiation treatment. The only woman on the court, she has been a justice since 1993.

The pancreatic cancer was discovered during a routine, annual exam late last month at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

DeLauro and Emanuel Involved in a Scandalous Affair?

I doubt it. And NO! Not that kind of affair. Gawker says that they are sharing a single dwelling in Washington, something that is very common among legislators trying to save a few bucks.

He's the cheapskate of staff. Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama's right-hand man, lives in a basement apartment on Capitol Hill rented to him by Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro. Just one problem: He's not allowed to live there.

That's what private investigator Joseph Culligan discovered after asking questions of D.C. officials. A zoning administrator responded to Culligan's inquiry and told him that DeLauro's house at 816 E. Capitol St. NE was listed as a single-family dwelling, and as such, could not be rented out.

She rents a place and they share it. I am trying to figure out what the real scandal is? Empty space in newspapers and on Blogs that need to be filled?

Get back to me with pictures of them messing around in a hot tub together with some Playboy bunnies while some Chippendale guys are swinging from the chandeliers butt naked with their asses painted candy apple red and pissing pissing on the crowd. Then you might have have a real scandal.

Anyways... Emanuel is looking for new DC digs already.

I gotta say that I do find it interesting that one of the more lefty leaning members of the Democratic party, Rosa Delauro, and the brass knuckles more conservative type politician, Rahm Emanuel, are able to accomplish the feat of co-existance under the same roof without some kind of nuclear dust up? Sounds like "fly on the wall" type fun.

Republican strategy summed up...

Republicans are crapping in one hand and wishing in the other. Over here on the reality side, we really want you Republicans to get back to us on which hand fills up first?

Nevermind... You still don't get it. Obviously, you never did.

Here is an interesting post on soldiers, suicide and some health care issues that is well worth the read. The post is not all doom and gloom as The Political Cat also offers some humor to lighten up your day.