Monday, September 17, 2012

New movie on the masses' mindless conformity; more bizarre tax and govt news

Somebody's made a documentary on the capacity of ameriKans (and no doubt sheeple in other countries too) to fall prey to any authority figure, even an obviously fake or evil one! Warning: Generation-X hosts and corresponding language.

http://www.brasschecktv.com/videos/law-enforcement-corruption--abuse-1/a-police-state-invites-this-kind-of-abuse.html
At least 1 out of 3 comply with authority mindlessly

As the commentators point out, the new research resembles the famous 1960s Milgram Experiments in which people showed great willingness to torture each other if ordered to by a properly white-coated medical guru. 1984.... Animal Farm.... and, I think, the absurdist play The Bald Soprano show the same things from a creative-writing stance. 


..........Now for some purely fun stuff. I've been urging all mature adults to become regular checkers of newsoftheweird.com. It's unofficially a frivolous site for entertainment purposes, but you can learn a lot from it about..... well, about most any subject over time. Warning: this is the real, unrehearsed human race. Not for the faint of heart!

In August, an abbot at the Wat Phra Dhammakaya Buddhist temple in Bangkok, Thailand, reported that Steve Jobs is doing well now as a "mid-level angel." He was reincarnated as "a half-Witthayathorn, half-Yak," which the Bangkok Post took to mean that Jobs continues to be a "giant" and a seeker of scientific knowledge and apparently resides in a "parallel universe" near his former office in Cupertino, Calif. [Bangkok Post via CNBC, 8-24-2012]

Finally responding to defense lawyers, the U.S. Department of Justice acknowledged that it has been trying to keep certain North Carolina inmates locked up even though judges had declared them legally innocent. About 60 prisoners, according to a June USA Today investigation, were victims of an incorrect interpretation of federal gun-possession law supposedly rectified by a May 2011 U.S. Court of Appeals decision, but the Justice Department had continued to demand holds, for 12 months, arguing that somehow it still needed time to consider the men's records. (Some of the inmates are serving time for multiple counts and would only be eligible for sentence reductions.) In August, the department, sportingly, said it would stop opposing release of the men who had been ruled innocent more than a year earlier. [USA Today, 8-14-2012, 6-14-2012]

Are We Safe? In August, Daniel Castillo'a Jet Ski broke down in New York City's Jamaica Bay, forcing him to swim to the nearest shore -- at JFK International Airport. As Castillo roamed the grounds, he somehow failed to disturb the airport's $100 million, state-of-the-art Perimeter Intrusion Detection System of cameras and motion sensors, stumbling into the Delta terminal before an employee noticed him. This happened two weeks after the now-notorious "peace" protest of nun Megan Rice, 82, and two colleagues, who cut through fences at the Oak Ridge (Tenn.) nuclear reservation's Y-12 facility that houses more than 100 tons of highly enriched uranium. They braved numerous (though apparently unmonitored or malfunctioning) alarms and sensors for up to two hours before a lone guard stopped them. [ABC News via Yahoo News, 8-13-2012; New York Times, 8-8-2012]

The Treasury Department's inspector general reported in August that the IRS doled out more than $5 billion in fraudulent income tax returns in 2011 (owing to its mission to provide refunds promptly without first vetting the claims). The agency "refunded" $3.3 million to a single address in Lansing, Mich. (supposedly the home of 2,137 different tax filers) and nearly $4 million to three Florida addresses (518 to one in Tampa, 741 to one in Belle Glade, and 703 to a post office box in Orlando). In all, refunds were claimed by, among others, 105,000 dead people. [Associated Press via Washington Post, 8-2-2012; South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 8-6-2012]

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