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High pressure concrete-filled blast doors:

The door is constructed with an envelope of 3/16 inch steel plate - but after you hang it in place, you fill it with concrete - no forms necessary - the skins are in place. This construction method keeps the door relatively light for installation - and once it is filled with cured concrete, it has a lot of dense mass between you and whatever fallout is outside your shelter. It also helps to prevent anyone from using a cutting torch to gain access through the door because concrete doesn't "burn."

The Free Market Solution

A city in California is now charging people $300 per call for 911 access.:

Tracy residents will now have to pay every time they call 9-1-1 for a medical emergency.

But there are a couple of options. Residents can pay a $48 voluntary fee for the year which allows them to call 9-1-1 as many times as necessary.

Or, there's the option of not signing up for the annual fee. Instead, they will be charged $300 if they make a call for help.

"A $300 fee and you don't even want to be thinking about that when somebody is in need of assistance," said Tracy resident Greg Bidlack.

Residents will soon receive the form in the mail where they'll be able to make their selection. No date has been set for when the charges will go into effect.

This is of course the inevitable free-market Libertarian answer to the question: “Why should I let those politicians spend my hard-earned tax money on services that overwhelmingly benefit poor people?”

It's the "pay only for what you use" model. Well, congratulations, free-marketeers, now you can rest easy knowing that the homeless will now be truly dying on the streets instead of wasting your hard-earned income.

Political Myths We Live By

Here's an excellent itemization of the tacit assumptions that many people hold about our political situation, from Z Magazine:

It includes such very important points as

8. Public opinion is made by the public. (The Public Opinion Fallacy)

It isn't. It is made for the public by a process of selective filtering and re-framing on the part of the owners, managers and employed commentators of the corporate media. Corporate think tanks and PR machines also play important public opinion-forming roles, often behind the scenes. The important ideological and manipulative work of all these ‘pundits' is to keep public discourse within the tight parameters and limited concepts of allowed official discourse. The purpose is to manufacture consent for the decisions and policies of the ruling elites. There is no conspiracy involved here, it is a ‘natural' part of the system and works largely by cultural osmosis and conformity.

and

10. Economically, this is a Free Market Society. (The Free Market Fallacy)

There is no free market and never has been, even under the rule of the deregulating, neo-liberal state. A completely free market system would self-destruct in no time. Because it can, by definition, only care for its individual vested interests and not for the good of the whole system, capitalism needs constant saving from itself by the state. The capitalist state has always been there to massively support, gently oversee, subsidize and bail out the capitalist economy in countless ways, not only in times of crisis. Corporate and middle class welfare is actually its main game. The state helps capital privatise the profits and socialise the costs. It provides the physical infrastructure, educational development of the ‘human capital' and picks up the immense social, health and environmental costs of the latter's wrecking balls. All this happens whether the state is neo-liberal or social democratic (Keynesian) in nature.

Dennis Kucinich Answers Questions

Queenie's in trouble!

"We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts."

A very clear discussion of the current heath care plans

Healthcare Napkins:

Healthcare Napkins All

View more documents from Dan Roam.

Brazil TV host turned politician 'ordered killings to boost ratings'

This is could almost be the plot of a David Cronenberg film.

From The Guardian:

A Brazilian politician who fronts a popular television crime show is being investigated for allegedly ordering a series of executions in a bid to boost his ratings.

Wallace Souza, a former police officer who used his lunchtime television slot to rail against the violence sweeping the jungle city of Manaus, is suspected of commissioning at least five murders to prove his claim that the region is awash with violent crime.

"Manaus can no longer live with this wave of crime," Souza, 50, frequently told the audience of his daily show Canal Livre. "Nowadays everyone is killing."

In a 2008 speech at Manaus's local parliament, Souza boasted that Canal Livre enjoyed complete editorial freedom and was conducted with "journalistic responsibility".

But prosecutors in the remote Amazon city say the politician's actions went far beyond the call of journalistic duty, accusing Souza of links to drug trafficking, death squads and organised crime, and possessing illegal arms.

"Our investigations indicate that they went as far as creating facts," Thomaz Augusto Correa, the local police intelligence chief, told a Brazilian news channel. "Crimes were committed in order to create news for the group and for the programme."

How Different Groups Spend Their Day

See this excellent summary of different demographics' daily activities, presented in the style of those Histograph of History maps:

How Different Groups Spend Their Day

Who is that Pokemon?

FLAMING TETHERBALL

Back to the Future, part TWO

REGULATION VACATION CELEBRATION!

Quote of the day

One of the most famous of the Civil War balloons was made by the Confederacy of donated undergarments of the ladies of the South, all silk and the only source of silk the South had at the time. It was hoped that it would counter the shocking success of Union balloons which were providing airborne intelligence of opposing troop movements that was proving devastating. The southern patchwork balloon only flew once before it was captured by the Union, a disappointment and an afront for which General Longstreet claimed he never found it in his heart to forgive the Union.

(Lifting gases)

The End of Work

From Anxiety Culture:

Every technological advance implemented in industry effectively increases wealth - otherwise it wouldn’t be utilised. Wealth is piling up all around us. The technological revolution which brought this wealth should be seen as a social phenomenon – it was not created by any one individual or group; neither is it a creature solely of the marketplace – it rightly ‘belongs’ to everyone.

In a world of decreasing demand for human labour, the economic rewards derived from technology will need to be distributed to people in ways that have nothing to do with the amount of work, if any, they perform.

Big Brother: what's on your PC?

The U.S. and European governments are working behind closed doors to establish an international copyright treaty (ACTA, leaked here) that would create a global police force, answerable to no one, with the authority to seize and inspect any device, without recourse or the possibility of appeal.

What's more, this copyright treaty has now been classified in the "interest of national security".

What you are witnessing is a conspiracy perpetrated by global capitalists to cement their control, under the guise of protecting intellectual property.

Treaties between nations are effectively law, and when they can be negotiated in secret without any public debate, then democracy is completely subverted. The government has no mandate from the people to carry out laws drafted in this manner, and when they do, they are acting on behalf of the corporate oligarchy.

On the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the holders of capital

Rich People Don’t Create Wealth. They Manipulate It.:

The point is that both intellectuals and labourers are definitely more valuable than wealthy executives who only know how to increase their personal fortunes (which we perceive as “making the company successful”). We all know that the real success of a company is a consequence of innovators, good labour, and good marketing. In most cases the extremely wealthy don’t directly involve themselves with those tasks, but rather leave them up to hired experts.

Rich people skim wealth off the surface and manipulate their wealth, thus creating the illusion that they’re performing an important service. In truth a computer could do most of what they do; hire specialists to manage their companies and hire workers to perform labour. The wealthy just have what, superficially, appear to be complicated jobs because they’re always leveraging their existing capital to make more money. That’s not really a useful job - that’s just the manifestation of their own self interest, and a consequence of our willingness to allow this parasitic elite class to exist.

United States Economic Collapse Facing Its Weimar Moment

From The Market Oracle:

As a result of the failure of the right, the German people elected a moderately leftist government to lead the nation's rebuilding. It was named the Weimar Republic for the city in which the new post-imperial constitution was written. The new government was led by Friedrich Ebert, head of the German Socialist Party.

But the country's new parliamentary system had allowed dozens of parties to run, making it impossible for any one party to win an outright majority. Ebert's party had achieved the highest portion of votes, 38%, in the first post-War elections, held in January 1919. Ebert would have to govern by coalition.

It was at this time that the right wing made its crucial decision. Despite its shocking, naked failure over the prior decade, despite the horrific devastation it had wrought on the German people, despite the discrediting of everything they had purported to stand for, they would fight Ebert, his new government, and its plans for recovery. They would do everything they could to make sure that the new government failed.