Working hard?

Working hard? Unlike municipalities, you may be thinking about living within some quotient of accounts recieveable. All businesses must think about balancing what is earned against what is spent on costs. Yet value extraction is a threat to business. Now, witness value extraction as Hispanic family taxi businesses in Suffolk county are fined by Nassau officials for operating ground transportation services across Suffolk County lines. These legitimate businesses maintain Suffolk County Brick and Mortar so as to receive legal service, they consequently pay Suffolk County property taxes under commercial property zoning regulations in Suffolk County. Are Nassau County Operators required to conform to Suffolk County Taxi Regulations? Interstate truckers have always been aware that there is an apportioned road tax that heavy commercial vehicles must pay, assessed through the amount of fuel burned over distance traveled in a given state while hauling goods. This tax ostensibly helps pay for damage on principal highways where these heavy trucks operate. Such businesses are also taxed corporately at state and federal levels. Taxis are not heavy commercial vehicles however. Taxis use parkways where traffic and time permits. Some years ago Nassau County taxi cabs were impounded for operating ground conveyance without NYC medallions in New York City limits (namely Laguardia and JFK airports). When this occurred the blindsided Nassau County operators (who maintained Brick and Mortar for legal service in Nassau County) sought a legal remedy in the courts. Because of the monetary damage incurred (fines and impoundings in NYC) by these Nassau Operators (NOs) at that time a stop gap method of transporting inter county fares (customers) was devised. NOs stopped the impounding and fining of their inter-county commerce by operating D.O.T. Regulated heavy vans across county lines where the borders were Nassau County and New York City. The New York City TLC or taxi and limousine commission was forced to leave those intrastate operated vans alone as they are regulated by the New York State Department of Transportation. Ultimately, an agreement was hammered out in which NYC taxis doing business in Nassau County are required to buy a Nassau County sticker showing they have paid Nassau County tax. Failure to display a current sticker will get the NYC taxi or limo fined and impounded should they be found doing business in Nassau County without a sticker. Having their own medallion is as far as Nassau County Operators have to go, provided drivers maintain a trip sheet of all assigned work (including NYC pick ups and drop offs.) Additionally, Nassau County operators are forbidden to pick up flags (hails from the side walk) when operating in NYC. Nassau County also has no soliciting laws to stop harassment of patrons in it's own communities. If you are licensed to pick up in a specific area this rule is waivered. Now, the largely Hispanic Suffolk operators face a similar application of Nassau County enforcement. As a patron of the largely Hispanic taxi operators in both Suffolk County and Nassau County, such bureaucratic inter-county Municipal tax requirements between non-New York City jurisdictions seems arbitrary, misplaced and somewhat less than congenial. Nassau TLC now impounds and fines operators licensed in counties (Suffolk) other than it's own for both pick ups and drop offs. While such conduct may pass the corporate municipal sniff test, it illustrates how corporations and municipalities manipulate citizens prerogatives and the larger legal question of jurisdiction over the citizens right to travel and the workers right to contract so as to fulfill this right under corporate rather than Constitutional jurisdiction. Do corporations have a conflict of interest with the Constitution where citizens rights to travel are concerned? It seems the municipalities do.

Squared Away gate keeper.

My experience in the military comprises one full term of enlistment as a non-commissioned airman, as well as time spent in the New Jersey Air National Guard during the Lebanon crisis as a result of the  U.S. Marine Barracks Bombing there.

The recent carnage at Fort Hood is truly an unbearable sorrow. My thoughts and condolences go out to the victims and the bereaved. 

My feeling is that when a mission fails, senior ranking personnel  (in this case Base commander on down) has failed to properly ascertain the  readiness of it's subordinate ranks and failed to maintain the process and procedures which address the mission objectives.

This principal never changes no matter how high up the command chain it is realized. The Oath of office (always part of the contract as such), Time in  RANK + credential  + any special and on the job training is observed to comprise the skill set of command at any part in the chain of command. In the possible event that some part of the rank is broken or incapacitated, it is filled in promotions with the best qualified personnel on hand.  In the field promotion comes with subsequent training to hold the position. No one in the service skips the contract and oath.

In the command structure,  the top of each installation is the base commander. Such a command is usually reserved for academy graduates, I believe. That person is accountable for mission success or failure on that base. There are technical orders for procedures which have been tailored to the respective mission(s) at hand. These orders must be followed to preserve the integrity of said mission. When they are not followed process fails to address mission objectives and the mission fails.

Any competent review (standard evaluation from HQ)  of the mission status at Fort Hood will proceed to examine the facts on that basis.

The event in question: It looks like the person alleged to have committed the shooting assaults and murders at Fort Hood was some sort of squared away gate keeper. (Gate keeper: A person in a position of authority and trust who is put there to do a job, but who only gives the appearances of manning the position.)  He was at least 2 promotions away from a stint as base commander. As such, He held a position in the chain of command in a manner that was less than the prescribed duty. His web transgressions, moral and attempts to remove himself from duty roster indicate his readiness for duty and competence at his post were not foremost in his mind. He was not a Chaplin.  According to the news in print, He was a military trained psychiatrist, a MD who could prescribe psychotropic drugs and run a clinical practice.

He gave away his things before he went on the rogue killing mission he orchestrated. FBI and BATF agents who went to his home after he was shot, found little left there to indicate the cause of his homicidal rampage. We are told the rogue attacker  saw to it there was little left there beforehand. The alleged shooter seems like a really squared away gate keeper in this regard.

While it is certainly true that a narrowing of options is one of the hallmarks of mental illness, this individual never resigned his commission or raised doubts about his fitness to serve within the capacity he held in the minds of his superiors. Fact is he had been promoted to Major and was going to be shipped into battle.  Not only is resigning always an option,  he seemed perfectly at home in the acts of violating every cannon of ethics and tenet of the profession (any) medical practitioners would  have had a name for.

You can get out of the service in less than 2 weeks if you really want to get out. I don't have sympathy for the alleged shooter. He could have refused to man  his post. He could have signed papers that he was experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs such as Lysergic Acid Diethylamide.  They would have kicked his butt out of the military faster than Comet Haley travels in a day. He would have had to pay back the bill for his training though, and been barred from any similar work for life. But, he could have REALLY been "the worlds smartest Garbage man" and not done the harm that he did!  If at trial it is found that he did this, IT is treason. As he has sworn fidelity to The Constitution of the United States and has acknowledged the President is his commander in chief, he has acted (the shooter) as the enemy of the United States.

This would make him more of a home styled Manchurian Candidate. A sleeper agent of chaos and horrible  mayhem.

How About a Block Party?

I block people from responding to my postings if they demonstrate they do not understand that steel frame buildings can not collapse when torched by fancy kerosene fires (jet fuel). Kerosene can't melt steel. That's why kerosene heaters aren't made of plastic or wood, or some fool's b.s.! Load bearing Steel framing in a steel frame building must be cut to remove it. You can use Oxyacetylene torches or Lasers (too slow) or explosives, or cutter charges, but you must cut the steel, or blow it up to remove it.
What about resonance? We've all seen the videos of bridges collapsing when the wind itself created resonance in the structure that tore it apart. Could such a wind resonance tear down the world trade center towers once they were opened up to the wind by plane strikes, since it has torn down bridges open to the wind? Building 7 was never hit by a plane and it fell any way. Also, there are plenty of bridges and buildings still standing which haven't succumbed to wind resonance one might notice.
Believers in the hypothesis that this type of building can collapse into it's own foot print with no credible diminution of the load bearing capacities in supportive framing on the floors beneath the points of an airplane strike is part of the end meme "walls of Jericho" screed in the biblical fables. Zealots who rest their mentalities on such castles made of sand internalized these fables during mitigating circumstance of their socialization- when they were raised! As a result, they will carp and gather like zombies savoring the flesh (your time and effort) of any one who attempts to show them their moribund poorly concealed biblical foundation has crumbled to dust beneath a veneer of sociability and credential, even as they seek to relive that end meme again and again. Go to their pages and Block them as I have! Don't honor their insane babbling, insults and calumny with rational counsel. Block them and their pejorative drama! This act of omission will conserve your energy for cogent rational endeavor. Providing free therapy for the insane is never free. The insane are institutionalized at great cost, so they can not harm themselves and others.

U.S. Unemployment graphics from Reuters

Please click on  the following hot link to view the page:
US_UNEMPL1009.gif (GIF Image, 550x731 pixels) - Scaled (66%)

The Movie: Surrogates

I enjoyed the plot detail. However, like "The Matrix',  "Aeon Flux", "The Day the Earth Stood Still",  "Equilibrium", "Forbidden Planet", "Terminator" and many other Science Fiction movies you know these things always end with the destruction of dystopia causing technology gone horribly wrong. These are different than movies like "Alien" or "Predator"  and "AVP" in the sense that in the latter type it is a malevolent life form being eliminated to restore balance among humanity, not a technology. In the movies "Forbidden Planet" "The Matrix", "The Golden Compass" and  "Equilibrium" both boxes would be checked. The point of "Surrogates" seems to be that while real technological surrogates (androids networked to our brains with hardware, firmware and software) could provide a kind of second life in real life for society's handicapped and physically challenged members when they needed it (to go to places physically the challenged found no access), it would ultimately be abused by everybody just like the prescription anti-anxiety / anti-pain medications we're familiar with in real life. Here abuse happens because those seeking fantasy once enabled would soon choose  to never leave their apartments sober and as themselves. To reclaim the human condition for humanity, the hero ( Bruce Willis) must unplug real people from the surrogate network. (I thought that was  Morpheus's job.) So working your way to responsibility and adulthood in this flick would  not guarantee you could do what you wanted with your life because someone else would judge the efficacy of your paradigms and adjust the game accordingly. Any way you splice it, that's a lot of lines of code to corrupt, edit, or debug. Seems that for  something with that much effort and money behind it there would be better safeguards and the location of the mainframe would not allow access to the general population (like in "Aeon Flux",  "Resident Evil" and The Matrix). Yet, TV still exists here and there while our own World Trade center complex faced premature demolition in 2001.
Basing an entire society on surrogate activity as a primary living circumstance is where this screen play becomes utter fantasy,  although like Wall Street trading, it would seem to be one of the ultimate RPGs (Role Playing Games) this life could offer.

Philanthropy is an act of volition, not coersion.

The idea of philanthropy is a prerogative you may wield if you have the means and the inclination. It is not the government's job to extract charity or sacrifice from you by means of force, even if they are democratic or arbitrary about it.

The laws are not as plain.

The constitution says representation and income tax shall be apportioned, not collected according non-apportionment (democracy or political whim or statist mandate or bank fiat).

Apportionment means Congress is supposed to take a census, set up a budget and divide it equally amongst the inhabitants (excluding slaves taxed as 3/5 of a person and Indians not taxed as they are of foreign nations). The 13th amendment abolished slavery.
The 14th amendment gave free non-inhabitants the right to attain citizenship under residency, and the right to due process under the law although not the same dejure status of the FREE BORN OF STATES.
15th amendment gave voting rights to resident citizens which could no longer be withheld due to race, color or previous conditions of servitude.(Women were excluded from sufferage till 19th amendment).

The 16th amendment said "Congress shall have the power to tax all incomes without regards to the origin of the income." It is assessed in a non-apportioned manner on residents (everybody treated as a resident for tax purposes) by jurisdiction and contract where they either never were free born of one of the states or have submitted knowing and intelligent waivers to such inhabitant status (such as by agreeing under residency rules to: "abide by all the rules of the bank" when getting a bank account or receiving some benefit under residency or by having their mail sent to their "residence" instead of a post office box). Prima Fascia proof of residency along with contract to a bank under residency rules places one under the 16th amendment arrangement for non-apportioned tax obligations...... in MY VIEW.

In law, excluding some influence of contract or jurisdiction or both, the words income and wage are separate with separate meanings and so are the words resident (debtor- owing their citizenship to 14th amendment, an act of Congress) and inhabitant (creditor, someone to whom a debt is owed- a peer of any in political power who took such a vocation by volition- to serve the people as representatives.)

Is China getting ahead of the curve in mental health?

Will trends practiced there be perfected and exported?

www.pbs.org
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/july-dec09/china_09-11.html

Search China, mental health. in the pbs.org search field.

The transcript (Originally Aired: September 11, 2009} and audio download of this video which showed the disturbing trend to diagnosis many of the political dissidents in china as psychotic is still available if you go to pbs.org and search the topic "China Mental Health".