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AARON SWARTZ: WHaT KiND oF a WoRLD?
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According to Reuters, tomorrow, JP Morgan's Board will consider releasing an internal report that faults CEO Jamie Dimon's oversight of a division that lost more than $6.2 billion in botched trades.
The office of the Comptroller of Currency may wrist slap the Bank as early as today for lax anti-money laundering controls.
Separately, JP Morgan agreed in a deal announced last week to pay $2 billion on top of $5.29 billion assessed last year, to settle mortgage abuse charges.
A few more stinky bad apples, right Jamie?
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As is usual in today's Klepto-Crony-Fraudocratic-Ponzi-Plutopian world, no criminal charges are contemplated and the swindling CEO midget at the top of JP Madoff's wonderful magnificent perpetually ponzi klepto crony pyramid has absolutely nothing to be worried about with regard to the safety and security of his fat assed TBTF throne of fraud.
What kind of a world is this you ought justifiable ask?
HERE IS WHAT KIND OF A WORLD...
"For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House -- and where even those brought to "justice" never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled "felons."
In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a "felon." For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million-dollar trial in April -- his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge.
And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it."
Lawrence Lessig
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Swartz was ahead of his time
A victim cut-down in his prime
His criminal deed
To help those in need?
I no longer understand "crime"
The Limerick King
R.I.P. Aaron Swartz...
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/us/keith-ratliff-gun-enthusiast-of-fps...
Good coverage this a.m. on Democracy Now radio program. When will these people start to see Obysmal for the facsist corporate criminal he is? One wealthy liberal college prof I know referred to Obysmal as "not perfect" in his Christmas card. You cannot have a reasonable discussion with people like this. Willful ignorance and a steadfast refusal of the truth is alive and well in academia. Like the passive anti semiticism that allowed the slaughter of Jews these folks are greasing the skids into tyranny...........
When will these people start to see Obysmal for the facsist corporate criminal he is?...
Not until we get another Kent State imo. The other funny thing most people seen to forget is it was the far right that intitiated the gun control movement back when the black panthers showed up at a California county courthouse packing back in the 60s.
... these folks are greasing the skids into tyranny...........
I think the tyranny has always been there. It is just more visible today than it was when we got our information through the Pony Express.
'Obysmal'.... Good one pine marten!
Well, well, well, where's our Commander in Chief now with one of his perfunctory and admonishing speeches about "how we'll be judged as a society" for failing Mr. Swartz? Oh, that's right, Mr. Swartz was trying to do an honorable and noble deed by making available to all of us, free of charge, published academic journals that would enrich and broaden our lives. I can sure see the crime in that (facetious). All those published papers might have encouraged a more informed public. And we all know what a well informed public can do? Rise up and demand social justice!
Terrorizing and threatening Mr. Swartz to the point that he chose suicide as his only option, that is murder. And while this won't bring Mr. Swartz back, nor will it soothe or quell the unimaginable grief surrounding his death, I hope like hell someone close enough to Mr. Swartz will file murder charges against any and/or all of the people responsible for harassing and bullying him.
I didn't know much about Aaron Swartz before reading Glenn Greenwald's article eulogizing him (read first link below). He is a hero; the type of man whose courageous behavior we could all do right by through emulating.
How many more martyrs like Aaron do there have to be before people face the reality of how far the criminal element running this country and the world are willing to go to maintain their grip on power? These people are the sickest monsters the human race can produce. It's time to call them out in unison so they know that no one is buying their propaganda anymore. The truth is it is THEY who hate US for our freedom. The freedom to communicate that is. They demand total control of information. That's why they're persecuting Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Jeremy Hammond, a leading member of the hacker group Anonymous (listen to second link below).
To his family and friends, my sincere condolences. I'm ashamed of our Dept. of Justice.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/12/aaron-swartz-heroism-suicide1
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/12/27/the_other_bradley_manning_jeremy_hammond
Scwartz was a 'useful idiot', as the marxist vanguard, Bolshevist diaspora calls them. The episode should be a lesson to the 65,450,000 other useful idiots inhabiting this territory.
Sounds like you have your head shoved up your SOPA.
While you're a talented artist, William - that doesn't mean that you know the first thing about philosophy or marxist ideology.
The guy was a useful idiot and he paid the price for it. Let that be a lesson to the rest of you who may consider yourself "progressive". The neo-Bolsheviks and their marxist vanguard will dispose of you at the first opportunity they have.
Harbour no illusions.
All I know about philosophy is that it is one of the degrees hanging on my wall, not that that means much in and of itself.
I don't mean to disrespect you in particular, but having lived and worked as a good soldier of capitalism in several former communist countries on and off during the past 20 years I consider myself to be something of a hands-on expert on the subject of real world Marxism, how it works in practice and how it fucks up people's lives.
Frankly, after seeing everything I have, and i have seen plenty, I am now very tired of listening to old worn out ideological diatribes about collectivism versus capitalism from self styled experts such as yourself.
Sorry, I am not impressed.
Your entire lingo is laced with marxist terms and premises. Let me try to straighten this out, starting with a point from Karl Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies", Volume I (The Spell of Plato):
Collectivism is opposed by individualism
Altruism is opposed by egoism
Four possibilities - not two. For whatever reason, collectivists claim that altruism and collectivism somehow magically materialize together. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth - as Hayek pointed on in Chapter 10 (Why the Worst Get on Top) of "The Road to Serfdom".
While you may be tired of listening to the diatribes, there is no escaping the perennial battle that the primitive superstitions of collectivisism wage upon the morality, liberty, and prosperity of Western civilization.
f. bastiat your a right f. ing. bastiat and i would individually love to lace your asstiat with my size 11 ( feet not inches which i know you'd prefer ). OBNOX
When I am standing at the street corner should I wait for the green light like everyone else, or should I cross at my own peril? What is the peril, the ticket or the cars? Should I move to Timuktu, Chiang Mai or Ulan Bator?
Everyone will have their own answer.
We can discuss this question for hours, days and months.
Bottom line, if you choose to live in a society and abide by one or all of its rules, someone is always happy to inform you where you are in the spectrum.
At some point you have to divest yourself of the right/left meme.
Both the leftist Democrats and right wing Republicans passed N.D.A.A., as well as the bailouts.
Sure, "Marxists" love central control and suppression of information and dissent - but so apparently do the supposed "conservatives" of the G.O.P. and the right wing.
I have not seen Boehner nor any of the other Republicrats speak against Drones in our skies, seek to put Corzine in prison, or rescind N.D.A.A., or end the slaughter of our kids in the Middle East to support Israel, Oil, and Poppy Fields.
Mammon lusters and megalomaniacs are all of the same stripe; they adopt ideologues and ideologies to bait one-dimensional thinkers and the passions of the naive youth.
Labels serve to rally the masses for or against sides, and to allow the obfuscation necessary to erode liberty in the name of safety and/or security.
Whatever Swartz was or wasn't politically is moot; he was trying to gain freedom of information, transparency, and open discourse; hardly Marxist or Communist views or tactics.
There is collectivism and there is individualism. There is savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Those things exist, whether you attempt to divest yourself from them or not.
Agreed.
I don't see how Aaron Swartz trying to keep the Internet free, and the results of billions of taxpayer dollars spent on research that is secreted away in overpriced journals open to the public that paid for them is collectivism.
Drop the ideology for one minute and be thankful that he was trying to support part of your and my belief in individualism.
Nothing is free. That's the problem.
Aaron Swartz had no logical, lawful, or moral motivation to attempt to impose his notions of "free" upon everyone else.
For example - I have no right to steal William's content, just because I proclaim that stealing it and giving it away is somehow in the best interest of "society" as I conjure it up to be.
Positivism (progressivism) is a recipe for armed conflict. Liberty, privacy, and respect for the property of others are the keys to peace and prosperity.
Yes, but WB7 isn't funded by a taxpayer supported research university.
Court documents are records of courts supported, and purportedly established for protection of, taxpayers.
You are confounding individual copyrights and privacy with public records and information.
I certainly agree that maximum transparency, with some national security exceptions, should be the norm for all institutions that are funded by taxpayers - absolutely.
Please flesh out your accusation of "useful idiot" a bit. A prima facie look at the situation tends to beg the question, if he was so useful, why was he hounded to death?
Was he not a self-proclaimed "progressive" who voted for the Hawaiian Allende not once but twice? And then he complains about the marxist vanguard disposing of him. How foolish, ignorant, or combination of both, can one individual possibly be?
Sad but true. I bet you $10 FR notes that he, his family and all his friends (real and virtual) would still vote for you know who even as his goons were kicking the chair from under Swartz feet in his apartment.
Sad. You would think by 2012 he would have learned something.
Of course they would. That's what we mean by the term "useful idiot".
If information is not free, that makes living on this planet a little less worth it, if worth anything at all. Sentience = responsibility. Information = freedom. Discretion = strength. Discretion is also one of those things way misunderstood. It's not what you do that makes you excellent - it's what you don't do...
It's pathetic that I've hung out with several female cats that are more feminine than most human females I know (if you don't get what that means and can't comprehend it beyond the superficial layer of words strung together, don't bother putting it down... no, not you in particular WB - the subjective you), and most dogs show more loyalty than most men I know.
Weird fucking times... but hey, it's always been about control. Not necessarily power, but always control.
Morning thoughts from Skateboarder. Now I go to work.
Freedom is minimized coercion. It really doesn't have anthing to do with information per se. Silly notions and cliches like the claim that "information is freedom", somehow magically, are part of the reason that so many people are so confused.
Didn't Swartz vote for the Hawaiian Allende twice? And then he complains about the marxist vanguard disposing of him.
What a fool. Or, as Lenin would have described him - a useful idiot.
Aaron Swartz was aggressively prosecuted and threatened with a massive 35 year prison sentence by federal prosecutors for allegedly downloading millions of articles, essays and scholarly works from MIT's databases, an act that was done not for money or malice, but to promote the critical truth that no society can be saved from the oligarchs and plutocrats, who core purpose for waking each morning is the desire to concentrate their power & resources while slinking in the shadows (and not be exposed to the light of day), while Jon Corzine walks as a free man, not even threatened with prosecution, while entities such as Goldman Sachs & TBTF banks pay relatively trivial fines (that represent a small % of ill gotten gains that they reaped) for far greater sins and crimes, and while murderous tyrants in African nations are left free to systematically rape and kill innocent humans (as they have been free to do for decades, while the west wages trillion dollar warfare in the "other" places that have deep reserves of oil and/or are systemically important in the never-ending saga of Arab/Israeli tension).
Shame on the DoJ, shame on MIT (not just for this, but for being a co-opted and corrupted arm of the U.S. Government, the DoD/Pentagon/NSA in particular, rather than the bastion of academic progress and excellence it promotes itself as), and shame on all of academia for either following in the footsteps of MIT (that would be you, Yale, Harvard, Standord, et al.) or for their deafening silence on the original sin of MIT.
We are seeing President Esienhower famous warning about the "military-industrial complex" played out before our very eyes.
The guy was a useful idiot. When he was involved with the Occupy domestic insurrection, the Obama regime embraced him as it was attempting to fulfill the marxist prophecy of the magical overthrow of "capitalism".
You see, the marxist vanguard disposes of useful idiots. Don't say you've not been warned.
And good for you for calling bullshit on MIT.
Harvard Soviets one and all.
The Guardian dearly loves the one. I wonder how many of Aaron's family and friends voted for the one. The kid was suicide-d. I did not care much for Bush but Clinton and Totus seem to suicide a lot of people.
Other recent victims are the AR builder in the NW and a youtube blogger guy NE of Atlanta. Those were less than 2 weeks ago.
Maybe all these little f***s with their iPads, Twitter, FraudBook, et al will wake up. RIP Aaron.
William, the people at MIT that started the shitball rolling should get some of your attention. Just a suggestion!
Love the Hitler Mickey Mouse clip!
Is it Cynthia?? Such terrific comments.
Has Noam Chomsky weighed in on this yet??
Aaron Swartz was pushed to suicide by the Obama administration's incredibly aggressive persecution for his actions against JSTOR. His beef with JSTOR was that they were a gatekeeper stopping the dissemination of ideas in academia, they charge large fees to the public which stop people getting access to academic papers but pay NOTHING to the Authors in most cases. This is why there is now a movement in academia to boycott JSTOR.
Noam Chomsky addressed many of the issues here, particularly the core, that Obama according to a black women's group "has no moral center" and on many issues has been worse than both Bush administrations.
Chomsky: The responsibility of privilege
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101791735
MIT is one of the universities heavily tied to Big Military from what I found out. Swartz being a hero in trying to spread the education wealth unlike Obama and the feckless Democrats pretending to "spread the wealth" and then calling people making 400k a year "middle class", I could see how the monied and military elites would hate people who tried to help make it easier for people to properly manage the information they come across on the Internet. The death of Swartz is another reason this administration deserves to be impeached and convicted.
*DINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDING*
MIT, Darpa(.mil) and Lincoln Laboratory
RIP Aaron.
I think Mickey comes into public domain soon. Be careful of the language in the next copyright extension Disney buys. It could revert many works now in public domain into private ownership.
If you told Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Andrew Jackson that a corporation could eseentially mint and print it's own currency on American soil, like Disney Dollars, they would have had a stroke.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_dollar
Certainly, financial coercion is the primary weapon of coercion wielded against the people and the several states by the central government.
We suffer under a system of "justice" that is measurably worse than that under King George III that was explained in detail by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.
Most "modern" folk seem not to notice the incremental destruction of true justice, likely the result of the very successful brainwashing program, *Crime Wave Fear Factor*.
The pressure that the DOJ placed on Aaron Swartz is nothing short of torture. Those with intimate experience with the criminal justice system (either as a defendant or in close proximity to a defendant) in this country know how Aaron saw zero hope of justice; saw no way to avoid the inevitable result of the twisted "due process" applied to him-decades wasting away in our cruel prisons, but to voluntarily depart this evil-soaked existence.
The state of justice in this country is not unlike the justice meted out under the Spanish Inquisition, and is often every bit as brutal.
A true justice system seeks truth and a just result and operates in a fair manner. "Our" current "system" seeks to utterly destroy and/or hammer the target (the defendant) into submission and gain convictions by whatever expedient means it can get away with...
It is a disgrace.
More disgraceful is our toleration of it. Especially when we still have the fairly easy-and peaceful-means of correction-jury duty at the Trial as well as Grand Jury level.
The "law" and the "judicial system" that administers it is the primary means of the destruction of all that is was great about this country.
Now, take a close look at what Aaron Swartz was about, and see that he was indeed an "enemy of the state" who had to be destroyed...because he was a serious threat to "our" government..."our" out-of-control evil government...
This is so disgusting, in so many ways.
I cannot see any singular issue more critical than...justice.
All that is wrong in this country revolves around justice, either directly or indirectly.
Justice forms the bedrock underlying any civilization worthy as being labeled as such.
Our bedrock is near 100% quicksand.
The time is short (the current rush to disarm us may be the last alarm...), time to shove aside materialism, the stacking and piling up of wealth, and the notion that we need to be constantly entertained...or all will be lost.
Aaron saw zero hope of justice; saw no way to avoid the inevitable result of the twisted "due process" applied to him-decades wasting away in our cruel prisons, but to voluntarily depart this evil-soaked existence.
So - Aaron saw this after he broke the law, but he didn't see it before he broke the law? Your quote could read: Aaron saw no way to avoid the inevitable result of the twisted "due process" applied to him ... other than to refrain from breaking the law. That would have saved his hide with less mess.
I agree that he was fighting for a good and right issue. I just think he could have gone about it in a "better" way. It is reported that Aaron suffered from serious bouts of depression (the bright ones can see better than most the injustice in the world). Therefore, I hesitate to accept that he took leave of this world only to escape jail time. To me, it makes just as much sense to think he had decided it was time to end his life, so he engaged in one last grand gesture to benefit his fellow man before he left.
Below is my hommage to Aaron from another thread at ZH. RIP Aaron Swartz.
Starry, starry night.
Paint your palette blue and grey,
Look out on a summer's day,
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.
Shadows on the hills,
Sketch the trees and the daffodils,
Catch the breeze and the winter chills,
In colors on the snowy linen land.
For they could not love you,
But still your love was true.
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night,
You took your life, as lovers often do.
But I could have told you, [Aaron],
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you.
Now I think I know what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they're not listening still.
Perhaps they never will... Don McLean
Possibly my favorite motivational poster styled one yet this year. Hells yeah, Will - hit it right on the head.
I just read that the father is livid with MIT, as he is one of their computer honcho's. Looks like MIT is going to take the hit on this one, with a possible civil suit!
I am suprised that the MSM is giving it any attention, but has got some real coverage in todays news.
Jamie with the Madoff hairdo is great!
More , more , more!
Sadly, civil suit against MIT would go to corrupt US judges working for the US government and oligarch families, approving torture and murder and all other civil rights violations and US gov operations.
Here is an article specifically charging that the recent death of 26-year-old hacker and Reddit co-founder, Aaron Swartz, under legal persecution by the US In-'Justice' Department, was a murder, not a self-hanging ... Part of a US programme against the computer dissidents
Piece on an Irish often-bashed 'conspiracy' site, but makes sense ... how many young people would really *choose* a slow death by strangulation hanging, even if they were suicidal? ... Such a murder apparently *legal* under US law if Obama ordered it
'Obama Regime Orders Computer Genius Aaron Swartz Suicided'
http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1646.htm
And this article with the same idea, pointing out that the fake suicide hangings are a typical modus of the American oligarch luciferian types
'Who Killed Aaron Swartz'
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/01/13/who-killed-aaron-swartz/
Is there any doubt that Mr. Schwartz voted for the Hawaiian Allende's regime in 2008 and in 2012? For better or worse, the guy is perhaps the best recent example of the "useful idiot" phenomenon.
veteranstoday is absolute steaming horse shit. Linking to them is a one-line IQ test fail.
Whether Swartz was killed by somebody directly or killed by the prospect of spending years in prison for nothing, doesn't matter. They killed him either way.
I want to see Ortiz and both prosecutors in prison, for at least the minimum offer they gave Aaron.
Fuck these nazis.