Unmanned Drones to Patrol US Border

Why do I suddenly flash back to RoboCop and the illfated ED-209?

“And you just stepped over it, buddy-boy. You’ve insulted me. And you’ve insulted this company with that bastard creation of yours. I had a guarantee military sale with ED 209. Renovation program. Spare parts for 25 years. Who cares if it worked or not?”

Police state; lovely story here, man is drowning, his sons call police, who arrive and taser the son while their father is swept out to sea: http://www.prisonplanet.com/cops-taser-drowned-dads-distraught-son.html

And I done tole you so: WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – U.S. nonfarm payrolls contracted by an astonishing 533,000 in November, the worst job loss in 34 years, the Labor Department reported Friday. It’s only the fourth time in the past 58 years that payrolls have fallen by more than 500,000 in a month. The unemployment rate rose from 6.5% in October to 6.7% in November, the highest jobless rate since October 1993. Job losses were widespread across industries in November. Economists expected job losses of around 350,000 in November.

Why don’t they just get the Rover from The Prisoner? Being suffocated by a weather balloon frightened me when I watched that show on PBS as a kid.

@Prommie: Oh, yeah, and no one knows how much of it is opportunistic trimming of body counts by profitable companies that just see this as an irresistible opportunity to get 120-hour weeks out of the remaining bodies they have chained to the desks and lathes. “They’ll never see a job ad again in their lifetimes. Ha. Haha. Hahahahahahaha. Go down stairs and pick a bunch to throw from the roof. Old ones first. They’re expensive. Hahahahahahaha. Once we’ve right-sized the workforce, we’ll start getting rid of the 401K contribution and health insurance all that marxist crap and get cracking on wage reductions. They’ll lick our fucking balls just to have jobs that are fucking killing them. It’s so fucking sweet.”

@FlyingChainSaw: well, the layoffs I am seeing in my industry are desperate efforts to keep afloat which for many will prove futile as the business is doomed anyway.

The signs continue to point to cannabilistic anarchy by next fall.

Well here’s a story to cheer you all up, it cheers me up, kinda sorta, I hate to see her going to jail, she should be free to keep up the good work. Smoking hot 35 year old high school drama teacher arrested for making sexytime with 17 year old student. http://www.app.com/article/20081205/NEWS/812050342&referrer=FRONTPAGECAROUSEL

TJ: Caroline Kennedy to replace Hillbot?

@Prommie: When a male teacher does it to a female student, he’s a predator. When a female teacher does it to a male student, it’s “niiiiiice,” like in South Park’s Ms. Teacher Bangs a Boy.

I have done it with a teacher before, but he never taught me (was my sister’s chorus teech), and it was after I graduated from HS, when we both had fled to Atlanta from the rest of Southeast Dumbfuckistan.

@Prommie: 17? Almost old enough to be shipping off to Iraq and dying. Why can’t he fuck the bejesus out of a nice healthy lady?

@Prommie:
the lovliest part of that sweet tale of our police state is those boys were CHARGED. later dropped, so i don’t have to kill myself today.
it’s a mad mad mad mad world.
we’re drowning in stupid.

rat’s business is off, he’s string cursing at the tv since the opening bell.
his income is determined by the strength of the dollar, as a commodities trader, every 1 point fluctuation means hundreds of thousands of dollar difference to him. his entire industry (paper/lumber) is not paying on time, dragging their feet on every deal, etc. etc. etc. his mills in the middle east are where most of his action is these days.
economic strain has arrived at the baked household for realz. he is turning purple with frustration. wall street daddy says we are heading into survival mode. he is resigned and quiet which is frightening the hell out of me more than anything. it really is as bad as we fear.
and we are lucky, relatively.

@baked:
My friends keep saying “we’ll be okay in a year or two.”

I keep telling them: “Wrong. More likely at least five and perhaps a decade.”

@FlyingChainSaw: I can haz Bread Riots?

@Prommie:
I never had a TILF even though as a hormone clogged teenybopper I wanted to have one. Most of my female teachers were white haired old ladies.

@rptrcub: Totally not fair. But was she a predator, or was there consent? When I was 17, I had teachers who invited us to their homes or we invited them to ours, we had parties with alcohol and all that, and on my birthday an English teacher gave me a deep, tongue-lingering kiss. If she had looked even remotely like this Ms. Glide (really?) I would have melted.

@rptrcub: Damn. I was hoping you meant for State…

@nabisco: The question becomes A) What is the age of consent in said state? and B) Are there laws in said state forbidding such relations between teachers and students (which exist in some states)?

I think we’re going to have the ‘bot regardless. Condi better be careful when she shows her the office.

i have mentioned this before. rat speaks fluent german because of the attentions and double D’s of his german teacher for 4 years of high school. he did not feel preyed upon. he thought he hit the lottery.
i feel like outing her. hi Miss Tilden!!!!!

@ManchuCandidate: I had one senior year, and there were rumors about him and a certain teacher’s aide, but even if he were game the wife and young child would have been more than enough to discourage me.

@baked: I had a similar experience with Latin – my teacher was young and hot, and it was my favorite class. My fantasies were not only unrealized, but crushed: my mother fucked him. Yes, I have issues.

@rptrcub:
my freshman year of college i was 17 and my computer science teacher not only asked me out, (i had dinner with him once), but changed my answers on tests so i always got A’s. is that why i am techytarded?
a lot of this going on obviously. we got 2 out of 2 right in my house.

@Mistress Cynica:
i LOVE that story!
may i add that my father fucked my best friend when he was between wives? we were in our 20’s.
ISSUE fist bump!

@mellbell:
My general unattractiveness did not help me.

I won the Geek Lottery and wore multiple “chastity” belts at the time. I was chubby (160 pounds), shorter (5’3″), zit faced (thanks mom!), braces, glasses, nerdy (allegedly the smartest kid in school by IQ–whatever) and socially awkward.

No way I would ever ever ever get laid by a female student let alone female teacher.

@Mistress Cynica:
@baked:
Nope, I can’t imagine how that would create issues…

;->

@ManchuCandidate: @Mistress Cynica:
i’m actually still friends with this siren, and she still refuses to tell me what his dick is like. (i get graphic details usually) is that weird that i wanted to know from what did i emerge from? i had an unusual opportunity to find out, what can i say, i’m a curious sort?
no, i have major daaaddy issues.
have i mentioned i think dear old is a closet case too?
why i married not one, but TWO gay men?
ISSUES.

@Prommie: I love stories like this, but for some reason, my wife is not amused.

@Prommie: Astonishing is right. 1 million jobs in three months? Bush/Cheney are on a roll, busting unions (UAW) and driving wages to starvation levels. Marx would be proud.

@baked: I definitely paid more attention to learning Spanish when my Costa Rican teachers were only a few years older than I and supremely caliente. Oye Carmen, can we go over the parts of the body one more time, please?

@Dodgerblue,Prom: So at what point do we hit a (non-fucking) related depression, now that the powers that be admit we are in a recession?

I really need to read up on this stuff to find out how we got here. Hard to know what sources to trust, though.

@nabisco: My Spanish teacher, Sra. Verde, would sit on the front of her desk in front of me and cross and uncross her legs like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. I loved her. She would know I had come back from lunch high and would walk up behind me and make fun of me, she would lean down and whisper in my ear, “stoned again, Paco?” to try to get me paranoid. I shoulda, dammit.

@redmanlaw: My guess is that in a year they will tell us we were in a depression a year ago, i.e., now.

Krugman, who has been relativley sanguine, yesterday gave up hope, on his blog.

U6, a broader measure of unemployment, is at 12%. I should check, I would bet thats 1930-ish.

@Mistress Cynica: @baked: Jesus H., you two win.

@Prommie: In November, the number of people who are unemployed but no longer looking for a job is 637,000, so they are not counted. And the number of people working a part-time job rose 621,000.

Oh and this tidbit:

November payrolls fell 533K, the biggest drop in 34 years and much worse than the consensus -335K. And there was a massive net revision of -199K to the previous two months’ numbers, thanks largely to overdue downward revisions to the seasonals. This is almost indescribably terrible. In the past six months the US has lost 1.55M jobs, almost as many as were lost in the whole 2001 recession, which included 9/11 and the two months after.

@SanFranLefty: I feel lucky just to have a job, even though our insurance premiums are being hiked. That, and gas prices going down gives me wiggle room. If food costs come down — it would be awesome.

@SanFranLefty:
on an up note, maybe we’ll get a nice avian pandemic or we are so far past the tipping point environmentally, we’ll be killing each other over a gallon of water sooner than later.
it will take our minds off the economy. think positive!

@Prommie: Unemployment in PA in the early Reagan years was over 20 percent. I took my wet-behind-the-ears college graduate ass to a “Get Rich Selling Solar Panels” meeting, and the place was packed with out of work steel and millworkers.

The economy has only done well when I was either in public school or living overseas, so I am thinking I may have to sacrifice myself for my country. Problem is, do I become a teacher or join the French Foreign Legion?

@Dodgerblue: These are the times the industrial fascists live for: they can argue on and on about the crisis being perpetrated by laborers and poor people. Oh, yes, all that financial trouble – caused by the Community Reinvestment Act forcing banks to give loans to terrorists. Big 3 Meltdown? The fault of labor. Need to bring those wages down to what they are in Pakistan where you can chain 4 year kids to looms and lathes and pay them in weekly bowls of rice.

@SanFranLefty: Ship those girls some liquor and ice cream.

@rptrcub: My firm downsized two or three years ago through attrition and learned to get by with a lot less overhead. We’re doing OK now, although I could see where a .5 FTE in our other office might have to go if absolutely necessary, but we have not discussed it at all.

Oh, but we have armed robberies of law offices to worry about where our Albuquerque office is located.

Thieves Targeting Lawyers

By Scott Sandlin*
Journal Staff Writer

Thieves broke into a Downtown law office Monday and stole camcorders, flat-screen TVs, computers and a bottle of pricey tequila. They rifled through desk drawers, heaped up men’s suits from closets but left them in a hallway and cut phone lines.
The break-in was the most recent in a string of crimes against lawyers in the Downtown area, from armed holdups to a car theft.
In the Monday break-in, perhaps the most disconcerting aspect was the note left by the burglars.
“TCK crime,” it said, an apparent reference to the shorthand for a gang formally known as Thugs Causing Kaos.
Scrawled beneath that, in large block letters on the draft first page of a lawsuit, was “Dont (expletive) sue APD.”
Attorney Shannon Kennedy, a co-owner of the building with her husband, Joe Kennedy, said the note signifies “they know who we are.”
The Kennedys and others in the suite of offices where they work have represented plaintiffs in excessive force or wrongful arrest cases against law enforcement agencies.
The note was left on the desk of Matthew Coyte, an attorney who represents a television cameraman who is preparing to sue the Albuquerque Police Department over an incident with officers.
“I think it’s strange,” Coyte said. “If it wasn’t for the note, it wouldn’t be concerning at all, it would just be random crime. I don’t think too many gang members particularly care about lawsuits against APD.”

***

â�� Attorney Maureen Sanders’ car was stolen from her office while she worked late one evening just over a week ago, only to turn up again over the weekend on First Street — inoperable, with the clutch stripped.
� An employee in the office of an attorney in the 1000 block of Lomas was locked in a back room Oct. 21 while robbers took a safe.
� A criminal defense attorney working Downtown was held at gunpoint while the office was robbed.
� An attorney with offices on First Street near the Kennedy firm has been broken into twice this fall.

http://www.abqjournal.com/news/metro/021118288668newsmetro12-02-08.htm

* old journalism buddy who dated my con law professor

@redmanlaw: So what is it? The cops under cover of local crime spree – or did the law firm stage it as some kind of tactic in the forthcoming suit?

T/J

OJ in the slammer. no bail. 8-15 years.
can you hear the sound of shiv’s being made?
AHHHHH..beautiful music.

@FlyingChainSaw: I think it’s clumsy cops in the TCK Crime incident. One of my partners down in Albuquerque wants to get herself a pistol for protection. I said she could expense it as “heat for the office” and recommended a stop at Tina’s Range Gear, the local woman-owned gun shop where I’m picking up my new shotgun today. They had several Ruger SP 101 snub nose revolvers in .38 special last week (I love mine in .357) . Anyway . . .

Seriously, though, I told her to get someone over there to install a buzzer operated lock on the front door.

@redmanlaw: ABQ cops are nuts. Aren’t those the guys that pulled the back of an apartment complex down with a tow truck on a drug raid like 15 years ago? I think a buzzer, double doors front and back and intrusion detection system would be the way to go. In a fire fight, the cops would have an edge and virtually unlimited backup with a city armory to draw from. And they’d have no idea whose side the state cops would take if they could get to them, if they ever arrived.

@FlyingChainSaw: The mayor banned the COPS TV show from coming to Albuquerque for a while because they were on so much. I used to watch see and see the War Zone neighborhood where my friend had a four-plex when he was a slumlord.

@baked: ::fist bump:: Yes, I decided years ago that I could either curl up and spend my life in therapy, or turn everything into an amusing anecdote. I’ve been dining out on the family dysfunction for years.

@Mistress Cynica:
i tried it all. curling up, acting out, analyzed to death, then i did the same as you. i wish i could remember who said this because i say it all the time. “everything has to be made funny, otherwise it would just be true. and that would be unbearable”

i miss our kentucky correspondant. whatever happened to the monk?
my daughter has instructions to alert the stinquers when i am taken out by a suicide bomber. i’m so considerate.

Nothing in my life has ever risen to the level of amusing anecdote. No tragedy, no abuse, no desperate poverty, no extravagant wealth, no dazzling success, no dramatic, flaming failure, nope, just mistakes and mediocrity, endless crushing timid mediocrity, quiet desperation. Banal insecurities, sad relationships, awkward moments, weakness and timidity.

@Prommie:
oh prommie, you are my bff! that makes it impossible for you to be anything other than insanely special. i’m very discriminating, you know i hate almost everyone!
do shut up and have a drink.

@Prommie: You could have been an emo musician if you were born 25 years later than you were.

@Prommie:
prom, my entire life is an amusing anecdote and it’s only funny in retrospect. in most moments it is terrifying and crazy making.
and i hate most people for the love i feel for all living things and the inevitable disappointment THAT will bring.
doesn’t kevin kline say it all in ‘wanda’ with his 2 signature words.
“asshoooooole!” and “dis-a-POINT-ed!”

@FlyingChainSaw: And it’s working.

@Prommie: As Diana Vreeland said, if you haven’t hadan interesting life, make one up.
@baked: Don’t even joke about that. I do worry if we don’t hear from someone for awhile. I was thinking about IanJ today — was he heading off somewhere?

@baked: @Mistress Cynica:

And I already told Cynica that her memoirs would be an awesome best-selling deal, but now I want the Cynica/baked combo – I can only imagine the two of y’all on Oprah’s Book Club.

To All: Re our beleaguered economy. It’s all very scary, but I think the scariest thing yet is the report that Harvard’s obscenely huge endowment has lost 22% of its value.

@SanFranLefty:
lefty, i have been writing a book. i have submitted 4 chapters. i didn’t want an advance because i didn’t want any pressure. they call and ask if i maybe have another sentence or two once a month. it took paula poundstone 8 years to write hers and it’s he-larious. i remind them of that. and it is a memoir. i idolize the writing style of david sedaris, who basically just tells the tales of his wacky life, that’s my format.
my life is way too chaotic to do any serious writing lately, but it will be memorialized one day in print. oprah? doubtful.

i have this new habit of falling asleep at 9 and making coffee in the dark around 4. i’m missing the late night chats and love catching up with my coffee at dawns ass crack. i’m stone sober and jittery from caffeine right now and can still say–i lerve all you guys.

actually, i went away to sexually annoy rat after tommiecatt’s and OA lube discussion……….
oversharing at 6:44 am!!

btw, we often have power outages here. i pee outside all the time.
pee-in-public fist bump to you! and i have peed in the car in a paper cup stuck in traffic in the lincoln tunnel, then tossed it out the window.
Klassy.

Emo musician, or Prufrock, whats the diff?

There was a song by the Mighty Mighty Lemondrops I once liked.