Toyota issues cars for six years where the gas pedal sticks to the floor mat, resulting in uncontrolled acceleration. It then sits on this issue for two years amidst complaints, until eight deaths (in two spectacular accidents) result in a mass recall. So I think we’ve learned which car company the narrator of Fight Club worked for.

Toyota then gets slapped with a class action lawsuit seeking punitive damages (understandable) but which also seek to “enjoin Toyota from implementing any fixes in the accelerator pedals of the subject vehicles without approval from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.” The catch? The NHTSA has never approved a recall fix, as that would involve taking responsibility for any problems that might later occur.

So acknowledgment of the problem was delayed due to the costs involved, and the treatment of the problem is delayed to maximize the possible damage settlements. Nobody wins: Not the consumers, the automaker or the government. Just the lawyers. Don’t you love modern commerce?

What is wrong with Lower Manhattan as a site to hold the Khalid Shiekh Mohammed trial? Mayor Bloomberg cites cost overruns in security upgrades. Seriously?

Several points bear asking. First of all, why does it cost $1 billion to secure Lower Manhattan for one trial? It cost $75 million for Obama’s inauguration – and that was with a flood of almost two million people!

Second, why would NYC foot the bill? It’s a federal trial. Let the feds pay for it. Actually, while they’re at it, let them bail out the state, too, so we don’t have to keep cutting city services, damnit.

Third, what’s with the obsession that terrorists are reactionary when it comes to doing such attacks? Why would they work on our schedule – you know, when security is tightest? We could have pipebombs in the subways now. Isn’t the whole point of terrorism to attack when least expected? We spent years checking people’s shoes and missed a guy lighting his underwear on fire.

Fourth, what’s with the obsession over security in the first place? We’re never going to be totally secure against any and all attacks. Never. Not with our entire GDP locked up in military expenditures and security details. Not with airport enemas and subway strip-searches. We spent years checking people’s shoes and missed a guy lighting his underwear on fire.

Fifth, doesn’t this needless delay further harm our rule of law? We have these trials because all people – even foreign nationals – are created equal and are afforded the rights of due process. To say that this is a special case not only weakens our moral standing – KSM is less than human yet is a superhuman criminal mastermind – but proves to the world that everything enemy propaganda says about us is true: We don’t believe our own values, we’re inconsistent and aggressive, and more than everything else their attack was effective.

The best of all possible messages we could impart is that we are secure enough in our values that this can be dealt with by our justice system as it is, such that we are not turning it into a kangaroo court where he is found guilty not by the evidence submitted but by the popular vote of an angry populace whipped up by a cynical propagandist media. We want a trial, not a stoning, and we have a federal court just for that purpose right in downtown Manhattan.

I’ve been wrestling with a rebuttal to Gleen Greenwald’s views on the Supreme Court ruling banning any campaign finance regulations. He’s decidedly liberal and takes no prisoners on either side of the debate, which is why it surprised me that he would defend the rulings that, in my view, threaten to destroy once and for all any vestige of democracy our Republic has. Clearly, I believe he has it wrong; specifically, that framing the argument as a constitutional one based on the First Amendment is the wrong way to go at it. It’s not a speech issue – even if the specific reason for the First Amendment was to protect political speech – it’s a commerce issue.

Luckily, Lawrence Lessig, professor of Law at Stanford and formerly Harvard took him down a notch on the Huffington Post, arguing that he’s gone down a dangerous line of reasoning in his zeal. I’d argue, though, that claiming corporations and other corporated organizations like unions and political parties are considered “people” because they are protected from government search and seizure is a disastrously liberal (in the small ‘l’ version of the word) interpretation of corporations as legal entities. They have protections for property and legal liabilities for debt: They do not speak, especially not politically. Their constituents speak, and have protected speech, but they do not.

The argument for Free Speech flies straight in the face of what Greenwald and everybody else who has a brain pretty much understands: That what this ruling entails is taking the kid gloves off for corporate oligarchy, destroying the political Free Speech of the great vast majority of the US population and thus destroying our collective Human Rights. Simply put, either we should all have equal time on the airwaves or none of us does, else we should drop the pretense of egalitarianism when it comes to speech. As it stands, what we have is a situation where the only “message” that gets out – and Karl Rove would be proud of this – is the one whose purveyors have the economic means of conveying it. Money isn’t necessarily speech, but it becomes the gatekeeper to speech.

Arguably, the Founding Fathers accepted this, considering the United States’ original restrictions on voting to land-owning white males, and as such this current monetary restriction – namely, who can afford campaign ads – is not without precedent, but it is certainly regressive in the extreme. But that said, this is not a speech issue. This is a commerce issue. This is the protection of property run rampant: When property is so encompassing as to include media rights, and its protection so immutable in the eyes (and guise) of the legislature, democracy falls hollow. The fundamental human right to Speech has fallen before the commercial right to Opportunity.

The corporations have bought themselves so many human rights they’re the only humans actually recognized.

Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor of the New York Times defended, today, the paper’s publishing of gory pictures from Haiti.

He acknowledges the criticism and makes the argument that the bereaved want the pictures taken of the dead. However, he doesn’t interview one. He interviews three photographers instead.

He says the scenes present the paper “with the challenge of telling the unsanitized truth without crossing into the offensive and truly exploitive” but doesn’t define what truly exploitive is.

Sir, if you believed in not crossing that line – that you had your finger on what news was Fit to Print – you would have fired David Brooks a long time ago. The argument can be made that what stops you from publishing similar pictures from disasters in California or New Orleans is the threat of lawsuits, which you don’t fear from Haiti.

with the supposed “looting” going on in Haiti. Ten thousand US troops are in Haiti. Ammunition is in abundance. Food, not so much. There are still only four distribution points in all of Port-Au-Prince – a city of two million – and food and supplies languish behind military checkpoints. To wit:

“An airdrop [of food] is simply going to lead to riots,”

said Defense Secretary Robert Gates, four days before they decided to airdrop the food they let pile up behind fences.

“Everything’s just 100 metres away. We can look at the supplies sitting there.”

said Alphonse Edwards, coordinator of the Port-Au-Prince General Hospital, unable to actually use said supplies.

The hold-up is supposedly because of security: They’re worried, like in New Orleans, at what Black people would do when desperate; hence the hang-up with “looting.” Or, to quote David Brooks of the New York Times, the problem in Haiti is

“…a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized.”

So let us beat civilization into these lazy, stupid primitives. Let us teach them that this tragedy is the fault of their own doing, and let us withhold supplies until they get the message. After all, America abhors giving free handouts: It’s capitalism for the poor all the way!

To speak of the vagaries of capitalism, Royal Caribbean Cruise lines have returned to stopping at Haiti’s ports of call so that their revelers can partake in its “pristine beaches,” defended by armed guards, while its people starve. Ahh, the new Gilded Age.

But honestly now – since Voodoo was mentioned – if we’re gonna be totally prejudiced and bigoted, why don’t we look at the Protestantism and charity: You know, the part where a “good person” is one who succeeds with money, begging is abhorred and charity is done by giving to “charitable organizations” instead of directly to those in need? Like how we’re right now doing everything in our power but directly help people – just as Royal Caribbean Cruises donated a million dollars to ease their corporate conscience while they continue to exploit those same people?

Would I go so far as to say that David Brooks is proposing that these people drag themselves up from grinding poverty, worldwide disdain, rampant racism and a huge natural disaster by their bootstraps because of the intolerance of his religion? NO! He’s just a fucking jerkoff!

The State Department got involved with Google’s issues with China, and China took note.

Setting aside the sovereignty issues of imposing what they view is an explicit attempt by America to undermine their media control – in that the US views Twitter, Google, YouTube et al as tools to encourage citizens of the world to clamber for freedom of press and expression – they simply point out that only once in their history has a foreign power succeeded at breaking into the Chinese market.

So the question I suppose is, is internet addiction as powerful as heroin?