Need Healthcare? Rob a Bank!
Wednesday, 22 June 2011 10:41

James Verone, a 59-year-old convenience store clerk, walked into a Gastonia, N.C., bank and handed the cashier a note demanding $1 and medical attention. Then he waited calmly for police to show up.

He’s now in jail and has an appointment with a doctor this week.

Study his face carefully, and then go look in the mirror. This is the face of the “new reality” in America. The American public has been sold out by the powers that be, and we will all pay the price sooner or later. Our tax dollars are going toward financing corporate greed and corrupt politicians and not for our citizens health.

Job promises for ex-politicians are the biggest contributor to the corruption, along with campaign finance which is nothing more than legal bribery. All the while the american people suffer, while the members of congress have stellar health car, at no cost to them.

Obama’s health care act will not go into place until 2014. James Verone needed medical attention and he didn’t want to be a burden on his sister and brothers. So he hatched a plan. On June 9, he woke up, showered, ironed his shirt and mailed a letter to the Gazette, listing the return address as the Gaston County Jail.

“When you receive this a bank robbery will have been committed by me,” Verone wrote in the letter. “This robbery is being committed by me for one dollar. I am of sound mind but not so much sound body.”

Verone’s problems started when he lost the job he’d held for 17 years as a Coca Cola deliveryman, amid the economic downturn. He then took a part-time position at the convenience store. But hiss body wasn’t up to it. The bending and lifting made his back ache. He had problems with his left foot, making him limp. He also suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis.

Then he noticed a protrusion on his chest. “The pain was beyond the tolerance that I could accept,” Verone told the Gaston Gazette. “I kind of hit a brick wall with everything.”

Verone hailed a cab to take him to the RBC Bank. Inside, he handed the teller his $1 robbery demand. “I didn’t have any fears,” said Verone. “I told the teller that I would sit over here and wait for police.”

Because he only asked for $1, Verone was charged with larceny, not bank robbery. But he said that if his punishment isn’t severe enough, he plans to tell the judge that he’ll do it again. His $100,000 bond has been reduced to $2,000, but he says he doesn’t plan to pay it.

In jail, Verone said he’s hoping to receive back and foot surgery, and get the protrusion on his chest treated. Then he plans to spend a few years in jail, before getting out in time to collect Social Security and move to the beach.

Verone also presented the view that if the United States had a health-care system which offered people more government support, he wouldn’t have had to make the choice he did.

“If you don’t have your health you don’t have anything,” Verone said.

The Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s health-care overhaul passed by Congress last year, was designed to make it easier for Americans in situations like Verone’s to get health insurance. But most of its provisions don’t go into effect until 2014.

As it is, Verone said he thinks he chose the best of a bunch of bad options. “I picked jail.”

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Chinese prisoners forced to farm WOW gold
Friday, 27 May 2011 14:41

chinese wow farming goldChinese gold farmers is nothing new. Now we find out that some of them were prisoners. Posted on the UK Gardian they have reports of one prisoner who told a reporter in Beijing how he used to do hard labor mining in NE China and by night he had to log into World of Warcraft and mine virtual gold for 12 hours.

Former prisoner, Liu Dali told of how “Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,” “There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb a day, worth upwards to $900 USD. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off.”

Dali states: “If I couldn’t complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things,”

According to figures from the China Internet Center, nearly $2 Billion of virtual to real money was traded in China in 2008 and the number of gamers who play to earn and trade virtual credits has been on the rise.

It has been estimated that 81% of all gold farmers are located in China. There is also estimated to be over 100,000 full-time gold farmers in the country.

I wonder if Leroy Jenkins knows about this?!?

 

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New age verification tool for websites
Friday, 20 May 2011 07:54

age verificationWe all have had to use age verification widgets on certain websites. There is a new one out now that doesn’t let you just click a box saying you are 18 or older, nor does it require you to enter in credit card information.

This new style is much like a captcha image. The beauty of it is the image is that of something only someone who is 18yrs or older would only know. In the case of this image you need to be at least 30. :P

Click for larger image.

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Who sings the song off the new Heineken commercial?‎
Saturday, 23 April 2011 12:13
Mette Lindberg - The Golden Age

Mette Lindberg - The Golden Age

If you are like me you like to know who sings some of the cool pop tunes that get used in commercials. Most of the time I already know the bands that get featured but this one I did not know. So if you have been dying to know who is singing the song in that Heineken commercial. Its Mette Lindberg of That Golden age. You can get the short 6 song album on iTunes. She sings a remake of Safety dance ,and there is a remix of That Golden Age single. But the other songs might take some getting used to. but her voice is very interesting and I give That Golden age two thumbs up.

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Two Morgan Stanley Wives get $220 Million in Bail Out Money!
Wednesday, 13 April 2011 08:35

Illus by Victor Juhesz

While the rest of us lost our shirts to Wall Street. Some great reporters like Matt Taibbi have been trying to track down where the money went. He discovered that two wives of Morgan Stanly Big Wigs had received $220 Million in Federal bailout money. Then they went on a shopping spree.

You can read the original story here. Here is the meat of the story. The wives with an upfront investment of $15 million,  quickly received $220 million in cash from the Fed, most of which they used to purchase student loans and commercial mortgages. The loans were set up so that Christy and Susan would keep 100 percent of any gains on the deals, while the Fed and the Treasury (read: the taxpayer) would eat 90 percent of the losses. Given out as part of a bailout program ostensibly designed to help ordinary people by kick-starting consumer lending, the deals were a classic heads-I-win, tails-you-lose investment.

They started out small, with the government throwing a few hundred billion in public money to prop up genuinely insolvent firms like Bear Stearns and AIG. Then came TARP and a few other programs that were designed to stave off bank failures and dispose of the toxic mortgage-backed securities that were a root cause of the financial crisis. But before long, the Fed began buying up every distressed investment on Wall Street, even those that were in no danger of widespread defaults: commercial real estate loans, credit- card loans, auto loans, student loans, even loans backed by the Small Business Administration. What started off as a targeted effort to stop the bleeding in a few specific trouble spots became a gigantic feeding frenzy. It was “free money for shit,” says Barry Ritholtz, author of Bailout Nation. “It turned into ‘Give us your crap that you can’t get rid of otherwise.’ ”

The impetus for this sudden manic expansion of the bailouts was a masterful bluff by Wall Street executives. Once the money started flowing from the Federal Reserve, the executives began moaning to their buddies at the Fed, claiming that they were suddenly afraid of investing in anything — student loans, car notes, you name it — unless their profits were guaranteed by the state. “You ever watch soccer, where the guy rolls six times to get a yellow card?” says William Black, a former federal bank regulator who teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri. “That’s what this is. If you have power and connections, they will give you a freebie deal — if you’re good at whining.”

Cue your Billy Mays voice, because wait, there’s more! A key aspect of TALF is that the Fed doles out the money through what are known as non-recourse loans. Essentially, this means that if you don’t pay the Fed back, it’s no big deal. The mechanism works like this: Hedge Fund Goon borrows, say, $100 million from the Fed to buy crappy loans, which are then transferred to the Fed as collateral. If Hedge Fund Goon decides not to repay that $100 million, the Fed simply keeps its pile of crappy securities and calls everything even.

Some people need to give us our money back and do some real jail time.

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Amazon puts the hurt on Borders book store
Friday, 08 April 2011 10:23

Borders Books Store SignA former employee of a now closed Borders books store in Chicago, posted this ironic note in the window. It infers that if you need to use the restroom then go to amazon which of course does not have any retail locations.

In mid-February, Borders filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. This after struggling for several years to compete against Amazon and Barnes & Noble, which have cornered the digital and physical book store markets, respectively. As a result, they have been in the process of closing 30% of their stores.

“It has become increasingly clear that in light of the environment of curtailed customer spending… and the company’s lack of liquidity, Borders Group does not have the capital resources it needs to be a viable competitor,” said Borders Group President Mike Edwards.

Great Commentary!

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3.7l V6 Mustang Hits the 12′s
Tuesday, 05 April 2011 10:07

First 2011 V6 Mustang in the 12's There has been a huge buzz on the internet among Form Mustang fans centered around the new 3.7L V6 mustang. This new motor has forever transformed the whole V6 car mindset. Before most people considered v6 pony cars a girls car or a rental car. Now that Ford has made a V6 with 305 horsepower from the factory, only a scant amount of HP short of their older 4.6L V8 motor just the year before. Ford sells 3 times as many V6 cars as they do the V8 model. Now how does this translate into the world of performance enthusiasts? Every one is watching.

One such enthusiast has supercharged his new 3.7L V6 mustang with a centrifugal supercharger from ProCharger. With the addition of a full exhaust system he has increased the horsepower by 74% over the factory amount. The car was then taken to the drag strip where it became the first 3.7l V6 Mustang to get a 12 second quarter mile run. Not only did it make a very fast run, but it also beat a new 5.0L mustang. This is no small feat as the 5.0 mustangs run high 12′s stock.

I say congrats on the run. There are a lot of upset 5.0 mustang guys out there crying, but until they run their 5.0 and put up a video running faster than 12.5 then i don’t want to hear the whining.

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