How does the World view America these days?

"There are about 2,300,000 inmates in the united states that buy and consume music every day without any access to the internet. So how do you make your music available to them? The answer is the Prison Music Kiosk. This is a billion-dollar market that should not be ignored'

6 minutes 23 seconds of helping get your head around the big picture

  On 9/18/2020 at 2:27 AM, prdctvsm said:

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Starting to seriously think about how I'm going to move to Europe.

Hold on hold on, let me get this straight - our government and military have been corrupted and operate as unaccountable slush funds??

Well I never...

shocking. 

the penatgon has not been able to submit the most basic audit to the GAO for decades. they literally do not know where the money goes. every gov't agency has to submit a basic  "in vs out" 1 page budget summary to the GAO every year.. the pentagon.. said.. we just can't because we don't know.. so the GAO said.. ok fine.. forget it. 

^ lets not forget that the day before the WTC attacks that...

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Americans have surrounded themselves with crappy things: consumer goods that are typically low priced, poorly made, composed of inferior materials, lacking in meaningful purpose, and not meant to last. Such crap has insinuated itself into just about every aspect of daily life, filling countless kitchen “junk” drawers and clotting garages and basements across the nation. So ubiquitous, crap is nearly invisible, like white noise in material form.

Crappiness is not just a material condition but a cultural one as well: an often exuberant and wholly unapologetic expression of American excess and waste. Crap’s creep into daily life might seem like a new thing, but it began centuries ago. Over time, Americans have decided—as individuals, as members of groups, and as a society—to embrace not just materialism itself but materialism with a certain shoddy complexion.

Living in a world of crap was not inevitable. But for various reasons, Americans forged consuming habits that are now ingrained in the nation’s very DNA. In an age of material surfeit, we continue to spend money on things we do not need, often will not use, and likely do not even want.

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The Long Golden Age of Useless, American Crap (LitHub)

I read an article around 2011 about four and five star generals and how much money they spend. It talked about how they have these entourages accompany them every with catered meals every day, every meal. They had entertainers and musicians follow them around.

Found it. It was 2012, actually: https://www.salon.com/2012/12/12/7_absurd_ways_the_military_wastes_taxpayer_dollars/

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According to 2010 Pentagon reports, there are 963 generals and admirals in the U.S. armed forces. This number has ballooned by about 100 officers since 9/11 when fighting terror -- and polishing the boots of senior military personnel -- became Washington’s No. 1 priority. (In roughly that same time frame, starting in 1998, the Pentagon’s budget also ballooned by more than 50 percent.)

Jack Jacobs, a retired U.S. army colonel and now a military analyst for MSNBC, says the military needs only a third of that number. Many of these generals are “spending time writing plans and defending plans with Congress, and trying to get the money,” he explained. In other words, a large number of these generals are essentially lobbyists for the Pentagon, but they still receive large personal staffs and private jet rides for official paper-pushing military matters.

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brand new service called civvl

it's like uber, but for evictions. basically a landlord trying to kick people out of their home and onto the street hires you- you go there and put those families on the street. "It's the fastest growing money making gig due to covid-19" 

"Too many people stopped paying rent and mortgages thinking they would not be evicted," Civvl's site reads. "Plenty of foreclosures and eviction properties to secure and clean out." who the hell do they think they are? help foreclose a home, serve someone their papers or post late notices on someone's door and get paid for it.because if they can't cough up the money, then they should be homeless. 

Glad to see this nation has its priorities in order......................................................................................................

  On 9/22/2020 at 6:55 PM, timbre monke said:

Glad to see this nation has its priorities in order......................................................................................................

big T promised jobs and "Civvl has branches in all 50 states and Canada. So there is no lack of work."

  On 9/22/2020 at 6:38 PM, Nebraska said:

brand new service called civvl

it's like uber, but for evictions. basically a landlord trying to kick people out of their home and onto the street hires you- you go there and put those families on the street. "It's the fastest growing money making gig due to covid-19" 

"Too many people stopped paying rent and mortgages thinking they would not be evicted," Civvl's site reads. "Plenty of foreclosures and eviction properties to secure and clean out." who the hell do they think they are? help foreclose a home, serve someone their papers or post late notices on someone's door and get paid for it.because if they can't cough up the money, then they should be homeless. 

 

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That sounds like a video game premise

  On 9/22/2020 at 7:16 PM, Nebraska said:

big T promised jobs and "Civvl has branches in all 50 states and Canada. So there is no lack of work."

Find work destroying the lives of people who can't find work.

This stuff is just so incredibly depressing, I can't even begin to imagine what the US will look like after four more years of this shit.

Or the rest of the world for that matter.

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“Why do you want to become a citizen?” I was asked this by a local TV reporter as I strode in my sari to cut a large chocolate cake decorated to resemble the American flag—not because I had been appointed to do so but because everybody else seemed too nervous to disrupt the red, white, and blue. “I want to demonstrate what it means to be a citizen,” I replied. “I want to give my American daughters a model of citizenship where pride in one’s country does not absolve one of working to mend its ills.”

Love for a country must surely carry with it love for its many parts. To claim love for this country and yet care not a whit for the public education of other people’s children, or the fate of young people too poor to have any other choice but to risk their lives at war, or the abandonment of people whose skin color marks them for a lifetime of injustice, is to exist in a vacuum where you possess but a superficial understanding of those two words: love, country.

And, so, I have discovered that love is a responsibility that has little to do with rights. I have listened, time and again, to Americans who can quote the First, the Second, the Fourth, and the Fifth constitutional Amendments. Rarely have I heard my fellow citizens speak up on behalf of the other amendments—the Thirteenth, the Fourteenth, and the Fifteenth, for instance, crafted to ensure dignity, due process, and equality, respectively, whose language speaks to the creation of the perfect union that we all seek and requires us to make a more nuanced reading of those other, more popular amendments.

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Many Rights, Few Responsibilities: What Does It Mean To Be an American Citizen? (Ru Freeman/LitHub)

  On 9/21/2020 at 11:44 AM, dcom said:

The Long Golden Age of Useless, American Crap (LitHub)

This is one of the areas where Adam Curtis's documentaries actually work - The Century of the Self is a great intro into how consumerism became a thing.

As well, the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky on behavioural economics is very important, as well as to a degree, Richard Thaler. Not so much for the economics part, but the psychological aspect of their work. Marketing and sales companies have fine-tuned a lot of those ideas. There needs to be education on marketing and sales tactics - starting around the time kids are 9 and ongoing. This is how you will break out of consumerist culture.

jesus christ

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/28/fred-perry-withdraws-polo-shirt-adopted-by-far-right-proud-boys

  On 10/4/2020 at 10:26 AM, IDEM said:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/28/fred-perry-withdraws-polo-shirt-adopted-by-far-right-proud-boys

https://www.fredperry.com/us/helpcentre/article/proud-boys-statement-1

Here's the statement on their official site.

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Conspiracies are lethal—to our health and to our democracy—and Election Day is now only weeks away. Even as Trump is being treated for COVID-19, he continues to rage-tweet lies and conspiracy theories so fast, it’s virtually impossible to correct them all. Although it removed one misleading Trump post about coronavirus on Oct. 5, Facebook has repeatedly failed to block other disinformation and refuses to implement systemic reforms advocated by the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, of which I am a part.

The fate of U.S. democracy now rests with voters and whether they stand up in record numbers and choose truth over lies. As protesters outside the 1968 Democratic convention chanted after they were brutally beaten by police, “The whole world is watching”—and this time it’s to see whether our planet’s oldest democracy will endure or slide into autocracy.

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We Must Save Democracy From Conspiracies (Sacha Baron Cohen/Time)

AGNB - man. i wish both these crews would just meet once a month and fight on a soccer field like soccer hooligans in poland. 

Someone on here asked why people cared so much about US politics even though they’re from elsewhere. As a Canadian, there are a lot of reasons why we care about what happens south of our border. This image explains it simply 

here in the land of the free we no longer allow "lewd, obscene and offensive" attire on planes