World of Suck

Well, that's *your* fault because you weren't brought up correctly! A good, decent, law-respecting citizen embraces the NSA and all its activities. An honest, patriotic, loyal citizen realizes that there's *is* no such thing as privacy or the right to maintain records out of the hands of the government... because that would be hiding something. And only terrorists need to hide something.

This generation of citizens seems like a lost cause. They insist that the constitution provides them a degree of privacy and security to maintain their own data. The nerve! The founding fathers would never have allowed that if they'd known just how dangerous it would be to the institutionalized government of the future.

So what to do? Start indoctrinating them young! Flashy NSA sites! For Kids!

http://www.nsa.gov/kids/

Gotta love these meetings. I mean, they're just a great concept. The staff is abused and exploited most of the year. We're understaffed, underfunded, overworked and short of resources. But we have a quarterly meeting that makes it all better.

A recognition meeting. I mean, sure, we all know what we look like, of course, but this is a chance for management to get a glimpse of us before returning to the ivory towers. Naturally, such a meeting can not interfere with normal operations, so it's held after normal work hours. We're naturally required to attend.

We're not a huge division of the company. Call it 40 staff and 10 managers. Yes, you read the proportion correctly. So, after bringing our division up out the red, reducing operational errors by 95%, expanding our services, and opening up new revenue streams, you'd think they'd be happy with us.

They are. Kinda. Mostly, they seem to have called the meeting to jerk off in front of us. The entire proceeding was one manager giving certificates to each other, followed by a reading of the significant accomplishments that they're taking credit for. Hell, one of them was so touched by the award, she broke down and cried tears of joy. Of the 40 witnesses... er... staff, 2 got awards. But all 10 managers did. It's really quite incredible.

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate corporate culture?

Halliburton, Cheney's company, put a clause in their employee contract that said essentially all litigation brought by the employee against the company could only be solved by arbitration. So when a female employee was held hostage in a shipping container and raped, they are being allowed to enforce the 'arbitration only' rule. It doesn't matter that it wasn't at work per se, it was at the barracks. It doesn't matter that it wasn't on the job, but on her own free time. It only matters that it's litigation and that it's against a company protected by the highest of the high (or lowest of the low, depending on your point of view).

It's pretty typical, in this administration, that people are only seen as tools, and that the business trumps individual rights, protections and freedoms. It's one thing to enforce litigation that's work related (such as harassment on the job), it's entirely another to support murder, abuse, and rape against an American citizen, simply because they're working outside the US.

Still we know how it goes, "it's for the safety of America" that contractors get to set their own rules and not be held liable in any way shape or form for the job they do in Iraq.

If "patriotism is the last bastion of the scoundrel" then what do you call someone who unceasingly invokes the specter of fear in the name of national security in order to repress their citizens?