The War Crimes of General Apathy

Released a new short story on Amazon today - A Tale of Two Lives - and here is the cover. The story is available for purchase, or free to any Amazon Prime members with Kindles. 

wilwheaton:

Good question.

(via reddit)

Being at the bottom of the heap in terms of social justice confirms the reality of both economic and political inequality that the Occupy movement is protesting. →

wilwheaton:

A foundation in Germany has analyzed the social justice records of all 31 members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), ranking each nation in such categories as health care, income inequality, pre-school education, and child poverty. The overall performance by the United States — which boasts of being an egalitarian society — outranks only Greece, Chile, Mexico, and Turkey. Actually, three of those countries performed better than ours in the education of pre-schoolers, and Greece did better than the United States on the prevention of poverty.

Our bottom-of-the-heap ranking in social justice confirms the economic and political inequality that the Occupy movement is protesting. It also helps explain why this grassroots uprising in America has spread so rapidly to more than 600 communities and has generated such broad public support. After all, our nation is fabulously rich, ranking well ahead of nearly every other OECD member in national wealth, so there’s no excuse for us sitting at the bottom of the list in education, health care, poverty, and other measures of a democratic and egalitarian society.

No Surprise. Oakland Police Chief Lied to Discredit Occupy Oakland. →

wilwheaton:

After the October 25th raid on Frank Ogawa Plaza / Oscar Grant Park, and before the November 2nd General Strike, a campaign by all the powers that be in Oakland had started to discredit anyone and anything associated with Occupy Oakland. And so, to no one’s particular surprise, in the emails poured over by KTVU reporters was found a note that might as well have caused the spontaneous combustion of the chief’s pants

When Jordan received an update that crime was actually down 19 percent in the last week of October, he wrote an email to one of Mayor Jean Quan’s advisers. “Not sure how you want to share this good news,” he wrote. “It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland.”

Emphasis mine.

This is why I never take any public statement from any police force at face value. I want to believe public officials, but there’s just too much consistent evidence that they lie about everything.

(Source: global-revolutions)

MythBuster Adam Savage: SOPA Could Destroy the Internet as We Know It  →

wilwheaton:

Right now Congress is considering two bills—the Protect IP Act, and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)—that would be laughable if they weren’t in fact real. Honestly, if a friend wrote these into a piece of fiction about government oversight gone amok, I’d have to tell them that they were too one-dimensional, too obviously anticonstitutional.

Make no mistake: These bills aren’t simply unconstitutional, they are anticonstitutional. They would allow for the wholesale elimination of entire websites, domain names, and chunks of the DNS (the underlying structure of the whole Internet), based on nothing more than the “good faith” assertion by a single party that the website is infringing on a copyright of the complainant. The accused doesn’t even have to be aware that the complaint has been made.

(Source: ummhello)

Wrote a little (goofy) short story. Threw it up on Kindle Digital Publishing for shits and giggles. 

PaRumpPahPahPum

divineirony:

citizensanonymous:

Help spread the message!

$16 TRILLION. Enough to pay off the entire national debt AND feed every hungry child on the planet for a year.

Woman given 3-year prison term for food stamp application lie. →

wilwheaton:

A Rankin County mother will serve more time in federal prison for lying on her food stamp application than a group of people recently sentenced in a multimillion-dollar mortgage fraud scheme.

…

[Judge] Wingate bypassed sentencing McLemore under federal guidelines that suggested she receive two to eight months in prison and would have made her eligible for probation. He instead sentenced her under a federal statute that carries a maximum five years in prison.

She received $4367 in benefits. She paid the money back, but she’s still going to fucking prison.

Yeah, she’s a liar and clearly has a drug problem, but three years in prison? For a 47 year-old non-violent offender? What the fuck is wrong with this country?

The rich and powerful get away with murder, while someone’s 47 year-old mom — who is so poor she needs food stamps — gets three years in prison for lying on an application. For food stamps. That she needs because she’s so poor.

This is happening in the richest country on the planet, by the way.