What's a person gotta do to get arrested in this joint?

Apparently, break the entire world economy = get a fat bailout from the Fed.

But be a poor single mom with a drug conviction and lie to get food stamps for your 2 little kids (cause bad druggies don't get food stamps, fyi) and you get 3 years in jail. Oh and lose you kids.

A quick googling and minimal math skills tells me that the maximum amount of food stamps she could have gotten if she received them for an entire year is $6312 (The max allotment for a family of 3 is $526 multiplied by 12).

Here's the thing- even if she received 10 times that amount, shit one hundred times that amount, and sold whatever she didn't use, she still wouldn't be fucking over anyone. Food stamps aren't even cash. They are an imaginary currency unit created by the government to restrict the spending of the poorest of the poor to pay only for food. The fed makes money. The fed makes food stamps. But unlike when Wall Street banksters take fed money and pocket it, food stamps go right back into the economy. They pay for grocery stores (and the clerks that work in them) and farms and factories (and the laborers who pick, pack and process the food).

So you've gotta wonder, what exactly are the government's priorities when they prosecute a poor person for surviving while bailing out a rich person who needs no help putting food on the table?

TRIGGER WARNING: About that unpleasantness at Penn State

TRIGGER WARNING: (child rape, extreme entitlement, rampant stupidity)

There are lots of things you can say about the unpleasant news from Penn State.

This, in my not-so-frigging humble-opinion, is the most appropriate. (There are plenty of extremely close runners-up. Like this. And this.)

If I hear one more tearful student or alum or bigshot talking about Penn State's healing, I'm going to make Hothead Paisan look like a genteel grandmother in a Victorian parlour. The victims come first, second, third, ad infinitum, bitches.

Pardon Me If I Can't be Bothered To Give A Rats Ass

The Kid has another abscessed tooth. This is what 10 years of medicaid dental gets you. His face is swollen. He's throwing up. He's in mountains of pain. He's cranky (and let me tell you, Kid is normally the chillest person in the room, cranky doesn't happen with him unless things are extreme). I am a sympathetic puker, so in addition to the giant hot rock of guilt turning my stomach, I am nauseous to boot.

But we finally have dental. Real dental. Not the "only for extractions done by a one or two providers in a 500k population metro area" medicaid dental. Not the "sometimes kids die of toothaches because they are poor" medicaid dental. Real dental, with deductibles and co-insurance that doesn't cover as much as it should but covers more than the nothing of medicaid. If I get up really early and start calling around, I may get lucky and find a dentist in our plan that can take him. If I clean out my tiny savings account, I might be able to pay for it. I was hoping we could make it to January 1 before using the dental, so I could skip this year's deductible. Oops. And we won't talk about how I am gonna have to call into work tomorrow. I'm going to push the fact that there were people let go last week out of my mind. I am going to cross my fingers and hope that taking a day off for a sick kid isn't going to put me next on the list of expendable employees.

This is a kind of violence. Economic violence. A thing that causes actual, physical harm to an actual living being. Kids not being able to go to the dentist because they don't have the right parents. That's violent. Hell, anyone not being able to see a dentist because that shit is expensive is a kind of violence. Parents skipping meals to stretch out the food budget to maybe last to the end of the month is a kind of violence. Choosing between drugs that keep you alive or paying the heating bill in the dead of winter is a kind of violence. Slow, creeping, scarier than anything Hollywood could come up with violence.

So while you're all throwing hissy fits about property damage, I'm gonna go deal with the inevitable outcomes of economic violence done to the poorest of us. Yeah broken windows suck. But I'd rather lose every single thing I own than have my kid suffer one more second of pain. Graffiti my door, piss on my sofa, steal my last dollar. That's all just stuff. My door doesn't feel pain. My sofa doesn't feel pain. My wallet doesn't feel pain. That's property damage. And having literally lost every damn thing that I own in the not so distant past, I am familiar with what losing everything feels like. It sucks. But it didn't end us.

And I just can't be bothered to give a rat's ass about property damage. Not when a real, live human being is sitting next to me in agony because he had the misfortune to be born to a poor woman in a time when things matter more than people.

Sunday Funnies

I freely admit that spending family tv watching (well internet) time watching almost exclusively BBC stuff is probably warping the child's brain. Probably. Since we've run through the only American shows he'll watch with me (Eureka and Warehouse 13) and Doctor Who is over and we've watched Torchwood America: Now with more graphic but strangely less sexy gay sex. So we needed something.

That Mitchell and Webb Look seems to be filling the bill at the moment.

One of these things is not like the other: Vandalism vs Violence

Let's get one thing straight, shall we.

Vandalism is not equal to, the same as, or even remotely like, violence. One is damage to property, inanimate objects that have no feelings what so ever. One is damage to people.

Graffiti, which may be the oldest form of political expression being that it is at least 2000 years old, is just that, political expression. Even when it's just some kid, who is probably not old enough to vote, leaving his or her tag on a wall somewhere. I love graffiti. Graffiti is not violence.

Window smashing, while scary and loud and full of breaky glass, is not violence. It is property damage.

Property is theft, and pardon me while I quote the Marquis de Sade: "Tracing the right of property back to its source, one infallibly arrives at usurpation. However, theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft."

In order to get the elites to release their stranglehold on the rest of humanity, the elites must scared. Yes, scared. That's an ugly truth, but it is truth none the less. And to scare them without committing acts of violence means that they must be afraid of something else, loss of property. And they should be afraid of that. They should be shaking in their boots, unable to sleep at night, haunted by the ghost of Jacob Marley in the wee small hours telling them to repent.

We know what violence looks like at the Occupy sites. It looks like cops pepper spraying young women behind a barricade. It looks like war vets getting skulls crushed and spleens lacerated by "non-lethal" weapons. It looks like douchebags rapists who rape women in tents. Violence causes actual harm to the bodies of actual people and is generally performed by those with power over those with less.

Vandalism is acts of destruction done to pieces of property done by those with less to property owned by those with more.

These things are not the same, and should never, ever be uttered in the same breath as if they were.

Outlook Police

My French Microsoft Outlook has this menu item:

It turns out that in French police has two meanings:

• Cops
• Font

I had been wondering why Outlook was offering to call the cops on my email. I thought I had the Microsoft Outlook Feminist Blogger Edition.

"We should raise a statue to Nafissatou Diallo"

The tale of Dominique Strauss-Kahn gets worse and worse. In mid-October the story broke that a dozen people, including hotel management, police officials, business executives and underworld figures, were placed under investigation for running a prostitution ring out of the Carlton Hotel in Lille. According to the testimony of at least one woman, France's leading sex addict was a customer, both in Paris and Washington, right up to his final stay at the Sofitel. One police official has been taken into custody and questioned about a trip to Washington in which prostituted women were trafficked to the US for DSK.

The distinctive feature of this episode--besides the wide scope and the involvement of police--is that it has come to light afterthe Socialist primary. The chilling realization has crept over his erstwhile supporters that had he not been knocked out of the race by his arrest in New York there is an excellent chance he would have won the nomination and then brought this shit storm down upon himself and the entire party. They plead ignorance and are livid with him for endangering their careers and the election. Even his staunchest allies have dropped him like a ton of bricks and are saying on the record that they never want to hear of the guy again.

Nafissatou Diallo single-handedly saved the French Socialist party. That same party would not be saved by its own officials, who willfully overlooked what it knew of its leading prospect's increasingly vile behaviour out of fear and misogyny. Le Monde report that Socialists are saying, "We should raise a statue to Nafissatou Diallo."