On Monday, January 9th, this student and blogger was arrested in New Hampshire for breaking no laws and creating no disorder. I'll let you read his account, then please come back and tell me what you think.

Congratulations, Romney campaign, and local police force in Hudson, NH, for clearly showing your utter lack of concern for all of the following:

1. Acting sensibly
2. Individual Constitutional rights
3. Due process

I can't blame the guy for steering clear of the area after his release from jail but it would have been kind of awesome if he went back to the site of the arrest and did exactly nothing, just to see what would happen.

I ask you, reader, what do we do with this? It is clearly utter nonsense. Hey, maybe he should be "thankful" that he wasn't detained for suspected terrorist activity. Since that's something the government can do now with no cause. (In case you missed it, our wonderful president signed this into law.)

I mean this story boils my blood. I feel like I'm in a movie about the dystopian future where no one realizes yet how bad it is and things are about to go to total shit.

I mean, here's another thing - you know those kind of creepy devices you can put in your car to lower your insurance rate? Well read that entire post to hear about something much creepier. The future is now and it's not a Jetsons future, it's the other kind.

Happy Wednesday.

Please read this account of a court hearing from the ACLU and tell me you don't find it pretty fucking disturbing. Because I do.

For Pete's sake, this is fucking Massachusetts. Bluest of the blue states. What in holy hell is going on, my beloved pinko-commie Commonwealth?

I don't like it at all. What happened to Give me liberty or give me death America? We decided that wasn't important anymore, because the most important things are apparently safety and order.

This country was founded on a lot of principles that society doesn't seem to give a flying fuck about anymore. It's deeply upsetting to me.

Now, because he already said it better than me and I'm just too tired of the horribleness of this fact, I directly quote Rob Reed:

I don't know what to say.

Usually I go on and on and sometimes I make a big deal out of what might seem like small things, arguing that there's some larger issue at stake. This time I'm going to keep it short in the hopes that everyone who sees this actually reads it. And please share this as widely as possible. I don't care how you choose to do that. Copy and paste all the text word for word and post it yourself. You have my permission to do that. I'm not looking for any credit.

It's important to note that this has nothing to do with opinion. It's all fact (as recently reported by Bloomberg).

I'd guess that whether you realize it or not we all know about TARP. At the height of the financial crisis the government loaned banks $700-800 billion in order to strengthen the financial sector and avoid an economic catastrophe. You remember that, right? The talk was about how the government was 'bailing out Wall Street but not Main Street'.

Well, I'm sure reasonable people could disagree about whether TARP was a good thing, whether it was necessary, whether it was the right thing to do, necessary or not, and if more should have been done for others caught up in that mess. Fair enough. It's a complicated issue, and maybe entirely unprecedented in scope and scale.

Now we find out - literally, just in the last couple of days, that the Fed -- ready for this? -- made secret loans -- are you sure you're ready? -- in the amount of -- here it comes -- 7.7 trillion dollars.

To put this in perspective, 7.7 trillion dollars is more than half of the value of everything produced in the United States that year. Put put it another way, it was twice the entire US Federal budget.

This was done without telling Congress, and certainly without telling the American people. Furthermore, the banks didn't disclose these loans to their investors, and none of this was reported when the government was re-writing legislation after the financial crisis. So lawmakers were dealing with a problem that required an $800 billion solution, when what they should have been addressing was an $8.5 trillion problem.

Believe it or not, it gets just a little bit worse. Apparently, the Fed loaned this money to banks at an interest rate of 0.01%. Obviously that's incredibly low. What did the banks do with it? They turned around and bought Treasury bills with it at 3% interest, making $13 billion by essentially selling the Federal government its own money back with interest.

This actually happened -- past tense.

We don't have to wonder about the integrity of the people responsible for managing our financial systems. We have the answer to those questions. We're not dealing with bickering in Washington or people who just won't set aside their personal differences. It's just corruption, pure and simple.

It is unreasonable to expect people to set aside their differences when those differences are concealing activities that are both illegal and immoral.

What we're talking about is a complete and utter failing of those entrusted with the responsibility of looking out for the best interests of the people not only of this country, but of the rest of the world as well. Not only are these things just blatantly wrong, but they're illegal -- or at least they would be if they weren't being done by the Federal government.

Rob Reed just informed me yesterday. Something like, you can listen to anything unlimited for free for 6 months. After that you can only listen to each song 5 times ever and you can only use the service at all for like 10 hours a month or something - unless you pay of course. It might be worse than that, he knows what the exact terms are.

So, Spotify's plan is, make yourself sound great, suck everybody in, get people using you, making playlists, sharing with their friends, etc., then start charging them.

Listen, Spotify, the service I'm using is ad-supported. Which is fine with me, I listen to ads and I don't have to pay. No problem. But after 6 months you just make your service completely unusable? Thanks for nothing.

We haven't been able to find anything saying they have reversed this policy so as far as I know it's in effect. I guess my days of using Spotify are numbered.

Let's see... I could pay spotify $5 or $10 a month or whatever forever, so $60-120 a year, to listen to the same approximately 30-40 songs (because really, I am not ever going to listen to the hundreds of thousands or millions of songs that are on the service)... or I could just spend $30-40 actually buying the same songs from iTunes or Amazon or something, and then play them as much as I want for the rest of my life.

I am pretty sure I know what my choice is. That's pretty basic math.

America has its head up its ass regarding global warming

Do you want to know why? Because too many Americans don't believe it and would therefore become "upset" hearing about it.

I have so many problems with this I'm not sure where to begin.

1. If you don't understand that human beings are the obvious cause of the changes in the climate then I seriously do not want to know you. Please cease to exist to me. Because you are embarrassingly stupid.
2. This: "In the U.S., Frozen Planet is being aired by Discovery. They were involved in the joint-production of the series. Yet they are still refusing to accommodate Frozen Planet in its entirety." Really, Discovery? So you produced it, but you think it's too scary/real for your audience?
3. This: "A poll earlier this year found that the majority of Americans believe that if climate change does exist, it is not caused by humans."

I'm sorry, if climate change does exist? You mean if this thing that is really happening that you are capable of observing with your very own eyes and ears - if this is really happening? Isn't that kind of like standing in a rain storm saying, "Well, IF rain really is falling from the sky..."

This is turning into a fairly disorganized rant but I can't help it at the moment. Where are the smart people in this society? You know, the ones that build buildings and bridges that don't fall down, that make incredible scientific discoveries, that have amazing musical talent, that build incredible machines and computers? Because I look around and all I see is lots of fucking stupid people.

I don't need the Discovery channel deciding what programming might be too upsetting for me to watch. I mean, I'm pretty sure I saw something more upsetting on the train today than a factual scientific program about something that I already know exists.

I don't have a good way to wrap this up. Stop being so goddamn stupid, everyone.

Note: I have no hope that people will actually do this.

You know China, at some point, this is going to stop working for you. Or you're not going to be able to pretend to be nice to your people anymore. You can't be so insanely controlling and not be outright mean and awful about it in the public eye.

I don't know what the result will be. Maybe in 10 years you will be my overlords.

In the infamous words of Homer Simpson when Bart signs up for military duty:

By the time Bart is 18, we're gonna control the world. [pause] We're China, right?

Oops, count me out of your customer base, kids.

Read about it here, from the designer herself:

Not Cool, Urban Outfitters

Amen. Almost all I see (I said almost) these days seems to be parents who are trying to be their kids' best friend and not a parent.

I hope anyone reading this knows me well enough to know I'm not some lunatic who thinks you need to cover your child from head to toe. I don't care if little girls wear short shorts or run around in tank tops in the summer. But they don't need push up bras and thongs and pants with words written across the ass. As a society can we just start being, I don't know, less disgusting?

Honestly. There are so many things bothering me right now.

The fact that there is a National Day of Prayer is upsetting to me. That Obama panders to the right by participating is just awful. That's not the president I thought we were getting. I mean come on, in 1994, in Doylestown, Ohio we had teachers telling the principal it was inappropriate to lead a prayer at graduation. At my tiny high school in Ohio. 17 years ago. Catch up, Obama.

I can't even begin to address all the awful stories in the news about abused and tortured animals. I went on a crying jag the other day because our cat Molly used to be a stray (before she was turned in to the shelter where we adopted her). Used to be. I can't even handle this issue at the moment without going into hysterics.

And I mean, birthers. I don't even have words. Well, I have a lot of words, but they're all swearing. So imagine a lot of swearing right now.

Charlie Sheen exists. As does Donald Trump.

And don't think this is even 1% of the things there are to be upset about.

And amidst all the awfulness and insanity going on, someone sees a guy with an umbrella at the fucking mall and somehow the SWAT team shows up? Like there aren't more important things to worry about? Honestly, America, I'm pretty much giving up on most of you at the moment.

He killed an elephant and made a video about it because he thinks it's awesome.

What a complete idiot. If you host with godaddy think about changing please.

I'll add godaddy to the companies I'll never patronize again, along with WalMart.

Why Wal-Mart? The Wal-Mart You Don't Know