Everybody’s used to dealing with daily parasites. It’s a feature of living in a country where it’s been decided that it’s proper to not make anything and instead have an economy based on services and the provision of non-essentials and s— from China.
However, every now and then you run into a daily parasite who really takes the cake.
For DD, this usually happens outside Ralphs on Lake. And I’m not pointing at the beggars. Increasing numbers of beggars are a natural product of American business and you should always be nice to people at the bottom for someday you might join them.
The standard Ralphs supermarket parasite is someone with a clipboard who wants you to sign a paper so that an initiative favorable to the wealthy or some big company and inimical to everyone else needs putting on the ballot. Like this one in which PG&E tried to schwick everyone in the state right down to the level of local government.
Yesterday’s parasite, however, was a woman with a clipboard, not asking for signatures, but allegedly conducting a ‘survey.’
The question: Do you think Americans work more or less than they did fifty years ago?
It’s a question only an organization full of assholes would sponsor in 2010.
And I was immediately suspicious it was to collect coached or cherry-picked answers for some political survey by a right wing business group, to be unleashed at some future press conference on FOX News, perhaps as incontrovertible proof the majority of Americans really think they have it a lot easier than folks did fifty years ago.
So the socialist Obama government should get off everyone’s back and stop trying to fix things, get back to fiscal austerity and not worry about mass unemployment.
Because mass unemployment naturally means many people are involuntarily working much less than their peers fifty years ago.
Coincidentally, it dovetailed with much of FOX News afternoon broadcast, which devoted itself to the books of Ayn Rand and warning that Obama better be nice to BP or the company would be forced out of business with thousands and thousands of jobs lost.
Anyway, I laughed at the woman holding the clipboard and said I thought Americans definitely had to work more now than fifty years ago.
It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She did not record my answer. So I watched her from the parking lot for a couple minutes as she approached others. And she hardly did any writing at all.
I wondered what she thought about the hardness of her work outside Ralphs and its daily compensation vis-a-vis what her dad or grandpap did for a living. By the way, there was no identification of who was actually doing the poll or why.
In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, it was a commonplace that Americans would soon devote their lives to leisure, not work. The number of hours the average American worked had fallen by almost twenty-five per cent between 1900 and 1950, and pundits saw no reason for the trend to stop. By the end of the twentieth century, the futurist Herman Kahn prophesied in 1967, Americans would enjoy thirteen weeks of vacation and a four-day work week. The challenge, it seemed, would be figuring out what to do with all our free time.
Kahn was wrong. Today, Americans work about as many hours each year as they did in 1970, and, instead of thirteen weeks of vacation, the average American now gets four (and that includes holidays).
This bit, from the paper of Ted Nugent — the WaTimes, in 2009, is also a laugh riot:
American workers who still have their jobs are laboring harder than ever, keeping their companies operating profitably following the biggest rounds of job cuts since the Great Depression …
Because hourly compensation, including wages and benefits, increased by only 0.2 percent, unit labor costs dipped 5.8 percent during the second quarter. It was the biggest drop in labor costs in more than eight years. Over the past year, labor costs have declined 0.6 percent as productivity has advanced by 1.8 percent.
Soaring productivity and plunging labor costs helped to bolster second-quarter corporate profits …
Remember what DD said about an agency of assholes at the top of the post? Who would commission something like the Ralphs survey?
Lots of groups in America, one imagines. Employees of Satan’s Bank — OneWest — right across the street, I should think, if they weren’t so busy capitalizing on foreclosures.
Americans work hard for their money. Too hard, according to CNN. Even worse than even grovelling medieval peasants scratching the land to survive.
That conclusion came from reporter Polly Labarre of CNN’s “In the Money.??? In the June 9 broadcast, Labarre argued that Americans are working too much, using her “favorite comparison??? to explain “we work more than medieval peasants used to work.???
The “peasant??? claim has grown common in media outlets …
But [no organization has] provided basis for the idea that peasants worked less than Americans do now.
One of the recurring themes on DD blog is the massively annoying American delusion that we live in a can-do country, that our technology and business and people have an answer for everything.
Always.
It’s rubbish. Reality shows us repeatedly it’s not so, many times over the last decade. From alleged miracle weapons for the Iraq war, to Katrina, to even the smallest pieces of crappenstance like the underwear bomber’s smouldering privates, the world outside has shown Americans definitively what for.
Americans have long had an unswerving belief that technology will save us — it is the cavalry coming over the hill, just as we are about to lose the battle. And yet, as Americans watched scientists struggle to plug the undersea well over the past month, it became apparent that our great belief in technology was perhaps misplaced.
“Americans have a lot of faith that over the long run technology will solve everything, a sense that somehow we’re going to find a way to fix it,??? said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. He said Pew polling in 1999 — before the September 2001 terror attacks — found that 64 percent of Americans pessimistically believed that a terrorist attack on the United States probably or definitely would happen. But they were naïvely optimistic about the fruits of technology: 81 percent said there would be a cure for cancer, 76 percent said we would put men on Mars.
They just figured this out, huh?
One of DD’s touchstone books is Paul Fussell’s BAD.
In 1991, Fussell saw the future quite clearly.
“The United States especially overflows with [BAD] because above all countries it is the most addicted to self-praise and complacency — even more than France,” he wrote.
Further in: “And what’s made it worse is the recent rapid accumulation of technology. The current US can be defined as an immense accumulation of not terribly acute or attentive people obliged to operate a uniquely complex technology, which, all other things being equal, always wins. No wonder error and embarrassment lurk everywhere …”
On engineering, and this is very much pre-World Wide Web and instant global communication, Fussell had this to say:
If pressed, Americans may admit that the ideas that have made the modern world have all originated elsewhere — ideas like Darwin’s and Marx’s and Freud’s and Einstein’s and Jung’s — and never in These States. Our forte, which compensates for our weakness in creative intelligence, is held to be in engineering. Perhaps deficient in a comprehensive understanding of values and ends, we are said to be gifted in the management of techniques and means.
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The American achievement — and I know it’s bad taste to mention this — is the Challenger, brought to you by faulty manufacture, inept and dishonest quality control, and lying and evasion for the sake of big bucks.
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People as materialistic as Americans are supposed to be gifted at material operations, but the local urge toward the showy and spectacular constantly invites disaster … Bad design and construction, in fact, appear to be something like American specialties.
Chalk part of the rugged idiot belief that technology will save everything to bad — or at least incomplete — education.
After having spent close to a decade of my best learning years in a research lab and seeing the multifarious ways things could and did go wrong — how the toast often landed buttered side down, despite the best laid plans, I had no personal illusions about what science and technology could deliver in the short term. And that was on small scale shit.
Upper class reporters sometimes write very strangely in their zeal to cover the news.
Such was the case with a surprising story in the New York Times yesterday. It was on a scientific boat ride out to the very bad oceanic chemistry demonstration that’s the Gulf Oil spill. And I call it surprising, not because of what was reported, but how it was reported — like being in with the regatta crowd to gaily observe a curious experiment at sea.
At the site of a disaster of Biblical proportion, the reporter — Justin Gillis — wrote:
Soon, a giant winch on the rear of the boat hauled special bottles back from the deep, carrying water samples. The younger researchers rushed to the rear deck.
Special bottles? The younger researchers were rushing!
Exciting!
And:
Working quickly in a daisy chain, circling the bottles, they filled small vials and other containers, then hustled back to their makeshift laboratory on the main deck of the Walton Smith.
Slowly, as the Walton Smith and other boats worked the gulf this past week, the weird physics of a deep-water well blowout came into better focus. The idea that oil rises quickly to the surface of an ocean may be one of the casualties of this disaster.
They hustled! And there was the delving into of “weird physics.”
Then the meant-to-sound-gnomic-quote:
“Nothing really makes sense out here,??? Dr. Joye said as her ship plowed through orange slicks of oil.
Then even more excitement at the finish:
From the bridge of the ship, Capt. Shawn Lake made an announcement. Everyone rushed to the outside decks.
Once again, in the middle distance, the ocean was burning.
Wow!
Judging from the prose, it sure seemed exciting for the New York Times reporter to be on the “Walton Smith” looking for funnels of oil floating in the Gulf. Important stuff was being noted, like the surface of the water being on fire and graduate students taking water samples.
The reporter makes a conclusion about the import of vast bodies of underwater oil.
“That would be troubling because it could mean the oil would slip past coastal defenses such as ‘containment booms’ …”
Troubling? Only troubling? And has not oil already gone past ‘containment booms’?
This is the best work the New York Times can do?
But what’s the real message, one obscured by the vanities of trying to be calm, scenic and cineramic?
What, exactly, can a few US scientists in a boat do when confronted with an undefinable immense volume of underwater oil?
Nothing. There’s nothing to fix it except to hope for nature to slowly take it away.
“We really never found either end of it,” one scientist said to the Times reporter. “He said he did not know how wide the plume actually was … ”
It’s a colossal failure on every level.
No amount of deluding oneself about American business, science and technology, or promising leadership and the delivery of fine sayings, or that only the oil companies have the savvy to deal with it, makes any difference.
The one thing that does make sense is the human desire for revenge. The Obama administration ignores this — as it seemingly has done with the general desire to inflict payback on Wall Street — at very real peril.
A Reuters news piece mentions briefly, and with seemingly inappropriate humorous intent, that “Concocting revenge fantasies has become a popular sport.”
“A Louisiana resident suggested in a letter to the Times Picayune newspaper that BP executives be tarred in spilled oil, rolled in blackened pelican feathers and sent to the guillotine so their severed heads could be used in a ‘junk shot’ to clog the well.” it added.
When all is said and done, the US government must find a way to put the minions who did this on the end of pitchforks. And it will have to firmly and publicly. Or it will have also allowed BP’s disaster to not only destroy the environment of the Gulf Coast, but also take down its ability to effectively govern.
Good news, lads! Good news! Some Wall Street prognosticators have identified the symptoms of an American economic collapse!
From earlier this week, a crew of power suit Wall Streeters issue this hilarity:
Macro economic data suggest the great recession is over. But the gap between the haves and the have-nots is growing, thanks, in large part, to a jobless recovery. Wall Street Cheat Sheet’s Damien Hoffman says the growing underclass now accounts for about 10% of the U.S. population.
Ya don’t say, boys!
You really have to see the clip of them here. Or you can take my word they deserve an astoundingly painful beating for being obvious and enthusiastically unselfconscious.
“In this clip, [Damien and Derek], who jointly run the Wall Street Cheat Sheet website, point to several signs America is turning into a two-class society,” Yahoo ‘news’ informed readers.
These findings include:
– Unemployment. The official rate is 9.9% but the wider measure of under employed and those who have given up on their job search is more like 17%. That’s more than 24 million Americans out of work.
– Record numbers using food stamps. The Agriculture Department said a record 40 million Americans, or 1 in 8 Americans, may not be able to eat without government assistance. “This is the ultimate sign of an under class,??? the Hoffman Brothers say.
– Take a look at Dollar Tree Stores. The discounter’s stock is near an all-time high while revenues are up 12.5% this year. In other words, more Americans are chasing cheaper goods.
In college football, the NCAA ended Southern Methodist’s football program in 1987, killing its reputation as an honorable and respected school in what became known as the ‘death penalty.’
And that was only for really bad conduct in a college football program.
It will be the Obama administration’s challenge to see to it that the public perceives justice in the case of the BP oil spill.
A government-administered ‘death penalty’ to the energy giant’s operations in the United States is one idea that comes to mind.
Extraordinary screw-ups and perfidies call for extraordinary counter-measures.
Using the power of the government to quickly dismantle BP, seize its holdings and dismiss its employees, to be branded with some sort of official mark of Cain would certainly be seen as a just response.
There would certainly be no public outcry. And there would be considerable political risk in being any part of government or a political party that would take BP’s side.
Using Feds to remove BP officials from their US offices would be good, visually speaking.
At a time when the US government and military are allowed to pick off civilians and suspected terrorists around the globe with impunity, there certainly is nothing irrational about an argument calling for the picking off of an entity that’s caused an environmental disaster of Biblical proportion.
Agency Orders BP to Use a Less Toxic Chemical in Cleanup
After submitting a list of one or more alternatives to the agency, the company would then have 72 hours to start using one of them.
In seeking to break up the oil bubbling to the surface from the Deepwater Horizon well, BP has sprayed nearly 700,000 gallons of Corexit chemical dispersants on the surface of the gulf and directly onto the leaking well head, a mile underwater. It is by far the largest use of chemicals to break up an oil spill in United States waters to date.
But scientists and politicians have increasingly questioned why the E.P.A. is allowing use of the Corexit products when less toxic alternatives are available.
Because oil spills are relatively rare, only small amounts of a few dispersants are kept stockpiled, so at the outset of the disaster in the gulf, the amount of Corexit used was only in the tens of thousands of gallons. BP then ordered much more from its manufacturer, Nalco North America of Naperville, Ill., and applied the product repeatedly.
On Monday, Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of New Jersey, sent a letter to Lisa P. Jackson, the E.P.A.’s administrator, demanding details of the formula for Corexit products and information about any testing that had been carried out on the chemicals.
In most countries, the active ingredients of dispersants are trade secrets carefully guarded by the companies that make them, but the recipes must be conveyed to national testing agencies.
It was not clear what chemical alternatives BP would select in response to the agency’s order, or whether the company would choose instead to rely less heavily on chemical treatment of the oil spill. But U.S. Polychemical of Spring Valley, N.Y., which makes a dispersant called Dispersit SPC 1000, said Thursday morning that it had received a large order from BP and would increase its production to 20,000 gallons a day in the next few days, and eventually as much as 60,000 gallons a day.
Currently, just switching to another compound of similar nature would seem to just mean substituting one poison for another.
More meaningful national leadership might call a halt to the process of turning the disaster into an even more gigantic ocean chemistry experiment and business opportunity for firms which have no real idea what their products will do when used in this manner.
What’s the old medical admonition to first do no harm?
Political risk taker or just more stupid than people realize?
From the wire:
Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul criticized President Barack Obama’s handling of the Gulf oil spill Friday as anti-business and sounding “really un-American.”
Paul’s defense of oil company BP PLC came during an interview as he tried to explain his controversial take on civil rights law, an issue that seemed to suddenly swamp his campaign after his victory in Tuesday’s GOP primary.
“What I don’t like from the president’s administration is this sort of, ‘I’ll put my boot heel on the throat of BP,'” Paul said in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business.”
Other Republicans have criticized the administration’s handling of the oil spill, but few have been so vocal in defending BP …
The rest of the GOP apparently still lacks the nerve to assert its un-American not to like big corporations which create Biblical disasters.
Good news, lads! Good news! My retirement is now guaranteed and proceeding nicely.
Plain as the nose on your face, life for many in the formerly great US of A is relentlessly bleak.
Chalk the next piece up to that, along with innovative use of punishments for carrying out powder hoaxes after 9/11. While an interesting read, it impeaches our ‘way of life’ on many levels.
So far, Timothy Cloud’s retirement plan seems to be working out for him.
In a statement written by Cloud last month for two federal agents, he admitted mailing menacing messages scrawled on 3-by-5 cards, along with talcum powder, from Roseville to President Barack Obama at the White House and to Social Security Administration offices in New York City, Kansas City, Mo., and Baltimore.
“I mailed the envelopes … to those addresses because I hoped people would think it was anthrax,” he wrote. “I mailed the letters because I was mad. I knew I would be caught.
“I do not regret sending the envelopes because that was my retirement plan. Either I was going to get Social Security or I was going to jail.”
He went to jail in Sacramento, where he remains held without bail as a flight risk.
“All he wanted was three hots and a cot,” said his attorney, Assistant Federal Defender Matthew Bockmon. “He was frustrated with Social Security over denial of benefits to which he feels entitled.
“This is a pathetic case of a homeless person making a desperate cry for help. He’s been on the streets a long time; long enough that he was sick of it.”
You think Ted Nugent might offer him some stale balogna sandwiches, too?
It’s interesting watching the press stumble over itself trying to explain the ‘pros’ of using ‘disperstants’ — allegedly magic mixtures — to combat the Gulf oil spill. Unable to come to grips with the real world limits of American technology — for so long regarded as capable of anything.
All you really need to know about Corexit is here in this .pdf.
It’s bad. There’s no dressing it up. The safety sheet reads as if it’s almost as nasty as an oil spill itself — only slightly different.
Consider the masses of such a mixture necessary to even make the slightest dent in the volume of released petroleum. The US chemical industry can’t make enough. And there’s no way to ship enough.
This is probably a good thing, all matters considered. Think of using it as a giant chemistry experiment performed by people who have no real idea about what they’re doing.
What could be the outcomes? Choose one from three: Worse, worser, or worst.
One of the dilemmas faced by the Obama administration – and the US government, in general — in these days of Biblical fail is the inability to see to swift and very public punishment for those who visit catastrophe upon the nation.
It’s a hallmark of Paul Fussell’s BAD, so to speak. Always much bragging and talk about technology and America’s limitless can-do talent during staged events and commercials. But a more deeply rooted and expansive talent for folding like cardboard when the chips are down, then making a lot of excuses and dressing up fail as a great new paradigm of success.
The US is great at bombing and assassinating trivial pests and civilians around the globe — and making big boogeymen out of the same.
It’s virtually powerless to administer quick justice to wrecking balls like the Tony Haywards and Lloyd Blankfeins on its own property.
BP will have to pay for the clean-up, insists the President.
This is very weak, semantically. It will read even worse when the millions of barrels of oil in the Gulf have smashed livelihoods and wildlife, very visibly, across many states.
Sometimes the bad people just have to be tarred, feathered and put away permanently. Being called before Congress to be badgered by a few puffed-up white guys with pointing fingers for television cameras doesn’t really do it for anyone.
Speed is also a virtue. Allowing weasels to squirm around on the loose for years because they’re wealthy, it’s capitalism and they have an army of corporate lawyers, isn’t justice — it’s the process of fail set in cement.
This is political dynamite for the Obama administration. It can either have its arms blown off or choose to blow someone else’s life up who deserves it up for a change.
Putting such men specifically on notice — on network TV, f’r instance — that they’re now officially on a Public Enemies list, could be a start.
Quote from website: Good news, lads! Good news! … Thanks to you today I work for Halliburton, a company which is perfectly inline with my values.
Pssst, I added the “Good news, lads!” bit. The rest is real, though.
This blog deals with a sizeable number of montebanks in the national security business who regularly predict attacks by American enemies which result in catastrophes of Biblical proportion.
And then there are real world Biblical catastrophes which have no relationship with the fictions the former like to peddle.
It’s a symbol of systemic US dysfunction at almost every level, from simple comprehension and critical thinking about subjects to the national leadership which has made all the wrong decisions, seeing fit to cede all authority and regulation to corporate power.
When the best one can come up with are containment booms and silly talk about chemical dispersant, as if the latter is some magic wand which can be applied to an oil slick, we know the holster’s empty and the gun jammed.
Quotes:
At a town hall meeting in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, Mayor Stan Wright warned fishermen in the audience that outbursts would be met with arrest. The fishermen were told that they were not allowed to ask questions.
Stifle your questions and anger. Don’t demand BP bosses be lynched. What fine leadership qualities this shows.
Crews worked through Friday night to dispense 3,000 gallons of sub-surface dispersant, officials said.
About 1.6 million gallons of oil have spilled since the explosion, the Coast Guard said.
Since journalists have no idea about simple chemistry and mass action, they have only an inkling of how pathetic this reads.
And the President — who probably thought he was doing something clever by latching onto the Republican position on drilling — is now inconveniently seen as being on the wrong side with the rest of the rascals.
Today’s first item is bizarre, an example of how a box of well-meaning rocks, to which physical fitness means everything, think only narrowly and in a peculiar manner.
That the American diet in 2010 stinks is beyond question. Decades on it has resulted in obesity as a growth industry. And its consequences with regards to the general health of the population have been staggering.
A report today from the Associated Press concerns a group of retired military men who view “school lunches” as a national security threat because they make kids too fat to fight.
It’s what happens when you have no outside advisors, no person to read what you’ve come up with and give you a good slap upside the head, saying: “And just when did you discover obesity is a bad thing?”
“So you’ve decided to label school lunches a natsec threat. What about all the other ways in which people get their foods and the nature of such nourishment choices, huh?”
Paid any attention to Michelle Obama recently, fellows? She’s not just concerned about national security.
School lunches have been called many things, but a group of retired military officers is giving them a new label: national security threat.
That’s not a reference to the mystery meat served up in the cafeteria line either. The retired officers are saying that school lunches have helped make the nation’s young people so fat that fewer of them can meet the military’s physical fitness standards, and recruitment is in jeopardy.
A new report being released Tuesday says more than 9 million young adults, or 27 percent of all Americans ages 17 to 24, are too overweight to join the military. Now, the officers are advocating for passage of a wide-ranging nutrition bill that aims to make the nation’s school lunches healthier.
The officers’ group, Mission: Readiness, was appearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday with Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
—
“When over a quarter of young adults are too fat to fight, we need to take notice,” [one military man] said. He noted that national security in the year 2030 is “absolutely dependent” on reversing child obesity rates.
Today, the group is urging Congress to eliminate junk food and high-calorie beverages from schools, put more money into the school lunch program and develop new strategies that help children develop healthier habits.
Good luck with stopping kids and everyone else from drinking corn syrup sweetened soda pop, armed forces dudes.
There are many problems facing the United States. Obesity, not just in children, but in the entire population, is certainly one that looms … large.
A lesser problem, but one that is still vexing in a way very unique to Americans, is to view too many problems in terms of their impact as a threat to national security.
That is, to think of them in such a narrow-focus way that proposed solutions only serve your profession’s goals. That’s just damn selfish.
It’s not just ALL ABOUT YOU.
What was that famous picture of the future from the cute sci-fi movie?
Oh yeah, this … Well, there’s always robots. Isn’t the US military big on them?
