03.06.14
Americans lack necessary skills
Today’s morning hilarity. Big.
Lack skills — in the Google news tab.
The Pasadena Whole Foods job fair imbroglio.
Accidentally perfect.
03.05.14
Out of action
Our pundits — stupid and lazy. They continue writing about America’s favorite racist as if he’s still in action and paying attention.
“Ted Nugent, the old rocker from the ’70s, is now just plain old — and off his rocker,” writes Jim Hightower for the Colorado Independent.
“Some years ago, ’70s-era rocker Ted Nugent reinvented himself as a professional rhetorical bomb-thrower on behalf of right-wing causes, especially gun supremacy,” writes Katy Burns, for a New England newspaper.
“He mostly blathered on the fringes, unnoticed by mainstream media but embraced by a collection of Republican candidates and conservative media figures … But even then, calling the duly elected and re-elected president of the United States a ‘subhuman mongrel’ seemed initially to be unremarked on by anyone but a few leftist bloggers,” she continued on Sunday.
Last week Ted Nugent went into the hospital for double knee replacement surgery. And as I predicted, the ranting stopped.
Most have missed it. And that’s because our six-figure explainers don’t really follow Ted Nugent. They just get their material from others — “leftist bloggers” — or the most inflammatory video segments at the top of the Google pile-up.
Here’s Ted Nugent’s Twitter feed.
Nugent’s medical problem and its solution are serious.
No “animal skulldancing” any time soon.
Pay no mind to scolds
The Culture of Lickspittle is alight with news of a new reality show set for Sunday, one in which toper actress Lindsay Lohan is scolded as she undergoes an intervention held by Oprah Winfrey.
Would you watch a show of Oprah scolding someone? Would you sit still for a scolding from Oprah? Not unless there was decent money involved. There is the perceptible scent of calculated artifice.
Readers know the WhiteManistan Blues Band has shown a certain fondness for Lindsay Lohan.
Here she is at 2:03 in The National Anthem! It’s one of the best parts, too!
And she also stars, cute as a frosted-tequila-shot-button, in Hooray for the Salvation Army Band. (Google!)
Of course, I’m a fan of the Machete movie.
I don’t see the problem. She could be part of art like this for the next 20 years, easy. That’s longevity no amount of being a good girl can buy.
Keep on keeping on, LiLo.
I now return you to regular programming.
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03.04.14
The Second Coming of Jesus of America
Can we push it to 700 views?!
From the Washington Post, yesterday, on Jesus of America:
“The [federal government’s anti-poverty programs] effectively discourages [those who are recipients] from making more money.???
Medicaid, which provides health coverage to low-income families, is the object of a sharply worded review. “Medicaid coverage has little effect on patients’ health,??? the report says, adding that it imposes an “implicit tax on beneficiaries,??? “crowds out private insurance??? and “increases the likelihood of receiving welfare benefits.???
As he crafted the report, Ryan — a former adviser to the late Jack Kemp, a longtime GOP voice on poverty issues — consulted with a diverse group of conservative thinkers. Ryan counselor Yuval Levin, a policy analyst, played an instrumental role, as did the American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks …
Ryan also huddled with Iain Duncan Smith, a former leader of Britain’s Conservative Party. Smith is well known in the United Kingdom for his attempts to better connect conservatives with the poor.
“We’ve been paying very close attention to the Tories and their think tanks,??? Ryan said. “They’ve done a lot of work already, and we can learn from their experience, both their mistakes and their successes, so we can rework our welfare system and get people out of poverty and onto lives of self-sufficiency and dignity.???
Before becoming a beneficiary of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, for many years I paid for what is now referred to as a “junk” health insurance policy from a private sector vendor. It was policy that came with high premiums, one that returned nothing. If you got sick, the deductibles and you-pay-for-it loopholes were so large the insurance provider was essentially extracting a fee from you for guaranteeing no access to health care.
The American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks comes in for special mention because I used a quote from him yesterday.
The essence, envy of the wealthy is bad for America:
[We] must recognize that fomenting bitterness over income differences may be powerful politics, but it injures our nation. We need aspirational leaders willing to do the hard work of uniting Americans around an optimistic vision in which anyone can earn his or her success. This will never happen when we vilify the rich or give up on the poor.
Only a shared, joyful mission of freedom, opportunity and enterprise for all will cure us of envy …
Like Paul Ryan, Arthur Brooks is just another wealthy libertarian dickhead.
He is most famous for writing a series of books promoting the insipid idea that only through entrepreneurship can all Americans know true happiness and freedom.
In other words, those who run their own small businesses are the most happy of Americans. Of course, Arthur Brooks has never been an American entrepreneur, making his living only writing that it is the best thing in life, over and over, for a right-wing business institute.
But never you mind that. As a logical Brooks extension, people who are Christian, centrist-to-right and supporters of totally free markets, are the most happy of all.
Brooks’ biography, on Wikipedia, presumably ghost-written by an American Enterprise Institute staffer, gives one the flavor of the philosophical grab bag.
It is unintentionally hilarious:
Conservatives, he writes, are twice as likely to call themselves “very happy” than liberals. Those with extreme political beliefs, right or left, tend to be happier than moderates—although their provocations lower happiness for the rest of society. Devout people of all religions are much happier than secularists …
[In The Road to Freedom (this is a play on the Austrian libertarian Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom)], Brooks argues that only free enterprise encourages true happiness based on earned success … Next, Brooks claims that only free enterprise creates true fairness by rewarding merit. Last, Brooks states that only free enterprise lifts up the poor and vulnerable. For this last section, Brooks cites many statistics regarding world poverty reduction from increased trade and globalization, as well as statistics concerning limited government breeding charity.
Therefore, yesterday’s lollipop of free market optimism from Brooks — “It means regulatory and tax reform tailored to spark hiring and entrepreneurship at all levels, especially the bottom of the income scale” — makes perfect sense.
All that needs to be done is to stop being angry with the 1 percent and become, too, an American entrepreneur.
“Brooks believes America is locked in a culture war in which either America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise, limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces, or America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution,” continues Wiki.
Moving along to Ryan’s assertion about taking inspiration from Iain Duncan Smith and the Tories of the Cameron government in Blighty, this is prelude to further recommendation of American adoption of the former’s Universal Credit plan.
Ryan never mentions Universal Credit in his new Congressional report on poverty, but on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, about a month ago, he explicitly did so.
Universal Credit’s aim in England, and British readers please correct me if I’m wrong, was to place all social welfare programs in one big new bag so they could be more easily slashed. This was marketed as the conservative effort to show empathy for the disadvantaged.
Universal Credit appears to be a failure.
Ryan’s affinity for the Universal Credit scheme is easy to grasp. It puts all the social welfare programs for the poor, the 47 percent, those he disdains, into one easy to destroy sack. One big program is far easier to slash than many nationally distributed programs.
Since Paul Ryan is Jesus of America, today it took only a couple hours for Paul Krugman to crucify him. Twice.
I took Paul Ryan’s measure almost four years ago, back when everyone in Washington was determined to see him as the Serious, Honest Conservative they knew had to exist somewhere. Everything we’ve seen of him since then has confirmed that initial judgment. When you see a big report from Ryan, you shouldn’t ask “Is this a con job???? but instead skip right to “Where’s the con????
And so it is with the new poverty report …
What he offers is a report making some strong assertions, and citing an impressive array of research papers. What you aren’t supposed to notice is that the research papers don’t actually support the assertions.
In some cases we’re talking about artful misrepresentation of what the papers say, drawing angry protests from the authors.
Now, as it happens the best available research suggests that the programs Ryan most wants to slash — Medicaid and food stamps — don’t even have large negative effects on work effort. There is, however, some international evidence that generous welfare states have an incentive effect: America has by far the weakest safety net in the advanced world, and sure enough, the American poor work much more than their counterparts abroad …
In fact, the evidence suggests that welfare-state programs enhance social mobility …
I mean, think about it: Do you really believe that making conditions harsh enough that poor women must work while pregnant or while they still have young children actually makes it more likely that those children will succeed in life?
Jesus of America sez ‘Don’t feed the poor!’
If you do, they’ll come right to your door.
They’ll wind up like stray cats, shedding on your floor.
Republican Jesus, he’s our favorite guy!
He believes in markets, sing praises to the sky!
If Jesus said it, you know it must be true!
So now it’s time to whip the poor, you know what to do!
“[We need] to bring the poor in — to expand their access to our country’s free enterprise and civil society. Luckily … other countries are doing just that…
“In welfare, rely on simplicity and standards. In 2012, Great Britain approved a far-reaching reform called the Universal Credit. The government is now putting the program into practice, and it’s going through a rough patch. But the basic concept is sound. Britain collapsed six means-tested programs into one overall payment…But the payment isn’t a giveaway. Every recipient, except the disabled, must either have a job or be actively looking for one.” — Paul Ryan, the Wall Street Journal, Jan. 25, 2014
Some recent news excerpts on the inspiration to Paul Ryan, Tory Iain Duncan Smith:
Nearly 70,000 job seekers have had their benefits withdrawn unfairly, making them reliant on food banks, the right-of-centre thinktank Policy Exchange has said .
The intervention is the first by a respected rightwing voice claiming that something has gone wrong with the administration of benefits.
A chorus of churches, charities and Labour has been warning the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, for months that the administration of benefit sanctions has become too punitive.
On Sunday, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the archbishop of Westminster, repeated his criticisms of the welfare system, saying that “some of the priests who are right there on the ground say it comes across as punitive”.
— The Guardian
Sick and disabled people trying to claim a new benefit introduced by Iain Duncan Smith are facing “distress and financial difficulties” because of mismanagement by civil servants and the outsourcing firms Atos and Capita, a spending watchdog has found.
The National Audit Office discovered that the new personal independence payment, which will replace the disability living allowance, will cost almost three and a half times more to administer and take double the amount of time to process.
Iain Duncan Smith tonight stepped up the Tory war on the poor by turning his sights on society’s most vulnerable.The penny-pinching Work and Pensions Secretary wants to slash winter fuel allowances for pensioners and scrap their free bus passes and TV licences in a move that would spell misery for millions of people.
His cruel cuts could mean OAPs having to choose between heating their homes or eating as they lose up to £300 in cold weather payments.
And the over-75s would also have to fork out £145 for TV licences.
Mr Duncan Smith’s move finally destroyed any claim the party had to being caring Conservatives. — The Mirror
Paul Ryan, Jesus of America, when mentioning Iain Duncan Smith, counts on American disinterest in whatever is happening in other countries to render the stupid, including reporters for the Washington Post, oblivious to the fact he’s drawing ideas from someone roundly condemned for attacking the poor in British society.
Caption this picture from Ponzi Planet
I lost my shirt but am still Google cyborging! Liberty!
Keys: BitCoin Aaron Kolin Burges
Morning comment reclamation:
Like so many digital inventions, Bitcoin is the universal solvent/solution to everything. Another Bitcoin bank robbed? No problem! Bitcoin goes up, the Winkdex says $674.21!
From the Guardian:
A bitcoin bank has been forced to close after hackers stole 896 bitcoin, worth £365,000, in an attack on Sunday.
The company shut its website and posted a statement on Tuesday morning detailing the loss.
“On March 2nd 2014 Flexcoin was attacked and robbed of all coins in the hot wallet,??? the statement read. “As Flexcoin does not have the resources, assets, or otherwise to come back from this loss, we are closing our doors immediately???…
The same day the company came clean about its losses, a second bitcoin firm, Poloniex, also admitted that 12.3% of its reserves had been stolen by hackers.
Nothing dents the confidence of the tech libertarians on their march to the glorious future of freedom from all vile tyrannies.
03.03.14
All Petitioned Out
The idea that it’s possible to correct the big problems of the American economy with on-line petitioning needs to be sent to the glue factory.
In the last seven days I’ve been peppered with them. The most recent, multiple mails asking to start a local petition in Pasadena to raise the minimum wage.
This one, administered through the on-line app, YouPower, from Democracy for America.
This one, ala a theoretical Pasadena effort, to raise the minimum wage in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, appears to have zero to little support.
Facebook and social media didn’t free the middle east. And you can’t rectify the problems of US democracy by tapping your fingers on your smartphone or PC.
The purpose of a democratic government was to provide for the common good, to do just the things that the American government cannot do now.
The idea that software devices for on-line petitioning are one remedy is really tiresome. The US government was broken over the course of a few decades. Web widgets, clickbait, and crowd-sourcing won’t fix it.
Now, if you want to use it as a front for donations for your pet cause, that’s a slightly different application. One that’s antagonizing if you mass mail it to people who aren’t even making minimum wage.
Yes, I’m a cynic. What of it?
There is a practical alternative. Proper people don’t care much for it but its use is honored by time. Plus it’s a small way to put money into local economies. People who work at supermarkets need to keep their paychecks.
Quote of the weekend, from the “president” of the American Enterprise Institute, a kinder gentler plutocrat, writing for the NY Times:
How can we break the back of envy and rebuild the optimism that made America the marvel of the world?
First and foremost, we must increase mobility for more Americans with a radical opportunity agenda … It means regulatory and tax reform tailored to spark hiring and entrepreneurship at all levels, especially the bottom of the income scale.
Second, we must recognize that fomenting bitterness over income differences may be powerful politics, but it injures our nation. We need aspirational leaders willing to do the hard work of uniting Americans around an optimistic vision in which anyone can earn his or her success. This will never happen when we vilify the rich or give up on the poor.
Only a shared, joyful mission of freedom, opportunity and enterprise for all will cure us of envy …
We really haven’t given vilification and envy enough time to work their magic yet.
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03.02.14
Seen by appointment only
Yesterday in Pasadena, DD and the WhiteManistan Blues Band were on fire at Artscape. Perhaps it was the unusual sheeting rain but more likely was the Whole Foods “job fair” experience earlier in the week.
There was nothing to do but jeer at the tale of musical cars in the parking deck and a couple hundred job-seekers lined up out the door for two part-time positions. And you needed an “appointment” just to get your resume looked at.
My friend Mark, the drummer, admitted the country was pathetic.
It hardly produces jobs for its people. The majority of those it does don’t pay much of anything.
When you have no more practical chance of landing even part-time work as a dishwasher or someone wrapping and weighing meat in a supermarket than winning the jackpot with a lottery ticket bought at the liquor store, there’s nothing to do but laugh.
The unemployment problem is caused by a skills mismatch! Americans are too stupid to get the jobs the new global economy furnishes! If you want a job bad enough, you’ll have one! Only the lazy and sinful do not!
From the New York Times opinion page:
[Since] 2000, many college graduates have taken jobs that do not require college degrees and, in the process, have displaced less-educated lower-skilled workers. “In this maturity stage,??? [a] report says, “having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less-educated workers for the barista or clerical job…???
[The future] norm may very well be an economy where even college-educated workers cannot thrive.
Employer demand for “cognitive skills” has waned, adds the Times. Wages are stagnant. Corporate America declines to give raises except to the most well-off.
No need for cognitive skills as a part-timer in the meat department. And certainly there were plenty of college-educated unemployed people in the Whole Foods line and parking garage.
The Times has no answers other than the usual things that can’t happen: raising the minimum wage, bringing back regulation and enforcement of standards in corporate America, “support for union organizing.”
Additional hilarity provided by e-mails from Robert Reich and other progressive organizations asking if I’d be willing to start a petition to raise the minimum wage in Pasadena, or contribute three dollars, if I could.
Two years old, more true every day. The only bit wrong, a minor detail: Cairo, the Seal Team 6 dog wasn’t elected president.
Hey, use Kickstarter and social networking to collect enough money to make it into a record or CD! Make an ad for this video, advises Google!
What a laugh riot.
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Abrin is the new ricin
Today, more indirect news evidence the Dept. of Homeland Security and FBI are heavily engaged in surveillance of Internet web sites on the Internet and/or on the Tor network. In this instance, a fascinating tidbit in the United Kingdom, a collateral arrest linked to the investigation of Black Market Reloaded and Jesse Korff.
From a small English newspaper:
A banker accused of trying to kill her magistrate mother at their Stratford home by lacing her Diet Coke with a poison more deadly than ricin is to stand trial in July after appearing at Southwark Crown Court today where she was further remanded in custody.
Kuntal Patel,36, is alledged to have plotted to kill Meena Patel,54, using abrin-a rare poison extracted from the seeds of a Peruvian plant.
She was arrested by counter terrrorism officers at the £450,000 home they share in Park Road earlier this month after US homeland security is believed to have tipped off Scotland Yard’s Counter Terrorism Command about a website based in the US which specialised in selling lethal toxins.
She is not facing terrorist charges, but is accused of attempted murder between December 10 2013 and January 26.
The Mirror also informs: “Their home has been subject to a four-day fingertip search by police wearing masks and protective suits.”
Three raids in London were conducted in connection with the case.
And last week, one kook in New York:
City cops are using facial recognition software and leaning on the FBI and Interpol to learn more about the unhinged Swedish man who showed up at a Bronx police station with cyanide.
Jonathan Norling, 22, had more of the toxin and a suicide note in his Cadillac. Another poison, abrin, was found in his Cruger Ave. apartment, cops said. Officers also recovered 9-mm. pistol and an AR-15 assault rifle in his rented U-Haul truck …
[Norling] claimed to have a background in chemistry and an expertise in computer hacking, though detectives doubt his claim that he hacked into Citibank when he was 14.
[Norling] told police he tried to make cyanide himself, failed to do so, then hacked into [Black Market Reloaded], an Internet black market that he accessed using [the TOR network], which is free software that provides online anonymity and hides the user’s location. He then purchased the cyanide online.
What’s with the baby-faced kook pretending he’s a hacker spreading anarchy 25 years after the fact?
“Precatory bean plants may be purchased at nurseries nationwide.
“Some years ago, a few very stupid people came up with the idea of using the attractive scarlet and sable beans for rosary beads… If your target is strongly religious, then these beads can easily be modified to kill.???
[Hutchkinson continues with the advice to scarify the rosary peas so that the abrin might leak out and poison anyone who handles them. Since abrin is a protein, it can’t be much of a contact poison, any more than you can eat a piece of meat by putting it on your skin, but Hutchkinson, of course, does not know this. He is more interested in poisoning the Pope.]
“As the abrin slowly kills your target, an interesting cycle will begin. The worse your target gets, the more he will pray with his rosary beads, which will only make him worse… ???
“These items make wonderful presents for the religious target. We’d send one to the Pope, but he already has nineteen hundred years of Christian spoils to adorn himself with.???
— Maxwell Hutchkinson, The Poisoner’s Handbook
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03.01.14
Music for a Ponzi Planet
Pete Seeger’d shit: “Oh, lord, pass me some more.”
Demographics:
Boys’ club, a minor subset of WhiteManistan, even though they exist in tech centers. Young right-wingers who don’t get wound up over gay people.
Losing 300,000 to MtGox as an affordable loss for someone who lives in a money-laundering hub, Panama City, and posts the truth to “the Internet’s front page,??? Reddit.
The perfect philosophy of money for someone freeing the world from government tyranny with a plastic gun until the State Department took it off him for unbelief in the ITAR.
Winkdex says BitCoin is still worth $516 today even though MtGox just blew a big hole in the stash. The fanbase is desperate to keep it propped up and they can, for a while, since most of it is held by a tiny niche of the population. And the thieves certainly don’t want it to devalue.
Have you ever run across a female ‘glibertarian’?
What happens when an almost billion dollar hole is in a money supply held by a very small population?
How much of the next year do you devote to slow, stealthy money-laundering?
Young men who have no use for Western Union and check-cashing stores.
I Bought Subway with BitCoin and it was Really Awesome entrepreneurs who run start-ups on how to advertise on Facebook.
Young men “named” in tribute to John Galt.
Early semi-retirement canceled. BitCoin Godot never showed.
I’m not waiting for BitCoin Godot in today’s post.
Instead, the real world. Two or three hundred people for two part-time jobs at a local super-market.
02.28.14
Religious freedom fighters of WhiteManistan, unite!
Only a day after Arizona governor Jan Brewer vetoes Hate-the-Gays in Arizona because it would be bad for business and a Texas judge strikes down a forbid-gay-marriage law in Texas, the Grand Old HateMongers vow more vigorous efforts to burn witches “continue to press for additional legal protections for private businesses that deny service to gay men and lesbians, saying that a defeat in Arizona this week is only a minor setback and that religious-liberty legislation is the best way” to hate gay people.
It is the height of religious intolerance, anti-American and unwholesome to not allow WhiteManistan to burn witches refuse to do anything for gay people if their religious beliefs requires them to hate and punish said gay people.
As WhiteManistan tries to enact Uganda lite, in its honor, Autotune Eat da Poo Poo.
NSFW/Vulgar.
“Religious-freedom measures that could have implications for gay rights are pending in Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri and Oklahoma,” read the Washington Post this morning.
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