Now, the Australian mining heiress [Gina Rinehart], worth $19 billion dollars and earlier this year thought to be the world’s richest woman, has sparked another controversy in her latest column in Australian Resources and Investment magazine. (Yes, I am a registered reader online.) Rinehart rails against class warfare and says the non-rich should stop attacking the rich and go to work.
“There is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire,” she writes. “If you’re jealous of those with more money, don’t just sit there and complain. Do something to make more money yourself – spend less time drinking, or smoking and socializing and more time working.”
The comments were part of a treatise on what she sees as Australia’s decline due to high taxes, high wages and over-regulation. Rinehart said taxes should fall, red tape should be cut, environmental rules relaxed and the minimum wage should be lowered.
Looking inside the numbers, Obama continues to lead Romney among key parts of his political base, including African Americans (94 percent to 0 percent) … That’s right: according to this poll, Romney has zero percent support among African Americans.
The African Americans trotted out by the GOP at their conventions — the Powells, the Wests, etc — statistically non-existent.
“The poll should not be taken to mean that Romney has no African American supporters at all,” it continues. “However, at the very most, he has far fewer than Obama.”
The beliefs of the white South dominate Republican thinking. As the white share of the U.S. population shrinks and the Latino share rises, Republicans have passed draconian anti-immigrant laws and opposed legislation enabling immigrants brought here as children to gain legal status. They also exploit racist resentments …
The ghosts of Dixie — of the Scopes Trial and the underfunding of public education — also pop up in Republicans’ willful resistance to science and, more broadly, simple empiricism. Global warming? Evolution? Homosexuality’s causation? How babies get made? Find a robust scientific conclusion and you can find a significant number of Republicans — adducing pseudo-science and faith — who oppose it.
Even the most stupid among us get it. The only question remaining: Are there enough paranoid southern white bigots, or those like them, to elect Mitt Romney?
That thing of no bowels is he. (Paraphrased from Troilus and Cressida.)
Everyday, something new, accidentally humorous and illustratively awful. Vote for the tax-dodging rich guy because you hate the non-white guy in the White House and Mr. Romney humors all your paranoid white man’s southern grudges. That’s quite a sales pitch:
Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign toasted its top donors Wednesday aboard a 150-foot yacht flying the flag of the Cayman Islands.
The floating party, hosted by a Florida developer on his yacht “Cracker Bay” …
“I think it’s ironic they do this aboard a yacht that doesn’t even pay its taxes,” said a woman who lives aboard a much smaller boat moored at the St. Petersburg Municipal Marina.
Attention in the past decade has focused not on labor-saving innovation, but rather on a succession of entertainment and communication devices that do the same things as we could do before, but now in smaller and more convenient packages. The iPod replaced the CD Walkman; the smartphone replaced the garden-variety “dumb??? cellphone with functions that in part replaced desktop and laptop computers; and the iPad provided further competition with traditional personal computers. These innovations were enthusiastically adopted, but they provided new opportunities for consumption on the job and in leisure hours rather than a continuation of the historical tradition of replacing human labor with machines …
This, from a scholarly paper entitled, “Is US Economic Growth Over: Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds.”
“One hopes this is a paper to look back on fondly from the back seat of a robot-driven alternatively-fueled hover car in the near future but, even if you don’t find his arguments all that persuasive, it might be nice to take a moment and, courtesy of Gordon, remember how cool indoor plumbing is …” writes the blogger at the Financial Times.
Two options are presented. Option A — we get to keep everything up to and including Windows98. Option B, you get Facebook and iJunk, but you have to “give up” indoor plumbing.
Ha-ha. Good thought experiment. iJunk, but you get dysentery and cholera, among other things.
The balance of trade in non-military domestic manufacturing may have gone to hell upon sale to China but there’s one place were the US still rules supreme.
We’re the biggest sellers of arms, bar none, with special emphasis on sales to countries ruled by our toadies.
“A worldwide economic decline had suppressed arms sales over recent years,” writes the New York Times. “But increasing tensions with Iran drove a set of Persian Gulf nations — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman — to purchase American weapons at record levels.”
One can think of US arms manufacturing as a protected Keynsian jobs program. No other sector of the American economy enjoys such status. It is a near perfect example of industrial socialism in which the taxpayers assume all the investment and initial risk but are returned little to none of the profit made on it.
At the time, I made the argument that every American was entitled to a royalty on arms sales since it is taxpayer money that pays for the innovation, development and primary manufacturing of the American weapons coveted by the various tin pot oil-producing countries on the southern side of the Persian Gulf.
Again, it’s not unreasonable to make the argument that the stressed in the middle class ought to receive something back for the country’s primary business product/export, one its taxes bankroll and grow. A 20 percent war dividend for 2011 might look like this:
20 percent of 247 billion in arms sales = $49 400 000 000
20 percent of 164.7 billion for direct war = $32 940 000 000
Total war dividend clawback = $82 340 000 000
Bonus check cut for 49.3 million people on food stamps, adjustable for increases = $1670.18.
Billionaires alleged to be harmed by “socioeconomic lynching.” They “feel like they’re the victims.” Well, they can always go to Galt’s Gulch and we’ll all die and they’ll be able to come out.
“Is there an all clear signal? … What about the wealthy who think they’ve been victimized a lot?”
Near the end two of the shoeshiners snap to their senses and briefly say they’re unsure they believe all the rot about the victimization of the wealthy.
What the Democrats want to do is to play class warfare, pit rich against poor … The Democrats abhor success. They would rather Americans be beholden to Fedzilla for food stamps and other government programs than go out and become tremendously successful on their own.
The Democrats hate success … The “man??? keeping down the people is not a successful person such as Mr. Romney, but rather the Democratic Party, which buys their votes by enslaving its supporters with government programs and checks, funded with the tax dollars that people like Mr. Romney have paid.
Putting someone’s shaking ass in your video, more effective than trying to attract progressives with a merry song about Paul Ryan.
Cynically, pandering works. Pitching stuff to the pearl-clutchers in your ‘friends’ list, ‘twitter’ followers, and liberal news websites doesn’t. It’s the difference between this and something on NPR. I’ll take the “this.” (Click the link.)
547 views this morning, a marked rise after I switched the preview from Arnold to posterized booty. Not viral, but advantageous.
And you know what’s really annoying? The brainless sandwich videos Google/YouTube serves with it. “Healing Quest: Liver Reuben Sandwich” and “Gluten Free Bread Recipe — Oat or Sorghum” sod off.
From the Yahoo news blog, a man-in-the-street account of people solicited for their stories on becoming poor and not being able to afford food in the failed state:
Here’s a taste of Tom Servo’s bare-bones grocery list: A few bags of dried beans. Breakfast cereal of some kind — usually whatever’s on sale. A large canister of dried oats. Lots of bananas — typically a few pounds. A bag of apples. Other miscellaneous fresh fruits and veggies — whatever’s in season and on sale.
The 29-year-old college student in Tampa, Fla., says his grocery list is written for nutrition, not taste. He sticks to bare essentials and buys in bulk. But two weeks of groceries used to cost him $50; now it’s almost $100.
For example: “I used to pay 99 cents for one pound of dried black beans; now they cost $1.49 or more. Two years ago I paid $2.39 for a 16-ounce jar of generic peanut butter; now the same peanut butter costs $3.99.”
“For the first time in my life, I’ve recently had to make a choice between groceries or some other expense,” he writes.
College student illustrates the problem with asking for personal stories tossed in over e-mail transom. Maybe “Tom Servo’s” story is true. And maybe he just wanted to see the name in print, a laff riot at the dorm.
It does not impeach the story — one that’s dire — but it doesn’t help. And just because a lot of people might not know “Tom Servo” …
“Generics and store brands have replaced Tillamook cheese, Boar’s Head meats and Laura Scudder’s peanut butter,” writes the Yahoo journalist, on an upper middle class person’s shopping list, now that they’re on foodstamps.
It is, perhaps, not the way most would or could have phrased it.
The pictures of the disgruntled in their new jungle homes are worth thousands of words. The destination is Nicaragua, which not so long ago, geologically speaking, was a place of dangerous commies for these ex-voters. There, it is said by two, it will be possible to ride out a thermonuclear holocaust.
While the numbers of people are not particularly impressive, the mindset is now deadeningly familiar.
“Although Nicaragua hasn’t had good relationships with the US over the last three decades, it is a popular destination for US citizens,” it reads.
“I made it to Nicaragua … I don’t want to live in the US anymore … Obama ruins the country …Now I have my monkey, Cindy,” she says to NBC news.
“I earned good money in the US — $400,000 a year — I was a retail broker and I saw the crisis coming … We wanted to leave, we don’t like the politics of the US … Here is a safe place, safe for a nuclear war.”
“I don’t like the politics in the US and the cost of living is very high.”
In modern America, there are plaster casters all over the place. In the culture of lickspittle it’s been turned into a serious career track.
And by this I don’t mean people who fluff rockstars so their tumescence can be lovingly preserved. I mean it far more metaphorically, as in those who act as fellatrices for various agencies and industries in our allegedly technologically superior country …
Fussell never imagined the explosion of things of this ilk on the network … Print kept the number of such pubs small because even though execrable, it still took a good deal of money and resources to do it right.
However, web publishing did away with all that and, today, in full cooperation with the culture of lickspittle and its glory, there are literally hundreds of digital pubs for those who get hard reading about the products of US weapons shops.
And because there is a big audience with such a pathology, the publications that serve them are essentially groupie mags — like Tiger Beat — only staffed with journalists who write daily swooning copy on what I’ve called The Empire’s Dog Feces.
The web publications compete viciously with each other for the stories of the day, even the insignificant. The quality of journalism is terrible. The publications pay their contributors in … gum, little or nothing at all except the opportunity to be published and be in the Google news dragnet.
News flash: The Pentagon is replacing the classic stabbing bayonet on rifles with a tomahawk “designed for quick chopping motions??? complete with a twist-off head providing room for storage. And, the Department of Defense is ordering troops to stop wearing the popular TapouT MMA T-shirts because of security concerns.
Believable? Maybe, but not true.
With a hint of truth these cheeky fake news stories recently duped some serious blogs. Both Gizmodo and Yell magazine happened to mistake the posts on The Duffel Blog, a five-month old satirical website, for real news.
The owner of the Duffel Blog, which is wildly successful, tells NBC News:
“I do want to make people laugh,??? Szoldra said, “but at the same time I do have a little bit of a following, a bully pulpit if you will, where I can highlight something that I think is worth making fun of and a lot of time it’s better to make fun of it than it is to just complain about it.???
Good boy. But no, it is never not good to crap on shit.
Last week, here:
If you’re in a tech firm you can tell a Wired reporter you piss iced tea and they’ll publish it without blinking.
And it gets easier as you proceed down the ladder.
Some nobody at Gizmodo:
“The problem with the US military is that sometimes their contraptions get so wacky that I can believe anything they say,??? Gizmodo’s blogger wrote. “My mistake, people. Sorry about that.
And after twenty years of covering the ‘so wacky’ you know fantasy, or satire, as it where, when you see it. Instead of taking it for inside dope.
