Help make Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world. Work at an Amazon warehouse sweatshop in the scenic Pennsy Dutch Lehigh Valley. Enjoy the amenities of getting computerized e-mail notifications of temperature being so hot in the building you’ll suffer from heat exhaustion. Because Amazon cares so much, ambulances from a local company are kept onsite to take you to the hospital.
Don’t worry. While you’re being written up for missing work another temporary worker is being groomed.
One temporary employee who spent several months unloading boxes of books in the Amazon warehouse said: “Everybody gets backaches, but if you slow down, they reprimand you. They’re killing people mentally and physically. They just push, push, push.”
During one shift he hurt himself. After seeing a doctor, the worker went on “light duty.” The staffing firm didn’t have any such assignments available. So every scheduled work day he reported to the ISS office on Tilghman Street.
“You’re not allowed to walk around,” he said. “They put a chair in the corner and you sit there.”
His job was to count the number of people coming into the office. Another person he observed on light duty had to count how many trains passed by outside the office window.
Beatings will continues until morale improves.
Not by coincidence this is a “beggar they neighbor” corporate economic strategy, one which feeds off the atrocious job market by taking advantage of the desperation of laborers. The laborers, who will take ever decreasing compensation in relationship to work performed, make the goods cheaper but profits to those who already have the most, soar.
DHS’ latest bulletin, issued Sept. 3, warned the group has been using social media networks to urge followers working in the financial industry to sabotage their employers’ computer systems.
Reflecting the lingering impact of the recession, the U.S. poverty rate from 2007-2010 has now risen faster than any three-year period since the early 1980s, when a crippling energy crisis amid government cutbacks contributed to inflation, spiraling interest rates and unemployment.
Measured by total numbers, the 46 million now living in poverty is the largest on record dating back to when the census began tracking poverty in 1959 …
Bruce Meyer, a public policy professor at the University of Chicago, cautioned that the worst may yet to come in poverty levels, citing in part continued rising demand for food stamps this year as well as “staggeringly high” numbers in those unemployed for more than 26 weeks. He noted that more than 6 million people now represent the so-called long-term unemployed …
He can’t help smiling every time he sees each shiny new Grand Cherokee, one of Chrysler’s top-selling models, roll off the line. Still, it’s tough to accept that his entire annual salary of about $30,000 is not enough to afford the least expensive Jeep made at Jefferson North.
“It would be a shame to work at Chrysler,??? he said, “and not be able to drive a Chrysler.???
Research that took place in the US – no comment on why the US would be interested in studying unrest – used millions of articles as a feed for a computer and found that if you gave it enough information about unrest it could tell you that there was unrest.
In this case the analysis was carried out retrospectively, but according to those involved it could also be used to spot upcoming problems, which in the context of US backed research starts to sound a little bit sinister.
Today’s laugher re Howard is an interview conducted by Detroit music journalist Gary Graff for Billboard.
Almost all US music journalists are milchtoasts. They’re simply not capable of doing honest interviews with the likes of Ted Nugent.
Today’s piece in Billboard is no exception.
Entitled “Ted Nugent ‘Too Divisive’ to Get Role in Rick Perry Campaign,” the headline telegraphs what any reasonable person would find obvious.
However, most of the story is devoted to more puff hagiography for Ted Nugent.
It’s not the first time.
DD has mentioned Graff in the Ted Nugent tab before. Last year, right around the same time — Labor Day — when Ted had just finished his annual anti-union ritual.
I put it this way:
Nugent eventually left Michigan for Waco, Texas. And while assorted cream puff music journalists have asked Ted this summer whether he might run for political office, given his views, he’s unelectable wherever there is still an informed middle class. Even in this toxic climate. And that rules out almost his entire old home state. Ted knows it, too.
Ted Nugent, elected to represent places like Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor or Lansing? Surely you must be joking.
Now, as for Waco or Crawford, Texas? Maybe.
Ted’s return to Michigan for a Labor Day gig has generated local advance press. Typically, no one brings up the very bad odor of Ted’s attitudes and politics toward Detroit.
The only significant item appeared in the Royal Oak newspaper, a reprint of a trivial Gary Graff wire news piece which was published at Billboard a few days ago.
And did Graff ask Nugent about what he thought of the auto unions now, for a Labor Day gig? Nope. That would be possibly rife with unpleasantness.
Someone with guts might have chosen to make Nugent actually look at himself in a mirror, for a change.
Good job, Billboard and Gary Graff! Get that news on Nugent’s next album, supposedly featuring “‘ stone cold motherf***king songs’ ready to go when he takes his band into the studio later this year … ???
Guts, of course, are almost entirely ruled out in music journalism. It’s a black mark, a sign of mental illness and unreliability to have any.
But back to today’s Billboard piece on Nugent, again by Graff, which skips all mention of Nugent’s virulently anti-union piece for the Labor Day weekend in the WaTimes. The same weekend Ted played his “homecoming” gig in Detroit.
An enterprising reporter might have pleasantly asked Ted if he took time to share any of his opinions with the crowd at the DTE theatre in Clarkson.
Ted often shares his opinions, sprinkled with profanity, from the stage.
So, Ted, did you tell your crowd in Detroit last night that auto unions fucking suck, teachers unions blow and you despise them all? If not, why not? Did you not have the time?
As a Texas resident for the past six years, a diehard conservative and a personal friend of Gov. Rick Perry, there’s no question where Ted Nugent’s loyalties will lie during the 2012 presidential campaign. His capacity to be vocal about his candidate, however, is still up in the air …
“I don’t know if I’ll get a stamp of approval because I am so volatile and because the line in the sand in a political campaign can be so ambiguous — and I’m anything but, [Nugent tells Graff]. The reality is that Perry must penetrate what is presumed to be the non-Perry demographic, and if I scare them away so he doesn’t get their ear, then I’m being counterproductive” …
“That bully pulpit can also have a serious tone to it,” Nugent explains. “But on a rock ‘n’ roll stage, I can tell Hillary Clinton to straddle my machine gun. The more something causes problems with people, the more I’ll say it ’cause it’s rock ‘n’ roll and you can eat me. But that’s a rock ‘n’ roll show. I know how to change the tone …
“Volatile.” It’s like calling the first H-bomb test, the one that dug a crater a mile wide at Bikini atoll, a “big bang.” Here’s Ted being his usual tricky self when he knows a journalist won’t call him on it.
The tone in Nugent’s regular opinion pieces for the WaTimes contains no real differences from his stage rants.
Well, wait, let me correct that.
There is one difference. Ted is not allowed to use a constant stream of profanity at the WaTimes.
But otherwise, it’s the same. Ted hating on huge swaths of American society — condemning teachers, education, all aspects of the government, all Democrats, Muslims, just about everyone not exactly like him.
It’s easy to review and DD has done so. Hey, Media Matters runs a regular ticker on Nugent, too, and it did not miss Nugent’s anti-labor Labor Day generosity this weekend.
Gary Graff, and Billboard, I’m reasonably certain, know all this. They just choose not to share it with readers or take time to make Nugent defend himself. It’s just too damn distasteful to have to walk Nugent back over most of his proclamations, particularly those which are totally indefensible in a reasonable society with any kind of heart.
At one point Nugent is asked about his “I Still Believe” song.
He seems to acknowledge it’s a duff piece, asserting that if only he’d had more money to spend on it, that would have fixed things:
[Nugent] considers it more of a demo than an actual single.
“It’s [sic] doesn’t have the big, musical sound I’d normally get,” he explains. “The guitars aren’t what they need to be. The drums aren’t what they need to be. But I’m not going to spend $100,000 to give something away. I’ll spend $10,000 to give something away, and I wanted to get that song out there.”
Ten thousand dollars to give that song away? More horseshit.
The Billboard piece includes the Ted concert vid on YouTube, the one I laughed at and linked to over the weekend here.
Nugent threatens a new album, one he knows his current audience won’t buy.
From a business wire, no link, as it’s a joke masquerading as a piece of hopeful news.
Ten top jobs in the current US economy. And one of them is — spammer:
2. E-Mail Marketer
Hiring demand: 0.65 active job seekers for every open position
Annual salary range: $43,840-$84,430
10-year growth projection: 28%
Job description: Spam I am. The fragmenting of the information market makes it harder and harder to get the attention of consumers. Just as a fisherman has better luck if the bait ends up where the fish are, more companies are turning to targeted e-mail efforts to get the right message to the right audience. [Yeah, right. Not according to my mail filters.]
Other top jobs, those you’ve seen DD mock previously.
There’s the continuing growth market for bedpan technicians. Two types — one for working at the installations where the poor and average elderly are warehoused. And one — call them mobile bedpan technicians — for attending to the wealthy who warehouse in their mansions.
And, of course, programmers for trivial apps for “smart phones.”
True story: DD was at Ralphs in Pasadena last week when an iDolt used an app on his phone to enter the discount count, which is your phone number. Seriously. There’s an app that wastes your time, those behind you, and the grocery checker’s, in replacing your brain and index finger.
Hurricane Irene hit the East Coast and left more than 6 million homes and businesses without power. Transportation services were disrupted as a result of the hurricane. More than a million people got an idea of what it would be like if the United States were attacked by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon …
To address this threat, it is essential to expand the ballistic missile protection of the U.S. homeland.
The authors of the study, which examined the regulatory filings of the 100 companies with the best-paid chief executives, said that their findings suggested that current United States policy was rewarding tax avoidance rather than innovation.
“We have no evidence that C.E.O.’s are fashioning, with their executive leadership, more effective and efficient enterprises,??? the study concluded. “On the other hand, ample evidence suggests that C.E.O.’s and their corporations are expending considerably more energy on avoiding taxes than perhaps ever before — at a time when the federal government desperately needs more revenue to maintain basic services for the American people.???
The study comes at a time when business leaders have been lobbying for a cut in corporate taxes …
“We pay our taxes and we have added 5,000 more U.S. manufacturing jobs that were incentivized by tax benefits,??? he said.
Today, Nicholas Kristof turns his end of summer vacation in his old hometown into a column bemoaning unemployment — in less than one thousand words.
I detest Kristof. He’s a poster boy for my Culture of Lickspittle tab, someone appearing so hand-wringing and sincere in print butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.
And he’s here in the “Good Boy” tune at 21 seconds, gesturing at some edition of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. That’s where all the beautiful and brilliant people get invited to brainstorm on the world’s problems.
And they’ve done so well.
Twenty one seconds in, basking in the applause from the swells at Davos.
Anyway, here’s Kristof today, as usual, squandering the high-button real estate at the New York Times with the obvious.
Really, anyone could write this. A computer program, probably one of about twenty lines, might suffice. It’s that phoned in.
Kristof gently bemoans the media’s focus on the deficit, not the number one problem, joblessness, and that he’s been guilty, too. Specifically, he squandered a golden opportunity on Twitter.
I’m an offender, too: I asked President Obama a question at the Twitter town hall, and it was a gotcha query about his negotiations with Republicans. I’m sorry that I missed the chance to push him on the issue that Americans care most about …
Sorry I was a twit, sez Kristof. How many retweets did it earn him?
Kristof walks or drives around his town in Oregon, interviews a couple unemployed in the street, work that could’ve taken all of one morning.
Finally, Kristof bravely asks: “Mr. Obama, with 25 million Americans hurting, will you fight — really fight! — to put jobs at the top of the national agenda?”
Like a lawyer, he never asks questions he doesn’t already have the answer to. And this one is obviously “No.”
So fiery!
“I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter,” reads the usual italicized print.
1,147,543 followers.
A tweeted wisdom of Kristof, name-dropping another swell person:
Jaron Lanier just said to me: “Tweeting is like sex. Writing a book is like raising a child.”
On cyberterrorism and cyberwar, since he was just at a conference on them:
Cyber attacks could damage the grid, banking system, air traffic, dams, etc., and already are stealing many corp secrets.
My takeaway from a conference on cyber-terrorism: the “next 9/11” could be a cyber attack that shuts the electrical grid.
To sow distrust and confusion among jihadists, the United States also uses a technique of “webspoofing” called “false band replacement,” where U.S. intelligence officers infiltrate networks to post their own materials.
The agencies have forged an al-Qaida “web watermark” that in effect “makes messages posted on these sites official,” Schmitt and Shanker wrote.
We invade jihadi websites! Really! Don’t laugh. They’re serious!
“In which hopelessly inept journalists reduce me to having to debunk a school science project.”(The post as of this moment is temporarily unavailable, though we link to the cache.) The post indicates: “This is, I’m sad to say, clear nonsense. I’ll take this in two parts: one, why his experiment is, unfortunately, completely broken (sorry again). Two, why the imagined result is impossible nonsense.”
This, in reaction to an apparently widely reported story, one I assiduously ignored, on a solar power scientific breakthrough “discovered” by a “13-year-old”:
A 13-year-old who, observing trees, takes it upon himself to read up on the Fibonacci series and propose a way to better utilize solar energy is the feel-good story at its finest. So naturally, media outlets including us [the Atlantic] have been sharing the tale of seventh grader Aidan Dwyer’s solar power “breakthrough” science project.
Journalists don’t understand science, any of the laws of science, matter and energy, the scientific method, critical thinking, mathematics, biology, chemistry, or any other hard science. Period.
Even those with sissypants degrees in majors like “History of Science”
or “Science Writing” or “Science & Health Journalism.”
And I’ve stumbled across them again and again in the last ten years. They can’t write accurately about anything that requires a grasp of the laws of nature and cogent thinking without either being taken in by people playing them or running amok with news of the allegedly miraculous.
This one falls into the latter category: Kid! Disovers! What! All! The! Ph.D’s! Can’t!
Science doesn’t work that way. It didn’t work that way back when Edward Jenner discovered the cure for smallpox, either.
But American journalists and editors love magical and fantastical thinking. And jargon. I would bet one hundred bucks all the people involved in this had to see was an e-mail or press release containing the words “Fibonacci series” and it was off to the races.
Why the New Bombs Al-Qaeda is Building Are So Terrifying
What these stories have to do with is another trait Americans, including journalists, have embedded in their genetic code. And it’s one all the readers of this blog have seen again and again.
The inclination to believe, pass on and recommend rubbish based on the number of others who have adopted belief in the same rubbish.
There’s another way of putting it, much less politely: The belief in the rube that if the number of people spouting the bullshit reaches a certain critical mass it suddenly becomes not-bullshit.
This was also called groupthink and it meant bad brains. But that’s way too nice a term for our times.
Ironically, when this occurs only scientific argument can rip them a new one. And sometimes even that doesn’t work. As everyone can see everyday.
Song, as it applies to everyone involved in this story, not just the employees of MSNBC, the NY Times and the Atlantic, in the slideshow.
The band members [of Sidewinder] did not expect it either. Staff Sgt. Angie Johnson, of the 571st Air Force Band, 131st Bomb Wing, Air National Guard, only found out about the viral video when Carson Daly contacted her on Twitter. In short order, Mark Burnett and NBC’s the Voice reached out as well. “ Totally can’t believe I’m tweeting with you right now. Jaw.On.Floor,??? Johnson wrote.
I can believe it. The band has an incredible sound on par with the original songstress Adele. Watch it.
Eh. Not quite. The singer is indeed very good. The rest of the band? Not so much.
And if you look hard you can probably find an act in your hometown just as accomplished. That means — in quite a few places. Learnt it as a music journalist many years ago.
No link straight to YouTube. It’s easy enough to find, having been linked by every major media organization.
Go to the WaPo and read the gush. The video is embedded on the page.
Part of our new normalcy is the collective backdoor guilt shared by most of the country.
Which, of course, has not participated in the decade long wars.
And while that’s the way our leaders and the Pentagon set it up, when they removed our responsibility they also took a piece of everyone’s soul as payment.
So whenever something comes over the wire now, discovered to be from the young people in camo, the overcompensation squeezes out. Overcompensation as balm for the hole where a piece of the soul was surgically removed years ago.
Honor the soldiers in whatever they do.
No discouraging words please.
I’m tired of it. So call me an asshole if you must, it’s been done many times.
Go on American Idol or America’s Got Talent or The Voice or whatever, already. Just like the hundreds you see in the auditions, all of them pretty good, even though they never make it to the season.
