The country is weary of war, but the story Rubio tells, with eloquence and passion, is still tremendously appealing — the story of a great republic armed and righteous, with no limits on what it can accomplish in the world.
This is a story that many conservatives — and many Americans — want to believe. Once, I believed it myself.
But that was many years and many wars ago, and now I think Rand Paul is right.
This just in time to merge with Congressional House reluctance to go along with the President on regarding Bombing Moe as “not war.”
It’s not war, is the reasoning, if it’s by remote control.
Anyway, it’s not that they’re suddenly pacifists, it’s that they’re for any way to mess with Obama.
However, Moe stubbornly refuses to die or go away and Little Tommy Atkins and Co. have to keep re-ordering American smart bombs.
So the only difference taking the President out of the equation with some invocation of Congressional war powers is that it will only slightly slow down drone manufacturing and sales at General Atomics.
At this point the strategy of bombing paupers is not changeable. In fact, if the President were to suddenly advocate a draw down in the pauper-bombing mission planner, the Republican Party would quickly adopt a position for restoring the primacy of bombing the world’s beggars and pantywaists, or as Ross Douthat writes:
Rubio is the great neoconservative hope, the champion of a foreign policy that boldly goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy … His maiden Senate speech was a paean to national greatness, whose peroration invoked John F. Kennedy and insisted that America remain the “watchman on the wall of world freedom.???
Competing hard for the old Reader’s Digest demographic, Newsweek:
“To find out what pay U.S. workers will really accept for an hour’s work, and how that stacks up against other countries, NEWSWEEK turned to Mechanical Turk … The results: some Americans settled for a shockingly low 25 cents an hour—while counterparts in nations like India and the Philippines expected multiples more. Of course, the results also partly reflect how many workers in each country compete for work on Amazon’s system. But even against other wired places like the U.K. and Canada, Americans desperate to earn even a pittance were the cheapest around.”
Huffington Post exploits laborers desperate to get in print by offering them a byline without compensation while Ariana Huffington makes millions.
And we didn’t need Mechanical Turk and Newsweek to inform us. (Any mention of Mechanical Turf, btw, will automatically generate spam comment caught by the blog filter.)
Fifth-generation Georgia farmer Gary Paulk told local paper The Daily Journal that he has only been able to find half of the 300 workers he needs to pick his blueberry fields, and that’s after hiking wages 20 percent. Another farmer said he had to switch to (less efficient) machines when he couldn’t find enough workers for his fields this spring …
Anti-illegal immigration groups like FAIR argue that if illegal immigration goes down, wages would go up for farm jobs, and then native-born Americans and legal immigrants would want them. Farmers say they can’t afford to pay more.
The structural thing, at Newsweek, increasingly used as a rationalization to stop worrying about massive unemployment. It’s all the fault of stupid workers with atrophied, obsolete skills.
There are plenty of jobs and employers can’t fill them fast enough:
[One] survey for the National Association of Manufacturers in 2009, near the recession’s nadir, found that a third of companies still faced shortages. These were largest for engineers and scientists and among aerospace, defense and biotechnology firms.
Arms manufacturing and bombing others in our detached wars is bully.
Newsweek allows a little doubt to creep in at the end. Won’t corporate America take a chance? Brother, could you spare a dollar?
There is no instant cure for today’s job mismatch, but it might ease if America’s largest companies were a little bolder. Surely many of them — enjoying strong profits — could make a small gamble that, by providing more training for workers, they might actually do themselves and the country some good.
We know the answer to that.
Readers will remember that last week Jeff Immelt of GE, he of the Prez’s job council, recommended pushing tourism — America’s a great place to visit (!) — and community college.
Anyway, where are the dependable jobs of good wage?
Obvious, really, if you read the New York Times. Border patrol and building more robots to bomb the have-nots of the world.
The US government and Pentagon successfully removed the citizenry for the equation for war. That has made the market stable.
Now the national security apparatus is involved, practically speaking, mostly in money-making and plinking off a wide variety of paupers it finds around the globe. And only very stupid people believe that killing scruffs in AfPak or Yemen or Libya, no matter how bad some of the individuals may be, does anything to defend basic freedoms and promote American value. (Yes, dronifying the pantywaists really has done the trick.)
The mightiest military in the world is for wealth-generation as well as plutocracy and toady protection schemes, from which no fruits are generally shared. While it’s out picking off bad guys and civilians too close to the action, the stuff at home worth defending blows slowly away in the wind.
From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less widely known are the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.
The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones …
There’s the official designated expert cheerleader on drones, Peter W. Singer — Brookings man, to vouchsafe something meant to sound clever and wonderful:
The Pentagon has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones next year, and by 2030 envisions ever more stuff of science fiction: “spy flies??? equipped with sensors and microcameras to detect enemies, nuclear weapons or victims in rubble. Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Wired for War,??? a book about military robotics, calls them “bugs with bugs.???
Had to throw the “victims in rubble” part in to make the technology sound a little like it’s making the world a better place.
If you’re structurally unemployed and not able to get into arms manufacturing, perhaps you aren’t leveraging your iKit and cyberpersona enough.
At Mashable, no link, a consultant tells what you must do:
1. Leverage Your Social Graph
2. Use Augmented Reality and Job Search Apps
And don’t don’t don’t be short on Klout —
In today’s world, not only do you need strong hard and soft skills, but you need to develop online influence.
Online influence is measured in how many connections you have, who those connections are (and how influential they are), who and how many people are sharing your content and backlinking to your website and more. Klout.com, a site that measures online influence and gives you a “Klout score??? … [Klout, incidentally, seems to be nothing more than an elaborate parasite economy app for digging into your life on Facebook or Twitter. If you don’t consent to logging onto it through these accounts, you can’t use it.]
5. Turn Yourself Into an Advertisement
Dan Schawbel is the author of Me 2.0 and the founder of Millennial Branding, a full-service personal branding agency. He’s spoken about personal branding at Google …
Eleventy-thousand three hundred six and a buck two eighty “like” it on Facebook.
And there’s the DARPA balloon hunt, won by MIT using social networking, to develop a way to find terrorist networks.
That [really did great things.]
Ten thousand nine hundred followers of Spencer Ackerman on Twitter, says the banner. That’s more than four times the people that live in my old hometown.
When incapable of the significant, take another page from the GOP playbook. Wave your arms and make a big noise about how you’re stamping out trivial stuff that costs the taxpayer pennies when compared to the money being blown out the exhaust pipe for endless war.
In a message on the White House website entitled, “There’s a New Sheriff in Town,” Biden addressed potential cuts to spending.
“And I bet you didn’t know that your tax dollars pay for a website dedicated to the Desert Tortoise. I’m sure it’s a wonderful species, but we can’t afford to have a standalone site devoted to every member of the animal kingdom,” Biden wrote in the message also sent via email to supporters. “It’s just one of hundreds of government websites that should be consolidated or eliminated.”
The President continues his co-opting of tricks from the GOP playbook along with the community college obsession/cure-all in a swing through the south.
The latest, from the wires, is so Republican: We can only create jobs if we cut the deficit. Deficit cutting is job creation.
Also:
Before meeting with his jobs council at Cree, Inc., Obama toured a portion of the plant where LED lights are assembled. He met Josephine Lynch, a 43-year-old mother of four who landed the job two months ago after nearly three year of unemployment. She was a substitute teacher in New Jersey before losing her job. She then went back to school to get her electronics certification.
Obama hopes millions of unemployed workers will follow Lynch’s example by going back to school to get training for jobs in new industries, such as clean energy.
Empirical proof they’ve settled on the idea that mass unemployment is caused by stupid underskilled Americans who need to go to training camp to meet the skills of the 21st century. When all the data shows unemployment as a lack of demand, with the highly-trained as well as the unskilled hit.
Timed with Obama’s appearance with his “jobs council,” a Jeffrey Immelt authored piece on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.
You wouldn’t expect much from Immelt, now more famous because of GE’s reputation as a giant tax evader, and he does not disappoint.
Boost jobs in travel and tourism. This industry is one of America’s largest employers, but the U.S. has lost significant market share. By making it easier to visit the U.S. through improved visa processes, we can win back market share in travel and tourism and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Homeland security screening has not been good for tourism, it’s true. However, the idea that we’re going to magically rebound as a beacon to the world and a surge in an employment will result if we only loosen up the asshole at the Customs gate is surely grasping at straws.
Plus, there’s the community college thing:
There are more than two million open jobs in the U.S., in part because employers can’t find workers with the advanced manufacturing skills they need. The private sector must quickly form partnerships with community colleges …
Nobody, not the President or Immelt, mentions that a lot of the jobs that go to people successfully placed after retraining camp community college pay much less than the jobs held prior to entering camp. And some of them pay so poorly there’s no book for someone with a family to chase them around the country.
“By year-end we also will have looked at and made recommendations on building and improving systems for national competitiveness, including R&D investment, tax policy … ” Immelt continues.
Immelt had the gene for shame surgically removed years ago.
“America needs more growth … Government, business and labor need to work together to get this done,” Immelt concludes.
Thanks, Dad. Did you buy lunch for the staffer who wrote this for you?
Good news, lads! Good news! The view count ticks up every time Jeff Immelt is in the news.
In related matters, General Electric has permanently dispensed with the happy line dance. Now its commercials are about all the “imagination” it’s bringing to life, since a lot of this “stuff” is done overseas, a sore point.
Now the commercials are about GE Capital financing American businesses. Or technology not made here, like a medical scanner. Or technology that’s not really new but mostly sold to foreign countries, now misleadingly cast as improving American conditions, like GE gas turbines.
Some of GE’s biggest global growth drivers are built right here in the U.S. Our Greenville, South Carolina, site is the largest gas turbine manufacturing plant in the world, producing the majority of its advanced gas turbines for global export.
Built in 1968, this GE Energy site originally housed 250 employees and focused on building the Frame 7 gas turbine. Today, the Greenville site manufactures a diverse range of energy and infrastructure products on a campus spanning 413 acres with over 3,000 employees.
GE Energy’s innovative solutions, such as fuel flexibility for turbines, have been critical in winning major deals, including the $3 billion agreement signed between GE Energy and the government of Iraq, the largest single win in the history of GE Energy.
General Electric’s strategy of pursuing environmentally friendly business has given its Greenville site new jobs making wind turbines, softening the blow of layoffs that cut the plant’s work force by more than 600 jobs in the past three years.
More than 200 employees will be laid off from GE Security’s Tualatin manufacturing facilities this year, company officials confirmed Monday. GE Security, which makes video, access-control and anti-intrusion products, is cutting all of its manufacturing jobs in Tualatin, moving them to GE locations across the United States and Mexico, said spokeswoman Michelle May.
“GE exists for the benefit of the executives and the directors,” Meyer says.
“The four executives I looked at received and realized total compensation of roughly $30 million a year during a time when the stock price declined and underperformed the S&P 500. Immelt totally underperformed and totally missed expectations.”
Meyer made the right move for his client, as GE shares are down more than 45% since the beginning of 2007, before the financial crisis that crushed GE Capital, one of the company’s many business units. While the finance unit has stabilized in recent quarters after Immelt shrunk it, GE’s reputation has been tarnished in other ways.
The upshot is that it takes thirty seconds to find lots of Internet notices and news about GE destruction of jobs in the past decade.
But everyone knows this. Which only makes Jeff Immelt’s advice on job creation all the more odious.
But that seems to be the corporate lizard brain for ya. It was just two months the company was still into this smarmy ad campaign on YouTube.
In case the underclass parasites get the idea to come for your stuff:
When she costs $230,000, as Julia did, the preferred title is “executive protection dog” …
Julia and her ilk have some of the same tracking and fighting skills as the dogs used in elite military units like Navy Seal Team 6, which took a dog on its successful raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.
In fact, Julia was sold by a trainer, Harrison Prather, who used to supply dogs to Seal Team 6 and the British special forces. But then Mr. Prather switched to a more lucrative market.
“Either rich people discovered me or I discovered them — I can’t remember which happened first,??? said Mr. Prather …
“She’s a top deal,??? Julia’s owner, John Johnson, said as she escorted him around the grounds of his 15-acre estate outside Minneapolis … Mr. Johnson said he got his first protection dog after receiving personal threats while he was running the Northland Group, a debt-collection company in Minnesota that he founded and eventually sold three years ago …
Michael Galpert rolls over in bed in his New York apartment, the alarm clock still chiming. The 28-year-old internet entrepreneur slips off the headband that’s been recording his brainwaves all night and studies the bar graph of his deep sleep … Before he eats his scrambled egg whites with spinach, he takes a picture of his plate with his mobile phone, which then logs the calories. He sets his mileage tracker before he hops on his bike and rides to the office, where a different set of data spreadsheets awaits.
“Running a start-up, I’m always looking at numbers, always tracking how business is going,” he says. Page views, clicks and downloads, he tallies it all. “That’s under-the-hood information that you can only garner from analyzing different data points. So I started doing that with myself.”
His weight, exercise habits, caloric intake, sleep patterns—they’re all quantified and graphed like a quarterly revenue statement.
The founder of his own online company, Galpert is one of a growing number of “self-quantifiers ….”
“I’ve rewired my brain [with smart pills],” [says another ‘self-quantifer’].
[The annoying guy has made it into a product, sharing] his results with the CEOs and venture capitalists he consults with through his executive coaching business, BulletProofExecutive, but he’s found an even more welcoming audience at the first-ever international Quantified Self Conference.
Over the last weekend of May, in the upstairs of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, 400 “Quantified-Selfers” from around the globe have gathered to show off their Excel sheets, databases and gadgets.
Participants are mostly middle to upper class, mostly white …
“I was giving birth to our son, and instead of holding my hand and supporting me and hugging me, [the self-quantifier husband of this poor woman] was sitting in the corner entering the time between my contractions into a spreadsheet,” says Lisa Betts-LaCroix.
You can’t change what you can’t measure, say the “self-quantifiers” in the piece.
It’s true. How do you measure the amount of asshole in your personal composition? The douchebaggery? There’s no machine for it, no way to digitally quantize, no way to visualize it in an .xls file.
But you know it when you see or hear about it.
It’s a dilemma, not being able to change something because you can’t measure it even when you know it must be there.
I’ve been trying not to say anything bad about Andrew Ross Sorkin. I even made a point of not watching Too Big To Fail so as not to get upset — and when I heard from friends that the film turned Hank Paulson into Joan of Arc, that decision seemed to have been validated.
The “Good Boys” are all the white guy journalists and pundits one sees trotted out for the news and opinion shows on TV. They all have great agents, great book deals, the best paying gigs at the best real estate. And they all look and sound the same, of generally liberal persuasion but always smiling and giggling their way through segments on MSNBC or CNN. Yes, the f—— country may be coming apart at the seams but it’s never so bad they can’t say something clever and meant to sound gnomic for the cameras.
Republicans can’t be “Good Boys.” Ugly pricks from the far right are immune to “Good Boy-ism.”
It’s only the fellows on MSNBC, everyone who’s a guest on Chris Matthews or the Rachel Maddow Show, everyone who writes for the Atlantic or the Nation — the cream of the crop.
If another war is declared or the US defaults on its debts and plunges the world into the economic abyss, they’ll still be on hand to provide wisdom and entertainment. Never showing upset or dyspepsia, they’re always the perfect fiddlers for the burning and sacking of Rome.
Don’t leave the girls out. Megan McCardle, Joan Walsh, Melissa Harris Perry Jonathan Capehart, Dana Milbank (oh wait, the last two aren’t women) etc. I know you can think of so many more.
The song lends itself to a pastiche of glued together video segments.
Update: I started gathering news clips for this and realized I’d have to look at them all over again, hundreds of times, to get the editing for any video right. That was a great recipe for a blinding headache and I couldn’t face it. Someone else want to jump on the grenade?
Assorted includes: Gene Robinson, the guy from the Nation who is always on Maddow, Marc Ambinder, Howard Fineman, Jonathan Alter, Bill Maher (who pretends to be a malcontent but hosts a “good boy” show masquerading as comedy and criticism), Arianna Huffington …
