Wait, no, not "tempting" that other thing that's the opposite of that.
I mean it's true that they give you a "side of the news that you just can't find anywhere else" -- the greasy, racist, Cheeto®-stained, basement-dwelling side is just so, so unrepresented in print these days. Oooh, ooh, they have "unsurpassed book and movie reviews" too! I do so wish I could stay up-to-date with the latest in shitty right-wing "entertainment" gossip.
Alas, I think I'll have to pass.
I'm moving. There will be even fewer shitty posts than normal around here for a while. I know you're all terribly upset.
I guess I'll be nice awful and make sure you all know about the Cards Against Humanity's Holiday Bullshit for this year (hurry, less than 200,000 left, they'll go quick).
To tide you over until I post again, here is a mesmerizing picture of the McKenzie river I took a couple months ago:
(click to embigginate)
That is all, we now return you to your regularly scheduled blogoscape. See you on the flipside, if I survive.
Evidently all the things that were cool and hip and swingin' long ago in 2003 are back "in" again! Yay. Here, have an album released that year:
Here are a couple other things from that year. Nina Simone died:
So did Noel Redding:
So did Warren Zevon and Johnny Cash, and more.
And the Challenger Shuttle blew up on reentry.
And there was some war or something and a bunch of people in some country across the ocean might have died or been horribly maimed, but they don't count so whatevs.
Now I'm just gonna sit back and wait for the reanimated corpse of Robert Novak show up on my TV to out a CIA agent. Man, those were the days!
After yesterday's post about GMO wheat, Another article out today with a bit more detail. The telling bit from there is this:
"STREAMLINED" SYSTEM
Heavy criticism has already hit Monsanto, including a lawsuit filed Monday by a U.S. farmer who is alleging the seed company was negligent in allowing its experimental seed to escape its control.
Monsanto countered that its wheat development program was "government-directed, rigorous and well-documented and audited."
The field trials were conducted under a streamlined system known as "notification," which is more lenient than the tightly controlled permitting process.
Under the permit process, companies must establish buffer areas around field trial sites to help avoid contamination of neighboring fields; to use only dedicated machinery and storage facilities for GMO material; and train personnel. Annual inspections are required.
Under the notification process, there are fewer field inspections and regulators rely largely on developers like Monsanto for evaluating and reporting the adequacy of their controls.
Over time, more and more field trials have come under the notification process and it now accounts for the vast majority of field trials on biotech crops.
In light of the discovery in Oregon, USDA should assess its review process, said U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon.
"This incident underscores the need for an agency review of field-testing practices to determine how to avoid this situation in the future," he said.
(emPHAsis mine)
Again, who could've possibly predicted that allowing massive corporations to police themselves would result in anything but glorious positive outcomes and rainbow sparkleponies for all? Inconceivable.
Also, thankfully we have an actual progressive Democratic Senator now in Merkley that isn't in the corporate pocket like his predecessor Smith was, and isn't a traditional, wishy-washy, centrist, Paul Ryan-lovin' "normal" Democrat.
(*Note: not urgent at all)
So it turns out if you try to shrink government small enough to drown in a tub, there are eventually some consequences.
What!? This came as a huge surprise to me too. Nobody could've predicted, etc.
Thankfully, the brilliant "job creators" that are so busy creating jobs in other countries to make cheap crap to sell to rubes here will be able to sail their yachts off to the Cayman Islands and live out their lives in peace while we fight for scraps.
I mean that's obviously what's really important after all.
I still have a job. For now. Yay.
Unfortunate that nobody even notices May Day in the U.S. anymore, even though the change from a traditional spring holiday to a modern worker's rights holiday celebrated in pretty much the whole rest of the world is related to an American incident.
Anyway, cheers! If you don't have a job, may your search be short and your résumé be type-o free. If you have a job, may our glorious international corporate overlords not decide that it's more efficiently done in a deadly Bangladeshi sweatshop.
...that our glorious corporate overlords (all hail!) pushing for more "skilled" immigration to solve our desperate "skills shortage" were doing so solely in order to keep wages in the STEM sectors low.
A brief excerpt:
If there was a shortage of IT jobs then you'd expect wages to rise, but in fact the team found wages in the field (on average) peaked in 2001 and have remained flat ever since, and in some cases have fallen over the last 14 years. The reason, according to the research, is that overseas workers are being recruited to keep wages low.
The researchers found that the US produces a surfeit of STEM graduates, but only half of them are hired. The rest of the jobs in the IT industry, primarily entry-level positions for the under 30s, are filled using foreign workers and may account for up to 50 per cent of new hires.
"Even our high-end estimate, of 50 percent, is a conservative estimate of the proportion of guestworkers hired," Professor Salzman told The Register. Salzman has spent the last 13 years researching this area of the market and has amassed a large body of evidence to support his claims.
I'm so surprised.
Just to be clear, I'm totally fine with immigration. Let people come here, whether they want to be ag workers, or tech workers. Just don't pretend that a certain kind of immigration is all swell and good and shiny while a darker icky smelly kind of immigration is eleventy times as bad as Hitler.
And the creatures in congress that they own. Fuck them right in the ear, with the biggest example of one of the fucking guns they worship.
What a horrible, fucked up, shitty week.
Once again the fucking idiots in charge of this country have managed to manufacture a completely unnecessary and imaginary crisis and freak right the fuck out about it. And then let it actually happen. Our gloriously useless press is more than happy to cheer on the debacle. They go along because this imaginary self-created crisis perfectly reflects the unfortunately very real beltway consensus that if only there were some perfect, reasonable, moderate people or party in government everybody would get together and talk about reasonable, moderate solutions to this completely imaginary and unnecessary crisis. All while ignoring the few, y'know, actual reasonable people yelling at them. 'Cause "Eew, ick, who wants to talk to a liberal they're always right about everything and so uncivil and so smug. Let's see if we can see what John McCain thinks! He's mavericky!"
Fuck. There haven't been enough fucks in this post yet. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!
You may be able to tell that I'm more than a little annoyed by this. Yeah, it's personal. My livelihood relies on money from the ebil gubmint. I actually end up saving we taxpayers a pretty decent amount of money because I do the work of the equivalent of about 10 six-figure-salaried federal workers back in DC. I know this is true because they call me to do projects they can't manage to finish. And I don't mind, really -- they're good folks, generally. They mean well, they just work in a completely dysfunctional bureaucracy that values the quantity of meetings you attend over the work you produce.
Nothing has been solidified yet, but there's a pretty decent chance my project (a long running project that actually benefits the general public) will get chopped because of this. We've already been running bare-bones ever since the cuts a few years ago, and we can't absorb another one. It's too bad, I've been producing some especially good work recently -- I finished my most recent project on time and on-budget yesterday in spite of them constantly interrupting me with work on unrelated projects. It's pretty darn cool and has been well received by the folks that have heard about it and seen previews. It may all just be flushed down the shitter along with thousands and thousands of similar projects done by similar unknown wage slaves all over this country just because we're ruled by a cult of Austerity-worshiping center-right fools.
Fuck.
I can get another job, and have options lined up. I'll be fine. Fucking pissed, but fine.
Oh well, might as well see what else I can get done before we get chopped...
I've now received two copies of the following idiocy in my email:
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2013 10:45:39 +0700 Message-Id: <201301300345.r0U3jdEh028401@siamnaliga.com> To: [REDACTED] From: Freedom@Network.net Subject: Sandy Hook Shooting Didn't Happen Excerpt from Muad'Dib's January 7th, 2013 Critical Mass Radio interview: ..They used a poster child for this to get everybody's sympathy and to get everybody's emotions up so that they could hopefully bring in a gun ban. They used a little poster child, a little blonde-haired blue-eyed six year old girl. She was the face, the poster child. She was supposedly killed along with the other 19 six year olds and seven year olds at Sandy Hook. Three days later Obama was there doing a photo op and she's sitting on his knee. She's supposed to be dead, used as a poster child, this little girl died - she's sitting on Obama's knee three days later. The same little girl. And then they have her parents interviewed. It shows that they're all actors. It never really happened, because the guy that was supposedly her dad, is shown in the video where he's to the side and he's laughing and joking with other people and then he's called up in front of the camera. He's off to the left. Then he's called to the center, to the focus of the camera to be interviewed and to give his speech about Sandy Hook and about his daughter. And he goes from on the side from laughing and joking with everybody, he comes up to the center and ... he takes the joking, smiling face off and you can see him physically trying to force his face to look sad and then he starts talking about how his daughter's been killed. They're actors. There were no bodies. It was a made for TV drama to try to ram through the gun control laws, because they want to kill the American people and they can't kill armed people. That's why Hitler disarmed the Germans, it's why Stalin disarmed the Russians, it's why chairman Mao disarmed the Chinese and they killed between them something like 120 million of their own people. And that's what they want to do in America and they can't do it because the people have the Second Amendment and they have guns. So they have to do all of this, and they'll keep doing it. There will be more incidents like this, which are made for television, until they manage to persuade the American people to give up their guns. And then they'll start killing the Americans. Because the Americans are the only people stopping them from doing what they want to do already. They know they can't put their next phase, which is reducing the world's population, they can't put that phase into operation whilst the Americans have got millions! of guns.
How the fuck did I get on this person's mailing list?
What do you even say about this level of crazy? I mean we could examine the little details like how this massive conspiracy is necessary so the ebil gubmint can kill all its citizens. Because obviously if we citizens have our cute little semi-automatic rifles to protect us, we'll be completely invulnerable to the government's drones and vast stockpiles of biological weaponry. Right. But that's just the tip of the crazy, crazy iceberg in this one. Definitely not willing to examine this person's various issues any further.
The "author" (I'm being generous -- "screed spewer" is probably more accurate) closes with this:
This message has no links to help it get through spam blockers. If you are interested in the subjects being discussed, please search the Web for more information.
Uh, thanks, but no, really, I'm fine.
Welp, this is it, another election day has come and the usual anticipation, trepidation, and knotty naughty stomach are present.
Rather than do my usual election night schtick and stay home drinking myself into a stupor, I'm going to go out to dinner and drink myself into slightly less of a stupor. Hopefully wherever I end up with doesn't have a TV so I won't see waht's going on 'til I get home late.
Until then, I'll just leave these here:
And for something completely different:
You're welcome.
Against my better judgment I watched the debate last night. I was pleasantly surprised not to be tempted to toss my pint glass at the TV more than a couple of times.
With regard to the WTF moment and fucking hilarious "binder" thing, this bit immediately after that also caught my attention:
Now, one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort, but number two, because I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce, that sometimes they need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school. She said, I can’t be here until 7:00 or 8:00 at night. I need to be able to get home at 5:00 so I can be there for — making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said, fine, let’s have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.
...
What we can do to help young women and women of all ages is to have a strong economy, so strong that employers are looking to find good employees and bringing them into their workforce and adapting to a — a flexible work schedule that gives women the opportunities that — that they would otherwise not be able to — to afford.
That is just condescending as all hell. Everybody wants a flexible work schedule, you fucking asshat! It's not just "mom" who should have to be able to work, take them to soccer, go home and make dinner, tuck the kids into bed, do the dishes, etc. Y'know, if women made as much (or more, FFS!) than men for the same work, maybe dad might like, and be able, to do some of those "home" things while mom stays late for a meeting?
Is it really so fucking hard to imagine a world where everybody had flexible schedules and equal pay for equal work? Just a possibility? Ever thought about that Willard?
No, of course you haven't. You'd prefer we still lived in the pretend 1950s America that only ever existed on TV, you pathetic fucking misogynistic Mormon wanker.
In a just and sane world (i.e., not this one) women would be seeing this bullshit and Willard's general contempt for the moderator and the women asking the questions and run away screaming from his candidacy. Perhaps in this world it'll translate to fewer votes for the wanker. We'll see.
Oh, also, too, etc.: vaguely related
UPDATE: I see I'm not the only one to notice this part.
UPDATE AGAIN: I want to make clear that I, a (married) man with no children would also like a flexible schedule.
Because flexibility.
Just in case that wasn't entirely clear here.
This post over at TPM inspired me. Others have already pointed out Newt's resemblence to Baron Harkonnen of Dune, but I didn't know was that Newt is also working with Glossu 'Beast' Rabban. His campaign makes perfect sense to me now.
