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.
There is dissension in the blogroll!
I'm with Drifty -- vote, then bitch later -- but I understand the "whatever, fuck it" mentality that pervades these mid-term shenanigans. We have some interesting shit going on in Beerville (legal marijuana, fuck yeah!) and some really nasty house races. Oh yeah, and piss-lover Art Robinson, always good for a laugh.
It's all a bit anticlimactic here since we vote by mail. "Election day" is a bit meaningless, other than it being the last day you can get your ballot in and the day the counting finishes up. But with luck, hopefully today we'll all get to listen to this in celebration after it's all counted up:
We'll see. Keep your fingers crossed.
noun
So, I guess this bullshit is just the sad cost of living in 'Merka (fuck yeah!) these days, huh?
This is fucking insane and needs to stop.
Update: Here's the live dispatch audio from the police responding to the shooting:
While the photoshoopery is fun, the more mundane of our political realities are really fucking pissing me off. I'd really, really like to hope that this is a sign of some clever politicking that is ideally designed to quiet the constant barrage of noisy OMGWTFBBQ!? over the non-compliant policy cancellations. I dunno, I'd like to hope I guess. Anyway, the whole "MM-MUH PLAN! WHUT ABOUT MUH PRESHUS PLAN!" bullshit, along with Neil Young's recent birthday (68!) collided here:
I feel like it would be perfect if we adjust the lyrics a teensy bit for the current situation:
I caught them knockin' at my cellar door We love you, baby, can we have some more? Ooh, ooh, the damage done. I hit the city and I lost my friends I watched the needle take another plan Gone, gone, the damage done. I sing the song because I love the plan I know that some of you won't understand Milk-blood to keep from running out. I've seen the needle and the damage done A little part of it in everyone But every flunkie's like a settin' sun.
Meh, that'll work. As usual, vast readership, suggestions welcome in the comments.
Just got this e-mail:
At its November meeting, the State Board's Academic Strategies Committee approved OSU's proposal for the Ph.D. in Business Administration degree program. This program will be effective Fall Term 2014.
The program will offer two graduate options: Innovation/Commercialization and Accounting. The primary objective of this degree is to prepare its graduates for careers in research and teaching at research-oriented colleges and universities.
It's bad enough that campus is infested with a bunch of dudebros working on their MBAs, now they will be able to continue their studies even longer.
I wonder what their theses will look like? Hmm...
Maybe my vast commentariat can suggest some more. No fair cheating and looking at the actual topics Stanford's Ph.D. program has produced for ideas.
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.
...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.
Oregon's Dumbest Glibertarian has a new article in today's campus paper. (See here and here for the previous installments if you can stand it.)
Today we get the pleasure anguish of reading yet another article about same-sex marriage. Because nobody else in the media is talking about it from that super-special-snowflake of glibertarian perspective. Or something. At least the glibertarians usually want to allow same sex marriage, like sane people should. Unfortunately that's typically where the sanity stops with them, and indeed we'll see that here as well.
As with the last installment in this series, he starts off in semi-sane mode, if you're willing to ignore the usual "government must stay out of governing" angle:
Since the Supreme Court heard arguments for and against gay marriage last week, the bandwagon for marriage equality returned. However, the real issue remains dormant on both sides. We should not be asking government to give us “marriage equality.” Instead, the government should have no part in marriage.
Of course, it immediately continues to accelerate downhill from there:
Marriage has existed longer than the government. Marriage is not a product of the government. Many people believe marriage comes from religion and in America, we have the separation of church and state, but many other ideas of marriage exist, as well. Regardless of any one view, why does the government regulate marriage when it should not?
That's some awesometastic sentence construction there. Good thing you don't write for a newspaper or anything. But yes, why does the evil government have an interest in regulating marriage? It's not like society has any interest in encouraging healthy relationships between people. That's why we also don't regulate any sorts of violence between individuals. And have no regulations whatsoever about interaction between folks in various transactions and how various people treat other people. Because America! FREEDUMB! Fuck yeah! WOLVERINES!!!
Oh wait, what do you mean we do have all sorts of laws and regulations about all sorts of relationships between people? Contracts and such between folks that want to conduct trade without the threat of violence? Oh, yeah, we do! How silly of me.
But still, this one particular form of relationship is one the government should stay completely out of. Uh, because freedom, I guess? Let's see what he thinks:
The government requires marriage licenses in order to call a couple married. But what business of the government's is it if two people want to, and do, get married? The government should not have any rules about it. The government even requires marriage licenses. Why? The original intent of marriage licenses was to prevent interracial marriages. Marriage license laws began in the mid-1800s to stop whites from marrying anyone who was not white. By the 1920s, 38 states had state laws prohibiting the marriage of whites with other ethnicities.
As is his typical pattern, now he's just started making shit up. While he's correct about about states in the '20s specifically using laws to prevent interracial marriage, his assertion that the "original intent" was to prevent them is laughably false. Marriage licenses have been around since at least the middle ages, and were all about contracts between families. That is something glibertarians usually like, sacredfreemarket and all that. I should really stop being surprised by this guy's complete lack of historic knowledge and/or utter contempt for facts, but whatever.
At this point we know how this is going to end, and indeed it proceeds down through all the standard glibertarian tropes of evil government stealing people's money and freedom. I can't be arsed to dissect the rest of it, so just read it if you must. Here's the concluding paragraph:
Marriage equality may be the big uproar right now, but we need to look at the bigger picture. The government erodes our freedoms, and turning to them for more laws and oversight will only wear away at the few freedoms we have left. We need to tell the government to get out of marriage, to get out of our lives, and not return.
At this point I think he only wants the government to stop regulating marriage so he'll finally be able to marry Ayn Rand's corpse. I hope somebody's keeping an eye on her grave.
I pointed out over on Sadly, No! recently that we seem to have the state's dumbest glibertarian writing a column for the campus paper. In a state that is home to Lars Larson, taking away the "dumbest glibertarian" crown is no small feat, but this guy is trying his damndest.
(The paper's website is complete and utter crap, so don't be surprised if it barely works most of the time if you click the links.)
Here are some short snippets from a few of his columns, just so you can get a feel for the stupidity without the need for full immersion:
Less intrusive government is key for better market, consumers
One of the biggest places in which the government invades our lives is through transportation. The government built, owns and maintains most of the roads in America. But to think we need the government to do any of this remains absurd. ... Henry Ford is the most revolutionary of them all. ... Ford sold cars to the common man at an affordable price, $850. Over the next few years, the price dropped to approximately $250. The government didn’t force Ford to do it. The government hadn’t taxed people heavily to build roads yet either. Ford sold cars to people before roads existed. ... Now that roads are owned by the government, prices skyrocket due to artificial demand the government has created by printing money.
I especially like this one because the lead sentence in the article is: "Today’s America consists of massive government intrusion and a lack of knowledge of history." And then he proceeds to completely fuck up the history of transportation in America. I mean "Ford sold cars to people before roads existed." is just absurd on its face for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that he must almost think that Henry Ford actually invented the wheel or something. Regardless, a nice quick search for road history in America might have led an actual thinking person to the League of American Bicyclists history page, where we find this:
The League began as the League of American Wheelmen (LAW) in 1880 -- Newport, R.I. was the location of our founding meeting -- and was responsible for defending the rights of cyclists from its start. The League of American Wheelmen is credited with getting paved roads in this country before the reign of the automobile.
And it's barely worth getting into the utter absurdity of thinking that private industry could have somehow built the railroads and interstate freeway system without government help. He doesn't even know basic history of the Transcontinental Railroad:
The construction and operation of the line was authorized by the Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862 and 1864 during the American Civil War. Congress supported it with 30-year U.S. government bonds and extensive land grants of government-owned land. Completion of the railroad was the culmination of a decades-long movement to build such a line. It was one of the crowning achievements in the crossing of plains and high mountains westward by the Union Pacific and eastward by the Central Pacific. Opened for through traffic on May 10, 1869, with the driving of the "Last Spike" at Promontory Summit, Utah, the road established a mechanized transcontinental transportation network that revolutionized the population and economy of the American West.
Yep, no government help there. Stupid government, can't do anything right!
Here's another gem:
Trillion-dollar coin will hyperinflate US currency
Although the U.S. government “averted” the fiscal cliff, a new proposal has risen that could send us maybe not off the fiscal cliff, but into hyperinflation and total destruction of the U.S. dollar. Paul Krugman, and others who have power or influence, but still don’t understand economics, have proposed the minting of a trillion-dollar coin.
(emphasis mine)
Yep, you guessed it, of course the rest of the article is about OMG FIAT CURRENCY! and ending the Federal Reserve and such. The best part of this though is that an earlier article is:
If only people understood economics
If people had a firm understanding of economics and the free market, we could have a much better world. ... Too many people comment on the subject of economics without a firm knowledge and understanding of it. The Austrian School of Economics has been the only school of economic thought that explains real-life behavior.
That really does just not need any further comment, the stupid stands tall and proud, all on it's own.
In the comments ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© helpfully provided an excellent link to a really good series of articles about the Austrian school. Just in case nobody reads the comments, and so you don't have to dig up the links to the other two parts, here they are:
And here's a podcast the author did covering the series and another article by the same author that is about the Austrian school and the constant libertarian yakking about gold.
All really good stuff, thanks ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©!
I've seen a bunch of stuff all over the Intartronictubes about gun control this week. Mostly it's all: "guns are bad, get rid of them" and "bbbbut my farm, and hunting, and defending my castle from invaders!" -- I get it, honest. Up until this week, when this shit got way too personal for me (and I'm not going to detail that further than to just say teachers in this country aren't paid nearly enough to deal with the kind of shit they deal with), I really liked having my own personal arsenal around the house. But why did I like that? I never really thought about it.
I haven't shot any of my guns for a couple years now, but they're there, in the safe, ready. But for what? I don't hunt, so not that. Zombpocalpyse? Hmm, maybe I'll keep a shotgun. A home invasion? Yeah.... no.
I have not and cannot live in that kind of fear -- I've never had a loaded weapon by my bedside, and never will. How is a gun locked in the safe gonna help me in that invasion, exactly? Oh right, it won't.
"But I have a farm! I have to defend my chickens!"
Yep, I get it. I lived on a farm for a number of years, but the farm raised grass (not the fun kind) and xmas trees so predators weren't a big deal. Mostly we had to worry about gophers, rabbits, and coyotes, just as annoyances. We ignored the rabbits. The coyotes came around at night to try to eat the rabbits -- no biggy, ignore them too. I think a coyote got a cat once, but I don't really like cats so there's that. The gophers were a bit of a messy pain, and hard to shoot. I tried (and failed) shooting them but that is hard and wastes way too much time. Oh well, there were some holes in the yard. But yeah, I can see that. A nice small-bore bolt-action rifle and/or a shotgun should do just dandy if you really need them, so you should keep one of those. I'm cool with that.
I understand the rural hunting and guns-on-the-farm thing, really. I'm not a hunter, but I know many hunters and have lots of hunting weapons I inherited. I understand the appeal -- I've had fresh venison. Hunting or having a gun around to protect your farm does make sense to me.
But that doesn't mean we need the kind of ridiculous fucking gun culture we have in America.
Obviously, I don't think a full ban would ever fly in 'Merka. Just way, way too entrenched and way too much money spent convincing people they "need" guns. But I still think we have an oh-so-brief opportunity to do something.
Maybe.
That opportunity will, of course, be utterly squandered by our useless political class. Before it is, it would be at best constructive, and at worst slightly amusing, to imagine something that might work in the way of gun regulation. So I will. And please note again, I own many guns:
First, ban all semi-automatic weapons. Yes, all of them. (Note, this would require that I get rid of several of my own guns. I'm cool with that.) They serve no legitimate hunting purpose. If you need a semi-auto to hunt: UR DOIN IT RONG. Banning them all means no more quibbling over what an "assault rifle" is, which is critical.
B) ban all high-capacity weapons. Again, if you need more than a few shots for hunting: UR DOIN IT RONG. And yes, that means I need to get rid of more of my own personal guns (although high-capacity and semi-auto tend to go hand-in-hand, no surprise). Oh well.
3) no handguns. Yeah, people love them, but they serve no purpose. And no, once again, "self defense" is not a real purpose, and if you really think having a gun around the house will save you from the blahs coming to steal your white wimmens, go buy a nice simple double-barrel shotgun. Bonus: you can force the dude that gets your daughter pregnant to marry her while standing there like the patriarchic asshole you probably are.
IV) regulate, regulate, regulate -- like the sacred second amendment says! Guns are way, way, WAY too easy to get in this country. There are dozens of mundane things we all do day-to-day that take more work than owning a gun. Getting a gun needs to be at least as hard to deal with as it is to try to start a fucking legal brewery!
Fünf: Have all the fancy shit we just banned be available to play with at licensed, ridiculously regulated, private facilities. Shoot the hell out of those guns! Waste thousands of dollars on ammo! It's almost as good as Viagra after all.
Will we see an instantaneous drop in gun violence in this country and suddenly only worry about violent attacks from sparkleponies? No. Would it make a difference? Probably. I'm willing to try it to find out.
And yeah, I've completely glossed over the "how" parts in all of this "banning" talk. Gov't sponsored gun buy backs? Buy backs by private anti-violence charities? Ship them all to Somalia, along with the owners that refuse to get rid of them? Dunno. I'm sick and tired of thinking of violence and death, and thinking about how our useless goverment could manage to implement all the details behind this pipe dream is just too much right now.
I recognize that this is all a sad fucking dream. Oh well, a guy's gotta dream.
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.
