2011 archive
QOTD 0
Napoleon Hill, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
The path of least resistance makes all rivers, and some men, crooked.
Facebook Frolics 0
The internet is a public place, even in north Jersey:
The teacher, whose name was not disclosed, was removed from the classroom this week after several parents who saw the posts came to Paterson School 21 and asked that their children be removed from her class.
Twits on Twitter 0
Not so much social as celeb-gazing?
The study looked at roughly 260 million tweets generated between July 28, 2009 and March 8, 2010 found some other striking revelations. Such as the fact that only about 20% of Twitter users reciprocate follows that they receive from other users. This of course is in stark contrast to Facebook’s near total reciprocal rate, wherein all “friendships” are mutually held. Plainly said, only about 1/5th of all Twitter users will bother to “follow” someone who follows them…well thanks A LOT Snooki!
What Happens When a Congressman Tries To Tell the Truth? 0
This has been simmering all week.
A teabagging Wisconsin Congressman admitted in front of a town hall meeting that his $174,000 Congressional salary doesn’t go very far, even with allowances. He’s not independently wealthy; his pay his all he has.
I believe him and can’t bring myself to throw snark at him.
Congresspersons generally maintain two residences (some of them sleep on the floors of their offices in Washington) and Washington is an expensive city. It was expensive when I lived in Northern Virginia and is many times worse now.
But honesty has no place in politics.
The Wisconsin Republican Party has spent all week trying to censor the news of his statement (that link leads to more links so you can walk backwards through the events).
Corporate Personhoodlums 0
Barbara Ehrenreich, writing at the Guardian, considers the personhood of Walmart in the light of the sex discrimination lawsuit against Walmart:
So if Walmart is indeed a person, it is a person without a central nervous system, or at least without central control of its various body parts. There exist such persons, I admit, but surely, when the supreme court declared that corporations were persons, it did not mean to say “persons with advanced neuromuscular degenerative diseases”.
(snip)
So if Walmart is a life form, it is an unclassifiable one. It eats, devouring town after town. It grows without limit, sometimes assuming new names – Walmex in Mexico, Asda in the UK. Yet in its defence in the Dukes v Walmart suit, Walmart claims to have no idea what it’s doing. This could be a metaphor for capitalism or a sign that a successful alien invasion is in progress. The only thing that’s for sure is, should the supreme court decide in favour of Walmart, we’ll have a lot more of these creatures running around: monstrously oversized “persons” who insist that they can’t control their own actions.
In the article, the writer shares some of experience in working for Walmart for a few months.
Apparently, Walmart is a shape-shifter.
Facebook Frolics 0
Facebookers goes through a rough spell.
Driving while Brown 0
Earlier this week, I linked to a Chicago Tribune story police in McHenry County, Illinois, falsely classify Hispanic drivers stopped for traffic violations are “white”; the implication was that this was done to avoid charges of profiling.
Today the Tribune has more. A nugget:
There is another twist to this story. McHenry houses one of two county jails in Illinois under contract with the federal government to hold immigrant detainees, at a rate of $85 a night. Up to 300 detainees, most from other counties, are housed nightly in the McHenry jail, and the federal contract is worth some $$10.5 million a year to the county. Hispanics arrested in McHenry for a traffic violation and who are subsequently held in jail as immigration detainees have become an important source of income for the sheriff’s office.
Interesting. From traffic to trafficking.
Taking the profit motive out of incarceration is essential.
The impetus for incarceration really should not be based on a balance sheet.
The agency–state, federal, or local–that imprisons someone should be directly responsible for providing and paying for the imprisonment, without involving third parties; criminal justice is a function of government, not an engine of economic growth.
We have seen what putting profit first does to justice.
Lines of Koch, Reprise 0
“those poor, thin-skinned billionaires . . .”
Bachmann Spinner Overdrive and April Fools’ Day Year ‘Round 0
Dick Polman shines the light (sorry, couldn’t resist) on Michelle Backmann’s crusade against CFLs* (follow the link for the complete article):
Seriously, this is one of Bachmann’s big causes. She happens to be flat wrong on the facts, but people who pay attention to facts probably wouldn’t vote for her anyway. Besides, she’s interested in being visceral, not empirical, and the lightbulb shtick is a wonderful way to quicken tea party pulses.
The last sentence of the excerpt above does not go far enough.
Bachmann, Palin, and, indeed much of the Republican Party don’t care for or about facts–consider Newt the Gingrinch’s flippity flops on intervention in Libya.
They say today whatever they think will get attention, feed the base, and fool the middle, then say the opposite tomorrow, if they think it will get attention, feed the base, and fool the middle.
Republicans don’t have positions.
They have press releases.
_________________
*The bill requiring more efficient light bulbs was passed under George Bush with support from his administration.
Nothing To Do, Nowhere To Go 0
I missed the weekly unemployment figures, having spent most of the last two days on the road, and I haven’t looked them up yet.
The monthly figures are slightly encouraging in a lukewarm king of way. From Bloomberg:
Weakening Tea? 0
Shaun Mullen thinks the tea bags are going limp.
Look no further than Michele Bachmann to understand why.
The wingnut from Minnesota is likely to be the Tea Party’s standard bearer through the early 2012 primaries, stealing attention from serious candidates with her attention-grabbing obfuscations and conspiracy theories.
When Bachmann brands Democrats as being anti-American, Obama an Islamofascist socialist and that the Serve America Act will lead to reeducation camps many of us roll our eyes, but it is talk like this that makes her so popular with the loony toon brigade in the sort of all-important Iowa primary if unpalatable to voters at large.
Follow the link to follow his reasoning.
I’m Getting Old 0
My little brother’s retirement luncheon was today.
Spill Here, Spill Now, Harder, Harder 0
Facing South reports on the Gulf of Petroleum:
“That would make it a major spill (more than 100,000 gallons), and a heckuva lot more than the 4 gallons in total that was reported to the National Response Center,” SkyTruth states on its blog.
Following last April’s explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, BP and the U.S. government claimed the well was leaking about 1,000 barrels of oil a day. But SkyTruth’s analysis of satellite imagery concluded the flow rate had to be at least 5,000 barrels a day and probably far more, leading the government to revise its own estimate upward.