2011 archive
QOTD 0
Havelock Ellis, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
The place where optimism flourishes most is the lunatic asylum.
All the News That Fits (None That Doesn’t) 0
CLick for a larger image.
In a related story, Shaun Mullen considers Occupy Wall Street. A nugget:
The House majority leader symbolizes more than any other Republican the moral rot at the heart of today’s GOP.
President Obama has sent up to Capitol Hill a jobs creation bill that by any measure is modest but at least begins to address the major reason that the aftereffects of the Bush Recession linger, but Cantor says he won’t even allow the bill to come up for a vote.
Main Street is in deep distress, Wall Street is sipping the champagne of record profits and it still is more important to Cantor and his ilk to be obstructionist than actually help the president govern, a tactical decision that they will come to regret next November 6 when the votes are counted.
This is because while there is anger out there toward Obama, the contrast between the party’s stances on helping the middle class, not to mention the poor, elderly and infirm, could not be more striking, and while a lot of us are pissed off even more of us have retained some perspective. And compassion.
Thom Hartmann’s Mail Bag 0
It’s rambling, and it’s funny; The bit on the voter fraud fraud is definitely worth a listen–it lasts for the first two minutes or so:
Droning On, Sauce for the Goose Dept. 0
Jennifer Abel asks the question:
Follow the link for her answer.
The Entitlement Society 0
No, they don’t.
They have a right to compete in the market place by providing a competitive product at a fair price.
If they fail, they have a right to go out of business.
Walking behind Elephants 0
The mind-twisting thing is that Hartman said,
. . . stepping away from the absurd for a moment
then proceeded to discuss Rick Perry.
QOTD 0
Niels Bohr, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.
Drinking Liberally Norfolk Wednesday 0
Drinking Liberally is a support group for liberals, where you can realize you are not alone.
We are still looking for a (semi-)permanent home.
Our chapter host tried to call the scheduled location repeatedly today and no one answered the telly phone. That and the Madoff film triggered the next to next to next to last minute change in location.
When: 6 p., Wednesday, October 12.
Where:
The Green Onion
1603 Colley Ave.(map)
Followed by the 7:15 show
Chasing Madoff
Naro Expanded Cinema
1507 Colley (map)
Details here.
Flying while Brown, Common Carrier Dept. 0
When boarding, Abbassi says she was on the phone with a Verizon representative in order to activate her smartphone. When the plane was getting ready to depart, Abbassi alleges she told the representative “I’ve got to go.”
Soon after, there was an announcement that an “administrative delay” would hold up the flight, at which point a TSA agent came on board and asked Abbassi to get off.
TSA took her off the plane, then cleared her to travel, but the pilot refused her admittance, claiming the crew was not “comfortable” with her on board.
And bigotry flew the skies.
Double Standards 0
Jon Stewart examines the coverage of Occupy Wall Street vs. the coverage of Teabaggery.
Bushonomics Is Da Bomb 0
It blows up the economy.
Consider this from Asia Times:
Then there’s income. In 2010, the average middle-class family took home US$49,445, a drop of $3,719 or 7%, in yearly earnings from 10 years earlier. In other words, that family now earns the same amount as in 1996. After peaking in 1999, middle-class income dwindled through the early years of the George W Bush presidency, climbing briefly during the housing boom, then nosediving in its aftermath.
In this lost decade, according to economist Jared Bernstein, poor families watched their income shrivel by 12%, falling from $13,538 to $11,904. Even families in the 90th percentile of earners suffered a 1% percent hit, dropping on average from $141,032 to $138,923. Only among the staggeringly wealthy was this not a lost decade: the top 1% of earners enjoyed 65% of all income growth in America for much of the decade, one hell of a run, only briefly interrupted by the financial meltdown of 2008 and now, by the look of things, back on track.
The swelling ranks of the American poor tell an even more dismal story. In September, the Census Bureau rolled out its latest snapshot of poverty in the United States, counting more than 46 million men, women, and children among this country’s poor. In other words, 15.1% of all Americans are now living in officially defined poverty, the most since 1993. (Last year, the poverty line for a family of four was set at $22,113; for a single working-age person, $11,334.) Unlike in the lost decade, the poverty rate decreased for much of the 1990s, and in 2000 was at about 11%.
The Fee Hand of the Market 0
This does not affect me.
I don’t use my debit card to buy things. I use either a credit card or that green stuff, whadyyacallit, oh, yeah, cash (emphasis added):
The thought of another bank fee really bothers Whitney Chitwood.
“It’s our money that we work hard for, and they’re just taking it from us,” said Chitwood, 22, who has a Bank of America checking account.
Next year, Bank of America Corp. plans to impose a $5 a month fee when customers use their debit cards for a purchase, whether they punch in a personal identification number or sign a receipt. Other banks, including Wells Fargo and SunTrust, are initiating similar fees in some markets.
The banks began initiating the fees in response to federal legislation, which took effect Oct. 1, that limits the “swipe” fees they can charge merchants for debit-card transactions. Bank officials say the fees will help offset the billions in revenue they expect to lose as a result of the new ceiling.
(Much more at the link.)
When I see persons whipping out the plastic to buy a 79-cent cup of coffee, I always wonder how they keep up with their checkbooks. (Then, when I read about the outrageous overdraft fees, I realized that they don’t.)
It highlights the larger issue, though: a change in the nature of banking as an industry over the past three decades. It has moved from valuing honest stewardship of customer accounts and secure, though not spectacular, profits from sound loans to high-stakes casino gambling.
Banks became gambling addicts, but, since they were the house and the house always wins, they guaranteed their winnings, changing the rules of the game to suit their greed need and burying those changes in unreadable “terms of service” notices that no one read because they were designed to be unreadable. Collectively, we now have the First National Bank of Rocky and Mugsy.
Now that reforms are mandating that they fix the wheel so it isn’t quite so crooked, banksters are looking for new ways to fix the wheel.
My father was a banker. He would be ashamed to admit that today.
The Voter Fraud Fraud 0
Keep up with Republican attempts to steal the franchise with the interactive Map of Shame.
Via Balloon Juice.
Update from the Foreclosure-Based Economy 0
Job prospects for robosigners and process servers remain strong in the mid-South. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:
During good years in metro Atlanta, there were between 2,000 and 3,000 (foreclosure–ed.) notices a month. They hit a peak in November of 2010 with 13,834, and were above 10,000 for the first three months of this year.
QOTD 0
Denis Diderot, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.
The Voter Fraud Fraud 0
Ed Quillen looks for its roots and wonders whether they in cutting spending:
Droning On 0
I’m going out on a limb and suggesting that they are using Windows, not Linux or Unix.
A mysterious computer virus has infected the Predator and Reaper drones of the U.S. Military.
According to a report published by Wired, the Virus was first found about two weeks ago and was several times removed from the systems. However, the virus keeps coming back and there appears to be no solution how to effectively get rid of it.
The virus did not prevent pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying the drones, but sources told Wired that the virus is logging every keystroke.
Aside:
The story about this in the local rag referred to the persons who operate the drones as “pilots.”
“Gamers” would be a more accurate term. They are no more pilots than my 13-year-old playing Star Wars was a space man.
For the robotic overlords at the joysticks and their commanders, it’s no more real than WoW.
I am more and more coming to believe that engineering the remote-controlled death of unidentified or poorly-identified persons is as morally indefensible as My Lai.