July, 2012 archive
Twits on Twitter 0
Twits win on appeal.
Stray Thought 0
If nutcases packing heat is the problem, more nutcases packing more heat is unlikely to be the solution.
Decline and Fall 0
At Psychology Today, Ray B. Williams wonders whether the United States is in decline.
I know, it’s an apocalyptic question that is usually employed to support blowing up faceless, usually brown, people somewhere in the world, on the theory that decline may be blocked by piling up bodies of dead strangers in faraway places with strange-sounding names.
Williams’s take has a twist. Among others, he cites Alfred McCoy, who suggests that blowing up faceless, usually brown, people somewhere in the world is the problem, not the solution:
Read the rest.
TSA Security Theatre 0
You are the puppet, they are the strings.
The Voter Fraud Fraud 0
At Philly dot com, two law professors conclude that Republican “gut out the vote” laws violate the 24th Amendment to the Constitution, which states succintly:
A nugget from the column:
If they can’t come up with the money for the qualifying documents, they can’t vote. The 24th Amendment denies states the power to create such a financial barrier to the ballot box.
Mitt the Flip the Bird to the Truth 0
In Florida, Mitt the Flip brought forth two companies to prove that they succeeded all on their ownsome, without government interference or assistance.
Tampabay dot com looked into the claims and found slight flaws (details at the link):
Government, in other words, had nothing to do with it.
But the Romney campaign couldn’t have picked more puzzling examples. Far from not needing big government, the Tampa companies have embraced government and benefited from it.
Jon Stewart asks,
Do you really want to hang entire your campaign on a willful out-of-context misunderstanding?
To answer Mr. Stewart (not that he’ll ever notice me), “Of course they do. It’s all they got.”
Nothing To Do, Nowhere To Go 0
Down somewhat, but still oscillating in the same general area:
(snip)
The volatility may last one more week, a Labor Department spokesman said as the figures were released to the press. The four-week moving average, a less-volatile measure of jobless claims, fell to 367,250, the lowest since March, from 376,000.
The number of people continuing to collect jobless benefits shrank by 30,000 in the week ended July 14 to 3.29 million.
Bloomberg’s experts still not able to pick the ponies irrelevant unless you’re running their numbers.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
It is not polite to shoot yourself in the brain while paying the bill.
An off-duty officer saw the incident and confronted Canady, who allegedly ran off.
Via TPM.
A. P. Ticker’s Scrapple News 0
Excerpt:
The Joe Paterno statue was the only thing that was eleven years old that Penn State tried to protect.
Football uber Alles 2
In today’s local rag, Bob Molinaro calls out the media crocodiles for their tears. A nugget:
But you can’t teach those who won’t learn. Nick Saban, Urban Meyer, Les Miles and other sideline Svengalis will continue to receive the royal treatment from TV they’ve come to expect – the kind Joe Paterno was accorded – for the simple reason that a moratorium on hero worship isn’t good for ratings.
Cult worship by TV networks, and also media with a far smaller financial stake in the game, leads not just to coddling but to the deliberate misinterpretation of a coach’s responsibilities and his school’s failings.
Read it.
Lies and Lying Liars 0
If one picture is worth 10,000 words, what price two?
Spill Here, Spill Now, Strain at a Gnat Dept. 0
In a piece right out of Inverse Universe, a story at Tampabay dot com states that Buccaneer Petroleum and Transamerica, the Deepwater Horizon wild well folks, were so focused on safety that they were unable to focus on safety.
Among the blurry areas:
- BP and Transocean’s “bridging document,” designed to align safety procedures between the companies, was generic and addressed only six safety issues, but none of them dealt with major issues.
- The companies didn’t have key process limits or controls for safe drilling.
- There were no written instructions for how to conduct a crucial test at the end of the cementing process, one that ultimately was misinterpreted by the crew after it was conducted several times, each time differently.
- Similar concerns about too narrow a focus on personal safety were raised after an explosion in 2005 at BP’s Texas City refinery that killed 15 people, but few of the panel’s recommendations were implemented on the offshore rig.
As near as I can decipher it, the reasoning seems to be that the two titans of industry were so wrapped up in rules to prevent personal injuries (broken legs, back sprains, and hangnails) to employees (and, no doubt, attendant liability for workers’ comp), that they didn’t pay attention to minor distractions such as exploding wells; spewing oil; burning, sinking oil rigs; and drowning employees.
Nice suits do not correlate with competence.
When you see one of those commercials set against an industrial background and showing a Master of the Universe in a suit with an ill-fitting hard hat talking to some schmuck in work clothes, remind yourself of just who in that scene actually knows what he is doing and does real work.
Hint: It’s not the suit.
“Get Off My Lawn” 0
In the San Jose Mercury-News, Scott Herhold rounds up nominees for his NIMBY awards. A nugget:
The General Welfare 0
President Obama explains something beyond the kin of Wingnut World: Society is, well, societal.
Plowshares to Swords 0
Too true to be funny:
Via Delaware Liberal, where Jason 330 points out in the comments:
This shows how tough it is to satirize the Club for Growth and their flunkies in the GOP. It would only take a few minor word choice changes in the script to make that conform tot he prevailing wingnut talking points.
