Holes

Greetings good citizen,

I am still struggling to adapt to a work routine (two years of being a slug doesn’t help) I am, er, ‘worried’ by this first sure sign of ‘economic recovery’.

Unemployment at 4-Year Low as U.S. Hiring Gains Steam
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

The joblessness rate sank to 7.7 percent as 236,000 positions were added across a broad range of sectors, but analysts warned that federal budget cuts could slow the recovery.

Jobs Fuel Stock Rally
Economix: The Rise of Part-Time Work | Shrinking Government

Why would I be ‘worried’ good citizen? Because I’ve seen this before…many times.

They ship work overseas and the ‘customer base’ collapses. (The unemployed can’t afford your product.) As local economies ‘adjust’ (the unemployed pull up stakes and head to where the work is) ‘recovery’ is declared and they start farming out work again!

As you can see, the so-called ‘recovery’ is the final stage of this cycle.

Now how much longer can they keep this up is unknown, they’ve almost completely hollowed out the US and Japanese economies (and completely destroyed the Real Estate markets in both countries in the process.)

Now, I count myself as fortunate. I landed a ‘real job’; 40 hours with full benefits and not the part-time/no insurance or benefit purgatory that most of the ‘inexperienced’ find themselves condemned to.

And the looming energy crisis seems to be driving a movement to restore some local capacity in basic industries while there is still some talent who remembers how to do it!

Whether or not this movement can sustain itself when a renewed contraction strikes remains to be seen.

But we’re talking patterns here.

Now the ‘new normal’ can form the basis for a real recovery BUT you need to ‘let it ride’ and establish itself.

Why don’t I think this is what they have in mind for us good citizen?

Would that it were that we have finally reached the end of the global race to the bottom that was completely 'unnecessary’ in the first place.

But you know as well as I that this thing won’t be over until the oligarchy can protect itself from prosecution.

And short of wiping out an entire generation I don’t see how they can do that.

But it’s not stopping them from trying:

Blocked Bids to Fill Judgeships Stir New Fight on Filibuster
By CARL HULSE

Republican senators have so far kept President Obama from filling any of the four vacancies on the nation's most important appeals court, reviving talk of a change in Senate rules.

Graphic Graphic: Filling the D.C. Appeals Court

Our best, er, ‘indicator’ of social health has been our badly broken political system. The very fact that most of the commerce system is in private hands contradicts the precepts of a ‘democratic’ society.

We even have our ‘activist’ (conservo-loony) judges to prove this argument.

No civilization can stand without justice…sometimes they take a long time to fall but in the end the final destination remains unchanged.

The bad apples use the ‘holes’ left in the legal system by the founders to drive civilization off a cliff.

Why do those holes exist?

Because the founders didn’t want to leave themselves open to prosecution!

No society founded on theft can survive for long so how sad is it that the backbone of capitalism is the ‘fake ownership’ of that which belongs to us all?

Understand good citizen, the ‘well, it’s not yours’ argument leads directly back to the ‘why don’t I kill you where you stand?’ question.

Were I writing this for the firewalled version, there would be some mighty choice expletives employed here.

Especially surrounding the argument as to whether or not lynching someone for being a greedy blockhead is ‘justifiable’…

Or perhaps just for being a blockhead as we can observe in our final offering:

Law Backs Guns in Class for Teachers in South Dakota
By JOHN ELIGON

South Dakota became the first state to enact a law explicitly authorizing school employees to carry guns on the job, under a measure signed Friday by Gov. Dennis Daugaard.

Um, as I commented repeatedly and I’m sure you have noticed the same phenomenon in your own local news organs, the local rag exists to highlight the bad behavior of people in positions of public trust.

No doubt this is sometimes ‘witch hunts’ like the recent attack [by Fox News] on a local animal control officer but half of the stories center on malfeasance and inappropriate behavior of wide range of, er, ‘public servants’.

Now we hire (and supposedly psychologically screen) our police forces to carry guns…and our most recent nation headline shows once again that the ‘screening process’ isn’t ‘infallible’. [re: the Park Ranger who blew away the reality show host for being in the company of his wife while he was elsewhere.]

The ‘green-eyed monster’ is probably the most powerful of them all but it still provides an case in point. Kids are designed to frustrate you, even if you’re taught to deal with that, kids can ‘get under your skin and push your buttons’ because you’re in the protectors role.

They trust you not to harm them.

They even have the chutzpah to give you that knowing little smirk after they’ve twisted the knife and you’ve retaliated by suspending them (although you’d prefer to have had them drawn and quartered!)

Do you really want to add handguns into that volatile environment?

Not that we humans are overly smart…like the young lady who wanted to ‘play with the kitty’…what part of ‘wild’ didn’t she understand…because she sure understands it now!

Mother Nature is VERY ‘unforgiving’ and we need to respect that…or we will pay.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Shame on You!

Greetings good citizen,

I received a rather bizarre e-mail yesterday inviting me to attend an economics ‘summer school’ in Italy.

Five Nobel Laureates will teach the class in English, so the Italian setting is merely to make the surroundings more…’realistic’ (While not currently in the headlines, Italy is one of the PIIGS in case anyone was wondering why they spelled pig with two i’s.)

How ‘appropriate’ that these five, er, ‘nitwits’ expound upon their economic theories in a country that likely practiced (and definitely suffered) from them?

Which brings us to yet another long neglected hobby horse…the one that each of these ‘Nobel Laureates’ needs to have hammered into their squeany little heads…

(Sing it choir!)

ALL ECONOMIES ARE LOCAL!

(Now give me an Amen!)

Hallelujah!

(Where the heck is MY Nobel Prize?)

Yes good citizen, I would ‘opine’ that you don’t know squat about economics if you turn a blind eye to this most basic of economic facts.

(Apparently my opinion is worthless to the rabid capitalists who hand out Nobel Prizes.)

Neither YOU (nor anyone else) can live in an ‘economic wasteland’.

That’s why the ‘global economy’ is in the tank (and it going to stay there until it gets ‘re-balanced’.)

Somehow these, er, ‘gentlemen’ believe this problem is going to solve itself. (and it very well might…however, the fabric of society can only take so much tearing before it shreds completely.)

Which is to ‘opine’ that IF society is ‘left to its own devices’ the fabric of civilization will be ‘obliterated’.

How complete will the destruction be?

Total (barring last minute intervention…which may or may not be successful.)

Sort of boggles the mind to see who’s still drinking the Kool-Aid after all these years.

Considering how lethal that stuff is you have to be amazed that they’re still lining up to down a shot or three!

But that’s all part of another ‘self-correcting’ genetic defect, the tendency to trust people who don’t have your best interests at heart.

Add in the ‘stupid factor’ and we find an endless line of potential Kool-Aid drinkers!

What Kool-Aid is that, you ask?

It’s the kind that blinds you to the existence of the ‘economic desert’.

“There are plenty of jobs out there! You’re just not trying hard enough.”

Yeah, the hundred million unemployed are just a figment of your imagination, especially considering how they ‘don’t want to work’…(which is right next to deciding you no longer want to live…but conservo-whackos will swallow anything regardless of how jagged the hooks are.)

How sad is it good citizen that these facts are also being ignored by the (alleged) alternative media thus our current political dialog is centered on NOT trimming the military budget?

Mighty sad.

Even more disturbing is this headline from today’s NY Times:

White House Tactic for C.I.A. Bid Holds Back Drone Memos
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI

The administration may deny Senate Democrats information on targeted killings but tell Republicans more about a militant attack in Libya to win confirmation for John O. Brennan as C.I.A. director.

Um, correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t Obama run as a Democrat?

WTF is going on here?

Seriously good citizen, how far gone is our situation?

It’s looking mighty tough to me…but who cares what I think, surely not the rabid capitalists!

Which makes me ask, just who has to live among these animals?

Why, (by gum) YOU DO!

And if you don’t do something to help yourself (hint, it all starts with the politicians) then shame on you!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

SOTU

Greetings good citizen,

Well, the SOTU speech last night has us all scratching our heads, because it was nothing we haven’t heard a thousand times before.

Maybe it was comforting when more competent leaders told us we were in the process of rectifying longstanding wrongs…but in my mid-fifties, I’ve heard all of this crap before and guess what, it’s getting worse!

Isn’t insanity defined as doing the same act repeatedly, each time expecting a different outcome?

Pray tell, explain to me how throwing money at an education system that trains our kids for jobs that aren’t here any more is going to help?

This is nearly as ludicrous as letting banks ‘audit’ themselves. Given the, er, ‘integrity’ of modern banking, just how ‘trustworthy’ would these self-audits be?

I wouldn’t touch ‘em with a fifty-foot pole!

But I digress, back to the ‘how we doin’ speech…

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"Every day, we should ask ourselves three questions as a nation: How do we attract more jobs to our shores? How do we equip our people with the skills to get those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?"

PRESIDENT OBAMA, in his State of the Union address.

I’d start with a different first question. I’d start by asking how much longer are we going to put up with this BS?

Because the answer to the first question is moot. There used to be a lot more jobs here BUT our sell-out politicians signed ‘free trade agreements’ with every Banana Republic on the planet, pauperizing the nation as a result.

So don’t ask STUPID QUESTIONS like ‘How do we ‘attract’ more jobs to our shores?’ when you already know the answer.

We have to ‘out Banana Republic the Banana Republics’ and throw our STANDARD OF LIVING IN THE TOILET…(so ‘a few’ can be rich.)

Worse good citizen, you’d all have to be blind not to see that this is exactly the direction we are headed in!

Good for the capitalist, not so good for you and yours.

I’d use a stronger adjective than ‘good’ but this has to go on an unfirewalled page too.

Left unchecked good citizen our civilization is headed the way of Easter Island…all because nobody has the courage to stand up to ‘the insane money men’ and tell them ‘no!’

I do it regularly but as you can see a single voice has no effect…all I do is annoy them. (Even that remark is ‘vanity’, it far more likely they don’t know I exist!)

But we left two statements ‘unchallenged’, let us return to our ‘quote of the day’…

Our number two ‘mission’ is to how do we ‘equip’ our people to do the ‘jobs of tomorrow’?

Again, stupid question, we do it the ‘old fashioned way’…ON THE JOB TRAINING!

Our numbskull politicians would have you believe the people who perform commerce’s heavy lifting learned to do what they do in college.

We old people know better, AFTER college, your new employer TRAINS YOU on how THEY WANT IT DONE!

To the point that most college grads wonder why they bothered taking on all of that debt only to be spoon-fed everything they do.

But they don’t say anything because they write it off as ‘the cost of the job’. They invested tens of thousand in an education that will pay them back a million over the course of their career.

Without the degree (that they don’t use) they wouldn’t have gotten the job.

Simple.

But they want YOU to believe it was hard…when nothing changes.

Now we arrive at the last, er, ‘assertion’, which is as comical as it is farcial!

How do we ‘insure’ these new jobs pay a living wage?

How sad is it nobody has an answer to the second half of that statement (What is ‘a living wage?’)

Once upon a time after Europe was desolated by WWII and the last man standing was the US, a living wage was a ‘middle class’ income. Where the multiple redundant ‘middle manager’ made enough money to swing that (modest) home in the suburbs, put his kids through school and sock away enough for retirement all before reaching age 55!

Jr. got his twenty year mortgage in his twenties so it was paid off by the time he turned forty(ish) and he had the last twenty years to sock away cash to retire ‘in style’.

Now things are different.

There are no ‘middle managers’ just as there is no ‘redundancy’, the ‘market’ is supposed to take care of those trifles…if a void presents itself, the market will fill it (despite the enormous cost.)

The few have already waxed richer than their needs, pauperizing the rest of the world. Now we have enormous sums with no place to go and the global economy is locked in a dead stall…all so a few could be rich.

Since the rest of us have been condemned to death by this reckless action of our politicians, let us pray the rich are enjoying their wealth…and will enjoy doing their own heavy lifting after we’re gone.

Although I doubt we’ll vanish completely…

Stupid is as stupid does.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

(This post is ‘related’ to the larger series examining our civilization and how to repair/replace it.)

Rare Form

Greetings good citizen,

Oil has edged up to $97 a barrel (which is only 36 gallons when they’re measuring oil) and the Dow is in the black at the moment at 13,916 again, for no discernable reason.

Well, Pfizer did ‘beat expectations’ but Pfizer isn’t a component of the Dow…Under the category of Wall Street’s useful purpose, maybe the optimism is derived from the markets being used to ‘focus’ our politicians on the goals of the One Percent.

And it seems the One Percent needs some new legislation to protect profits from those pesky ‘generics’…(the devil with the consumer! It’s his inability to pay that’s causing this whole mess, (says the One Percent…)

So if any of you are wondering what our (bought and paid for) ‘legislators’ will be working on next…chances are it will be this:

Biotech Firms, Billions at Risk, Lobby States to Limit Generics
By ANDREW POLLACK

The industry’s lobbying effort could blunt new competition to its products and reduce the savings anticipated in the federal health care overhaul.

You can understand the ‘no vaseline’ but did they really need to throw the ground glass in there too?

If we take the point of view that the price of ‘LIFE SAVING MEDICATION’ doesn’t matter ‘cuz the ‘precious few’ plan on exterminating us anyway then stories like this aren’t worth getting angry over.

Since ‘United we aren’t’ we’re all alone in our death march. Nobody’s going to help us because they are all in the murderer’s pay.

How’s that for ‘dim’?

Worse, I can sit here and plead that we’ve got to get our act together but it falls on deaf ears.

Nobody’s going to stick their neck out until this thing reaches critical mass, then it will be too late (to guide it.)

Although you want to talk about ‘tap dancing on a land mine’, the bad boy is gonna blow any day now.

All it’s going to take is one more good push. And nobody knows what direction that push is going to come from.

Which should serve to tell us that things are pretty far-gone when a single headline about the manipulation of our legal system is enough to launch a tirade on the (largely unacknowledged) 'war between the classes!'

But that’s not all that’s going on good citizen…

11:24 AM ET NYTimes
When Good Drivers Pay More for Insurance than Bad Ones

11:22 AM ET Reuters
Goodbye Goodwill as European Firms Pay High Price for M&A

11:16 AM ET NYTimes
Report Gauges Companies' Approach to Advertising on Social Media

11:10 AM ET NYTimes
New Home Office Deduction Is Simpler, but Smaller

10:51 AM ET IHT
French Central Bank Workers Strike Over Job Cut Plans

10:38 AM ET AP
CNN Executive Mark Whitaker Quitting

10:34 AM ET Reuters
Financial Fears Hit Consumer Confidence in January

10:25 AM ET IHT
Appeals Court Suspends Peugeot's Job-Cut Plan

Maybe it just us old people but every time we look at the media we see more jobs going away. Obviously to make us ‘more competitive’ but that hole appears to be ‘bottomless’.

Which is to opine that when we finally achieve ‘parity’ we will simultaneously achieve pauperdom!

But that’s our ‘lot in life’ (according to ‘the One Percent’) and who are we to complain.

We should be GRATEFUL we aren’t euthanized when we are born! (Fear not, legislation along this line is being drafted by Alex as you read this. So much for the conservative devotion to the ‘sanctity of life’, eh?)

Of course, if you talk to one, practically the first words out of their mouths is what a waste of perfectly good butt-wipe the rest of the human race is.

Yet these psycho’s are ‘anti-abortion’, what’s up with that? (Because once you’re born these same freaks are pro eugenics!)

Needless to say good citizen it’s been a rough 48 hours, thus am I in ‘rare form’…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Disgusted!

Greetings good citizen,

The destruction of our civilization proceeds apace but the top of my head exploded when I read this nonsense!

The New Tao of Trade: Don’t Just Import from China. Sell There.

Like many American businesses fighting to keep their prices competitive, Vision Quest Lighting turned to China about six years ago. It now imports about a sixth of the two dozen to three dozen parts required to make its lighting fixtures from there. Recently, however, the Long Island company began to see China in a different light: as a sales target. The growing economy of the world’s most populous nation made it ripe for Vision Quest’s architectural lighting fixtures, many custom-made for hotel and restaurant chains like Hilton and KFC.

When one such client, a clothing retailer, ordered 1,500 lights for five stores, Vision Quest’s chief executive, Larry Lieberman, decided it made sense to start manufacturing lights in China. Other American clients, he reasoned, would no doubt begin placing similar orders as their chains sought to capitalize on the world’s fastest-growing consumer market. And with high-quality products from the West coveted in China, Mr. Lieberman also imagined his products on display in Chinese showrooms.

And yet, selling goods in China is not easy. Mr. Lieberman made the 1,500 lights only to see them gather dust in a warehouse in Guangzhou for more than four weeks because he had not yet established a local enterprise approved to process sales.

Pssst! We wouldn’t need to listen to IDIOT SUGGESTIONS LIKE THIS if we castigated (as well as castrated) our legislators for letting work that was originally here to migrate there!

And guess what? Once energy becomes scarce, the ‘cheaper there’ vanishes…and the ‘silent majority’ will be standing here, holding on to an empty bag, unable to afford the goods we ‘used to make for ourselves’.

What seems to be the main problem here?

Looks to me the problem is men like Skippy, who the moment things get busy, the first thought that pops into his teeny little mind is “I could really rake it in if I could farm this out to China!”

Take it from a manufacturing man, 1,500 pieces ain’t nothin, most shops would turn the work away. You also aren’t going to see appreciable saving in those quantities. You aren’t buying enough material to take advantage of the volume discount.

How will Skippy ‘get lucky’? He’ll be directed to a manufacturer who is subsidized by the Chinese government to do work that originates in the US.

That’s where Skippy will reap his profits from and the Chinese shop owner will make his off of the government…and the government will get theirs by charging the Americans more interest as they subsidize predatory capitalism around the globe.

As our ‘standard of living’ descends into the basement and we start moving back towards the trees, the shrinking mindless and clueless ‘middle class’ will continue to wonder why their purchasing power keeps shrinking.

I must admit, I started this post in an ‘agitated’ state, marveling over how we have gotten this far with 20 CENTURIES OF FAIRY TALES being passed off as history.

We are either A.) incredibly STUPID or B.) unbelievably tolerant…(to the point of stupidity.)

I think we’d all be at least a little cranky when the only two possible answers arrive at the same conclusion.

I got started on this (what’s wrong with my species) jag considering the ‘gold paradox’.

True, the stuff is ‘rare’ but it is also ‘useless’ if we consider its electrical properties weren’t discovered until the advent of the electronics age in the 1950’s. It’s been considered ‘precious’ since pre-historic time, a fact that has given rise (and a degree of credibility) to ancient alien theorists.

And this preciousness is based solely on its resistance to oxidation! Shiny gold stays shiny! Whoop-de do!

Well, look at where this ‘silliness’ has landed us?

A global economy on the verge of cascading systemic collapse…because boneheads like Skippy think farming things out to China is a ‘good idea’!

FULL STOP!

What does Skippy’s desire to make pockets full of cash through outsourcing and the value of gold have to do with one another?

Our value system is bankrupt! We have been ‘hoodwinked’ into pursuing ‘representative wealth’ while others step in and simply take the stuff worth having from us.


This is like the people ‘upset’ by Russia’s sudden ban on the adoption of Russian children by US citizens…don’t they think there are enough kids right here in the US that need a good home?

[They’re going to Russia so they can adopt White kids, as sad as that is.]

Perhaps this would be a good time to bring up the issue of not knowing anybody who ISN’T in some kind of fertility program (because they squandered their prime reproductive years chasing their capitalist enforced goals?)

Why isn’t the media paying any attention to this crisis…or does the corporate owned media think (the rabble being unable to reproduce) is a ‘good thing’

I’m too disgusted to continue…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Useful

Greetings good citizen,

Once again we find ourselves on the cusp of that relic of the New Deal formerly referred to as ‘the weekend.’

We still call them weekends but the week no longer ‘ends’ for the vast majority of us. For the unemployed the weekend represents two bad days to prospect for a job despite the best chance of finding work being in the 24/7 service/retail sector…where it is impossible to get forty hours, never mind forty-one.

So, yeah, the unemployed usually suspend their search for work on Saturday and Sunday because they retain hope that their new job will provide them with those two days off.

Call it ‘tradition’ but we have the Sabbath built into our psyches. (The fact that one is Jew and the other Christian is of no consequence, we have ‘become accustomed’ to having those two days off.

Ironically, our brave new world seldom provides ‘days off’ period.

Some of us are expected to report to work seven days a week but only for a few hours a day (usually ‘peak time’.)

So you only work 28 hours but you have to go back & forth 14 times to get even that little bit!

And you don’t have a ‘day off’…

Now, if you only work four hours out of twenty-four you have most of every day off BUT, in the relentless world of retail, the only days off you get (for now) are Thanksgiving and Christmas.

How ironic is it that you (as a part-time employee) don’t get paid for either of them?

Isn’t capitalism great? (All capitalists think so!)

363 days a year you must wake up and make yourself presentable. Drive yourself to the work place to perform your duties (as assigned that day.) Stay on the job until you are granted permission to depart…(can’t just up and leave come quittin’ time in retail!) and all of this for a minimum wage job that has absolutely zero loyalty.

Screw up even once and you’ll be out the door so fast your head will spin.

But that’s the (broken) ‘make yourself useful’ meme of capitalism. People are ‘disposable’. (And if the people you have disposed of become ‘troublesome’ you have the police shoot them down.)

Sort of going off the rails here when it was my ‘original intent’ to point out that weekends are rapidly becoming ‘a thing of the past.’

And this phenomenon is not restricted to the ‘rabble’ doomed to work short hours for shorter money, people who are routinely dismissed with the threat, ‘be happy you have a job!’

That threat extends to the ‘rank and file’ workers in cubicle land as well. Now the pay is slightly better and the atmosphere (slightly) more ‘professional’ than retail but the threat remains the same…or perhaps it gets turned on its head when the boss asks ‘how many of you can speak Hindi?’

Which might explain inexplicable stories such as this one:

Morgan Stanley's $481 Million 4th-Quarter Profit Beats Estimates
By SUSANNE CRAIG 42 minutes ago

Morgan Stanley reported adjusted earnings of 45 cents a share on Friday, driven by gains in wealth management and investment banking.

On a planet with a broken financial system, how the, er, heck does any bank ‘earn’ 45 cents a share without committing fraud?

Banking is (irretrievably) broken good citizen. The imbalances in the global economy CAN NOT BE ‘corrected’ without a complete overhaul that starts with a ‘clean slate’ (across the board.)

So ‘fictions’ like the one above are exactly that.

Which leads us to our next, er, ‘questionable data’:

Economix Blog
Lifting the Veil on the Fed's 2007 Discussions
By DAVID LEONHARDT 27 minutes ago

The Federal Reserve has just released the transcripts of its meetings in the pivotal year of 2007, when the housing bubble started to burst and the global financial crisis began.

Now that they’ve had five years to ‘muddy the waters’ naturally this work of fiction will have gaping holes in it but it will be downplayed as a side effect of the ‘whole truth’ being ‘unknowable’.

Here is another episode of 'the story that refuses to die' despite the corporate owned media not even hinting that globalization is responsible:

Praised but Fire-Prone, Battery Fails Test in 787
By JAD MOUAWAD and CHRISTOPHER DREW

Lithium-ion batteries are popular because they are powerful and charge quickly, but Boeing has had serious problems with the technology on its new Dreamliner.

Powerful Chemical Cocktail, With a Drawback

And anyone who didn’t see the ‘design-flaw’ card coming needs a serious reality check.

Of course it was a design flaw…but why did the design flaw occur?

Was it because the system was designed in Bejing and built in Seattle? It goes without saying that there was ‘no need’ to test it because it is ‘proven technology’…in the end, stupid is as stupid does.

Yet again, this old dog doesn’t need new tricks, the old ones still work fine!

G.E. Profit and Revenues Top Estimates
By REUTERS 7:40 AM ET

General Electric reported a better-than-expected 7.5 percent rise in fourth quarter profit and a sharp increase in its backlog of equipment orders, sending shares up in premarket trading.

Funny how profitability is easy when you’re half manufacturer and three-quarters bank! If you don’t ‘turn a profit’ from sales you just have the banking arm ‘cook the books’!

Speaking of cooked books and their ‘unintended consequences’:

Shell’s rig was grounded after being set adrift in a storm.
As Shell’s Arctic Drilling Hopes Hit Snags, Its Rivals Watch
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and JOHN M. BRODER

Shell’s drilling program, the subject of two federal inquiries, has had problems environmentalists say highlight the dangers of prospecting for oil in the severe Arctic environment.

Talk about your ‘common threads, for years environmentalist have been screaming about the dangers of arctic drilling BUT the ‘too stupid to listen’ crowd goes ahead and does it anyway!

Will they have the chutzpah to say they’re ‘sorry’ after they despoil the arctic chasing what little crude there is?

No, I doubt it, nor will anyone be executed for their ‘hubris’ as has happened here:

At Algerian Oil and Gas Fields Once Thought Safe, New Fears and Precautions
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

Local oil executives said foreign oil service companies were in the process of quietly removing several hundred workers until they were confident that the security situation was stable.

Odd how the article implies there was some kind of intelligence indicating the security situation was less than ‘ideal’ but apparently that ‘memo’ was, um, ignored a few moments too long with hostages being taken and killed.

Well, we all know the capitalist credo, ‘profits before people!’ (Power to the shareowners! And oh how they hate the O word! Which is why I use it every chance I get!)

What O word is that, you ask?

The one they can’t defend, ‘Own.’

And for our last entry:

Chinese Economy Expanded at End of 2012, Data Shows
By BETTINA WASSENER

Though there was improvement, economic data also underlined the view that the pace of future growth is likely to remain well below that seen in recent years.

Geez good citizen, I was going to cut this and the story above it off but as it would turn out, they are the two most important stories in today’s offering.

Especially this last offering because it translates to the One Percent’s ‘acceptance’ that the economy as it exists today will constitute the ‘new normal’.

Unemployment will remain as it is as energy prices climb beyond the reach of marginalized citizen.

Which begs the more basic question of whether or not you are still a citizen if the capitalist can’t find a use for you?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Re-think

Greetings good citizen,

As we start a New Year it might be helpful to re-think some of our beliefs (because the people pitching so-called ‘solutions’ have their heads up their asses!)

Thus is today’s offering a vivid example of precisely that phenomenon (I’ll explain after the excerpt.)

Robots Don't Destroy Jobs; Rapacious Corporate Executives Do

Worrying about automation distracts us from the real problem: misuse of corporate profits.

December 31, 2012 |

Americans are understandably upset about profits without prosperity. Corporate executives seem to be the big winners, while the middle class is declining and young people face a bleak economic future. How did this happen? It's easy to blame technology, especially the automation that supposedly displaces workers. But that's not the real story. The fact is that automation creates jobs. It's the misuse of corporate profits that is destroying them.

There was a time when high corporate profits meant bright employment prospects for most members of the US labor force. That relation between profits and prosperity was strongest in the immediate post-World War II decades when US corporations led the world in manufacturing, provided workers with career-long employment security, and reinvested profits in productive capabilities in the United States. For the past three decades, however, the pursuit of corporate profits has been at the expense of prosperity for an ever-growing proportion of the American population.

This disconnect between profits and prosperity began in the 1980s with permanent plant closings that cost production workers their middle-class jobs. It increased in the 1990s as major US corporations scrapped the career-with-one-company norm that had prevailed for salaried employees, and it became common even for college-educated people with a couple of decades of work experience to find themselves on the wrong end of the pink slip. Then in the 2000s, as US corporations accelerated the globalization of production activities, the jobs of all members of the US labor force, no matter what their level of educational attainment, became vulnerable to competition from qualified people in lower wage areas of the world.

The article ‘essentially’ asserts the truth, although it is a stretch indeed to think how automation ‘creates’ jobs (it always ends in ‘net’ job destruction, otherwise it wouldn’t be doable.)

Um, again, the sights are set a bit too low as far as pointing to the true culprits here as well. The front line supervisors do what they’re told, just as unit managers are merely glorified ‘yes men’.

You need to venture into the boardroom and then follow the link to Wall Street, that’s where these irresponsible marching orders originate.

It’s also where the legislation that permits such foolishness starts.

Want to find out who destroyed the US economy…look at who was behind NAFTA…and its primary champion, Ronald Reagan.

Funny how much of what is wrong with today can be traced back to the Reagan Revolution…and the ‘rise of the >One Percent.’

More disturbing are the commercials trying to sucker you into going back to school for a job that most likely doesn’t exist.

Have you seen the college ad that speculates we could ad 20 million new jobs if we only ‘prepared’ for them?

Sort of short for the fucking 230 million working aged people who need work, isn’t it?

This is what I mean, we need to strengthen our grip on ‘reality’ before we become reality’s ‘road kill’.

I’m pretty sure good citizen that the only place on the whole net that you will find pointing to this factor is right here…everyone else either clueless and doesn’t care or assumes you already know and have come to terms with it.

Speaking of the origination of irresponsible concepts we could ‘follow the money’ into the Ivory Towers of Academia to learn who is behind the Randite/Friedman school of economic idiocy.

Rumor has it ‘twas the renowned monopolist Rockefeller…funny (and not necessarily ‘humorous’) the things you can do with ‘money’…

Which only strengthens my case against the current laws governing the uses of money today.

In a ‘more equitable’ world assholes like Rockefeller would be unable to ‘buy legitimacy’ for his pet prejudices.

In a more equitable world you wouldn’t be able to buy the truth either…

But, naturally, I digress…
If I were to share one thing with you good citizen it would be the ‘awareness’ that those who lord over us as our ‘betters’ stopped caring about the welfare of society long ago and focus only on what is good, to and for, THEM.

The ‘fatal myopia’ that I have warned of repeatedly has become so widespread and rampant as to become uncontrollable.

Small comfort that will be when the preppers go on the offensive after squandering their store bought existence…

Again, money gone horribly wrong (but you won’t hear that from Faux News.)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Brinksmanship

Greetings good citizen,

What a week to round out a year spent waiting for the other shoe to drop, eh?

Seems we aren't the only ones incapable of rolling back the tax structure:

French Council Strikes Down 75% Tax Rate
By SCOTT SAYARE 11:33 AM ET

A council opposed a plan to impose a 75 percent marginal income tax rate on the wealthy that would have applied to annual income above 1 million euros, or about $1.3 million.

Like I said in yesterday’s post, this ‘criminal elite’ shit transcends the ‘Nation State’ (via the global banking cartels.)

Which, ironically, leaves us here:

If a deal is reached, votes in the Senate could begin Sunday.

Obama Urges Senate Leaders to Put Together a Tax Deal
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and ANNIE LOWREY 12:03 PM ET

In his weekly address, President Obama again urged lawmakers to find a last-minute solution to avert a fiscal crisis that would begin Jan. 1.

As many of my contemporaries point out, the ‘fiscal cliff’ only exists in the ‘neocons’ heads.

It is being used as an excuse to extend tax cuts the wealthy should never have received and to cut desperately needed social programs as the global economy continues to tank.

The question none of our so-called ‘betters’ is prepared to answer is what they intend to do about the badly broken and now largely rogue criminal banking sector.

It CAN’T be ‘repaired’ (and certainly not by the criminals currently in charge!) so it has to be ‘replaced’…and none of the chiselers has given this predicament a single moment of thought.

So we get bullshit stories like this:

Several of Walmart's suppliers had used the factory in Bangladesh where 112 workers died last month.

As Walmart Makes Safety Vows, It’s Seen as Obstacle to Change
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE and JIM YARDLEY

After a deadly factory fire in Bangladesh stirred soul-searching around the apparel industry, critics say Walmart has not done enough to improve safety standards.

And naturally those ‘critics’ will be dismissed as being ‘anti-capitalist’ and ignored.

Business always does the right thing (for the company, if some employees become collateral damage, so what?)

There was an interesting story in the local rag praising a recent government decision to make restitution to the families of workers who unwittingly handled highly hazardous material (which proved fatal for almost all of them!)

And the decidedly conservative local rag was praising the government for doing the ‘right thing’…while totally ignoring the private sector employer who murdered these people (by failing to disclose, never mind failing to provide adequate safeguards so these workers might have had a fighting chance.

Again it is being swept under the rug under the mantle of ‘state secret’ and the situation does involve The Manhattan Project and how the uranium was processed.

And the private sector contractor didn’t pay these people a single cent extra…(probably terminated them when they got sick!)

(I know, nothing personal, it’s just business! Where are your fucking ‘job creators’ when people die because of their recklessness? Sadly the twits are still thumping their chests, damn proud of what they’ve done!)

Stupid is as stupid does…

Did I mention capitalism is a bad idea? How about another example:

Utility workers in Seaside Heights, N.J., making pole repairs after the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy.
Hurricane Sandy Alters Utilities’ Calculus on Upgrades
By DIANE CARDWELL, MATTHEW L. WALD and CHRISTOPHER DREW

It is typically much cheaper for a utility, and its customers, to skip prevention measures and just clean up the mess after a catastrophe, but Hurricane Sandy has changed that thinking.

This particular headline sends a chill up my spine because of what’s implied here. The US no longer ‘needs’ its robust power infrastructure (as our ‘betters’ continue to export our jobs wholesale.)

Will our ‘private sector’ power companies take the ‘cheap out’ once again and only replace what is needed to restore service, even if that means reduced capacity?

What the hell, the peasants don’t need it (and can’t pay for it anyway…)

Have you ever wondered what would happen if our mostly imported economy stopped?

Unlike the fiscal cliff, the fuckers in charge bowed to the longshoreman’s demands…partially anyway.

Ports in Newark and more than a dozen other cities will stay open after longshoremen reached an agreement with shipping companies to avert a coastwide strike.

Partial Deal With Union Averts a Strike at 14 Ports
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Shipping companies and dockworkers reached a deal on their main dispute, and the longshoremen’s union agreed to drop its threat of a strike this Sunday.

Probably just a mistaken perception that ‘brinksmanship’ has become the watch-word of the day. Fiscal cliff on one hand with a shutdown of the real economy looming on the other.

Yeah, it just ‘looks like’ they’re playing ‘hardball’ (because if they really try it there can be ‘no escape’ for most of them.)

And stiffing so many of their minions would leave them in a bad way when it came to cleaning up the mess the peasants are going to make.

Yeah, life can really suck when you look down on everyone like they’re beneath dirt.

Just something to ponder as we head off the non-existent ‘fiscal cliff’…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Bug Out

Greetings good citizen,

Markets are cliff diving this morning although they are not currently at serious negative levels…but the average person stopped caring about what happens on Wall Street years ago. They abandoned it along with the hope of ever seeing their retirement money again…fucking thieves!

But that is not the topic of the day, today I want to address a bizarre practice that the media has turned into a ‘reality show’ and that practice is known as ‘prepping’.

You can see the potential for comic relief when you listen to the disasters these ‘seemingly ordinary’ people are preparing for (provided complete with ‘expert rebuttal’ by the show’s producers…who call themselves ‘Practical Preppers’.

Um, perhaps the point is the show is produced as ‘entertainment’ but the people highlighted in each episode are deadly serious…

And, in a highly litigious world you have to wonder who bears the liability of someone imitating what they see on these shows and killing a lot of innocent people because of it?

Never once do they mention the NEED to ‘rotate’ the food they are stockpiling, instead they feed the ‘it’ll keep’ mentality by not brining up the issues of perishability and contamination at all. (Probably because they are unqualified to speak ‘authoritatively’ on the subject.)

So who’s libel if a bunch of people get poisoned due to the, er, ‘incomplete’ information they get from the show?

Well, if the world goes to pot the answer is simple, nobody…because there won’t be anyone around to hold court.

We’ll all be too busy keeping our sorry asses alive to be bothering with jury trials…besides, under ‘gun rules’ things are intensely ‘simplified’, the one with the gun makes the rules.

(If both parties are armed, the one who deals a fatal wound to his target first wins! However, USUALLY both parties will succeed in wounding one another and they will both die due to the lack of medical attention societal collapse will precipitate…(written in the interests of ‘full disclosure’.)

We won’t go into strategies to avoid being critically injured in a gunfight here, let it suffice to say I am trying to be more ‘responsible’ than the Fox News owned TV channel that produces the, er, ‘entertainment’.

(Talk about your fucking ‘legal fig leafs’ because that’s the one they’re hiding behind!)

As you might suspect, most of these ‘doomers’ fear social collapse brought on by a collapse of the monetary system…which is always ‘pooh-poohed’ by the producers/self-appointed ‘experts’.

Worse, they cite ‘economists’ as their source for their denial…like economists saw the collapse of the banking system coming! They’ve been in denial for five years that it has already happened, what would you expect them to say?

ONE MORE TIME for those of you too thick to ‘get it’ the first time or to figure it out for yourself…

THE GLOBAL BANKING SYSTEM COLLAPSED FIVE YEARS AGO AND NOBODY HAS DONE ANYTHING TO FIX IT!

That’s why the banks need perpetual ‘taxpayer bailouts’…they will eventually bankrupt the treasury and the whole shooting match will collapse, virtually ‘instantly’ (in a matter of hours.)

IF the current, er, failed system remains in place.

But you don’t care about that, do you good citizen?

More importantly, you’ve only watched one episode of ‘Doomsday Preppers’ and you were drunk so you thought it was funny as hell…and you haven’t thought about it since.

Despite being aware that the ‘bug-out’ movement has been around for a long time, people have been ‘preparing’ for a nuclear war since 1945 so ‘prepping’ isn’t ‘new’.

The thing that’s disturbing about our modern preppers is they somehow think they stand a chance against hoards of ‘disenfranchised’ fellow citizens who aren’t as well ‘prepared’ but stand a mighty good chance of being ‘equally’ (if not better) armed.

My ‘advice’ regarding being ‘prepared’ is to know where to find wild edibles, stockpiles of ANYTHING will only make you a ‘high value target’ and groups of well-armed and probably somewhat well trained individuals will make short work of you and your puny defenses.

Best not to have anything they can take…simple as that (if not particularly ‘entertaining’…funny, when the show first aired, they had ONE GUY in California on who was ‘doing it right’ and they haven’t had another since…what does that tell you?

Brings us back to our ‘fig leaf’, doesn’t it?

It’s just ‘entertainment’ (that some people choose to take VERY seriously, albeit, this doesn’t prevent them from doing all of the ‘wrong things’.)

Don’t know what to tell you good citizen. It disturbs me that the corporate owned media would use such a phenomenon for its ‘entertainment value’ (although they are careful not to, er, ‘discredit’ any of the preppers.)

It’s the piss poor advice their ‘experts’ hand out at the end of each episode (and I’ve only seen a handful because the show is painful to watch.) that really gets my goat.

I’m waiting for them to come right out and say ‘Hey, why don’t you all paint bulls-eyes on your backs and go running through that open field over there and let the audience see what happens next?

Well good citizen, what do YOU think will happen next?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Immigrant's Song

Greetings good citizen,

As predicted, the Dow has handed back the irrational 175 point gain it made a little more than a week ago and is currently plumbing new depths as the emptiness that is US productive capacity remains hollow.

But fear not good citizen as we see from this ‘fluff piece’ written to demonstrate to the rest of us ungrateful slobs how foreign nationals still have the ‘drive’ to make lemonade with the lemon that is ‘The American Dream’.

PHOENIX — Hussein Al Hamka is going to farm his famous cucumbers on a 15-acre vacant lot in the heart of this city, where nearly half of all lots sit empty and unused.

If his piece of fertilized dirt had a price tag, it would cost much more than he could ever dream of affording; the lot is valued at $25 million, or at least it was before the housing market collapsed and it was left undeveloped. To survive, Mr. Hamka, 50, an Iraqi refugee three years into his life in the United States, grows and sells cucumbers just like the ones he ate in his home country.

On Friday, Fidele Komezusenge, 25, a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, picked rocks from the loose soil in the raised beds next to Mr. Hamka’s. Mr. Komezusenge was planning to plant carrot and cabbage seeds, his first farming foray since arriving in the United States in June. Nearby, Safala Chhetri, 50, a refugee from Bhutan who arrived in 2009, wavered between planting spinach or kale, but then decided to give onions a second chance.

Left unstated is where the time to tend these garden patches is coming from (are they all unemployed, like half of all working aged US citizens) or do they work the night shift at the local convenience store?

Then there is the other issue, only briefly touched upon by the vegetable garden writer…what was the lot BEFORE it was abandoned?

(Did they house the shops that Wal-Mart drove out of business?)

Can’t say as I’ve never been to Phoenix.

But it’s the same old story, everywhere you go.

What (like so many things) ‘disturbs’ me about this story is the clear evidence it provides regarding the ‘pauperization’ of our civilization.

There was an article that I should have jumped on yesterday, an article explaining (actually debunking) the conservative position that we don’t possess enough trained manufacturing personnel to fill the open jobs.

I am living proof that the problem is NOT the lack of personnel but the unwillingness of the employer to pay for that talent!

Just yesterday I was passed over for a job I low-balled! It can’t be the ‘experience’, I’m a twenty year man and 3 times a foreman! (not only can I do the job, I can run it as well!)

They just didn’t want to pay…

Which reflects on our current situation.

Do you KNOW why our economy is ‘stalled’?

Too many of us only earn enough to keep us alive. This excludes us from being able to participate in and thereby 'expand' the economy...our other needs go 'unfulfilled'. (This is what happens when (idiot) ‘entrepreneurs’ decide they are going to become billionaires too!)

They screw their employees until they are forced to close because NOBODY can afford to work for them anymore.

Worse, good citizen, the well-trodden path has a name. Do you know what that name is, when the vast majority of the population lives in abject poverty while a, er, ‘fortunate few’ live in the ‘lap of luxury’?

When this happens they call that place a Banana Republic.

Well don’t look now. Worse, the people responsible for this phenomenon honestly believe it is not their fault…(they just played the game better than everyone else!)

And THAT’S part of the problem too…considering the very real business of life ‘a game’ where winning is accomplished by pauperizing all of the other players…

I’m going to stop right here so you can ponder the wisdom laid down for you to absorb…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Rinse & Repeat

Greetings good citizen,

For most of us life is centered on doing what we need to do to keep the wolves from the door. We slave away at unrewarding jobs (even good jobs don’t ‘reward’ YOU…) never giving much thought to the NITWITS in charge!

Which is somewhat off base…we think about the MORONS all of the time…but there’s nothing we can do about the incompetents at the top.

We don’t ‘vote’ for them and, push come to shove, we don’t have the luxury of choosing not to work for them, the job market has been tight (and getting tighter) for years.

It’s generally accepted we ALL work for idiots and that we’re also led by incompetents. While we may get to ‘vote’ for who leads us we are powerless to ‘fire’ them…(although these same imbeciles can have us killed for no reason whatsoever!)

But let us not get distracted by the subtleties involved.

Again, I am pointing to something YOU aren’t supposed to be thinking about…

Leadership that is responsive to YOUR needs…(so why would your government need the power to KILL you without reason? Could we be back at the original issue of ‘whose government is it anyway?’)

(Not that it’s going to be an issue much longer.)

Well, here’s something for you to ponder while your figuring out whether you want pork or chicken in the ‘barf bag’ tonight.

This whole ‘investor charade’ only works in the ‘one size fits all’ mode!

Thus, starting last year, Goldman began to offer an N-11 Equity fund to complement its BRIC fund. Ms. Koch said both funds could have roles in retail investors’ portfolios, either as someone’s full emerging-markets allocation or as an add-on, particularly for a person invested only in an emerging-markets index fund. That’s because the leading emerging-markets index, by MSCI, excludes Nigeria, Vietnam and Bangladesh — three countries that Goldman counts as promising.

“We’re saying that the default is suboptimal,” she said. “You have to ask which countries are really going to drive growth.”

BUT William S. Rocco, an analyst for Morningstar, advised caution when considering a BRIC fund or any narrowly targeted emerging-market offering. Investors who haven’t invested in emerging markets before should consider a broader offering, he said. “Generally, at Morningstar, we don’t like the idea of artificially limiting a manager’s choices,” he said.

And if they already own foreign or emerging-markets funds, they probably have exposure to the BRICs and several other emerging and frontier countries, he said. “Why would you want so much Brazil and China?” he asked. “You’re really doubling down.”

DO you understand what you’re seeing here good citizen?

This is taking the ‘Western Lifestyle and ‘making it fit’ around the globe.

And guess what good citizen, in order to pull this off the idiot capitalists’ need one and a half more Earth’s to exploit!

But that doesn’t stop them or even slow them down.

A lack of resources only means higher prices for those who can afford such things.

Remember money’s ‘one useful purpose’, that of ‘regulator’.

You don’t think about it that way but believe you me, those who can help themselves to as much as they want think about it precisely like that…because NOTHING is beyond THEIR reach!

Um, just to verify something that has been troubling you, the impression that you’re trapped on a ‘runaway train’…it’s true…and there is NO SAFE EXIT!

Why are YOU being ‘priced out’ of the market for goods your parents could easily afford? Because they are being sold to hundred of millions more customers than they were back in your parents day…because ALL ECONOMIES ARE LOCAL!

And a sidebar to the priced out argument is we no longer make those things here…which has a huge bearing on their ‘affordability’.

But as I pointed out in yesterday’s post, we will soon be unable to afford the ‘Western Lifestyle’ at ANY price!

Energy scarcity is a real ‘game changer’.

How frightening is it that if we don’t carefully manage the transition to energy scarcity that we could quickly find ourselves in a ‘kill on sight’ situation?

Which is to point out that those of you playing the ‘don’t rock the boat card’ are in for a real ‘hard landing’ when they pop the ‘energy surprise’ out of the box…(likely this winter.)

Which brings us to another issue.

We are far from ‘out’…BUT there isn’t enough to keep things rolling at ‘the current rate of consumption.’…the ONLY way to stretch what remains is to KILL OFF the ‘surplus population.’

Not that is matters to the rest of us but the only way to do this AND maintain the ‘status quo’ is to follow the above recipe…

We can quite easily convert to an energy scarce economy…but we’d need to ‘re-shuffle the deck’ considerably. (Starting with the Human Anti-Exploitation law! When viewed in this context, it’s importance becomes apparent.)

Um, don’t look now but the fucking >One Percent has drawn a bulls-eye on the back of ALL Western (industrialized) nations.

Our masters think we have been ‘too free’ and aren’t ‘sufficiently disciplined’ to meet the challenges of an energy scarce world. Spoiled as we all are by unions and coddled by frivolous civil protections.

So if you’ve been wondering why the West is in decline…it isn’t the regular people who have gone ‘decadent’…it’s the >One Percent who believes we will be ‘unmanageable’.

So your desire to ‘hold on to what you’ve got’ will prove futile…change is coming whether you fight or you lay down and die.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Donkey

Greetings good citizen,

Despite the extraordinary amount of ‘happy talk’ being spewed by the irresponsible Corporate Owned Media, the global economy is still in a death spiral…But the savvy among you already know that. Financial values make absolutely zero sense, as we see here:

Shares Rise on Hope For Better Jobless Data
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 7:53 PM ET

Manufacturing grew in September for the first time in four months

Um, okay…you know these asshats are famous for their number games so first we need a definition of ‘manufacturing’ and then we need to know how many hundredths of a percent constitutes ‘growth’?

Of course these licker’s of dog penises don’t care about what they write so long as they get their paycheck.

In reality, you can’t fault them, a job is a job is a job. Who cares what you do as long as it pays the bills?

But, naturally not all jobs ‘pay the bills’ as evidenced by the 46 million Americans on some form of ‘food assistance’. Then there are the poor S.O.B’s living in shelters (IF they get there in time…)

Five years after the ‘re-fi lovefest’ crashed what passed for the real economy the clueless cheerleaders are still pointing at chimera and crying ‘recovery’!

But there’s something wrong in River City…

Unemployment in Euro Zone at Record High
By DAVID JOLLY and RAPHAEL MINDER

The data showing a jobless rate of 11.4 percent overall in the euro area in August underscores that the European recession is deepening, analysts said.

US unemployment is still in the eight percent range…but our friends over in the Euro-zone are suffering nearly half again that rate.

(And trust me, good citizen, I use the term ‘friend’ in the broadest possible sense. The Europeans KNOW who is the author of their suffering…)

But wait, it seems the Eurozone isn’t the only region suffering…

In China and Japan, Economic Troubles Persist
By BETTINA WASSENER

Fresh data on Monday underscored the economic drags holding back the global economy despite the efforts of policy makers and central bankers around the world.

I wonder if you asked the average Japanese citizen if they thought this, er, ‘global depression’ could last for three decades back in the 1990’s, the affable Japanese citizen back then would probably have thought you were pulling their leg.

I’ll bet they don’t find it’s ‘funny’ now.

And that’s the hell of it good citizen, now that ‘silly season’ is upon us, both candidates are unveiling their plans to ‘revitalize the US economy’.

Um, Mr. Romney is endorsing the ‘typical’ laundry list of Republican backed tax breaks for the rich and austerity for everyone else (after all, prosperity, like free speech, is for the ‘One Percent’.

The unwashed rabble ‘don’t deserve it.’

Okay, so Mr. Obama is running with the ‘exact same plan HE DIDN’T enact last time!’

Why, oh why would ANYONE believe he means it this time?

I mean after all, if we re-elect him, he can’t run again so if he doesn’t live up to his campaign promises, well, he’d be running right about average with the rest of ‘em.

The thing that’s ‘different’ this time is how that hard, stony ground is zooming up to meet us (as gravity pulls us to our doom. It has to do with that cliff we fell off of five years ago.)

Yeah baby, they can promise us blue skies from here to eternity because the whole damn thing is gonna crash and burn in a few weeks time (say roughly a dozen.)

Then this whole CF will be the ‘new management’s problem.

Worse, the ‘new management’ will become OUR problem.

People don’t like change, especially when it’s rammed up their poopchute!

But the new boss doesn’t care if you like it or not. They are ‘prepared’ for trouble and troublemakers like you.

His boyz, the ones in the blue suits, are gonna do what they’re told if they want to see their next paycheck.

Funny how that green paper has everybody in a sort of a trance.

It’s enough to make you wonder if the whole species is ‘too stupid to live’.

Because the, er, ‘deceivers’ are performing contortions to maintain control, while they are simultaneously planning on as hard a landing as possible.

Which is to ask, good citizen, how long will it be before YOU realize there are stacks of that green stuff just laying around for the taking.

Rather than working your butt off, when are you going to go down and ‘make a withdrawal’?

Actually, you’d be better off just grabbing the things the green stuff is used to buy.

Sort of cuts to the chase and eliminates the getting ripped off part of the puzzle.

Just try to time it close to collapse of civil order, then nobody is going to bother chasing you. (Although the ‘like-minded’ may, er, ‘challenge’ your claim. In which case the better-armed party will prevail.)

Funny how if you remove the paycheck, the guys in the blue suit are just like you, a paycheck donkey the predators capitalists beat mercilessly (and senseless.)

One thing is for certain, YOU can’t afford to be ‘a Donkey’ no more.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Economics or Law?

Greetings good citizen,

Watched Doomsday Preppers on National Geographic last night, contemplating the whole time how much of this (nonsense) was due to the channel being owned by Newscorp?

More interestingly, the preppers themselves were revealed to be conservo-whackos (by dint of their bumperstickers, never mind being STUPID enough to go on national TV with their so-called ‘secret stashes’ of weapons, food and cash.)

And these people did the term ‘conservo-loonie’ proud! They were doing it all wrong and were being praised for their efforts by the show’s ‘independent judges’.

Actually, I am personally thankful for the preppers efforts, they will become the supermarkets that will provide temporary relief from eating whatever you can chase down with a stick and beat to death after the collapse.

For people obsessed with cop shows they appear to be completely ignorant of just how easy it is to get ‘the drop’ on somebody.

And after they tear that gun out of your surprised hands you only have moments left to live…and those will be the moments it takes for you to give up the location and how to disable the booby traps protecting your stash.

And you WILL tell them because YOU want to live.

Heck, comply quickly enough and they just might decide to spare your life…if only to have you take some of the risk out of hunting down future supplies.

Not all ‘hoarders’ will be ‘pushovers’ and as time goes on the job will only get more difficult.

But that is not the topic of today’s post.

Like the headline says, it’s still about the economy…

“This is one of the reasons wages haven’t been growing,” he said. “People are taking jobs they didn’t take in the past, moving from sectors like construction into jobs at lower-paying, big-box retailers.”

There were a few slivers of encouragement in Friday’s report. Using the broadest measure of unemployment, which includes part-time workers who want to work full time as well as individuals who are not looking for jobs but indicate they want to work, the unemployment rate fell to 14.7 percent from 15 percent.

The pace of government layoffs seems to be slowing, said Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School and director of the school’s Center for Human Resources. As the private sector added 103,000 jobs in August, governments cut just 7,000. That is down from 21,000 in July, and well below the average of 16,000 reductions a month since March. Federal employment actually increased by 3,000 in August, to 2.8 million, the first monthly increase since February 2011.

There was only slight relief for the long-term unemployed, defined as workers out of a job for at least 27 weeks. Their ranks fell by 152,000 to just over five million in August, and they account for 40 percent of all unemployed people. Among workers with less than a high school education, the unemployment rate fell to 12 percent from 12.7 percent, but that remains far above the 4.1 percent unemployment level for workers with a college degree or more.

Still, there were plenty of other signs the economy was still treading water. Average hourly earnings paid by private employers ticked downward by 1 cent in August, to $23.52, while the length of the typical private sector workweek remained flat at 34.4 hours. Both measures have barely budged from where they were six months ago.

This slightly longer than generally permissible snippet was taken from the tail end of the article.

Funny to see all of the ‘hands in motion' here as they examine the public sector side by side with the private.

The Feds can ‘shazaam’ money and hire as many people as they want…below this and government is totally dependent on tax revenue and ‘grants’ for specific purposes.

City and states are laying off because their tax base has been gutted by the global race to the bottom.

No employers means no employees living in their once prosperous communities.

You’d think politicians would want to avoid that sort of thing but apparently we have a new breed running for office…

A breed that knows there is a lot to be had for those willing to do as their told without asking any questions.

Sadly, this new breed thinks their new masters will protect them from having their necks stretched for treason…and this is totally untrue!

If it suits these masters purposes, they will have them strung up themselves! (if only to buy themselves a few more precious minutes of ‘run time’.)

But I digress…it’s not about being ‘sold out’ (although in the end it is ALL about that!) It is about the badly broken economy the massive unemployment problem the idiot capitalists have created!

Here’s a simple proposition I’m sure everybody can understand. When your commerce system excludes ‘too many’ people, your civilization collapses.

For all of this 8%, 12%, hell, 5% unemployment, the REAL rate is closer to 50%!

Worse, you can’t tolerate a 50% unemployment rate and expect your society to remain cohesive.

For too long the working have been taught to despise the unemployed as lazy freeloaders despite being the victims of predatory capitalism.

So when non-workers achieve parity with workers a conflict erupts.

And guess what else has been bubbling right under the surface of this cauldron? The ‘I can get any one of those people out there to do YOUR job!’ threat.

Coupled with the other famous taunt: Be happy YOU even HAVE a job!

Now the unthinking conservo-whacko worker doesn’t realize the guy in the street doesn’t want HIS job…well, I think you can see where this whole thing is headed.

[He wants something that doesn’t exist, a job of his own!]

They don’t say ‘blood in the streets’ for nothing…although, supposedly, we have a robust ‘justice system’ to prevent things like this from ‘getting out of hand’.

Boy, are they gonna be surprised!

As I have stated repeatedly, we don’t have a ‘money problem’ (because money is fiction, albeit a very dangerous one) we have one pisser of a legal problem! (with criminals in charge of the justice system.)

Thanks for letting me inside our head,

Gegner

Pickle

Greetings good citizen,

The economy added 96,000 (minimum wage) jobs in August and unemployment dropped to 8.1% (due mostly to the large number of (old) people exhausting their claims.)

Could this be the ‘good news’ behind yesterday’s theft of trillions from the 99% as the Dow (now mostly financial sector stocks) tacked on 244 highly irrational points?

It’s difficult to imagine there’s even going to BE a ‘banking sector’ (anywhere on the planet) in a couple of months time.

Which is just a long-winded way of saying the destruction of our civilization proceeds apace…we should be (effectively) ‘gone’ by the winter solstice…

Massive coincidence…

But let us set those ‘phantom fears’ aside for now (when it goes you won’t be able to tell, just to give you an idea of how bad things are right now.)

And turn to today’s ‘top story’:

Obama Makes Case for 2nd Term: 'Harder' Path to 'Better Place'
By HELENE COOPER and PETER BAKER

In accepting the Democratic nomination for a second term, President Obama conceded the country's difficulties, but argued that it would "take more than a few years for us to solve challenges that have built up over decades.

Hmmn…considering he has done next to nothing to correct the ‘imbalances’ that caused the economy to crash in the first place, how long do you think he’s talking here?

It took three decades to drive unemployment up to a permanent 50% level, will it take another three to bring it back down to 25%?

Because the bottom line, good citizen is ‘how long can you tread water?’

Being ever mindful that if you can’t live on what your employer pays you, it’s not THEIR problem…it’s YOURS!

No irony intended here good citizen but I foresee the birth of a bumper crop of ‘problem solvers’, people who will solve the problems of under pay and unemployment the only way they can.

They will simply ‘take’ what they need from whoever has it, whenever the need presents itself.

And there aren't enough cops to stop them, hell, even the military isn’t big enough to stop a band of marauders a hundred-million strong!

Sadly, that leaves us with a secondary, more serious problem. With a hundred-million unemployed, there won’t be anybody working so the amount of shit a force that size needs to seize will ‘disappear’ pretty quickly…and then what will our ‘problem solvers’ do?

Declare war upon one another…or at least that’s how the >One percent HOPES things will go.

Because the ‘smarter move’ will be to hijack global commerce while we rebuild domestic productive capacity.

This is the end result of the global race to the bottom…coming to a neighborhood near you, much sooner than you might imagine!

The hell of it will be the ‘disinformation’ fed to you by the corporate owned media, capitalism’s principal cheerleaders.

You’ll be told how ‘government forces’ (mostly Mercs) have the situation ‘under control’ while you can see for yourself that YOUR city is burning to the ground while the talking heads make jokes about the ‘walk in the park’ this has been for the (non English speaking) counter-insurgency forces.

Until their studio vanishes in a brief fireball before your astonished eyes. If you manage to pick up another station it will be reported that their ‘competitor’ was merely experiencing ‘technical difficulties’ and would return to the airwaves 'soon'…

[Meaning as soon as they can have a new transmitter/studio built…]

But, naturally I digress.

The pertinent question here is ‘how’?

How do they expect the broken consumer to soldier on in an environment that no longer needs them?

What I like to refer to as the ‘magic’ conundrum.

There is absolutely no ‘rational explanation’ for how the consumer/employee is going to ‘bounce back’ from a financial system that collapsed five years ago and nothing has been done to repair it.

So we can only guess that Mr. Obama’s ‘few years’ is short-hand for a period considerably longer than the second term he’s seeking.

But let’s leave ‘Barry’ alone for a minute and ask the identical question of Willard…

How does HE expect to create 12 million jobs over the next four years?

Short answer is he doesn’t.

They had one of Wall Streets most shameless cheerleaders on the Today how this morning and Cramer was positively enthusiastic about the economy…as he has been through out the entire (faux) ‘recovery’.

He even hipshot that the economy would add 135,000 jobs (he was only off by 40,000!) but unemployment would remain ‘unchanged’ but it dropped instead. (Sadly, we all know it dropped in a ‘bad way’. Mostly exhausted claims than returns to work.)

So Willard’s plan is to follow the same Republican recipe that landed us in this shit stew and, like all of his predecessors, ‘hope for the best’.

I don’t suppose now would be an opportune time to point out that doing the same thing, over and over again, each time expecting a different outcome, is the very definition of ‘insane’ would be very helpful, would it?

No, (it wouldn’t.) The corporate owned media is going to tell you that the rest of us voted for the guy anyway.

There are two messages here. One is you need to participate in order to survive. When you are denied the opportunity to participate, you are basically left with the choice between destitution and becoming a criminal. (This is when capitalists put on their ‘magical thinking caps’ and place the burden of ‘making yourself useful’ on YOU!)

Throwing the mechanics of economic right out the window!

But hey, just because something is inconvenient doesn’t mean you can’t ignore it until it goes away…it’s worked for hundred of years…until it doesn’t.

And that’s happened thousands of times too.

What we’re coming up on is the second message. The >One Percent has pried the cover off of our (collective) septic tank and is doing their damnedest to push us in.

That’s what’s behind the purposeful mis-management of our civilization is all about.

The homicidal maniacs WANT to kill you and yours off.

They can only extend the reign of fossil fuels by killing off the ‘surplus users’.

Can YOU guess how they intend to accomplish this?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Prisoner

Greetings good citizen,

In case you were wondering, the collapse of our civilization proceeds unimpeded, not that any of you were expecting to be rescued anytime soon.

Unemployment is still at crisis proportions while the famine is gathering steam as safety nets around the planet are exhausted.

Not a pretty picture but at least the nonsense (stock) markets are ‘sympathetic’ (all in the red as of 9:00 AM 8/22)

Not that it matters to the average grunt out there.

Can you say ‘scroomed’? (Get used to it, it’s gonna be a word!)

Funny how the direction things are headed in is NOT where they are going to end up, although this article doesn’t paint a pretty picture regarding the future of work:

Almost one-third of American workers now do some kind of freelance work—and they lack almost every kind of economic security that permanent full-time workers have traditionally had.

Though exact figures are impossible to find, many experts and labor organizers estimate that about 30 percent of U.S. workers are “contingent.” That means they don’t have a permanent job. They work as freelancers, temporary workers, on contract, or on call, or their employers define them (often illegally) as “independent contractors.”

Their ranks include writers and warehouse workers, janitors and business consultants, truck drivers and graphic designers—and their number is rising. Richard Greenwald, a sociologist of work and professor at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, estimates that their share of the U.S. workforce has increased by close to half in the last ten years. In July, Staffing Industry Analysts reported that the average share of contingent workers at companies it surveyed had gone up by one-third since 2009, to 16 percent. Last year, a different survey found that contingent workers averaged 22 percent of the workers at 200 large companies.

This is a disturbing trend established back in the Seventies, right after they started disassembling our economy and shipping the working pieces overseas.

Not only did the jobs go but the equipment to do the job went too!

So we couldn’t make the stuff ourselves even if we wanted to.

And guess what? We were perfectly happy making these items for ourselves. NONE of the work shipped overseas ‘begged to go’; the tens of millions of unemployed DID NOT clasp their hands with joy and cry, “I hope I like my next job better!”

Even though many did ‘pray’ that they WOULD ‘do better’ only to end up accepting less because they didn’t have the skills the new jobs required…despite those requirements being ‘pie in the sky’.

Oh, they ‘short-sheeted’ us good!

And why? So they could post bigger profits for their ‘share-owners’…and you know who owns the most shares in any given enterprise?

The owners! (It sure as hell ain’t the workers!)

Um, in case you were wondering, the ‘cheaper there’ (the places all of these jobs went to) is an ‘artificial construct’…it doesn’t really exist.

It came about through ‘currency manipulation’ that formed the basis for the outright fraud that bankrupted the global economy today.

But you’re never going to read that in a corporate owned media press release…or maybe you will, after the crash when distribution drops to zero!

THEN you’ll see all of these so-called ‘journalists’ rushing to ‘scoop’ one another with stories us old people already know.

Naturally, being who we are, the ‘blame game’ will start and those with the megaphone are going to blame the rest of us for not ‘standing up’ (when the courts were hanging whistleblowers out to dry with frightening regularity!)

Yup, it will be ‘our fault’ we ‘didn’t protest in the streets’ after our justice system proved repeatedly that it had failed.

And there’s no doubt that we’ve all known this for a very long time…so it’s ‘our fault’.

What we don’t see is the danger this situation presents.

Because the same people who broke the justice system are NOT the people who should be allowed to ‘fix it’.

But that’s the thing that makes bloody revolution inevitable. The criminals start prosecuting the people who protest their illegal behavior, which turns the public against them.

But as we also know, the criminals don’t care what you think, it’s what you believe that matters!

Because what you believe is what you will act upon!

And once you believe that the criminals are helping themselves at the expense of you and yours, you’ll act!

Just a little ‘tell’ that has appeared in the paper a lot lately is the suicide rate for US service personnel is the highest it's ever been…

What do you suppose the ‘red-blooded, conservative’ reaction to that news is…besides deafening silence?

Would it be something along the lines of ‘if they’re too chicken to fight for this country then maybe they’d better kill themselves?

Whoa, Silver!

Why would anybody be happy with being a ‘button man’ for a bunch of capitalist pigs who don’t give a fuck about you?

Like our Syrian soldier in yesterday’s post, he too had a ‘WTF am I doing?’ moment.

All I can say good citizen is it’s a damn good thing people are ‘basically good’ (with a huge ‘tolerance’ for ‘wicked’) or our species wouldn’t have made it this far.

And the race is far from over.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sympathy for the Devil

Greetings good citizen,

Must be ‘one of those days’. In what I would call a major gaffe, (You will never read one of my pieces where I refer to our species as ‘animals’…inferring, as in this case, that they are ‘mindless and needy’.)

Yet from the headlines of today’s NY Times we have this:

QUOTATION OF THE DAY
"As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache."
TERRY GOU, chairman of Foxconn, which has more than a million employees worldwide but is using a growing number of robots.

Speaking of which:

The iEconomy
Skilled Work, Without the Worker
By JOHN MARKOFF

Robots far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other industries are replacing workers in both manufacturing and distribution.

I am sore tempted to type this in ‘caps lock’, the writer’s version of screaming but I’m going to ask you to simply imagine that I’m ‘screaming’ until I say otherwise:

[Scream on]

Hello, is anybody fucking home? This is what I mean when I say these assholes are blind as well as Deaf!

How much luck do you think Sparky would have selling his worthless bullshit to his fucking robots?

Because when it’s all said and done, that’s what’s left of the ‘paying economy’.

Who is raising these freakazoid capitalists to believe that money grows on trees and comes for divine entities that don’t need an income source?

Because there’s a name for this phenomenon, it’s called ‘counterfeiting’.

Not wanting employees is the same thing as saying ‘I don’t want customers’.

Hello?

Did I forget to mention the close correlation between workers and commerce? Without workers there is no commerce (because you have eliminated the ‘paying customer’.)

Somebody remind me why we let these morons manage our affairs? (WTF!)

[Scream-off/Rant-on]

Perfect fucking timing, just received a phone call to verify that I received a pledge card for the Cancer Society…is THIS how they’re spending my donation? Even if we assume the sweet person on the phone was doing it out of the ‘goodness of her heart’, the phone call itself came from Michigan and must have cost a chunk of change as I live next to the frigid North Atlantic.

Again WTF!

Eliminating real jobs through automation to create, er, ‘idiot jobs’ like the phone call I just received is not the path to universal prosperity we so desperately need to switch to.

Note I do not say we need to ‘find the path’ to prosperity, it’s already right there before us…we need to step onto it but first we have to eliminate the greed heads blocking the way.

Have I mentioned lately that our civilization is severely ‘mismanaged’…although this has been true for time out of mind.

People just don’t ‘get’ the whole ‘money thing’.

Examples like the one above happen when the object of doing a given task is reduced to its monetary terms.

MONEY IS NOTHING!

IT IS NOT AND CANNOT BE 'THE GOAL', yet our entire economic system is based on the opposite belief, that money is the 'be all, end all.'

If capturing large amounts of our ‘medium of exchange’ is all it took to achieve success, why not just run the printing presses until everybody had pockets overflowing with MONEY?

Is it because once you do something like that the whole ‘incentive to work’ flies out the window?

Giving money away destroys it.

Sucking all of the money out of the ‘bottom of society’ destroys civilization…and will destroy our species.

Which has no rational reason for happening save an elite group trying to destroy the government and its monopoly on the law.

There is one theory that explains this irrational behavior…and that’s so far off the reservation I refuse to go there, even if it’s true!

Unfortunately, good citizen, the more [evidence] I see, the clearer that one possibility becomes.

So as you lay your ‘little animals’ down to sleep, remember what their future employers regard them as.

I can only pray your mind rebels at the prospect.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Happy Talk

Greetings good citizen,

As might seem obvious, ‘happy talk’ in not one of my mandates…that said, I don’t go ‘out of my way’ to trash talk our badly mismanaged economy either…

(Well, not too far out of my way.)

…Okay, I trash talk the economy all of the friggin’ time, every chance I get.

Left to your imagination is whether or not I am being ‘too critical’, that, good citizen, is for you to decide.

Although I would be the first to admit that I have my, er, ‘biases’.

Naturally, by now some of you are wondering what set me down this trail this morning and the answer is The NY Times:

Off the Charts
Recovery in U.S., Though Lackluster, Trumps Europe’s
By FLOYD NORRIS

Economic recovery in the United States may be slow, but it is steady, while several European economies are either shrinking or stalling.

Graphic: Measuring Recoveries
Euro Watch: Merkel Sides With E.C.B. on Spain and Italy

Now Mr. Norris is well known in the world of economic commentary as one of the ‘serious people’, a proverbial ‘voice of reason’.

So what does it say when he has to resort to frivolous comparisons to distract you from the train wreck that will surely engulf the entire world?

He knows it’s coming. He’d be a fool to deny it. We can only wonder why he uses this space to go ‘rah, rah, sis-boom-bah!’ rather than to warn you of the inevitable collapse of the Euro-Zone. (Followed closely by the ‘mathematical collapse’ of the rest of the global economy. Understand, good citizen, as long as ‘the greater fool exists’ it will be ‘game on’ no matter how ‘bad’ (ridiculous) things get.)

YOU, the average individual, will literally start giving out ‘dope slaps’ to people who cling to outmoded realities.

(Understandably, you’ll be handing out these dope slaps with your pistol in your other hand…in case chucklehead takes offense.)

You think things are strange now? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
But, naturally, I digress…moving on:

Economix Blog
Is Simple Demography Behind Weak Economy?
By DAVID LEONHARDT

How important are demographic trends to the great growth slowdown of the last 12 years?

Throughout the Western world, as life expectancy increased, the number of children the ‘average’ family produced has decreased.

But pointing to the dwindling number of births in advanced nations has no bearing on our current unemployment crisis.

Bonehead is pointing to a drop in demand that is NOT (as is obvious by our rapidly rising population figures) due to a lack of customers but due rather to a lack of PAYING CUSTOMERS thanks to the GLOBAL RACE TO THE BOTTOM!

Which, naturally, arose from the ascendancy of global capitalism.

This should provide ample proof of how ‘toxic’ capitalism is yet the slavers among us still need to be convinced.

Don’t be hoodwinked, good citizen, there is an ample ‘customer base’ out there, the problem is capitalism has no use for them, capitalism has labeled them ‘surplus’!

So what about it good citizen, has capitalism made YOU ‘redundant’?

If you’re anywhere near ‘average’, it has several times already…and every time you’ve had to scramble to find a new way to ‘make yourself useful’ to worthless employer.

Ironically, half of these jokers didn’t even have a viable business model, they created ‘nothing jobs’ in order to mask the wholesale cannibalization of our economy!

A process that continues to this day…

Okay, so we have two well known and respected NY Times economists, neither of whom has felt the need to warn us of the pending collapse of the Euro-Zone and what that means for the rest of the global economy.

Do you think perhaps they will get ‘blindsided’ by the collapse, like the financial crisis snuck up and caught both of them unawares?

Yes good citizen, any ‘old time Yankee’ like me remembers when ‘snuck’ was a word…a word that disappeared when the FUCKING RABID CAPITALISTS AT MICROSOFT ‘farmed out’ the dictionary in word to India!

For all I know ‘snuck’ is a bad word in Hindi…so they ‘erased’ it.

Along with dove, the ‘past tense’ of dive. Maybe ‘Doves’ are sacred?

It is also a damning testament to our weak educational system that apparently NONE of the English Majors out there took MicroSoft to task for cavalierly altering our native tongue.

Or perhaps the blame lies with our badly broken justice system which seems totally incapable of punishing a corporate felon no matter what they do.

Just a few tidbits remain:

A strong Canadian dollar weighs on the auto industry as contract talks start

This, like the Euro, boggles the mind. How the fuck does the currency of a nation with only 27 million people trump the almighty US Dollar…probably the same way the flipping Euro does, fraud!

This is just another example of how capitalism perverts value!

Often to a disturbing degree:

The Kalashnikov factory in Russia is humming thanks to American buyers

Why do you suppose people are snapping up Kalashnikov’s here in the US? Are they fearful the turban wearing people of our society are gonna suicide bomb them when they least expect it?

That’s what the corporate owned media would like you to think…but you’re supposed to leave the killing to ‘Homeland Security’.

Or, more accurately as may be the case, are people arming up because they increasingly sense that our ‘internal security apparatus’ has adopted an ‘us vs. them’ mentality?

Probably being downplayed elsewhere but lately, in this neck of the woods, there has been quite a string of incidents involving men in uniform behaving badly.

The incidents often involve ‘officer brutality’…which once again calls into question the effectiveness of the ‘screening process’ these gun-toting apes are subjected to.

And like rape, for every incident that makes the news there are a hundred you never hear about.

But my, that ‘blue wall’ is effective.

Um, probably just me. I think police serve to protect the interests of the public although it would seem today’s police are selected for their ‘attack dog’ like obedience.

Which is to opine their willingness to attack on command is more desirable than their ability to deal calmly with the public.

I will once again state that I am NOT ‘anti-cop’ but I am definitely anti- the people who run and set policy for our law enforcement services…mostly lawyers and their ‘ilk’.

Lastly:
Amtrak’s Acela train service is dominating travel in the Washington-New York-Boston corridor.

And once again this story needs little explanation from me; the price of fuel combined with the increasing belligerence of Homeland Security makes this story completely ‘self explanitory…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner