Mark It Zero, Dude

The wisdom of The Big Lebowski proves the extreme stoopidity of "we're all safer when we all have guns in all circumstances".

Middle Class Blues

Oh, the horribleness of a life lived in the midst of middle-American privilege.

An Air Of Freshness

Outside of the disinformation bubble of the Baghdad Bob style of "news" at Wingnut Daily, News Fluffer, The RNC and DumFux News, there still exists a fact-based reality.

From Small Business Majority:

Key findings:
Only a third of small business owners want the Supreme Court to overturn the Affordable Care Act; a plurality of 50% would like it upheld, with minor or no changes. This support grows after learning more details about the law’s key provisions:
Only 34% of small businesses want to see the healthcare law overturned, while 50% want it to remain intact with, at most, minor changes. After learning more about its specifics, only 28% want to see it repealed and a 56% majority want it to be kept, as is or with minor changes. A 55% majority say they want it upheld because we need to make sure everyone has health coverage.

Today's Pix

To Be Clear

The income for the "average" American family in 2010 was less than $46,000.  That year, Willard and Ann Romney claimed a deduction of $77,000 on their tax return for expenses related to their horse hobby of Dressage.

I don't really care what these Silver-Spoon Legacy Fucks do with their disposable income or their spare time.  But I have a major problem with all of it when the system is rigged so that I'm forced to subsidize that kinda shit.

The Jesus Scam

When Jesus says we should walk away from everything in our lives in order to follow him; when he says we need to abandon ourselves and our thinking in order to "live in Christ" - when he says that shit, I can't help but think he's easily the most anti-individual,  anti-family, anti-society asshole there ever was.  No wonder they fucked him up.  Hopefully, of course, there was quite a lot more to it than that, but still.  Damn, son.

There's a pretty narrow intersection between me and Penn Jillette, but here's a good slice of it:

Employment Fantasies

From The Economic Populist:

There is no skills shortage, none. In fact employers are being absolutely ridiculous in their hiring practices. It's so bad, employers use software and third party rejection job application websites, which pretty much guarantee a candidate will be rejected. These websites and software are like virtual wastebaskets for your resume. No human involved, it's automatic, guaranteed rejection. It's so bad, an HR executive applied for his own job and was rejected.

If you think American Business Leaders (and their Coin-Operated Politicians) are really worried about unemployment, think again.  Labor is a market just like any other market. When the supply of laborers exceeds the demand for laborers, then employers can push down on the cost of labor while raising their expectations of any candidate's qualifications, which is exactly what we're seeing.

Unemployment only becomes a problem when we can no longer be bought off or distracted or intimidated.  In the meantime, getting dirt-cheap labor because you've got  400 applications for every open slot is a very good problem to have.

We've Only Just Begun

We're actually involved in a kind of (so far) slow-moving Civil War. And I think the progression is pretty easy to see.

1) Leadership. It's a fairly simple and obvious fact that if you have enough money, you're not subject to the same "Justice" as the rest of us. Once people see "leaders" getting away with larceny, fraud, torture, bribery, child rape, and even murder, then why should the "common folk" hold themselves to any other standard of behavior?

2) Followership: Even when those standards are set and adhered to by people we admire, over time, we will misconstrue and eventually totally pervert the concept. Vince Lombardi says, "winning isn't everything; it's the only thing", and a very short time later, it's morphed into "win at all cost". And that perversion happened well after Lombardi publicly refuted his own statement, saying he regretted ever having said it. Didn't matter.

3) Political Marketing: Self-Governance = Self-Loathing. Anti-Gubmint sentiment strikes at the very heart of our little experiment in democracy.

We're the Government, and Government sucks, so: We Suck.

But our need for self preservation requires us to try not to internalize that hatred - we will most likely turn it outward, looking for some external agent to blame for our feelings of being victimized. So pick a group - any group. Muslims, Hispanics, Liberals, Tea Partiers, NRA Members, NeoCons...you name it, we got a group for you to hate with the power of a thousand suns.

So what we have now is the beginning of something I think is already in motion and will simply continue to snowball until it consumes us all. If that sounds as dire and overblown to you as it does to me, then we can still hope for cooler heads to prevail, but it's probably best if you don't now start thinking about what happens if we mix in a nice big hunk of the disruptions we can expect to be driven by Climate Change in the next 10 - 30 years.

So, here's what I think is a kind of instigating incident:

Any given Stand Your Ground law is being interpreted by an awful lot of average yahoos as a license to impose their will on anybody they don't like, and/or act out their Wyatt Earp fantasies, and/or exact vengeance for what they perceive as "those people" tearing down our once-great USA blah blah blah.



None of these boneheads oughta get medals for brains - but nobody ever deserves to get shot arguing about noise in the neighborhood. This just gets worse from here on out.

Rocky Flats

From 1966 to about 1973, my family lived down-stream and down-wind from the facility where Dow Chemical and Rockwell built triggers and other parts for nuclear weapons.

Of the 4 women in my family who lived there, every one of them has had at least one bout with cancer, and 3 of them are dead.

There is no significant evidence of an hereditary factor for cancer among female relatives or ancestors in my family.







"Corporations are people, my friend".  Cool - I want the death penalty for these pricks.

This One's A Little Weird

Here's an example of a mis-remembered thing that gets stuck in my brain.  I went a good 40 years thinking I'd been taught in 3rd grade that this was Colorado's Official State Song.



BTW: The real Official State Song of Colorado (Where The Columbines Grow) is even worse.