Counting The Costs

The Chinese economy is a juggernaut.
The Chinese economy is the greatest thing since perforated toilet paper.
The Chinese figured out how to get Gubmint outa the way, and they've unleashed the awesome power of the unfettered free market.

From James Fallows at The Atlantic:

Last week I mentioned the effects that China's latest pollution emergency was having on Chinese citizens and foreigners living there. Here's a picture posted on Twitter just now from a friend in Beijing, showing the view from the 30th floor out toward our former neighborhood.

Always remember - nature bats last.

Surplus

...is the perfect way to describe what's happening to us, and this guy nails it.

From Gawker - Unemployment Stories, Vol 24:

I'm 40. Just got my J.D. in 2011, passed the SC Bar first go. This is my third career, after Aerospace Maintenance (got our when the airline business model tanked after 9/11) and IT. I've opened a virtual (ie, no overhead) solo practice because no one else will hire me. While having my own business sounds nice, I'm probably going to gross only about $4000 this year. We don't make enough to meet our budget and our credit and savings are almost out. I owe a quarter million in student loans. We've moved to a smaller (rented) house, scrimped, minimized our consumer debt for stuff like phones and cars and TV and such, but we're going to run out of resources this year. If it was just my wife and I, we could find a way, we could eat ramen for a few years. In theory, we could live apart and I could work where the jobs are; I could take a contract and work overseas - Xe, or many of their competitors. But we have an infant daughter, and that changes everything.

Sounds not too bad, right? Well, here's the reality: I've applied for more than 1100 jobs since I graduated in May 2011, legal and anything else I might be remotely qualified for. Pay scales from $20 grand to six figures. Nothing - not a peep. Never had an interview. Not a callback. Only a few rejection letters - just got one recently (September) for a job I applied for last December. It is like I do not exist. I am shouting in a vacuum.

So I've got a solid BS in business and info systems, JD and bar membership, aerospace background, 13 year USAF veteran with management experience both inside and outside the military. I have international experience in Asia (mostly business and education in Japan), have traveled extensively thanks to being a cargo plane mechanic, I get a veteran's preference on fed and state jobs for being mildly disabled (going deaf). Hell, I got the undergraduate version of a Fulbright scholarship (a Gilman). When I was in Law School, and looking at my peers whose previous experience was usually something like waitressing or summer camp counseloring, I thought I'd be fine in the employment area. I could always go back to one of my earlier careers, right?

Even better, rolling all my experience into one job. Or so I thought.

At first, it was merely frustrating. I was sending out about two dozen resumes a week for posted job openings anywhere within sane commuting distance. I figured I had good credentials, good experience, and a good resume - had it worked over by 4-5 different career services. The VA guys told me I had a better resume than they all did. The suspicion that my resume was getting tossed either because it wasn't believable, or because I fell in a black hole of not having enough law experience and having too much education for anything else began to grow. Now I'm certain of it. If I leave off my law degree, I've got to explain a 4 year gap in employment. If I put it in, I'm not considered for anything not a legal job, and even entry-level legal stuff wants 2-5 years of litigation experience. Now, I've given up. I recognize that what I am is surplus to the new economy, that this situation will only worsen, and no one will ever hire me again.

That realization turned frustration into despondence. I went from having the military discipline and drive that gave me the confidence to tackle anything, that had led me to greater and greater successes prior to law school, to the knowledge that I wasn't good enough for anything, that not only had I educated myself out of the job market but by doing so on student loans I had put my family at risk as well. Every day is a struggle to find a reason to get out of bed. Most days that reason is to take care of my daughter - but as a first-time dad at 40, I feel incompetent at that as well. I spend way too much time wondering if my wife and kid would be better off by themselves.

The funny thing is, before I joined the USAF I was actually homeless. I lived in a tent in the mountains, killed my own dinner, and I was happier then. Colder, but happier.

I don't want a handout. I don't want the government to step in and help me (unless they want to tackle my student loans, in which case go US government). At this point I don't even want a small business loan anymore - no one will loan you money if you don't have a house they can take. I just want enough paying clients to keep our lights on.

SCAttorney/IT Guy/Airplane Mechanic... someday.

Todays' Quote, Too

From Alex Wagner on The Last Word (Friday?) - speaking of Sen Ron Johnson's somewhat limited capacity for reasoned thought:

"The reality is that basically, Ron Johnson is intellectual Kryptonite - you get too close to him and your brain cells die."

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Today's Pix

Chris Hedges

Posted at truthdig:

The rewriting of history in the South is a retreat by beleaguered whites into a mythical self-glorification. I witnessed a similar retreat during the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As Yugoslavia’s economy deteriorated, ethnic groups built fantasies of a glorious past that became a substitute for history. They sought to remove, through exclusion and finally violence, competing ethnicities to restore this mythological past. The embrace by nationalist groups of a nonreality-based belief system made communication with other ethnic groups impossible. They no longer spoke the same cultural language. There was no common historical narrative built around verifiable truth. A similar disconnect was illustrated last week in Memphis when the chairman of the city’s parks committee, William Boyd, informed the council that Forrest “promoted progress for black people in this country after the war.” Boyd argued that the KKK was “more of a social club” at its inception and didn’t begin carrying out “bad and horrific things” until it reconstituted itself with the rise of the modern civil rights movement. 

From The Comments Section

...on a Daniel Larison post at The American Conservative:

• You don’t have to be a liberal to be OK with pre-Bush 2 tax rates.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to resist wasteful Defense spending levels and to see the wisdom of staying out of wars.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to live with a health care system many Republicans endorsed two decades ago.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to practice a productive legislative relationship with the other party.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to allow that at least some regulation is essential for a trustworthy business environment.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to quit gratuitously insulting minorities and women.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to quit using sneaky ways to circumvent democratically representative voting results.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to use your small-state Senate seat responsibly.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to have a gun policy that respects Second Amendment rights, but isn’t written by the firearms industry.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to conserve our natural resources.

Today's Quote

“As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.” --HP Lovecraft, 1936

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Fight The Power

I think this is what revolution should look like.

A Virginia man who wrote an abbreviated version of the Fourth Amendment on his body and stripped to his shorts at an airport security screening area won a trial Friday in his lawsuit seeking $250,000 in damages for being detained on a disorderly conduct charge.

Bad Lip Reading

It's unfortunate, but I hafta to believe there's a fair probability that when a whole buncha the Wingnuts "listen", this is what they actually hear.

It's Pretty Sad, Really

In general, I can get with anybody who has the smarts and the ingenuity to make stuff work.  I just wish we could move the culture forward enough to convince these Gun Geniuses to turn their talents towards Distributed Power Generation or Bio-Mechanics or Robotic Waste Recovery or or or.