Saturday, November 8, 2014

SAR #14311


Just for fun, reconcile “the American Way of Life” with WalMart.

Gag Me: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military admires the “extraordinary lengths” the Israelis went to get away with war crimes to avoid civilian casualties in the most recent assault on Gaza. Avoid in this instance means just a few more than 2,100, mostly women and children. The Pentagon has sent a team to Israel to see how they managed this miracle.

Paper Routes: The BLS says that employment rose by 214,000 in October and the unemployment rate edged down to 5.8%. There were about 700,000 new jobs added during the month, 528,000 of them filled by 16 -24 year olds, one in five of whom got a job as a bartender or waiter. After years of recovery, only 101 million Americans remain unemployed or out of the labor force. Only.

Paperwork Reduction Act: A police chief in AZ supposedly wrecked a Porsche. 'Suppoedly' because all the police reports of the incident have mysteriously destroyed. Illegal aliens from Central America are suspects.

Is That All You Get For The Money: The most expensive off-year election in US history brought about a minor shift in where a few old white guys sit. Americans think they've elected a new Congress. They have and they haven't. Yes, they got to vote. No, no substantive change is on the way. The US political system is quite stable, and continues to work quite well for the rich.

Update: the 85 richest people in the world now have as much money as poorest half of humanity. 
 
A Number On Numbers: Government numbers – CPI, unemployment, GDP, and so on – are frequently accused of being rigged, misleading, manipulated. But to believe that is to believe than thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of government employees are in on this ongoing conspiracy. Hard to believe that an administration that powerful can't rig an election. But government statistics are often questionable and not infrequently misleading. Why? Some is due to underlings rigging a bit of data so they look good, or their bosses do. Some is due to laziness in collecting the data, some because the surveys don't actually measure what we think they do, some because of the time lag between getting the raw data and publishing the analysis, some because we try to read more into the numbers than is there, and sometimes it snows. All forecasts are wrong, to some degree, but it is not a government conspiracy. Pass the salt.

Added Benefits: Verizon and AT&T track the internet activity of their cellular customers with undetectable and unremovable 'supercookies', then sell the information to advertisers. Just like Facebook and Google.

Pop Quiz: Who is Nehemiah and how is he going to balance the federal budget and get us all out of debt? 
 
Bravery: A man who “was seized by tribesmen in northern Pakistan, who sold him to the Pakistani army, which in turn handed him over to the United States," which sent him to Guantanamo and imprisoned him for 13 years with no charges ever filed against him, has been released. There are 79 more men who have been cleared(?) but remain imprisoned at Guantanamo. Are we sure they were “the worst of the worst”? Do we need a mirror?

Plain Brown Wrapper: The federal judges who upheld the KY, TN, OH, MI gay marriage bans did so, in part, because “the state has the duty to regulate sex and its consequences,” and because "couples of the same sex do not run the risk of unintended offspring.” The primary purpose of marriage being to diminish the risk of unintended offspring.

Porn O'Graph: High-Ho, off to work.

6 comments:

Dan Pangburn said...

Rich people buy things or hire people which creates jobs or loan it to others that have ambition but no money so they can buy things and hire people which creates jobs.

The government takes money with taxes and gives it away to others who do nothing, or worse, to others who do things that hardly anybody wants done.

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

Yeah, like building schools and highways and providing for our national defense and developing things like the internet and feeding the poor and picking up most of the cost of caring for your parents, providing police and courts and jails... and even stopping my wife from getting an abortion, which you probably see as a good thing, but I don't.

Go away.

Bill Hicks said...

The government also gives the money to those who build drones, missiles, bombs and super expensive weapons systems that are used to wantonly slaughter any uppity brown person with the impertinence to say no to the American empire agenda, but Dan probably favors that.

Dan Pangburn said...

You guys need to talk to each other about whether national defense is a good thing or a bad thing. Or are you planning to wait until they start murdering people and cutting heads off in this country. Oh wait, that is already happening.

Anonymous said...

Delusional

Tulsatime said...

DAN PANGBURN FAIL...too much kool aid, no sense at all of what you think you are trying to say, aside from government spending bad, rich people spending good, let me tell you about my buddy Hezikah....