August 7, 2010 archive

The 99ers — ARE simply ‘Americans who Want to Work’

The ’99ers’ Share Their Stories

Paul Solman, PBS, MAKING SEN$E — August 6, 2010

I’m a 49 year old single mother of a 15 year old. I was laid off in September of 2008 and my unemployment ended in April of 2010. The way New Jersey calculates your base year made me ineligible for more than 79 weeks.

I apply to just about 50 jobs per week and I went to school and got some medical certifications that are just about useless. Everyone I speak with says “your certifications are great, but we’re really looking for some experience.”

I have been unable to pay my rent since June and expect to be evicted shortly. I have no one in a position to help, and can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like, telling my daughter that we have no home. […] Although I can’t consider suicide, I understand where these people are at!

That was just one of the personal stories out of the MILLIONS of fellow out-of-work Americans,

also known as the 99er’s

911 FireFighters Speak Out!!

Must see….



911 FireFighter Speaks Out!

Open Blanket

Photobucket

What Goes Around Comes Around

Virginia Pols – Fake Veterans Association – Law Passed

Increasingly Bizarre U.S. Navy Veterans Association Saga: Political Slush Fund

This story seems to have no end as States have started investigating since the St. Petersburg Times first broke it near the beginning of the year.

Navy Vets story gets even stranger

Docudharma Times Saturday August 7




Saturday’s Headlines:

An apology fatally devalued by the passage of 65 years

Watergate Becomes Sore Point at Nixon Library

USA

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac losing political support as U.S. reshapes housing finance system

Justice Kennedy’s the one to watch on gay marriage test

Europe

Sarkozy’s crackdown on gipsies begins

Moscow choked by smog from devastating fires

Middle East

Israel-Lebanon border clash has Israel complaining of Hezbollah’s influence

Iran gains as Arabs’ Obama hopes sink

Asia

Hard-Line Islam Fills Void in Pakistan’s Flood Response

Kashmir burns again as India responds to dissent with violence

Africa

Facing life in jail, the woman who dared to take on Paul Kagame

Latin America

With Uribe era ending, Colombia looks back and ahead

When someone almost literally pisses on you, what do you do?

The blogs are full of what GLBT people need to do for their own benefit.

So, you tell me.  What should we do?  

We have been insulted.  We have been denied.  We have been delayed.  We have had our feet stomped on.  We have been quite literally laughed at, not even an exaggeration, by the President of the United States.  We have had the murder of our people called odious while the President breakfasted with those who engineered what could very quickly become mass murder.

As if our lives are a joke.

Then the argument goes, you vote for and support that person, or candidates who support that person, or people who support them, on the grounds that the other person could be worse.

Setting aside the utter deliberate and cruel nastiness of this situation, I want to ask you, the Docudharma community, what we should do.  And I don’t ask this without asking you to exercise your empathetic muscles.  I want you to think, move, stretch.

Put yourself in our place.

It’s not the insult — it’s what flows from the insult.  You could live with it if you got the insult, but you got good things to compensate.  A victory is a victory, even if it accompanied by a jeer, like Obama’s Axelrod saying of the GLBT court victory that he still didn’t support gay marriage.

And this is not about taxes.  This is about lives.  People.  

And then we are urged to be rational, cold blooded, non-spiteful, and calculating about this state of affairs.

But, see, we are being laughed at, and we are not the only ones.

Something is rotten in Denmark.  And GLBT people are, have been, and were used as a field weapons test for this very tactic.  THIS IS NOT JUST ABOUT US ANYMORE.  This is against not only us, but immigrants, environmentalists, women, anti-BP activists, black activists, rule of law advocates, economic justice advocates, energy advocates, and others.

Do not come to us and talk about the visceral, visceral hatred why you cannot vote or do X, if you advised us to do the very same thing.

They are learning how to treat you like fools by experiencing what it is like to treat us like fools.  And by blackmailing us, they are gauging the effectiveness of blackmailing you — not about the size of your 401K.  About your whole life.

And I think, you know, it might be livable to be blackmailed about taxes.  This kind of political blackmail, the kind that goes, vote for us, or the puppy gets it, is about a lifetime of discrimination.

In that kind of situation — please, think about yourself and put yourself in my and our place .. you don’t want to not vote for the people doing this to you, you want to kill them.  And they want you to vote for them.  I’m not advocating violence, I’m talking about feelings.

And we are being asked to vote for them, the people who ask for, nay, DEMAND, our votes, our money, and our support.  The people we want to, quite literally, and non-jokingly, strangle, with our bare hands.  And not only them.  Them and everyone with them, apologizing for them, knuckling under to them.  And there is no shame.  Not even embarrassment.  They can fail you and not advance you, then act like you are the guilty party for you not getting even modest progress when what you asked for what your basic human rights.

Millenials Rising……An Alternative View

(Cross-posted from The Free Speech Zone)

So I had the pleasure of reading this piece of shit recently:

Building on the concepts they first developed in Generations and 13th Gen, Neil Howe and William Strauss now take on Generation Y, or, as they call them, the Millennials. Unlike their rather distressing portrait of the more reactive Generation X (the 13th Gen), or the negative stereotypes that abound about today’s kids, this is all good news. According to Howe and Strauss, this group is poised to become the next great generation, one that will provide a more positive, group-oriented, can-do ethos.

http://www.amazon.com/Millenni…

which was, of course, written by Boomer Generation authors who are allowed to publish such things seeing as they were born first and therefore have had enough time to gain the necessary “credentials” to tell our story as if they’re an authority on it.

So now, a reply from a Millenial….

Late Night Karaoke

I’m king Citizen, and I’m a nasty nasty boss.

You should be forewarned, Mr. Politician.

If you accept the job, it should be rare, and valued as a precious jewel, when I reward you with one good word.  Even a tiny good word, as I inveigh against you, your culture, your ideas, your policies, and your mother, at a screaming volume, as a half-forgotten aside.

I will drag you through the mud.  On a daily basis.  On general principle.  And, moreover, I think my fellow Citizen Kings and Queens should do so was well, just because it’s good for you.

There is no fairness for you.  Nor should there be any.  Because you will take the first opportunity of fairness and use it as if you should be OUR Boss.

And you’re, uh, just not.

You have legions of supporters, just waiting to use the idea of fairness, of civility, of one ounce of mercy, to pounce.

To issue the idea that I should support you, vote for you, even give you the very money you cost me with your policies, and by not so doing I am a traitor to a political party for not treating you as my master, and you, my employee, should treat me as your slave.

Just by having the job, you have too much power already.

But, really, you’re a tool.  The constitution says so.  The constitution says you’re a servant.

Do you want to rule?  Do you want power?  Then you should not have the job.

Do you want to blackmail me with the idea that the employee I must replace you with, should you get out of line, will be worse than you ever were?

No one is indispensable and if you or your supporters even suggest that your replacement would be worse, you should be fired, just for being an uppity underling and even suggesting such a thing.  YOU SHOULD BE FIRED for having the disrespect to try to hold your bosses hostage, to the extent you do.  So don’t, just don’t.  Shut up, keep your head down, and work your work, and don’t get uppity.

Because, you see, Mr. Politician, you are a tool.  By running for the job you admitted you wanted to be a tool.  You wanted to find the Honor of Service.

And if you do not want to find Honor in Service, then you have too big a head to have a job being a politician.  And your supporters are dangerous.  Why do you not disavow them?  Why do you not tell your supporters, who browbeat and attack others who question you, to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up, because the Citizen is King?

I am beginning to get suspicious, Mr. Politician.  While you do not reign in your supporters, and tell them to shut up and that you know you have a job to do, it sounds, really, like you want to rule us Citizens, by the Constitution, your lords and masters, whom your supporters don’t respect.

Respect for your bosses is a given until you are OUT OF OFFICE.  Don’t come looking to me, during the term of your job, for laurels.  You don’t deserve any, and you won’t get any.  I will bite your hand if you offer me a chocolate bon-bon on your palm.  That is what you signed up for.  It’s only after, when you have served, and not betrayed, that you will get glory.

And, really, that glory, that immortality, is for you, if you can only be humble enough to serve, with all of democracy’s slings and arrows, for the brief time you are allotted.

Those are your rewards, for two years, four years, or six, of unending shit, that you deserve to get, just because of what you chose to be.  Remember, you chose the job, not me.

One more thing — don’t you or your slavish servants, whom you keep around you like a coterie, tell me what a hard job it is, being a politician.  And you might work diligently to get rid of any slavish servants you may have.  It doesn’t make you look good, rather the opposite.

You wanted the job.  If you don’t want it, I, your boss, will find someone who does.  And for the right reasons.

GULF COAST MEMORIAL DAYS

   It`s Friday again, time to temper my anger with a sharing of some of my images from my reef tanks.

You may have noticed that my images are  often of a same specimen.

I liken that to taking more than one picture of your cat, dog, bird, lizard or child.

Every image is a close encounter with what one loves doing with the loved ones one does it with.

  I titled this diary  with “memorial days” not because I want to have anyone remember these specimens, but for you to remember the days the authorities wanted you to forget.

They want you to forget how much oil was spilled.

They want you to forget how much was hidden, by the use of toxic dispersants.

They want you to forget the harm they`ve done.

And they want you to forget, they`ve  been trying to make you forget for years.

Well that will not happen. There are too many who will always remember.

Just reading through the blogs, we can see that there are Gulf Watchers everywhere.

From  here,

http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

(please rec them)

to here

https://www.docudharma.com/diar…

to here

http://healthygulf.org/

And to many others, we are watching you.

HAWKFISH

DSCN1937

Random Japan

WELL, THAT EXPLAINS IT

A 46-year-old professor in Hyogo Prefecture who was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence tried to dodge the charge by claiming that, instead of alcohol, he had drunk 40 bottles of a health tonic.

A tour guide who survived a climbing accident in Hokkaido last year recently admitted that forging ahead with the tour, which ultimately claimed the lives of eight people, was a “bad idea.”

A 40-year-old Hiroshima doctor was arrested for using a hidden camera to take indecent photos of two young sisters during a routine checkup. Prosecutors said the illicit practice had been going on since 2008 and that a number of women had been photographed.

An explosive situation was diffused in Naha when the Ground Self-Defense Force disposed of 902 unexploded shells found buried near a restaurant.

Service was disrupted for over three hours on Nagoya Railroad’s Komaki Line after a suspicious object was found on a local train. It turned out be a radio forgotten by a passenger.

A disgruntled JR West conductor was arrested for tampering with anti-crash equipment on some of the trains he operated in Osaka.

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