December 31, 2010 archive

Dec 31 2010

Play Day

It was warm for a winter day so we rode the horses first.  High stepping in the deep fresh snow made it great exercise for us all.  Didn’t take the camera for fear of loosing it in the snow.  A gallop through  new snow is like an entire day off.  We didn’t think they were trained enough to break out the sleigh so we experimented with tying plastic sleds behind the ATV until the optimum sled behind sled behind sled proved to be the safest way.  Grampy engineered and of course Grampy drove.

After we got all the kids soaking wet doing this we adjourned to dry off and made plans for the evening fire and a repeat performance with hot chocolate for the kids, mud slides for the adults and then homemade pizza and the pellet stove afterwards.  A great time was had by all.

It is New Years Day. My second grandson is in the dining room yelling Go!  Go!.  It is going to be a springlike day so we are getting ready for the next evolution of fun.  Maybe the ice will melt and become like glass while we check out the woodland trail.

“Give Grampy the phone”.

“Ah doobie wah dis mawa do”

“Thank you”

“Tank ooh”

“Wanna go?”

“Go!”

I can’t leave a key in the ATV.  He will start it but he still can’t put the machine in gear yet.  He loves his Grampy, the provider of sixteen months of fun so far.

Dec 31 2010

Most Minimum Wage Earners Can’t Afford Necessities of Life

Crossposted from Antemedius

Jeannette Wicks-Lim completed her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2005, and now specializes in labor economics with an emphasis on the low-wage labor market and has an overlapping interest in the political economy of race, and is now Assistant Research Professor at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). She is author of a paper produced at PERI entitled Creating Decent Jobs in the United States (.PDF), in which she concludes that “collective bargaining presents a powerful way to turn the tide on the declining workers’ pay and benefits we have seen for decades“, finds that “a union worker has a 20 percent greater chance of having a decent job than a similar non-union worker“, and shows that “that there is no strong evidence that higher unionization rates lead to higher unemployment rates“.

Her dissertation: Mandated wage floors and the wage structure: Analyzing the ripple effects of minimum and prevailing wage laws (.PDF), is a study of the overall impact of mandated wage floors on wages.

In her dissertation Wicks-Lim provides empirical estimates of the extent to which mandated wage floors cause wage changes beyond those required by law, either through wage effects that ripple across the wage distribution or spillover to workers that are not covered by mandated wage floors.

When asked in an interview published at PERI “Though living wage laws may increase pay for some workers, by raising costs for employers might these laws have perverse effects on other workers? From a policy perspective, how do you reconcile the income benefits from living wages with their disemployment effects?“, Wicks-Lim replied with:

I think it is important to first consider whether an employer will actually need to reduce his/her workforce. Whether an employer will actually need to reduce his/her workforce has a lot to do with whether the law increases the costs of doing business significantly or not. The increased costs to employers are typically quite small – on the order of two percent or less of their sales revenues. For employers in the restaurant and hotel industry who are more affected by these laws, increased costs are typically on the order of three to four percent of their sales revenue. So, the fact that most employers face modest cost increases raises the question of whether there are other ways that these costs may be offset-perhaps through increased productivity and lower turnover rates of their now better-paid employees, or perhaps through modest price increases or small reductions in their profit margins. In fact, past research has indicated that minimum wage laws, for example, have not had large disemployment effects, suggesting that employers may react differently to these types of laws from what standard economic theory predicts.

Even for those employers that face more substantial cost increases, it’s important to consider their possible range of responses and then evaluate whether there is still a way to avoid disemployment effects, and if not, see if there is a way to minimize them so that the income benefits more than offset those negative effects.

Here Jeannette talks with Real News Network’s Paul Jay and makes a proposal to combine minimum wage and earned income tax credit policies to guarantee a decent living wage for all.



Real News Network – December 31, 2010

…transcript follows…

Dec 31 2010

Happy-faced IndependentVoting.org really ‘a pressure group working to limit choices on the ballot’

Reprinted in full, with permission, from Ballot Access News, the newsletter of the highly respected and trustworthy ballot access expert Richard Winger.

Government-printed ballots in the United States were first created in 1888, and almost from the start, opponents of new and minor political parties started manipulating the ballot access laws to keep certain parties off the ballot.  The first such instance was in Nevada, when the 1893 legislature increased the petition requirement for new parties and independent candidates to 10% of the last vote cast, in a vain attempt to keep the Peoples (Populist) Party off the ballot.

But in over a century of struggle to avoid monopolization of the general election ballot to just the two major parties, there has never been a pressure group that worked in favor of restrictive ballot access laws, until very recently.  Leaders of the former New Alliance Party, who have renamed themselves several times, now call themselves IndependentVoting.org.  They hold themselves out as the leaders of independent voters, but they have become a pressure group working to limit choices on the general election ballot to just Democrats and Republicans.

Dec 31 2010

Veterans org. {political slush fund} That Wasn’t!!

While scams like this are on the constant it seems that under the previous administration and tepublican party congress, with two wars of choice raging, those targeted to Veterans or Military were reaping huge amounts for the conman as well as, well reported, the execs or founders of those supposedly legitimate ones and little to nothing for the Veterans or the Military. No regulation, as we’ve seen in the business community, and certainly no congressional oversite, yet the pols profited as well!

Dec 31 2010

Counting My Fucking Blessings…..

and wishing you a Happy Fucking New Year…..



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Well, I could be doing that, but I’d really rather surf porn or something. Or maybe break out Mr. Vape and watch all 5 seasons of “Weeds” that my boys got me for Xmas in some giggle-fest marathon.

But really, I should be thinking of the good things, like “His cancer is going into remission,” and telling you all how grateful I am for this past year. I should be waxing my usual sentimental self about how next year is an opportunity, full of hopey shit and wonder.

2010 has been nothing but fuckedinthethroatalicious for almost all of us. Not us in the WWL sense, but for humans on the planet. Wars are still raging, torture is still legal, what is left of our privacy is a voyeuristic wet dream and I cannot think of one piece of legislation that passed that was a victory in any sense except for the rat-bastard rabid weasels called the Elite Class devouring our flesh.

After two days of unfuckingbelievably hard physical labor and a year of stress and unidentified ailments, my body feels like it has been run wholesale through one of those chipper shredder things and been put back together by Picasso. My face is melting in to bags and baggage, flab hangs off my body in not just the regular places, but new and strange places of its own volition, despite the fact I almost eat nothing now, because every time I eat I hurt, my back feels like a sumo wrestler is tap dancing on it, and my feet feel like they have zircon encrusted swords embedded in them. Pointy side up!

But, hey, at least my body is in better shape than my psyche, which despite my “I can handle anything, I’m fiiiiiiine,” bullshit facade of bravado, still wants to go fetal in agony from the hardships, pain, rejections, and losses I have endured this year. I am so sick of being tough. I want someone to take care of me. I want a Mommy, not my Mommy though, she mostly sucked. Nah, thats not what I really want, either. I think I really just am in more need of a good lay than anyone on the Planet. I swear I’d go find some strange if the idea of me naked wouldn’t make even the most desperate fucker on the planet run screaming, clawing their own eyes out, with their pecker so turtled it would have to be surgically extracted.

As I open the “present” of 2011, all I can think is the words of a friend, “Is there heroin in there?”

Things aren’t going to get much better financially, as the twisted system of cash-for-torture called AFLAC ends with his treatments done, and who knows if/when he can return to work, if ever?

And now, the safety net is going to be run by the Tea Party. I can hardly fucking wait!

2011.

Really. Really fucking really! I can hardly fucking wait.

Seriously. Does it come with heroin?

Dec 31 2010

Counting My Fucking Blessings…..

and wishing you a Happy Fucking New Year…..



Photobucket

Well, I could be doing that, but I’d really rather surf porn or something. Or maybe break out Mr. Vape and watch all 5 seasons of “Weeds” that my boys got me for Xmas in some giggle-fest marathon.

But really, I should be thinking of the good things, like “His cancer is going into remission,” and telling you all how grateful I am for this past year. I should be waxing my usual sentimental self about how next year is an opportunity, full of hopey shit and wonder.

2010 has been nothing but fuckedinthethroatalicious for almost all of us. Not us in the WWL sense, but for humans on the planet. Wars are still raging, torture is still legal, what is left of our privacy is a voyeuristic wet dream and I cannot think of one piece of legislation that passed that was a victory in any sense except for the rat-bastard rabid weasels called the Elite Class devouring our flesh.

After two days of unfuckingbelievably hard physical labor and a year of stress and unidentified ailments, my body feels like it has been run wholesale through one of those chipper shredder things and been put back together by Picasso. My face is melting in to bags and baggage, flab hangs off my body in not just the regular places, but new and strange places of its own volition, despite the fact I almost eat nothing now, because every time I eat I hurt, my back feels like a sumo wrestler is tap dancing on it, and my feet feel like they have zircon encrusted swords embedded in them. Pointy side up!

But, hey, at least my body is in better shape than my psyche, which despite my “I can handle anything, I’m fiiiiiiine,” bullshit facade of bravado, still wants to go fetal in agony from the hardships, pain, rejections, and losses I have endured this year. I am so sick of being tough. I want someone to take care of me. I want a Mommy, not my Mommy though, she mostly sucked. Nah, thats not what I really want, either. I think I really just am in more need of a good lay than anyone on the Planet. I swear I’d go find some strange if the idea of me naked wouldn’t make even the most desperate  fucker on the planet run screaming, clawing their own eyes out with their pecker so turtled it would have to be surgically extracted.

As I open the “present” of 2011, all I can think is the words of a friend, “Is there heroin in there?”

Things aren’t going to get much better financially, as the twisted system of cash-for-torture called AFLAC ends with his treatments done, and who knows if/when he can return to work, if ever?

And now, the safety net is going to be run by the Tea Party. I can hardly fucking wait!

2011.

I can hardly fucking wait.

Seriously. Does it come with heroin?

Dec 31 2010

Six In The Morning

Don’t Worry The U.S. Government Will Never Take responsibility  



Research links rise in Falluja birth defects and cancers to US assault

A study examining the causes of a dramatic spike in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja has for the first time concluded that genetic damage could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults that took place six years ago.

The research, which will be published next week, confirms earlier estimates revealed by the Guardian of a major, unexplained rise in cancers and chronic neural-tube, cardiac and skeletal defects in newborns. The authors found that malformations are close to 11 times higher than normal rates, and rose to unprecedented levels in the first half of this year – a period that had not been surveyed in earlier reports.<

Dec 31 2010

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

Time for a break from poetry…in order to create some art.

Armageddon is not around the corner. This is only what the people of violence want us to believe. The complexity and diversity of the world is the hope for the future.

–Michael Palin


Hollow 4

Dec 31 2010

Late Night Karaoke

Dec 31 2010

Desert Island with Stossel, Carlson, and Hannity 20101230

I rarely write fiction, because I am better at scientific nonfiction.  However, listening to Stossel on the Fox “News” Network just now has stimulated me to imagine.  And what an imagination it is!

The three of them were on a junket and their small aeroplane crashed, gently, onto an uncharted island, sort of like Gilligan’s.  The three of them, plus the pilot (a rank amateur) and the other crew of one (a 55 year old mother of three) survived, but in very different camps.

Dec 31 2010

Anarchy Everywhere Please!!!!

Dec 31 2010

The Fool

Greatest hits, Tue Apr 01, 2008

Quoting from my favorite Tarot site Aeclectic Tarot

The fool in colorful motley clothes, pack tied to a staff, a small dog, a cliff.

The Rider-Waite card.

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Basic Tarot Story

With all his worldly possessions in one small pack, the Fool travels he knows not where. So filled with visions and daydreams is he, that he doesn’t see the cliff he is likely to fall over. At his heel, a small dog harries him (or tries to warn him of a possible mis-step).

Basic Tarot Meaning

At #0, the Fool is the card of infinite possibilities. The bag on the staff indicates that he has all he need to do or be anything he wants, he has only to stop and unpack. He is on his way to a brand new beginning. But the card carries a little bark of warning as well. Stop daydreaming and fantasising and watch your step, lest you fall and end up looking the fool.