Good PM, folks!
Be wary of that for which you ask
I follow on Twitter and FB a Caltech research physicist named Sean M. Carroll. I do not follow his politics, however, but we seem to be in alignment on one particular topic. Dr. Carroll quotes former ambassador and UT governor now R Prez candidate John Huntsman as saying, "To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy."
The liberal young physicist assures Mr. Huntsman that he will be. I agree with Dr. Carroll, but similarly approve of Huntsman's statement, will look at this candidate much closely, an R who does not regard science as witch medicine.
Labor pains
More thuggery by the continuing criminal enterprise known as organized labor, unprosecuted and ignored by DC:
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/581864/201108171839/Union-Thugs-No-Kidding.htm
Word watch
Confusion of number--from an internal company communication comes this ungrammatical datum: "Payer was sent a letter disclosing their surplus balance of $779.40." The payer in this instance is an individual.
Promising Michelle
Yesterday, I sneered at press' usage of "race" in reference to the wearisome treks that campaigns have become. Poster O.T. Rush had a sunnier outlook toward the process, as he looks forward to a 15-month clown show parading through all 57 states, featuring catered bestern BBQ from Lexington NH or someplace, and escorted by geezer Guardsman from Vermassahampshire.
O.T. was right. As if on cue, one of the current darlings of the R grind, Michelle Bachmann, promised to bring back $2/gallon gasoline. I'm posting the link to the report, but the punchline (which Michelle has obviously missed) is that we better hope $2/gallon gasoline does not come back.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/18/news/economy/bachmann_gas_prices/index.htm?hpt=hp_t2
This campaign promise ranks with those allegedly made by 5th graders running for student body president who pledge to put Pepsi in school drinking fountains.
On the fly
With so much news about the economy, hot weather, bozo pols, and wars, it's nice to read news that we can we really sink our teeth into, if we dare. From South Chicago comes a report of a Burger King that was so infested with flies that health inspectors reported being fearful to open their mouths.
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2011/08/17/so-many-flies-at-burger-king-inspectors-wouldnt-open-mouths/
This reminds of a line by W. C. Fields in "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break," as he sat down in a diner: "I don't know why I come here. The flies get the best of everything."
Washington State S.S.R.
A state law similar to the Federal Davis-Bacon law is preventing companies based in Washington state from effectively competing with out-of-state companies for state-funded projects. The DB law requires contractors to pay local prevailing wages on federally funded projects. Prevailing wages are taken to be union-scale wages, so that union hiring halls will not be priced out of the market. This is a payoff to unions that costs taxpayers more than they need to spend.
The state of Washington has a similar law, which no doubt bases prevailing wages on union scale. But, it applies only to companies based in the state. Other states, ID and UT to name a couple, have no such laws. Companies from those states can bid on projects, and undercut local contractors.
A Dem WA state senator acknowledges that the law has unintended consequences, and says it needs to be worked on. No doubt the Dem solution will be to apply the law to all contractors, rather than repeal it and save WA taxpayers some money. It's not for nothing that it was once said that the United States was composed of 49 states and the soviet republic of Washington.
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/18/139669069/wage-rules-twist-steel-companys-growth-plans
Labor pains. I read this on another blog last night. Seems this kind of activity is expected and excused and given plenty of political cover. Someday, somewhere, some union Red is going to push the wrong man and there will be a dead union Red.
ReplyDeleteWashington State SSR...more of the same theme re unions. Seems California is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Labor with its unified Government in Sacramento. Illinois is no better. NJ is recovering. Connecticut is struggling to survive.
ReplyDeleteR's need to deal a bit more on debt reduction, but they should name a price: repeal Davis-Bacon, do away with President Obama's project labor agreements, and ban card check.
ReplyDeleteRepeal Davis-Bacon works for me as a start.
ReplyDeleteHi Staballoy and Whitewall,
ReplyDeleteWow, I hadn't heard this from Bachmann. Sca-ree.
So I'm thinking about the election process: maybe instead of launching right into debates, we should have a candidate trivia game! Imagine the candidates having to answer simple questions that would highlight (or out) an indication of understanding (or lack of understanding) of basic economics, history, political science, cultural anthropology, etc. You know, the tools they need to truly function in the job of president.
I fear too many of our current candidates eek by on the "I'd love to have a beer with that good ol'boy/girl" trait.... not actual capacity for the job of president.
Hi Sharon! Not a bad idea, put 'em in front of Alex Trebek.
ReplyDelete"I'll take Graft and Grifting" for a thousand, Alex."
Davis-Bacon has been around for 80 years and really has out-lived its usefulness.
ReplyDeleteGreat comparison of Bachmann's gas "promise" to middle schoolers' pledges to put Pepsi in the water fountains. A prime example of why I disregard any promise made by any candidate. Unlike some, I don't see them as lies, but rather as BS sound bites to attract the uninformed. The only purpose they serve is material for late-night hosts and comedians.
I'll second Sharon's call for Candidate Trivia. It would be quite helpful if our candidates at least knew you need enough money in the banks to pay the bills the country owes.
ReplyDeleteHi dotnet!
ReplyDeleteDavis-Bacon was originally passed to protect local jobs from underbidding outsiders, or so saith its proponents. Opponents note that it drew support from those who complain of black contractors underbidding. Today, it continues that legacy of discrimination by inflating the cost of projects to enable unionized contractors to successfully bid on them.
Repeal of DB was one of the R's original negotiating points on the debt limit. They need to return to it and stick with it, along with the other items I mentioned above.
TU for all your comments particularly on D-B. Thanks to Staballoy, I'm increasingly aware of the role that unions have in our financial and economic meltdown.
ReplyDeleteUnions make me think of two poignant lessons I learned in B-school: 1) a company's most important asset is .... (no, not it's people) .... it's measurement system; and 2) every entity needs an exit strategy.
Unions are a great example of this. Measurement: what are they trying to achieve and how are they measuring it? I think they're not being honest about their goals. Exit strategy: Simply, we all know a lot of unions have lived well past their shelf lives. Disband elegantly and find something else to do.
The ACLU is the same. Once upon a time it was doing some neato work. It could probably still be an effective and necessary organization if it were a lot smaller and a lot more honest and realistic about it's goals. So it now has a bad rep, even though it has helped us in many ways. Unfortunate.
Way off base on the ACLU. It has and continues to do, as you put it, some "neato" work. It does not advocate for anything on its own...it represents its clients, who are ordinary citizens under attack by their government.
ReplyDeleteYou need to learn what they really do instead of what the talking heads say they do.
"Confusion of number--from an internal company communication comes this ungrammatical datum: "Payer was sent a letter disclosing their surplus balance of $779.40." The payer in this instance is an individual."
ReplyDeleteI can explain where this comes from...college essay classes taught by ultra politically correct fools. They are trying to avoid gender bias, so tell their students to use "they" rather than he or she. Some advocate just that, to say "he or she", others have come up with the equally as horrible "s/he". I know of one who advocated using "he" and "she" alternately in the same essay, regardless of the sex of the subject.
Republican presidential candidates are not the only idiots around.
"Unions are a great example of this. Measurement: what are they trying to achieve and how are they measuring it? I think they're not being honest about their goals. Exit strategy: Simply, we all know a lot of unions have lived well past their shelf lives. Disband elegantly and find something else to do" Now that is well put by golly!
ReplyDeleteYou need to read what I wrote. I do know what they really do, and you'll notice I did not say they should execute on an exit strategy, I said they could be smaller.
ReplyDeleteSmaller does not equal "it's bad and they should not exist".
I believe the ACLU's growth has not been properly managed, and it dilutes the significance of the great work they do.
Thanks Whitewall, although I believe the "find something else to do" is a direct quote from Staballoy, so I really can't take credit for it!
ReplyDeleteThere are sufficient employment laws to prevent the employer abuses that were abundent when unions first came into being. The circumstances that exist today vs. those of the mid 1800's to early 1900's are so different that I also question the need for unions. All they do today is create artificial wages that are out of line with the rest of the marketplace.
ReplyDeleteThumbs up Dotnet.
ReplyDeleteSharon, you are right. I forgot Stab's part. It just sounds so elegant coming from you though! I must apologize to Stab,maybe he will see.
ReplyDeleteRe ACLU
ReplyDeleteHaving been a member since I was 18 and having served on ACLU boards in two different states, I can confidently say that the one thing that the ACLU has not done and cannot do is get too big.
The demand for services is tremendous and the waiting list is long. A case that may seem trivial to you does not seem trivial at all to the person or group asking for help and it is often surprising which cases end up making important changes in constitutional law.
As dotnet noted recently, there is a huge social upheaval taking place right now in the US and around the world. That fact alone will greatly increase the pressure on ACLU resources. And don't even mention the internet, which is a whole new jungle to be explored.
We have a dozen or so cases on the Supreme Court docket right now, and many more making their way in that direction. The decisions in every one of them will make a significant difference in the lives of the ACLU clients and many others as well.
The fun has begun:
ReplyDeletePerry quizzed on the age of the earth by a woman and her son. "I know it's pretty old so it goes back a long long way. I'm not sure anybody actually knows completely and absolutely how long, how old the earth is."
Perry regarded evolution as "a theory that's out there" and one that's "got some gas in it." He added that in the Lone Star State both creationism and evolution are taught to students in public schools. He explained, "I figure you're smart enough to figure out which one is right."
Of course that would be a violation of Constitutional law.
Earlier this summer, GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann expressed doubt about the theory of evolution.
"I support intelligent design," she said after speaking at this year's Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans. "What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don't think it's a good idea for government to come down on one side of scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides."
In 2006, Bachmann suggested that some within the scientific community discredit the theory of evolution. "There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design," she said.
I love Bachmann's idea of putting everything on the table and letting the students decide. We could do the same thing in math. 2 plus 2 is…and give them every possible number to choose from. Whatever they choose, they are right. Actually, we could save an awful lot of money by not having schools at all. Let them teach themselves.
More for Word Watch. I think this came from Huff Post:
ReplyDelete"O'Donnell is out with a new book titled Troublemaker: Let's Do What It Takes to Make America Great Again."
More fun:
ReplyDeleteKathy Griffin: "Congresswoman Bachmann, were you born a bigot or did you, like, grow into it?"
Michelle Bachmann: "That's a good question. I'm gonna have to get back to ya."
Supposedly this was taped by one of Bachmann's people, but I don't think it is available on line. Griffin tells the story to Conan here:
http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2011/08/kathy-griffin-to-michele-bachmann-were-you-born-a-bigot-or/
Good evening, folks! In from choir practice and a late elegant dinner (Subway BLT sub), watching (with one eye) the Steelers in a preseason game (Pitt 21, Phi 0, halfway thru the 3rd).
ReplyDeleteO.T., I agree with your comments re Bachmann's inanity re students deciding between Intelligent Design and evolution. However, the "born a bigot" report has the ring of untruth, IMO.
I see a number of comments re my pet bete noire, unions. I have no problem with people hiring agents to negotiate transactions. My problem is how unions think they should become those agents, without employees having real free choice. Another problem is the fact that the undemocratically placed union officaldom has unfettered access to members' money, without members' permission, to operate unions as partisan political organizations.
Going further is the matter of public employee unions. I have read that unions were formed to give employees a share of businesses' profits. That is inapplicable to public employee unions. OTOH, supervisors, managers, et al, can be jerks, so there is argument for representation. As much as I despise the current theory and practice of US labor unions, nothing is cut and dried.
Back to Perry, Bachmann, and Intelligent Design: for the record, the Earth's age is about 4.6 billion years. It, our Sun, and ourselves are made in part of stars that lived and died in the first 9 billion years of our Milky Way galaxy's existence.
ReplyDeleteWhen a clergyperson intones, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," he/she (is that OK, O.T.?) is literally correct. We did indeed descend from the ashes of stars and from interstellar dust, also the ash of stars. And that is fact. Students need not vote on ir.
Sorry, he/she doesn't cut it. My wife would have given you an F, but if you had been in her class, you wouldn't have done it in the first place. She taught advanced composition and argumentative writing at a top university for some years and often debated the "gender problem" at conferences.
ReplyDeleteHer argument has always been the same...if you are writing about a specific person, obviously you use the correct gender pronoun. But if you are writing about a generic person, as in a clergyperson (she doesn't like that either), PLEASE do not use any of the namby-pamby (her phrase) new age crap (her phrase again).
She is quite happy with the traditional "he", but also allowed the use of "she", just as long as the writer chose one or the other and used it consistently in a particular essay.
The point is that writing is meant to convey information and ideas as concisely and precisely as possible and the addition of new age crap just contributes to clutter. I agree.
In my own writing, I often choose the feminine "she", especially if I think it might be read by some misogynistic jackass. It's my way of saying, as Commodore...I mean Governor...Perry might say...take that, mofo.
As to the union business, anything that involves money and power will sooner or later lead to corruption. I see little difference between union leaders, corporate executives and politicians...they are all about the same thing.
ReplyDeleteBut I tend to see things in historic perspective as well. In 1913, when the towns of Winston and Salem joined together, the average wage of the average working person here, factory hand or office worker, was $10 per week for a 60-70 hour week.
If everything had continued on course, allowing for inflation, that weekly income would now be $217.77, less than the current minimum wage. And the work week might have been cut back to 50-60 hours.
But in 1918, the same year that RJ Reynolds died, the first serious attempt to organize RJR Tobacco occurred. The company ruthlessly crushed it and the union faded away. But it got people thinking.
By the time WW II broke out, the work week had been cut back a bit and male workers at RJR were making about $25 per week, females about $20, considering inflation, about the same as they were making 30 years before. This despite record profits at RJR almost every year during the Great Depression.
When the unions returned in 1943, RJR and other local companies, assisted by J. Edgar Hoover, used every underhanded tactic they could to fight them. Several union leaders were sentenced to 3-8 years on the chain gang for essentially blocking a sidewalk. But even though RJR was able to fend the unions off once again, this time the unions stayed, establishing an office right across the street from the Reynolds Building.
And that is when we saw the work week begin to shrink and pay begin to rise until we reached the 1980s when cigarette machine operators worked 40 hour weeks, made $40,000 per year and, through profit sharing, retired as millionaires. Even then, their compensation was a tiny percentage of the take.
All who work today for someone else would be working longer hours and making way less for it if it hadn't been for unions. And unionized workers today, even after paying union dues, enjoy better, safer working conditions and make more money than their non-unionized peers.
So I don't really differentiate between union bosses, corporate bosses and political bosses. Corruption is corruption is corruption. Or as my friends on the street say "They all bad."
Stardust. Hoagy Carmichael supplied the romance. Scientists supplied the facts.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a kid, a science professor at the then Winston-Salem State Teacher's College organized an astronomy club which sometimes set up telescopes in front of the RJR High School auditorium on weekend nights and invited the public to come and look. My father, mother, sisters and I were frequent attendees.
This professor often talked about the fact that we were looking at the past, from whence we came. And stardust was a part of that conversation, as a part of the past and a part of the future. I found all this absolutely fascinating.
I was brought up in a Christian religion, which taught that when we die we will go to heaven, but it never quite defined what that might entail. Non-monotheistic eastern religions often include reincarnation here on earth. That seems a better match to me than the heaven of my childhood. I kind of like the idea that when I die, my dust will eventually become a part of something else.
To me, a perfect blend of Hoagy's romance and the scientist's facts. Part of me might become a grain of sand in the desert. Another part might be incorporated in a building. And perhaps another as a part of a future human being, or, as our Vietnamese sweeper more than once pointed out, maybe a grasshopper. He certainly taught us to respect the grasshoppers who frequently passed through our warehouses.
Twinkle, twinkle little star,
How I wonder WHO you are.
OTRush:
ReplyDeleteI just read your reply to me about the ACLU.
As I said before, I think the ACLU does a lot of great work. Nonetheless I maintain it has become too big, particularly with regards issues of government intervention and prisoner's rights.
Look at, for example, this headline they just released. http://www.aclu.org/infographic-safety-numbers-prison-population-statistics-new-york-vs-indiana
Really? You're a smart person from an academic family. This "infographic" is suggesting some kind of causal relationship! Ridiculous. It's only an implied causal relationship and you should know that. Even read the "learn more" resource articles they provided, they are no more statistically based on anything.
Most importantly, how does advocating releasing prisoners truly benefit me? If you tell me drug laws are too strict, I may agree with you. But do you know how freaking difficult it is to go to jail? I know chronic offenders who've spent little more than a token few hours in the slammer.
I didn't ask those people to be in possession of drugs, or drive around under the influence. Or to steal, or commit an act of violence, or to get it on with the next door neighbor's underage daughter. Like it or not, and I'm not saying I think drug laws (for example) don't need revising, but the law is the law. I don't drive drunk. I don't drive under the influence. And I sure as heck don't want some intoxicated moron driving under the influence near me and my family.
How is the ACLU protecting me here? And guess what, I HAVE RIGHTS TOO. My right is to live and not be in constant concern for my safety.
I can give you other examples, particularly with regards to government intervention.
It's too big, too much. I have a sneaking suspicion there are a lot of people on those LOB payrolls, and they like their jobs. Focus on the real rights issues. There the ACLU has my support.