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Bugs

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Everything posted by Bugs

  1. Why does the dork keep getting all these juicy job chances? He's They must feel that he has something. He's sufficiently bland to fill the bill -- anchors have to be the kind of people you don't mind seeing, day after day ... they are the wallpaper of our lives ... and it takes a strange puss to compbine that blandness, along with gravitas. So far, I can see it ... But then he opens his mouth , with all those sixty-five cent words of his ... It's like a Mercer rant without the humour, or the incisive insight, or ... actually, without any resemblance to the Truth. I'd love to see that Peter Lynch character, who was an anchor that had just had too much and urged people to lean out of their windows and shout " ... I'm not going to take it anymore ..." Wouldn't it be great to see him storm onto Olbermann's set, shoot him dead, and then turn the gun on himself ... It's be a ratings blockbuster.
  2. Another aspect of the minimum wage is that it destroys a lot of part-time jobs that would otherwise exist. When I was a kid, when you pulled into a gas station, you got full service, which included windshield wash, and (if requested) an oil check, as well as attend to the tire pressure. The supermarket reguarly had kids packing bags and carrying groceries out to people's cars for them. Bread and milk were delivered to the door. There simply were a bunch of these low-level jobs available for when people needed extra money. Up until the 1980ies, you could be a cab driver for a $10 license fee, Lots of adults drove cabs on weekends for extra money. Nowadays, it costs you around $1500 to get licensed, and you have to take a course that lasts three or four weeks. Service is far worse, now. Cabbies won't get out of their car to buzz an apt number, for instance. The idea that every job in society has be capable of supporting a family is nutz.
  3. Dastardly as Shady's behaviour may be, it's still the case that the equally dastardly perps at CRU were exposed, and their position has been destroyed. Phil Jones is trying to bold-face through a difficult interiew without admitting he cooked the data ... but he has to retreat from the his previous firm conclusions. He seems to be appealing to the same well-meaning people he duped before to save him from the embarrassment that a scientific fraud should expect. Even so, it's a long way from "... the Science is settled, so shut up..." to the current " ... Yes, there's no statistically significant global warming ... but it's almost significant ..." Is that a reason we should spend $trillions and wreck our economies? I hope you see where the path of good sense now lies ... TrueMetis
  4. Absolutely right ... What kind of weird turn has our mass culture taken when we pour calumny on a guy who doesn't have a lot a flaws, and the ones he has are so pedestrian. OK, OK, pedestrian at a very high level. In Italy, Tiger would be admired, toasted even ... I think Italians often have a well-grounded common sense that I respect. On the other hand, Goldman Sachs EXECUTIVES continue to take multi-$million bonuses for themselves, for their skills in using law and accounting to evade the purposes of the law. Last weekend, I got into a conversation with a guy, while waiting for the bus ... it started with the danged bus service, moved on to Giambrone, and then to Tiger. He was indignant at the thought that a active heterosexual could do a little 'free-lancing' and make any claim to respectability thereafter. I asked him if he'd seen the pictures of the ladies involved. Well, no, he hadn't. I described an Angel of Sensuality, purely the creation of my imagination, a 21st century version of Betty Boop ... as best I could in the cold, waiting for a bus. "When such a creatures fawns over q gentleman ... so-oo willing, so-oo eager ... can a gentleman really say "No'? He sat forward and turned to look me in the face. He had such a look of dumbfounded outrage on his face that I couldn't help but laugh. We both started to laugh, god bless him. He told me later he was 74, and that he never knows how he's supposed to react to things these days.
  5. Personally, I think Obama is done, politically. He knows more than we know, certainly, and he has any advisor he wants available to him. He must know that the stimulus has failed, simply because there are another 2.5 million people out of work. The Democrats have been reduced to putting out-and-out lies supporting their figures -- showing money going to non-existent Congressional Districts, and addresses to zip codes that didn't exist. This doesn't happen by accident. It's political bankruptcy. They don't have good numbers, so they'll make them up. And they aren't even good at it. It's Chicago style. Similarly, I don't think anyone can trust the stock market. Thin trading, low volumes ... what keeps that S&P thing up there? Who's buying, at these prices, with these prospects? With Greece going bankrupt, etc. how can the stock market be going up? Yet, it's effective. They are selling the idea that this is a 'recovery' ... and that the recession is over. If the market were sagging below 1,000 (S&P), it'd seem like a bigger stretch as a 'jobless recovery'. That's why I think this is a very dangerous time. Government will go to extremes to deceive. The Opposition is stubborn, and will go to extremes to stand in its way. Meanwhile, the Tea Party people are becoming the active element in the population. It holds a hammer over the heads of both parties, even the Republicans. So far, it has been civil. Believe me, the emotion has only started. You can feel it, already, with every new revelation about Goldman Sachs. Joe Stack's suicide note is the extreme of how people are feeling. Obama is now openly jeered, and all the stuff about a 'transcendental leader' is an unpleasant memory for a lot of voters. Even the media coverage is split, with Fox and the bloggers lining up against the old networks. Things are getting more bitter, month by month. When the homes start actually being foreclosed, when the benefits start to be cut -- Medicare and social security almost essential targets -- when the taxes start being imposed ... all of which looms ... the rage will start to grow. The problem, for Obama, is that the government is stuck with the choices it made in its first days. They chose to save the banks, and sacrifice the American people. The bankers are emerging as the main enablers of this disaster, and Obama is rewarding them, even as the people who did everything right are suffering. Can they stop bailing out now? Well, the restraint is, as it so often is ... the bond market. Government is paralysed, gridlocked, and adrift. The country is going to governed by executive order. The bond market is starting to grow restive. It will demand to be compensated for the increased risks. With every significant notch up in interest rates, the leaky ship of the Obama government comes closer to foundering. My own view? His strategy has already failed, it just isn't apparent yet. The whole world is entering a dangerous period. One of the things that they don't tell you is that many of the great dictators of history have come to power to stop a currency crisis, and they get support by creating new, gold-backed currencies. Napoleon came to power that way, and some say Hitler did too. But before that, there is a lag ... a period like we're entering, a period of stagnation and drift.
  6. This is an article from Salon ... worth reading as a whole. It can be found at http://mobile.salon.com/mwt/feature/2010/01/31/how_to_leave_a_soldier/index.html It's an article pointing out to the wives of soldiers how easy it is to ditch the lug ... "You'd be surprised how easy it is to leave a soldier on deployment. You can do it with a letter. (He can't argue with you. He doesn't have a phone.) If you lay the groundwork early, saying to the soldier before he leaves, "This will be the end of us, we might as well admit it," it's that much easier. The letter won't even come as a shock. "And if you have children with that soldier? You can handle all that with a letter, too. He'll write it -- because he cares about the kids, because he wants to work with you to do what's best for them even though you're leaving him -- and you'll give it to them. Here again, you will avoid a nasty confrontation. Who will they cry to? You? You're just the teary-eyed bearer of the letter. Him? The one who's sweating it out in the desert? "There will be no moving truck, no boxes, no house torn asunder. The soldier is peeing in a bucket as you pack. He doesn't care who gets the couch." What is striking is the changes that are occurring in all the family relationships. As every decade turns, we see the diminishment of men to the point where they (really) have to reason to serve. Troops often did it for their loved ones. Now, it turns out, the loved ones were only using him anyway. Hahahaha, the joke's on you, soldier! Now, quit your sniveling and 'man up'. You would even have to say, with family law the way it is, there is an incentive ... Comments?
  7. You're so right, Oleg. When the stimulus/porkulus bill was being debated ... was it debated??? ... Obama triumphantly promised it would create over three million jobs. Now they are saying that it 'saved' 2 million. What a joke. The jobs they have saved are the SEIU employees overpaid jobs with municipal and state governments. The states are broke. You think Greece is bad? To be justified, a stimulus is supposed to create more jobs than the people it directly hires. They should be in the private sector, because that is where the wealth is created. So, if it saved 2 million public sector jobs, it should have created at least that many in the private sector ... and the private sector is still shedding jobs. Whoever this 'punked' punk is ... he's been punked.
  8. Actually, I havwe been trying to document the dissolution of the coalition that -- opportunistically or not -- provided the backbone of Obama's Cap & Trade support. It was a big-money thing, a few short months ago. This is another little piece of that coalition breaking away. (I have to be sneaky because the powers that be already barred one of my posts on this topic. The censors of this board seem to think that we should treat the enviro-frauds with respect, as if they were honest but misguided, like Stalin's communists, and so ... you can't really hold them responsible for the millions they murdered ... I remember how they said the science was settled, and turned off the microphones. They're still at it. But, if readers don't believe there's a media blackout on this, just read the British press for contrast.
  9. The US is going ahead, building two new nuclear power plants. The idea that wind and sun can power a 21st Century society would last as long as it takes to get to our first set of rolling brownouts stops TV, music systems, and streetcars. Where do these supporters of electric cars think the power will come from? Even if climatescam has been revealed as a fraud on the public ... it doesn't seem to me to be a good idea to go on putting carbon (on this scale) into the air. What are the rational arguments, anymore, against nuclear reactors? In fact, they have been safe, and the nuclear wastes have been safely handled. Comments?
  10. Just wondering ... do you have a single example? What rich person has caused a war? What effort? The economy does not work on the basis of taking money from the poor, and giving it to the rich. If offers handsome wages to entice people to work. I can't remember this happening, either. What are you going on about? Does this have any reference to reality, to what is going on now? Any? Whatever? Or have you just come out of Avatar, and haven't switched the willing suspension of disbelief to "off" yet? What fairyland does your mind occupy. Robocop is not a description of reality. Well, give us an example. Exactly who are you talking about? The shrieking I hear comes from other sources. The ideologists I hear are talking about proroguing, and the threat to Democracy ... (didja know Pierre Trudeau did it 11 tiimes in 16 years?) ... or about what nasty people are troops are ... There are actual real things to criticize about the world ... you don't have to make them up.
  11. How about this? It's a good think the Pakistani folks have captured this guy. They don't have to worry about being censured for using waterboards to get their information ... they go right to the electrodes. Comments?
  12. It's a winter wonderland in Britain ... Surely it will amuse snow-hardened Canadians to see Brits in the slush. All I can say, that God all that craziness is over. Comments?
  13. You obviously are no student of history. The world has more rectitude in it now than it had before the British Empire put some starch into the colonials. Even so, bribes are a part of a lot of transactions between members of the public and officials. It is expected, and it is almost like a fee. In other parts of the world, you won't get service if you don't offer something. In extreme cases, the bribe borders on extortion; they will force you to bribe them or you'll go to jail on some charge, doesn't matter what because it's all an extortion anyway. In the old days, it was worse. It was customary for office-holders to buy their offices, at one time ... bribe them to step aside, in other words. Even in the mllitary, rank was purchased, until Napoleon. When they wanted Wellington to go to Spain, the British had to bump something like 120 higher ranking office-holders, most of them of no military value. If you go back before that, it's all family, but families are marrying daughters to rich merchants to get financial support from their new kinsman. I'd say that in most of the Moslem world, a bribe is never amiss. You get the feeling that Hindus have the same expectations. In the Chinese bureaucracy, it is probably standard, although I don't know. As for South America ... now, there's a place where money really spends. And Africa? Come on, brother ... The only places where bribes are inappropriate almost all the time is in Western Europe and North America. Maybe The truth is, if you don't have family connections, education is the only way you can get on the receiving end of most of these bribes. If anything, there's probably a lot of educated scoundrels who make out handsomely becauset they book the appointments for the minister. These bribes can be like 'bakeesh' ... smallish ... but repeated bites add up. Or they can be big if you want big things done. (It's right, don't you think, that things that hurt the public interest should be cost more?) In Russia, with prices fixed by the state, companies would bid for products with throw-ins, like other industrial staples, hookers, vodka ... etc. Are those bribes? Or do the throw-ins become a kind of 'money'? Anyway, that's the way it was in Breshnev's time. And that's the way it is in most of the world, outside of (blush) what they call the Anglo-Saxon democracies ... ex-British colonies, mostly. And not all of them, either. Think of Nigeria ... ============================ Actually, while it is understandable that people think educated people would be more cultivated, and have higher standards, it hasn't always been the case. Maybe half of the Gestapo was recruited from law schools during the war. These future lawyers didn't seem to have too many qualms, they were very good with complicated orders, and they could be controlled through ambition. Among other duties, they carried out the early parts of the extermination process.
  14. I grant you are certain sensibility, Oleg. But, in fact, isn't there a lot of protection, now, on the morraine? I think so. Try to get a building permit. Maybe it isn't perfect, but what is it about the environmentally concerned, that nothing is any good unless it is not only perfect, but eternally perfect? When I was running around what was then Port Arthur, now Thunder Bay, I didn't have any sense of anything being old, but I knew I could run around for miles, throw stones, try to trap rabbits, all that stuff. I remember all the cold weather stuff best, the tobogganing, and hockey, At the time Pee Wee hockey was a new thing, and every kid played hockey. The neighbours, coming over on the weekend with a nice catch of rainbow trout, already cleaned. I remember swimming lessons in Boulevard Lake in the first week of July, and there was still ice in the shady spots, draining, of course, into the lake. There's a lot of people in this country who get out in nature, even earn their living outside, just as there are even more who hardly get into nature. From what I can see, they ALL want nature protected and kept as pristine as possible. If global warming goes into the trash heap of history, it's no great loss, because the whole thing was a farce. People still want the environment protected, and they still have the force to get what they want.
  15. You know what? This isn't really about two sides, like teams, one fundamentally as good as the other, despite the strong feelings of their supporters. It's revealing that you react that way. It isn't the way someone who's first concern is the environment would react. That person would be pissed off at the fraudsters, whether a skeptic or a salary-man. This is more a bunch of crooks who have committed frauds, as well as every scientific sin, including destroying their data ... I pause for the gasps ... destroying one's own data being worse than incest in the Scientific hierarchy of sins. They were after our money. There never was any reason to believe that their jerry-rigged solutions would mean beans. Curly light bulbs. It's a joke. This story is about the public recognition of a scam, which was foiled at the last minute. Whoever released those e-mails should get a Nobel prize. In real life, we can now turn our attention to our environmental problems. Nanicoke is still on my list. At that level, nothing has to change ... we just do things apace, and take care of the water better, toxic chemicals, and all of that. And everybody wants to do that.
  16. It kind of amuses me that you two act in this off-handedly superior manner, talking about my obsessional streak ... you know, this general distaste I have for government-funded plots designed to tap god-knows how many $billions out of our economy, to the service of what? What, exactly? Why am I obsessional ... well, I posted on the same topic twice? There seems to be something wrong with that. I just don't understand why you chose to take as the lesson of all of this enviro-tom-foolery that I have my guns on it? Don't you feel as if someone's been caught trying to put their hands in your children's pockets?
  17. So what? Honestly, this material is all over the British press. It isn't like the media are giving us the information that will help us all sophisticate our judgement the next time some seemingly scientifically-based cause comes along. Just the opposite. That's why you don't seem to understand the significance of this getting into the Globe and Mail, and Margaret Wente's column. Greenpeace is still out on the street, soliciting funds. Secondly, this is new information, and this column causes a storm of controvery amongst Ms. Wente's readers. Her responses were record-setting.
  18. Where were you when the fraudsters were cheating us? You know very well that personal anecdotes don't replace systematically collected data. The global warming never had the science they needed to make their claims. That's N-E-V-E-R. You claim to be on the side of quiet objective research -- but where were you, Sir Bandelot, when ignorance was in the saddle? This is being kept out of the media. You have to go to British newspapers to get anything like a fair airing of this scandal. There's almost no part of the case that hasn't been dummied up, or interfered with, in some ways. You can talk about research, and all of that, but just clearing out the lies and distortions will be progress.
  19. Far right? You mean she would prefer if the government didn't run deficits? If anything marks one as one an aspiring member of the chattering classes, surely it's the easy accusation that someone else is over-the-boundary in terms of respectable political attitudes. I quoted her column. My point is exactly that when such a bland soul pronounces on this fraud, albeit in the nicest possible terms, that it amounts to the eulogy. Good night, Irene. I didn't notice any jackboots. Don't you believe in accountability? Surely, you don't think that it was an honest mistake? Al Gore, come on down. We have some questions ... about your Oscar ... and while we're at it ... how did a yokel like you ever get a chance to embarass the Nobel Committee this way?
  20. Eww ... I don't think that's anyone's answer. You should try to balance your cynicism a tad. No doubt there is great joy in a Shire, as these lying frauds get one-upped in this cruel way by Mother Nature ... but consider, before you float off on a cloud of sanctimony ... What reason do people now have to believe that global warming is a real threat to our immediate future as a species? Hmmm? The people of the Shire have been gagged, and stifled in their doubts ... insulted ... and the Ringwraiths set upon them. Surely they can be excused a little exuberance because their oppressors have been revealed? Nobody says we can't go back to conservation. In fact, it is because of 'environmentalism' that the world hasn't done much 'conservation' for a decade and more. The reason we have the biggest environmental blight in Canada, and possibly North America ... save Louisiana ... is because of Greenpeace!!! I don't know why you give these enviro-deceivers any respect at all.
  21. Margaret Wente is one of those people who accurately expresses the moods of Toronto's chattering classes ... those people who define what 'fashionable' is, in the realm of culture and acceptable thinking, to those multitudes who have little clue ... but who want to appear to have all the fashionable attitudes and opinions. She is the choirmaster who give the signal for the great Toronto middle classes that it is now fashionable to pull their heads out of their asses. Obviously, even these blasé creatures have standards. The movement is dead? Well, maybe ... except they're still working us for money. But that, surely, isn't the end of it. Crimes were committed. Come on, these people constructed a tissue of lies to deceive the world into making huge, wasteful expenditures -- all so they would get to play big-shot for awhile. It's just the Margaret Wente is a doyen of the chattering classes, and her vocabulary doesn't include words like "lying bunch of bastards" -- although that hardly seems adequate. It isn't as if she doesn't have standards -- it's just that she usually uses them on the kind of people who don't know which fork to use for their salad course. After all, on Ms. Wente's moral scale, these enviro-crooks have titles, academic degrees, and probably entry to all the best parties. They can't be all bad. It takes guts for a journalist to speak the plain ordinary truth about people above the salt -- even it is a mouthful of euphemisms that blunts every opportunity for us to learn from this experience. Perhaps we few who are less blinded by the accoutrements of social class and privilege, have the plain words that she lacks. We know the scandals aren't over yet, we scratch our heads when these enviro-creeps just stand around, as if they are still believable, as if they can be trusted, as if they are going to continue to get their funding. She admits to all the necessary facts. She just can't say that these people are, in fact, criminals. She ignores the profits all these fat-cat liars managed to garner for themselves. India won't accept the word of it's own national, the academic hustler and charlatan, Raj Pachauri. (The Times discovered that Mr. Pachauri's own company has collected millions in grants to study the effects of glacial melting – all on the strength of that bogus glacier claim, which happens to have been endorsed by the same scientist who now runs the unit that got the money.) Why can't we use the word CRIMINAL on this one? Why isn't fraud considered? It isn't as if these people are any more respectable than Col. Russell Williams, are they? Who cares if the socially prominent goofs she cites are bailing out? Why are they to be thought of as honorable[/i ]scientists? If they were the genuine goods, seeking truth above all else, why were they fooled? Where were their critical faculties? She goes on to recite the pieties, required of all members of the chattering classes, whenever they feel the urge to be critical of one of their own. But that's just blather. In fact, she's lying to herself, as much as to us. The climate changes all the time, certainly when you measure down to the tenths of a degree Centigrade, it does ... and there is no reliable evidence of global warming whatever. NONE!!!!! The only honest people involved in climate science were the skeptics. They ought to be recognized as heroes, and the lemmings ought to be discarded as useless, the kind that go along to get along. In fact, the environmentalists in general, including these blue-ribbon liars, used every means at their disposal to gag their critics. They used their classrooms to propagate the lies, and forced their students, on pain of failure, to reproduce these lies. They have almost certainly tried (at least) to destroy academic careers, as well as used blackmail, extortion, and deceit to intimidate honest skeptics. Further, they tried to corrupt Science itself, when they knew the data was turning against them These people are despicable. Margaret Wente is the kind of one-dimensional jerk that would catch a mouse, and return it to the back yard. She can't seem to finish the job, and let the squires of North Toronto know the truth in bald terms. Which is: YOU'VE BEEN PUNKED!. Now it's a time for retribution.
  22. This is the delightful sound of top scientists associated with the IPCC backing down, and falling all over themselves to place the blame elsewhere ... Professor Watson is one of the Priests of High Science, and a member (and a defender) of the IPCC. I'll give the man this -- he's a good sport, and he faces up to as tough an interviewer as he's likely to find.
  23. Nonsense ... how could you get more style over substance than JFK, who, by the way, stole his election? His campaign was based on a non-existent arms gap. Kennedy just about triggered World War III over the missile crisis. Mr. Hardner probably thinks Kennedy is a role-model for Presidents -- be born rich and arrogant. Hardner is merely restating the attitudes that are being distributed to us, the masses, by a partisan media, at one of their most partisan points in history. What's interesting about Sarah Palin is that it works so poorly. Rather, it exposes the motives of the media themselves. When the media accuse her of using her Downes syndrome child as a political prop, people see their spittle, and the green eyes of ambition. Palin recently appeared at the Tea Party Convention, in Nashville, and all the media showed up -- to get footage of her to ridicule. The come away with laugh-lines about the way she writes crib notes on her hand. In a strange way, that's her power. She draws the media like honey draws flies. And she demonstrates how trivial the media have become. A lot of people know damned well that there's too much spending going on, and suspect that a band of charlatans have sandbagged Obama. They know who's going to end up paying, and they know who's still getting big bonuses. To them, Sarah Palin is almost the only public figure speaking out. What have YOU got to say about that, Mr. Hardner? What should Sarah Palin be saying? Why can't people simply look at the facts for themselves? She speaks for a lot of people. It isn't what she says that should scare you, it's what the people applaud. Belittle her if you wish, Mr. Hardner -- but she's been Governor of Alaska. What have you done that gives your opinions and your attitudes more weight than her's? She hasn't even said she'd be a candidate for the Presidency. Why set those standards for her? Why not just simply note what she says, as one of a rising tide of voices that, apart from their usual party loyalties, oppose the spending, the spending, the spending ... and saddling their children with the problem of repaying? That's the political dynamite!
  24. Maybe he didn't do it? There is that possibility.
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