Whiskey Fire

Pre-Emptive Strike

I offer below the expected not-so-crypto fascist response to this from Alternet:

According to Workamper.com, a workamper is “an adventurous individual who has chosen a wonderful lifestyle that combines ANY kind of part-time or full-time work with RV camping. If you work as an employee, operate a business, or donate your time as a volunteer, AND you sleep in an RV (or on-site housing), you are a Workamper. Workampers generally receive compensation in the form of a free campsite, usually with free utilities (electricity, water, and sewer hookups) and additional wages.”

[...]

Most workamper jobs are of the minimum-wage variety. Workampers generally don’t receive unemployment insurance benefits, severance pay or any warning that a job is about to end. Workampers face many of the same job insecurity issues as the millions of Americans who have been downsized due to job outsourcing, financial mismanagement and slow consumer demand for products and services, except workampers are purposely more nimble and have been conditioned to pack up and move to where the jobs are. “We have to be mobile to land a job,” said Suzann. Those who become jobless and live in traditional stationary homes aren’t usually able to move to another city on a moment’s notice.

The (momentarily imaginary) response:

"What are these people complaining about? They own an RV (A recreational vehicle. See? Lazy mooching parasites!) so they're not poor & it's not as if they have to ride the rails the way they would have had to in the Great Depression of the 1930s, & this is a good thing anyway, because workers should have to accomodate whatever the desires of their job-creating betters may be. Too bad they can't just float their RVs across the Pacific to Asia, where the jobs have been sent by the Invisible Hand."

— M. Bouffant (Here too.)

Tuesday's Song

A goldfinch in German Village has a song for you.

 

 

In other news:

(Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)

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Like an Electric Child

Well, Irene knocked out our power, and we may not get it back until next frickin' week. Hold on.

Monday Morning Blues

Thers tells me that he and the family are high and dry, but powerless. I'm also powerless here in Ohio, but I do have electricity.

In other news, God told One L that the hurricane and the earthquake are signs that God wants us to cut spending. Maybe She just wants you to shut the hell up, Shelley?

And Ross Douthat is an enormous hypocrite.

(Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)

UPDATE: Doghouse Riley's take on Douthat.

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Gracious

The reason Obama is having polling issues is probably because the economy sucks. But then we have this class of wingnut shit:

A few days later, Carney acted surprised at a Wall Street Journal reporter’s failure to understand how extending unemployment benefits once more would create jobs. “I would expect a reporter from the Wall Street Journal would know this as part of the entrance exam,” he said.

Uh... yeah?

Jonah Goldberg Tells a Funny Joke

So, uh, hurricanes and so forth. In other news, Jonah Goldberg has said something on the Internet... and it is dumb!

As I am something of a fan of Internet Humor, please allow me to demonstrate why this Jonah Goldberg column is a Funny Joke. Below, I provide a set of direct quotes: Jonah's Setups, and then His Punchline.

You will laugh!

Texas governor Rick Perry is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination now, at least in the national polls. Undoubtedly that’s the main reason so many East Coast pundits and Beltway wags are making fun of him. He likes guns! He’s from Texas! He talks funny! He’s a — gird yourself now — Christian!

SETUP.

Rick Perry’s overt Christianity horrifies many of his liberal critics. Bill Keller, the outgoing editor of the New York Times, agonized recently that “Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are all affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity.

SETUP.

Perry’s twang offends liberals who think everyone should talk like Barack Obama, a man of cosmopolitan and learned diction.

SETUP.

Obama’s gaffes earn no traction the way, say, the last president’s “Bushisms” did. Nor do they cause bowel-stewing panic at MSNBC the way Sarah Palin’s flavorful patois does.

SETUP.

And don’t even get me started on Joe Biden.

SETUP.

A lot of people on the East and West coasts are bigots and snobs about “flyover types.” They equate funny accents with stupidity, and they automatically assume someone who went to Texas A&M must be dumber than someone who went to Yale. Overt displays of religion trigger their fight-or-flight instincts, causing them to lash out irrationally.

AND THE HILARIOUS PUNCHLINE...

... HE ACTUALLY SAYS THIS:

Conservatism is starting to have an identity-politics problem all its own.

!

 

 

 

Friday Butterflies

Same old, same old.

In the news, there's a little hurry-cane thing happening, but Eric Cantor doesn't want the Federal government paying for it because he's a man with a principle (the rich must get richer, and eff everybody else).

Obama loves tar sand pollution.

And that B.P. gulfie-thinghie we don't care about anymore, because Obama solved it all? Right.

On the other hand, we still have butterflies (for now):

(Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)

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America Science God Science

A few days ago some NRO twerp declared that to ask GOP candidates to defend their scientific quackery was naught but Liberal Jihadism, because, harrumph,

Why would anybody ask a politician about his views on a scientific question?....

In reality, of course, the progressive types who want to know politicians’ views on evolution are not asking a scientific question; they are asking a religious and political question, demanding a profession of faith in a particular materialist-secularist worldview.

Or else it is asking, are you you sticking your head up your ass because you're a genuine fucking loon or because you're a cynical hack? Williamson flails wildly, but really has nothing to flog with but a cotton-candy whip made of Reliance on Authority:

There are lots of good reasons not to wonder what Rick Perry thinks about scientific questions, foremost amongst them that there are probably fewer than 10,000 people in the United States whose views on disputed questions regarding evolution are worth consulting, and they are not politicians; they are scientists.

There are probably also fewer than 10,000 people in the USofA who can correctly define a "gerund" off the top of their heads, but (a) these people would be right and (b) someone who wanted to call gerunds a Communist Trick would be slimy assholes.

As it emerges it is not especially difficult to determine whose views on Science are worth consulting and whose are not. As an elementary exercise in this regard, Exhibit A. And Exhibit B.

The obvious point is that people who are responsible for determining policy should at least have some sense in terms of to whom they listen, if they even give a shit in the first place as to who lives and who dies. (Never mind gerunds; grammar is a noble lost cause -- but were I to be asked about dying to defend the subjunctive mood, I'd at least ask for six dollars first.)

But then also too, if asking questions about Science is too much like asking questions about Religion, why won't presidential candidates ever shut the fuck up about God?

Asking Our Betters to balance nonsense on the bunghole of an asshole is pointless. Asking why we're a suicidally stupid society would be more to the point, though you'd be ignored.

Also Children Dying in Coal Mines!

Slavery was and remains a free enterprise system.

Yanno.

This is a great line, from Marco Rubio:

He said that “Poverty does not create our social problems, our social problems create our poverty.”

The only logical solution is to have all poor people executed -- but then who would do our laundry? It is a conundrum.

 

Why We're A-Scairt of Teh Deficit

Because this.

The vast majority of members lack an academic background in business or economics, according to a study by the Employment Policies Institute, a nonprofit group that takes a conservative stand on fiscal issues. Only 13.7 percent majored in business or accounting, and 8.4 percent have an economics degree.

Ha ha ha. I don't as it happens assume that having a bachelor's in Business or Economics ought to be a qualification for running the country. Or an economy. Or, indeed, a business.

Which is not to say that it is bad to have such a degree, just as it is not to say that it would be nice if lawmakers understood how the economy works. It's just that it's irrelevant. Even if they knew what they were doing, which most of them probably don't, they'd still passionaltely KNOW they were smarter than Paul Krugman because they are so totally in love with self-serving bullshit.