frankilin roosevelt

It's not about being liberal or conservative anymore y'all. That is a hype offered by the fascist whores who want to confuse the people with lies while they turn this country into an aristocratic police state. Some people will say anything to attain power and money. There is no such thing as the Liberal Media, but the Corporate media is very real.


Check out my old  Voice of the People page.


Gino Napoli
San Francisco, California
High School Math Teacher

jonsdarc@mindspring.com




Loyalty without truth
is a trail to tyranny.

a middle-aged
George Washington



ARCHIVES
1664 POSTS
LATEST ITEM

March 2024
February 2024
January 2024
December 2023
November 2023
October 2023
August 2023
July 2023
June 2023
April 2023
March 2023
February 2023
January 2023
December 2022
November 2022
October 2022
September 2022
August 2022
July 2022
May 2022
April 2022
February 2022
January 2022
November 2021
October 2021
September 2021
August 2021
July 2021
June 2021
May 2021
April 2021
March 2021
February 2021
January 2021
November 2020
October 2020
September 2020
August 2020
July 2020
June 2020
May 2020
April 2020
March 2020
February 2020
January 2020
December 2019
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
June 2019
May 2019
April 2019
March 2019
February 2019
January 2019
December 2018
November 2018
October 2018
August 2018
July 2018
June 2018
May 2018
April 2018
December 2017
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
March 2017
February 2017
January 2017
December 2016
November 2016
September 2016
August 2016
May 2015
March 2015
February 2015
January 2015
December 2014
September 2014
August 2014
May 2014
March 2014
December 2013
November 2013
October 2013
August 2013
July 2013
June 2013
May 2013
April 2013
March 2013
February 2013
January 2013
December 2012
November 2012
October 2012
August 2012
July 2012
April 2012
March 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
August 2010
July 2010
March 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
August 2009
July 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
February 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
June 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
December 2005
November 2005
October 2005
September 2005
August 2005
June 2005
May 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004

Saturday, 10 May 2008 at 0h 46m 47s

Another funny cartoon

I guess I'm a little prolific this afternoon. Nothing like a cafe with free wi-fi, and a double latte to sip -- which helps the nausea. Its my way to deal with the rampant insanity of the modern world, and the zombies who live here.


Saturday, 10 May 2008 at 0h 25m 12s

More reasons why the Iraqi's love the occupation

The latest in a long, long line of scandals plaguing Iraq contracting company KBR, today the Times of London reports that British employees of KBR working in the British Embassy in Iraq have been accused of sexual harassment. One Iraqi woman, a cleaner at the embassy, says that the KBR employee offered to double her pay if she slept with him; when she refused, she was fired:

The Iraqis accuse the embassy of leaving the abuse unchallenged and failing adequately to respond to complaints against several British managers for KBR. The company was allowed to conduct its own inquiry, an arrangement criticised as a very serious conflict of interest.

The complainants — the cleaner and two male cooks who worked in the embassy canteen — say that some KBR managers groped Iraqi staff regularly, paid or otherwise rewarded them for sex and dismissed those who refused or spoke out.

All three Iraqis lost their jobs in the Green Zone. Two KRB employees who worked in the embassy spoke out in support of the women; a few days later, KBR sent them home on paid leave and later fired them. The women also say KBR never interviewed them when conducting their internal review.


[SOURCE:  | ThinkProgress | 8 May 2008]

[SOURCE: Deborah Haynes in Baghdad, and Sonia Verma in Dubai | London Times | 8 May 2008]


Saturday, 10 May 2008 at 0h 3m 48s

Smug self-righteousness

Clinton's "street cred" on national security consists, of course, of being massively wrong on the most important national security issue of her career. Paradoxically, a lot of folks find her massive wrongness on this hugely important issue reassuring because they and their friends were also wrong and they view having made the right call to be a suspicious quality. After all, the Iraq War may have led to thousands of U.S. deaths, tens of thousands of U.S. casualties, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and millions of Iraqi refugees all at a cost of over $1 trillion and in ways that's damaged the strategic position of the United States, but war opponents were all a bunch of hippies.

[SOURCE: Matthew Yglesias | The Atlantic Monthly blog | 9 May 2008]


Friday, 9 May 2008 at 23h 53m 19s

Self-righteous breeders of democracy

the US military and its Iraqi "allies" are laying siege to a sprawling neighborhood in Baghdad housing roughly 2.5 million Iraqis, launching air strikes, artillery attacks, tank shells and other assorted ordnance, shutting down hospitals and bombing others, cutting off the supply of food and walling off entire sectors of the embattled region, causing a refugee crisis by their actions - and now actually pursuing a policy with the intent of creating a larger refugee crisis!

For what reason: because a majority of residents in these regions support a political movement, and militia, that oppose our presence. Can't have that. Because we have to keep 150,000 troops in Iraq to safeguard the Iraqi people. After all, whose gonna set up the tents in the refugee catch basins we so magnanimously helped set up to receive the overflow from our relentless assault on political movements that would make it harder for us to stay in Iraq. To safeguard the Iraqi people.


[SOURCE: Eric Martin | American Footprints blog | 9 May 2008]

The link provides a summary of the events from 2 reputable news sources : BBC and McClatchy News Services.

This is how we bring them freedom. We bomb and kill the Iraqi civilians merely because the citizens of Iraq support resistance groups which oppose being occupied by American troops at 14 military bases. They will love us more when we flatten their cities and create tens of thousands of refugees, some of whom were not involved with the resistance groups.

I look at all these people driving around with "Pray for Our Troops" or "God Bless America" stickers and fight the urge to scream at their clueless dumb asses thinking they are exerting patriotic pride when they put a sticker on their vehicle.

How much have these suburbanites really sacrificed to support this invasion? Are they buying bonds to support the war effort? Are donating scrap metal to support the war effort? Are they sending more taxes to support the government's ability to pay the exorbitant contracts of the cost-plus government contractors? Are they bothered when the god damn VA is cutting back on services to the veterans who return home? Are they helping Vets from the National Guard make their mortgage payments when they can no longer work at their old jobs after they were stop-lossed 3 times in a row? Do they concern themselves with the children who grow up never knowing their father or mother because they got killed in this conflict? Do these bumper sticker patriots even give a shit how the average Iraqi feels about our actions half way across the world?

No. They have their heads shoved so far up their god damn asses, that it's impossible for them to understand the morbid hypocrisy that they exude every single moment of their pathetic lives.

I need to throw up.


Friday, 9 May 2008 at 23h 33m 41s

Word Problems for Hedge Fund Managers

This is hella funny. Click here for a sequence of comedic word problems that poke fun at hedge fund managers.

Here's two examples:

Among those earning 10-figure incomes, Mr. Soros's total annual compensation is greater than Mr. Falcone's. Mr. Falcone's is greater than Mr. Griffin's. Mr. Griffin's is smaller than Mr. Soros's, and Mr. Paulson's is greater than Mr. Soros's.

In descending order, list the men by the respective hotness of their trophy wives.

~ ~ ~

Your middle-class parents have a combined household income of $115,000. You receive an allowance of $20 per week. If you save all your allowance for two years, how much debt will you have to finance to hostilely take over your family? How will you structure the debt?



Friday, 9 May 2008 at 23h 6m 29s

Leo Tolstoy, on the Great Approaching Danger

"With the enemy's approach to Moscow, the Moscovites' view of their situation did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even more frivolous, as always happens with people who see a great danger approaching.

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man's power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant."

--Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace"


hat tip to Barry Ritholtz.


Sunday, 4 May 2008 at 15h 51m 57s

Government contractors doing one heck of a job

Today, The New York Times has more details on this malpractice, including the fact that senior KBR and Pentagon officials repeatedly ignored warnings by KBR electricians:

One electrician warned his KBR bosses in his 2005 letter of resignation that unsafe electrical work was “a disaster waiting to happen.” Another said he witnessed an American soldier in Afghanistan receiving a potentially lethal shock. A third provided e- mail messages and other documents showing that he had complained to KBR and the government that logs were created to make it appear that nonexistent electrical safety systems were properly functioning.

KBR itself told the Pentagon in early 2007 about unsafe electrical wiring at a base near the Baghdad airport, but no repairs were made. Less than a year later, a soldier was electrocuted in a shower there.

John McLain, the electrician who in 2007 told a visiting defense contracting agency official about his concerns over the logs, was fired shortly after the incident. Another employee “said his KBR bosses mocked him for raising safety issues.”

Today, The New York Times has more details on this malpractice, including the fact that senior KBR and Pentagon officials repeatedly ignored warnings by KBR electricians:

One electrician warned his KBR bosses in his 2005 letter of resignation that unsafe electrical work was “a disaster waiting to happen.” Another said he witnessed an American soldier in Afghanistan receiving a potentially lethal shock. A third provided e- mail messages and other documents showing that he had complained to KBR and the government that logs were created to make it appear that nonexistent electrical safety systems were properly functioning.

KBR itself told the Pentagon in early 2007 about unsafe electrical wiring at a base near the Baghdad airport, but no repairs were made. Less than a year later, a soldier was electrocuted in a shower there.

John McLain, the electrician who in 2007 told a visiting defense contracting agency official about his concerns over the logs, was fired shortly after the incident. Another employee “said his KBR bosses mocked him for raising safety issues.”


[SOURCE: Amanda | Think Progress | 3 May 2008]

[SOURCE: James Risen | New York Times | 4 May 2008]


Sunday, 4 May 2008 at 15h 41m 6s

The Bullshit Labor Department Employment statistics

No doubt you've already gleaned the beaming news that instead of the 75,000-80,000 or even greater job losses and higher unemployment rate that the soothsayers were prognosticating, payrolls last month were trimmed by a much more modest 20,000, and the unemployment rate dipped to 5%, from 5.1%. Hallelujah! It's such a happy contrast to those nasty expectations and to the 81,000 jobs that vanished in March.

What makes the report all the more extraordinary is that it comes in the face of otherwise dismal dispatches from the employment front. Layoffs last month, according to Challenger Gray & Christmas, the placement firm, tallied 90,015, a hefty 68% greater than in March. New claims for unemployment insurance in the last full week in April rose to 380,000, from 345,000 the week before, while continuing claims topped the three million mark. Monster, the online want-ad outfit, reported a 6% drop in its April index compared with the same month a year ago, and the Conference Board's help-wanted index sagged to a new low while its measure of employment opportunities showed, not surprisingly, jobs are ever-harder to come by.

The BLS report, then, was like a burst of sunshine dispelling the gloom. So we take this occasion to tip our hat to the bureau's artistry in being able to fashion a comparatively heartening picture of the job market out of some very unpromising raw material. The populace, as recent soundings make clear, is plenty uneasy and disgruntled about the stumbling economy, feeling the pinch and worried about a paycheck; so anything that can provide a lift to sagging spirits is more than welcome.

Actually, the praise really belongs to the unknown (at least to us) and certainly unsung numbers-bender who crafted the so- called birth/death adjustment, supposedly created to capture the additional jobs of firms too new to be captured by the survey. As it has demonstrated time and again, it's much more a product of the imagination than of dull data, as, of course, any worthwhile work of fiction is.

We have on occasion pointed out the contribution the birth/death adjustment has made to the payroll total, but we have trouble remembering when the additional slots it conjured up were anywhere near as massive as they were in the April reckoning, when it "generated" 267,000 jobs. Put another way, ex the adjustment, last month's job loss would have ballooned to 287,000. Bit of a difference, eh?

Just one illustration points up the, shall we say, peculiarity of what the BLS adjustment has wrought. According to the birth/death model, 8,000 jobs were added in April -- are you sitting down? -- in the financial sector. Which, we assume, will come as a stunning surprise to the gosh knows how many poor souls who have been laid off by the banks, the brokerage houses and the rest of the not-very-robust financial fraternity. Must be something really wrong with our vision, moreover, since new firms in that sector appear to be conspicuous by their absence.

As Philippa Dunne and Doug Henwood, the very bright bulbs who run The Liscio Report, point out -- though they usually view the birth/death model more kindly than we do -- among the stranger additions made via its agency in the April report was the 45,000 to construction jobs. (In case you've been vacationing on the moon, construction is not exactly booming.)

They also suggest that the 83,000 new slots supposedly created in the leisure and hospitality field is definitely suspect. "With vacation plans at near-record lows and restaurants reporting reduced traffic," they feel many of these supposed job gains could simply disappear come the next benchmark revision.

After reviewing the defects in the household version of last month's employment trends, Philippa and Doug warn, "given all its internal blemishes," it would be wrong to conclude from the April report that the economy and the job market are stabilizing. And they caution, "An economy providing lots of part-time jobs to the young and few full-time jobs to the prime-aged" is an economy that could have a tough time "sustaining life."


[SOURCE: Alan Abelson | Barrons | 5 May 2008]

Here is a graphic of the jobs market from Bloomberg which does not include the "imaginary jobs" created by imaginary new companies (which is what the B/D adjustment does in declining economy).



Feel better now?

Here is how Bary Ritholtz mentions the overstatement of jobs in the 4 sectors that are laying off employees by the tens of thousands.


As noted earlier, the Birth/Death model was a major distortion. (in several months, we will get the revisions). Lets look at how the B/D has changed from April 2007 (+262) to April 2008 (+267):

  • +45k construction jobs v 37k April 2007
  • +8k jobs were added in financial activities versus 1k last April.
  • +72k in professional/business services versus 48k last April.
  • +83k in leisure/hospitality (95k last April).

I am certain that some country on some planet in our galaxy is adding more jobs in construction and finance versus one year ago, but it ain't the USA on planet Earth, that's for sure.

[SOURCE: Barry Ritholtz | The Big picture blog | 2 May 2008]


Saturday, 26 April 2008 at 16h 4m 54s

Israel's spies

Click here for source number one.

Click here for source number two -- the American Conservative magazine !!!!

There are sleeper cells in the United States. They are from extremist Israeli reactionaries, passing United States military secrets to spy networks, and infiltrating the United States State Department in order to manipulate US policy in the interests of hard-right Israel reactionaries.


Saturday, 26 April 2008 at 15h 23m 5s

McCain gets a free pass

Click here for the complete article.

McCain releases 2 years of his tax records, and not any of his wife's tax records. And the media quietly says nothing and cheerleads that McCain is wonderful.

McCain is currently breaking the law by spending over the legal campaign finance limits, but nada is mentioned in the corporate media, who still call this corrupt old man a "maverick" anti-lobbyist politician. His entire campaign is filled with lobbyists. He uses putative non-profit organizations as fund-raising agents of his own political campaign, and the media says nothing.

If Americans ever learned to stop bothering to watch television, the media heads would not be able to manufacture opinion. But 75% are addicted to mind fodder, helplessly unable to live without having to turn on the tube everyday to get their brain food.

Read the link.




GOTO THE NEXT 10 COLUMNS