Read it.

Why Penelope Trunk has nothing to say that I want to hear.

Tom Smith makes it.

The thing that makes the IRS scandal really troubling is that it was (or is) an attempt to manipulate our political process. Again, obviously, it was an attempt by pro-Obama persons to suppress political activity that they disagreed with, and that their superiors disagreed with, and that was contrary to the party in power in the Senate and White House. I hate to say, this strikes at the heart of, but this really does strike at the heart of the democratic compact under which we live. If the party in power can use its influence to subvert the electoral process, then all bets are off. Of course, this is exactly how machine politics in Chicago have worked since the Daley machine and before. One party gets ahold of things, uses its influence to subvert the process, and then you don’t have a democracy any more. To oppose the party in power becomes too dangerous, too expensive or just too futile. I suppose this would not be so bad, except that the Democrats are such a lot of hohos.

Read it.

It remains to be seen how far governments will go. Laws are made to protect people from harm, but they’re also made by taking into account the interests of special interests who spend billions to lobby the halls of Congress. Innovation like the types cited here directly threaten a range of powerful, incumbent, cash-rich industries who view lobbying costs as a minor line-item expense, the cost of doing business in America. The other side of this coin is that, right now, government regulation that overreaches to the point of suppressing an individual’s ability to earn a living wage is the political equivalent of playing with fire. It’s early, but consumer demand is pointing in a direction where the democratization of access to technologies like electric vehicles, 3-D printers, alternative currencies, and peer-to-peer lending puts more power into peoples’ hands than government can realistically control.

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The very blue state of Massachusetts, whose voters preferred Barack Obama by 61% over their own former governor last November, gets by just fine with a flat tax of 5.25%, well below NC’s top rate. Ballot measures to create a graduated income tax system have been put before voters in this bastion of liberalism five times and five times Massachusetts voters have decided to keep their flat tax in place. The Bay State’s ever-so-progressive voters, who have voted for the Democratic candidate in the last seven presidential elections, seem to like their flat tax just fine and don’t want to get rid of it. If flat tax opponents truly believe their own hyperbolic rhetoric, they must consider places like Boston and Cambridge to be some dystopian wasteland.

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And perfectly suited to the people who get them, who are the most worthless people on campus.

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Notice that they did not call for black people to stop using and dealing illegal drugs. I guess they have more faith in their political clout than in the strength of religion, or in the sensibility of their own race.

Read it.

The humorlessness of feminism is an old story, but it is interesting to see a backlash building in mainstream America and not just among conservative critics.  The most interesting recent story you may have missed concerns Rebecca Walker, the daughter of the celebrated feminist author Alice Walker, who, according to her daughter, is an egregiously awful human being because of her feminist views.

The Other McCain is on the case.

“You can’t do that.”
   But it makes me feel good.
“It’s against the law.”
   Then we should change the law.
“Why?”
   Because it makes me feel good.
“Who cares about your feelings?”
   Hater.

Read it.

The Oath Keepers are a coalition of current and former military, police, and other public officials who have pledged not to obey unconstitutional commands. They’re extremely controversial, with critics accusing them (inaccurately) of fomenting terrorism and (more accurately) of attracting people with an affinity for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric. Since they were launched in the first year of the Obama administration, they are also sometimes accused of being unconcerned with the constitutional violations of the Bush years.

The latter charge doesn’t match what I’ve observed in my reporting about the group. Still, I was interested to see how they would react to the unfolding NSA story. In particular, I wondered whether they’d see Edward Snowden’s decision to leak the PRISM documents as the sort of disobedience they champion, and I wondered how much their discussion of the story would extend to Bush-era as well as Obama-era surveillance.

Wonder no more. Stewart Rhodes, the group’s founder, has emailed me a statement about Snowden….

Read it.

A.  Human nature is a blank slate to be written upon by the Laws of the Cathedral.

B.  Evolution exists but only insofar as it is a club to beat up on religion.  Otherwise, the logical conclusions of evolution (such as meaningful racial or gender differences) must be silenced.  All group differences must be ignored.  No cognitive or behavioral differences between groups exist; evolution occurred only from the neck down.

C.  Homosexuality has a genetic cause but only homosexuality is heritable.  Everything else (like violence, intelligence or stupidity) is the result of culture.

D.  Race does not exist…except when it does.  For non-whites, racial pride, racial resentment, racial organization and the excuse of racism for all their failings are permissible.  For whites, race does not exist; it is a cultural construct.  Behaviorally and cognitively, all races are identical.  Remember the decree:  neck down!

E.  Gender does not exist in any meaningful way.  There are no substantial differences between the genders because, well, they don’t really exist…except when they do.  Feminism is permissible, but that’s it. Behaviorally, genders are identical.  Remember the decree:  neck down!

Read it.

Reality intrudes.

Read it.

 The social network between characters in Homer’s Odyssey is remarkably similar to real social networks today. That suggests the story is based, at least in part, on real events, say researchers

Read it.

The ruling class — that is, the Democrats in lockstep and the establishment Republicans aiding them in what will be termed a bipartisan effort — is fast-tracking “comprehensive immigration reform” with a goal of having it passed by August 1, before summer recess.

What this new set of laws will do is essentially add 30 million new legal voters over a decade’s time, nearly all of them permanent clients to a big corporatist government determined to expand and entrench its power.   What it won’t do is secure the border in any way.  And whatever provisions it claims to offer as stepping stones on a path to citizenship are set-up for juridical overturn: different “classes” of citizens won’t hold legal water, and they know it.  It’s theater.

Here it is in plain, clear English:  The ruling class plan to defeat the TEA Party and the small-government base of the Republican Party is to import enough new progressive voters to offset the influence of we, the people.  Whose only remaining function will be to subsidize the people and programs that ensure our own subjugation to the State.  We become draft horses to the Beltway crowd’s plantation overseer.

August 1 is the date of fundamental transformation.  And it will be accomplished with the help of people you mistakenly believed were in office to represent you.

They aren’t.  They represent themselves, pragmatists being pragmatic, opportunists seizing an opportunity.  And they will vote themselves a ruling permanence by using human logistics to effectively end the American experiment in representative government — ironically by legalizing a dependent class, the representation for which will forever swing elections and guarantee big government progressivism.

And that pretty much sums it up.

Read it.

Surrounded by students nicely turned out in suits and dresses, looking more like the Mormon Youth Chorus than today’s undergraduates, Mr. Obama recently chastised Congress for not yet blocking a doubling of rates for new Stafford loans set to occur on July 1.

As the president well knows, the House has already passed a bill preventing the hike and tying new loan terms to market levels. The president’s solution is similar, but would lock in rates for the duration of the loan. The spat is like bickering over menu choices on the Titanic.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, explores some more of the modern world.

My son, who has his own way of getting to the essentials, asked how old the girl was, and the conversation went off on a tangent. I believe I got the main point across, though: Guys have our way of thinking, women have their way. There’s a lot of overlap, of course—I mean, we can both do crossword puzzles and so on—but some key areas of the female brain are wired differently from ours.

This is rank heresy under the reigning dogma of Absolute and Unquestionable Human Equality. Even as you read this I am probably being denounced somewhere by agents of our Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice as an unfit parent and a corrupter of the young.

Whatever: I shall proceed on the understanding that the reigning dogma of A&UHE is a stinking, wormy pile of intellectual dog crap that contradicts all human experience and scientific evidence. Everyone on board with that? Excellent.

Undeniable Truth #1:

I really don’t see how teenage boys can learn anything with girls in the classroom.

Undeniable Truth #2:

If healthy young adult males and females are assembled in units dedicated to a common purpose, in sex proportions much different from 50-50, and walled off from the general population, then strong sex-related emotions—notably sexual jealousy—will inevitably manifest themselves, corroding unit effectiveness.

Undeniable Truth #3:

Women are strongly attracted to higher-status men. If male officers are in command of units containing women, human nature is placed under severe strain.

Undeniable Truth #4:

Men who join the military are responding to widespread, innate male urges—the urge to break things and kill people, for example. Women who join the military are, by contrast, outliers in their sex. They are eccentric and prone to behave eccentrically. As a designated victim group, they are especially susceptible to the associated pathologies, e.g., victim hoaxes for attention, spite, or cash reward.

Four excellent reasons not to have women in the military at all, much less in combat units.

Read it.

The 17th Amendment, adopted in 1913, was an early major coup for Progressives. Prior to the 17th, of course, United States Senators were appointed by state legislatures, not by direct election. The Founders had damned good reasons for this setup.

Senators were supposed to represent the interests of the state, not of the current population. “Progressives’ did not — and do not — grasp this distinction … and if they did, they would reject it.

 Your average state legislature most likely has some corrupt element to it, but it also has the tempering logic of self-preservation. A Senator these days can take campaign lucre from any thousands of special interest groups whose sole interest is buying that Senator’s vote. They care not a whit for him or her. They just want the vote for their particular bugbear. A state legislature, on the other hand, can call a Senator back to the capital and have some very earnest and frank discussions about what the fuck he thinks he’s doing.

Read it.

Don Mattrick, the head of Xbox at Microsoft, explained to GameTrailers that Microsoft built a system that’s future-proof and if you don’t like it, there’s another option: the eight-year-old Xbox 360.

This is Microsoft’s stance and the company doesn’t care if you complain. That message came through loud and clear during the company’s E3 press conference. Take it or leave it. Microsoft doesn’t care. They know they’ll sell millions of boxes and a group of vociferous web trolls won’t change that – or will they?

Read it.

In a revealing column at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall (pictured) voices doubts about Edward Snowden (and Bradley Manning before him) less for the details of their leaks of government information than for why he thinks he did it. To Marshall, Snowden is “some young guy I’ve never heard of before who espouses a political philosophy I don’t agree with.” That philosophy, he believes, is one that views that state as “essentially malevolent.” That’s enough to put the columnist and the whistleblower in different tribes, and it’s a good start at explaining why so many Americans have lined up behind government officials on the matter of leaks and surveillance, while many others have cheered leakers and denounced the peeping-tom state.

Watch it.

Listen to the howls of hate from the pro-’tolerance’ crowd.

Read it.

Now that he’s exited HP, former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein has opened up a bit about his thoughts on how and why webOS failed. In an interview with Fierce Wireless, Rubinstein said that if he had it to do over again, he wouldn’t have sold to HP, “Talk about a waste. … If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company?”

Ummm … cash out while it was still worth something, rather than ride it into the ground? That’s just a guess, you understand….

Steve Sailer puts things in perspective.

 If you had access to all of DSK’s electronic communications, what kind of data mining algorithm would you craft to ferret out DKS’s greatest vulnerability? How could you best sift through terabytes of data to find DSK’s Achilles heel?

Well, you wouldn’t. You’d just call up your press secretary and ask, “What’s the gossip about DSK?”

Underlining the distinction between ‘data’ and ‘information’.

 The more general point is that a lot of the information that the public assumes must be secret is actually common knowledge among the tiny percentage of people who are paying attention. To find out about it, you often just have to ask.

And most people who worry about the government having access to their personal data are the sort of people in whom the government has no possible interest.

Read it.

Nick Meaney has a better reason for believing that the stars are overpaid: his algorithm tells him so. In fact, he says, with all but one of the above actors, the studios are almost certainly wasting their money. Because, according to his movie-analysis software, there are only three actors who make money for a film. And there is at least one A-list actress who is worth paying not to star in your next picture.

Freeberg nails it once again.

If gay marriage were all about providing equal rights, I’d be all for it. But it isn’t about that. Just like “raising the minimum wage” isn’t about raising anybody’s wage, when you really think about it you see it’s all about outlawing jobs that pay below a certain amount — “gay marriage” is a proposal to muck up a definition. That’s what it is, it’s an attack on definitions of things.

Read it.

Of course, I’ve been saying that for years.

Low-Information Voters would be puzzled by this: Why are rich people affiliating with the anti-rich party? But, propaganda aside, the Democrats aren’t anti-rich; they just say they are. Democrats are the biggest group of talk-the-talk-don’t-walk-the-walk hypocrites on the face of the planet. This is how AlGore can sputter and bluster and get Nobel Prizes for being pro-environment and anti-global-warming while his estate in Tennessee uses more electricity than a small town.

Read it.

What is the real issue brought up by this whole PRISM debacle? It’s not that the government is willing to overstep its role using national security as an excuse. That’s been going on for thousands of years. It’s not that companies in a position of power are willing to throw those that rely on them under the bus in order to get ahead. Again, that’s nothing new. And it’s not that the institution of journalism has crumbled into a dismal wreckage of its former glory. Possibly true, but beside the point.

The issue central to all of these is that the fundamental balance of power when it comes to control of information has been allowed to shift unthinkably far away from the individual and towards a set of institutions with motives that are at best mercenary. It’s about time we fixed that, don’t you think?

To address the PRISM scandal itself briefly, I think we will be less surprised at the existence of such a program than, as I think will inevitably transpire, the incompetence and inefficiency that almost certainly define its methods and usage. Allegations of a massive conspiracy that goes so deep that the most powerful tech companies in the world are muzzling themselves and spitting lies out of fear and legal obligation assume, as other theories often do, that this shadow government pulling the strings is both massively effective and operates totally in secret, two things that are highly incongruous with the likely reality of incompetent civil servants, out-of-date methods, and bureaucracy choking everything in sight like the inextinguishable weed it is.

Don’t hold back — tell us how you really feel.

‘Jesus loves you, everyone else things you’re an asshole.’

Read it.

The truth is that classes in the U.S. today are separated not by a staircase, but by a canyon (or in the case of Anacostia, a river), and that applies to other major cities with dangerous hinterlands, too: Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and no doubt half a dozen others.

In these pages a few years ago, Angelo Codevilla gave us a lengthy analysis of “America’s Ruling Class” (TAS, July/August 2010). The major parties aspired to merge into a governing class, he said: “Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.”

Their tastes amount to “a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints.” They seek to impose a unified orthodoxy about man’s origins and American history. They either insist on the need to expand government or fail to resist its expansion.

The ruling class also supports and is supported by a “client underclass” which receives lavish government benefits and votes reliably Democratic. It is opposed by what Codevilla called the country class, and might now be called the Tea Party.

In other words, others have spotted the Upper Crust and its relation to the Lower Crust, and its contrast with the Filling.

Incidentally, claiming that unintended outcomes may really be intended, or anticipated but winked at, is today called a “conspiracy theory.” An interesting analysis of the derogatory way the term “conspiracy theory” is now used was made recently by economist Gary North. It is acceptable to attribute political action to “special interest groups,” he points out, but only as long as the motive is profit. But if one argues that “economic self-interest is secondary, and that religious, ideological, or family connection interests are at the bottom of the special-interest group, the theory is automatically dismissed as crackpot.”

Indeed so.

Scott Adams leads the way.

If the plan works, someday a consumer will be able to download buildable home construction plans and order custom-cut materials to make home-building a breeze, and much cheaper. The biggest obstacle will be the complexity of local building standards. But I can imagine local governments embracing the system if it allows them to input their unique building requirements into it as a filter. It might be a big money-saver for the town because every proposed building plan that comes through the system will already meet codes.

…

Current home design is all about appearance over function because consumers buy homes that look great while having a hard time imagining all the little functional flaws such as a lack of storage space, how sound travels, and that sort of thing. The big homebuilders and architects design for the camera, not for the consumer. When homes are designed to meet the best standards of function as voted by actual homeowners, the value of the typical home will skyrocket at the same time the cost of construction drops.

Read it.

Freeberg nails it once again.

It occurred to me recently that, when it comes to tax money, progressives never grow out of this rapacious mental stage. Tax monies are there primarily for their personal gratification — to fund untested pet projects, to dole out more pork products than a salumeria to the usual suspects, and presumably these days to wiretap every man, woman and child in America. And if any’s left over, it gets laundered and finds its way into their bank accounts. The idea that these monies are not inherently theirs never seems to cross their minds, nor does the concern that they should first take care of their constitutionally mandated responsibilities. They want Disneyland and they want it now!

And if you dare try to curb their spending, they’ll threaten to shut off the water, power and telephone so they can keep paying for Disneyland. In fact, they do this so consistently that it’s become something of a cliche.

Andrew Stuttaford fisks Voice of the Crust Bernanke and his Crustian view of ‘fairness’.

To believe that meritocracy (even in a far more perfectly realized form) is the acme of fairness is a mistake, but its critics need to recall that old defense of democracy as  “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried”. Applying a similar argument to meritocracy works rather better than Bernanke’s hopelessly hesitant suggestion that it “may be fairer and more efficient than some alternatives.”

In any event, the key “fairness” problem coming our way is only tangentially connected to the flaws of meritocracy. Technology is skewing—and will further skew—the distribution of income in a way that is leaving large numbers of people, including, increasingly, highly educated people, on the wrong side of the earnings divide.  That may or not be “fair” but it is not a recipe for social peace.

Steve Sailer reveals all.

     For many decades, Chinese testimony was not accepted in California courts, an Alien Land Law discouraged Asian land purchases, the Chinese Exclusion Act (not repealed until 1943) prevented Chinese immigration, and a Gentlemen’s Agreement, signed in 1907, required Japan to cut back sharply on passports issued to Japanese who wished to emigrate to California. When World War II began, the Japanese were sent to relocation camps at great personal cost to them.

Yet today Californians of Asian ancestry are viewed by Caucasians with comfort and even pride. In spite of their distinctive physical features, no one crosses the street to avoid a Chinese or Japanese youth. One obvious reason is that they have remarkably low crime rates.

Read it.

This is the most disturbing aspect of the current kerfuffle: The expanded powers of the Federal government are now biting us all on the butt, and it is an insufficient safeguard of our rights to have in place running the system the people who were the loudest critics of the system when they were out of power. The lesson here is that power corrupts, and we’re never going to have saints in charge of the government, so our only effective protection is to take steps to limit the power that the government does have.

Read it.

Since 2005, when Katherine Flegal of the National Center for Health Statistics began reporting that people whom the government deems “overweight” appear to be healthier than people who stay within the recommended weight range, her work has provoked outrage from other obesity researchers. As Virginia Hughes explains in a recent Nature feature story, the critics’ main complaint is not that Flegal’s findings are wrong but that they are unhelpful.

I guess the sky isn’t falling after all. What a disappointment.

Read it.

A recent report in Education News states that, since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased by 75%. Though homeschooled children represent only 4% of all school-age children nationwide, the number of children whose parents choose to educate them at home rather than a traditional academic setting is growing seven times faster than the number of children enrolling in grades K-12 every year.

Guess there are a lot of parents out there who what their kids actually to get an education. Who knew?

Read it.

That’s the only conclusion one can reach after reading the evidence compiled against Harry Hopkins by Diana West in her latest book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault On Our Nation’s Character.

Some of us remember.

Sixty-nine years have passed since they hit the beaches at Normandy. To say that those men “lived in a different time” has become a cliché. They lived and died in another century, one that is becoming less recognizable with each passing year. What is not usually acknowledged is the deliberate attempts to airbrush out our recall in the West of this vast undertaking, or to change it to something different than the way the participants viewed it. They are strangers, those soldiers; not our relatives, our forebears, or the objects of immense bottomless sorrow for those who were killed.

Read it.

I didn’t think finding good work would be this easy. I always feared I would end up like my sister. My sister set academic records in high school and studied at the University of Chicago but the best job she ever got was translating airline menus. She has an especially bright and sensitive mind, but she has never specialised. Today she works the front desk at a hotel.

I remember one time at dinner she had asked my dad, who was something of a corporate bigshot: ‘You always talk about the value of hard work. But what about somebody in a coal mine — wouldn’t you say he works as hard as you? Why should you get paid so much more than that guy?’

One of the worst aspects of modern education is that it doesn’t answer that question correctly. Most teachers, being Cultural Marxists, really don’t have an answer that your average adolescent would find satisfactory. Hence our politics and our economics are screwed up by people who don’t know what they’re doing.

Work is to your job what bread is to a sandwich — it’s always there, but it‘s not the most important part. The important part is the knowledge that you bring to that work. The advent of the Information Age has brought that fact out plainly and squarely — the term ‘knowledge worker’ is a redundancy — and the most surprising aspect of that is the truly amazing number of people who refuse to look at what is right in front of their noses.

‘Labor’ is mostly useless, and ‘capital’ is totally useless, without the knowledge necessary to make it effective. (I first learned this from reading the works of Peter Drucker, who deserves a place with Henry Ford and Thomas Edison but probably won’t get it for another hundred years or so.) An employer pays an employee for the ability to apply knowledge to what they do, and the way to promotion and raises is the ability to acquire new knowledge and make it useful. Nothing else counts.

Read it.

Of course. I’m a database developer, which means I’m the information age analog of a tool and die maker. I’m good with that.

Read it.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to. And people avoid burdens, even when you think that’s rotten behavior.

I know! The immigration debate provides the perfect answer: We just need to think up a new and unthreatening name for the trnasgressors!

Undocumentd Producer. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Read it.

Ugly people have been banned from a new jobs site which only offers positions to applicants who are easy on the eye.

Freeberg waxes philosophical.

We start with the A-through-E “get me a beer” scale. An “A-girl” will get a guy a beer so he doesn’t have to get up. A “B-girl” will get a guy a beer provided he treats her as a dignified and intelligent human being, meaning, says “please” and “thank you” as his Mom taught him. A “C-girl” might get him a beer but she’s going to keep count of who does how many things for who, and after she gets his beer he’s going to “owe” her one. A “D-girl” won’t get him a beer, and an “E-girl” will build an identity for herself out of her refusal to get him a beer.

Hm.

If you make it your business to subscribe to liberal-feminist blogs, and read what they put up, you’ll see a striking pattern set in: Across the hundreds, and even the thousands, they all fall into this funnel of thought that could be summarized as “Oh how I hate this thing I found over here, come gather around loyal readers, and help me hate it.” They don’t have questions and they don’t have answers — all they have is “How Dare You.”

Yeah, that fits my experience.

Liberal women labor under a delusion that their primary motive is to elevate the stature and importance of women in our evolving society. Not only is this untrue, but they labor toward the opposite. Women can do an amazing number of things; some of these things can also be done by men, but there are just two of them that men cannot do. Those two things are 1) being a mother and 2) being a wife. Those are the two things that liberal women don’t want other women, anywhere, to do. Over the last few decades they have become unreasonably invested in the two public issues of 1) abortion, which stops a woman from becoming a mother, and 2) gay marriage, which robs women of their natural role as wives. In a society that is supposed to be sluggish in offering important and significant roles for women to occupy, those are the two roles that have always existed, and they are the very most important ones, supreme to anything a man can do. If liberal women were sincere and consistent in their stated desires, these are the two roles they would most vigilantly protect. As it is, these are the two roles for which they reserve their most incendiary hatred.

Read it.

But you knew that.

And there you have it. In a few sentences–the reason why it’s so much easier for “compassionate” liberals to recruit wealthy and upper-middle class blacks and Hispanics via race-based affirmative action programs than it is to actually go out and help the economically disadvantaged regardless of color. It comes down to money. By focusing on skin color, they can act as if they are helping the disadvantaged, but continue to cash those big tuition checks each semester.

This is the dirty little secret of race-based affirmative action in college admissions–most of the ethnic minorities who benefit are not from among the poor, but rather from among the upper class.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Bob Belvedere looks at the Crust.

Maybe at the start, decades ago, the Intelligentsia-based section of the current ruling class was non-hereditary, but not since around the 1980?s when a nearly quiet movement began among them in collusion with the wealthy [both old and new money, but especially the latter] to groom their offspring to prefer working for non-profit corporations or pursuing careers in politics or taking over the family businesses and running them as ‘enlightened and caring businessmen and women’, willing to cooperate enthusiastically with governments at all levels.  No matter which path these offspring went down, they and their parents all worked [and all continue to work] towards maintaining and strengthening the Governing Class, shaping it into a reflection of themselves, of their Ideology.

Yup. I’ve been saying that for years.

Between the Client Underclass and the Ruling Class exists a class of people akin to the Outer Party in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four.  They are the public and private bureaucrats who handle the day-to-day tasks of running the institutions of government, large corporations and law firms [for-profit and non-profit], the media, and academia.  Like the Client Underclass, the Bureaucratic Class is dependent for it’s living standards on the Ruling Class and so they serve them with a pragmatic gusto.

In my notation, the Upper Crust, the Lower Crust, and the Outer Crust.

Read it.

“The decision to end the Congress strike was a hard one, but it is the right time for the union and the strikers to move on,” Unite Here Local 1 President Henry Tamarin said in a statement. “The boycott has effectively and dramatically reduced the hotel’s business. … There is no more to do there.”

This is what Barack Obama intends to do in Afghanistan — declare a win that isn’t there, and Just Quit. Who do they think they’re fooling, other than themselves?

Since there is no new contract, those striking workers who return to work will return under the same wages and benefits they were making in 2003 when they went out on strike–$8.83 per hour.

This means that, based on a strike calculator, at $8.83 per hour, striking workers lost approximately $18,366 in wages (only) for every year they were on strike–or $183,660 over the ten years. Union bosses leading the strike, however, maintained their salaries and benefits.

And, at that, they’re lucky that there’s a there to go back to — no doubt the hotel has long since replaced them, and it is an act of conspicuous generosity that it didn’t say, ‘Sorry, we have enough employees, you’ll have to go somewhere else’.

Read it.

And why not? They both drank the same Kool-Aid.

Watch it.

He’s optimistic. I’m not.

(We need a shorthand term for this look: Shaved head, chin beard, with or without earring. What’s up with that?)