Category: Rants

Most issues in politics are contentious, but not not all of them are contested. Some issues have been effectively won by one side. The issue of gun control, for example, might as well be declared over since Heller and the non-response to Newtown. You need not like the NRA or buy their arguments to recognize that they've won on the issue. They've won in Congress, in court, and in the realm of public opinion (Most Americans' positions on the 2nd Amendment consist of verbatim NRA talking points). Anti-gun groups will continue to fight when the opportunity arises, but doing so serves a symbolic function at best. The outcome is predetermined.

I think it's time to add the battle to save American labor unions to that list of lost causes.

If you've been following the efforts to unionize Volkswagen's Chattanooga plant – Autoblog's coverage has been extensive and remarkably impartial – you understand that the Detroit Free Press is being charitable by describing the No vote as a "devastating defeat" for the UAW. The auto industry has been migrating southward for decades, lured to places like Chattanooga by massive subsidies, lower wages, and a docile, anti-labor workforce. The Chattanooga plant was the UAW's first major campaign to unionize a Southern plant. Volkswagen is unusually pro-union (Chattanooga is its only non-union plant in the world, and the No campaign was led not by the company but by the usual rogue's gallery of right wing bagmen and sycophants). Despite the favorable setup, or at least a setup as favorable as any likely to be found in the South, the drive failed – 712 opposed and 626 in favor with 89% of eligible workers participating.

The UAW and the other once-mighty industrial unions in this country have been in decline for four decades as a result of a combination of factors including anti-union rhetoric from the right, mainstreaming of a "business friendly" attitude toward regulation and the labor market, overseas competition, and the restructuring of tariff and trade policies to make it appealing to manufacture in low wage countries. Had the UAW been able to declare victory at Chattanooga, they might have had a chance to establish a foothold in the rapidly growing Southern auto industry. Hyundai, Honda and Mercedes are in Alabama.
buy isotretinoin generic noprescriptionrxbuyonline.com over the counter

Nissan and Toyota are in Mississippi. BMW is in South Carolina. Kia has a nation-sized complex in rural western Georgia. To be able to unionize in Chattanooga and arm future campaigns with the fact that the UAW did not spell the end of all life in Tennessee as right wingers claim would have been a boon. Instead the UAW appears to have lost its last, best chance to stop the bleeding.

The efforts by Republican bottom feeders to sway the outcome of the vote were vile even by their standards. TN state legislators were making the most bizarre of threats – to vote to end tax breaks for VW, as if that is something Republican state legislators are interested in or capable of doing. Bob Corker, aiming to prove that he is a shitheel of historic proportions, violated Federal labor law by announcing on the first day of the vote that he had "secret information" about VW planning to expand the plant if only the UAW could be kept out. In reality VW has been planning to expand in Chattanooga for years, as anyone who follows the auto industry even casually knows, in order to satisfy demand for the Passat and new CUV models to meet the company's ambitious new global sales goals.

In reality I think the efforts of the Peanut Gallery to manipulate the vote were meaningless.
https://www.health-advantage.net/wp-content/themes/mts_schema/lang/pot/symbicort.html

Auto plants are popping up all over the South specifically because the local workforce is anti-union and they don't need any last second shenanigans from Bob Corker to prejudice them against the UAW. Besides, everyone in that factory knows damn well that VW is at capacity and will be expanding it soon. It is informative to see how mendacious and low class Republican elected officials are willing to be in the context of a labor organizing effort, but I honestly believe that this vote, prior to which VW provided the UAW with open access to the Chattanooga facility to campaign directly to the workforce, reflects the desires of the people who voted. The anti-union leanings of the labor pool in a place like Chattanooga is one of the selling points of the South, after all.

The question is not where the UAW goes from here, because it is perfectly clear where the UAW is going. It will continue along the same path it has been traveling since the 1970s, losing membership to attrition, age, and the shifting political wind. Union membership seems to hit a new record low in the U.S. labor force every year and it's hard to see how that trend is going to be reversed. The Democrats do little more than pay lip service to organized labor. Republicans are almost cartoonishly vicious in their opposition to the idea. And the average American has absorbed enough anti-union rhetoric over the last thirty years that I can't fathom how even to begin to dislodge any of it. If the UAW even exists in another thirty years it will be as a shell of itself. I wouldn't argue with an assertion that it already is, for that matter.

If Chattanooga didn't work, Mississippi and Alabama and South Carolina certainly aren't going to work. I'm a proponent of organized labor and unionization but realistically I think it's a lost cause at this point. Our working conditions, wages/benefits, and standard of living are going to have to sink much lower, unfortunately, before the unions can start fighting back with a chance to win.
https://www.health-advantage.net/wp-content/themes/mts_schema/lang/pot/diflucan.html

Don't worry. We'll get there soon enough with this attitude that we'll be better off if everyone earns less.

It didn't take long for an NFL player reacting to the coming out of Michael Sam – you know, the best defensive player in the best conference in college football – to bust out the old Shower Time chestnut. You know, that the fundamental obstacle to having a gay guy in professional sports is that he will be ogling all those studs in the shower. In fairness, the player who said it seems to have an idea of how stupid it was, appearing on CNN to clarify that he is "A-OK" with having a gay teammate. But this is the original statement:

"I think that he would not be accepted as much as we think he would be accepted," Vilma told NFL Network. "I don't want people to just naturally assume, like, 'Oh, we're all homophobic.' That's really not the case. Imagine if he's the guy next to me and, you know, I get dressed, naked, taking a shower, the whole nine, and it just so happens he looks at me. How am I supposed to respond?"

He started out so well. It's absolutely true that, "he would not be accepted as much as we think he would be accepted.
buy grifulvin online buy grifulvin online no prescription

" Certainly he's going to encounter people who don't want to accept him during this saga. But dammit, we all knew that the Shower Time thing would be brought up. It was just a question of when and by whom.
buy orlistat online pavg.net/wp-content/languages/new/where/orlistat.html no prescription

Here's the problem with the whole "How can we let a gay guy be around naked straight guys? Or even clothed ones? Won't he be checking us out, like, constantly?" line of thought.

This is the exact same argument made by people who think that if a woman is dressed a certain way or behaves a certain way, it is all but impossible for a man not to have sex with her. The claim that "men will be men" and "you know how men are" is made by men who presuppose that all men are devoid of self control.
buy nolvadex online buy nolvadex online no prescription

It's an argument that is made to justify sexual assault yet somehow it ends up being even more insulting to men than it is to women. If a women flirts with a guy, how is he supposed to not have sex with her? Most of us realize that, despite the ironclad logic in play here, it's remarkably easy.

You know what I do for a living. In this line of work, I am constantly in proximity of young women. Many of them are quite attractive and/or in various states of undress (Perhaps that is just the Old Person in me being shocked at what The Kids wear out of the house these days). According to Shower Time theory, I should not be capable, as a Man, of keeping my eyes and hands to myself and my mouth shut. I should be pinching asses and catcalling (I'm not really sure how; maybe a Sideshow Bob-esque, "Capital knockers, madame!") because how can you expect otherwise from Men when you dress like that?

Oddly enough, however, I've spent a decade as a heterosexual male in this profession and somehow I – and 99.9% of my male colleagues – manage to avoid ass-grabbing and Hey Babying and all the other things that according to victim-blaming logic we should be incapable of avoiding around women. It's a miracle. Somehow I understand that there is a particular manner of conducting myself in a professional environment that is expected. It's almost like I'm not a tiny child or a drooling sex-crazed animal!
buy symbicort online drugeriemarket.co.uk/wp-content/languages/new/britain/symbicort.html no prescription

The Shower Time hypothetical assumes that, as a man, Michael Sam is incapable of controlling his sexual urges; that if he sees an attractive man (plenty of those in the NFL, obviously) he will be overcome with lust and end up grabbing asses, making suggestive comments, and staring in abject wonder at the naked bodies around him. It's easier to assume that a gay man in a locker room will be like a kid on (sexy) Christmas morning than to pause, think for a moment, and realize that he is an adult who is capable of understanding basic concepts like "Don't fuck your co-workers" or "I am here to work, not flirt" or "This straight man would not appreciate it if I told him he has a sexy wang."

So to anyone losing sleep at the thought of showering or undressing in the vicinity of a gay man, take comfort in the fact that he's seen a lot of male bodies in his life and somehow, some way, he has managed to not have sex with the overwhelming majority of them.

There are two things that drive me crazy about the frenzy of attention that follows celebrity deaths. One is the ludicrous efforts of self-centered people to make it about themselves somehow – it turns out that Don Cornelius was actually the most important person in their life because they watched Soul Train 20 years ago and thus they are grieving. The second is the death being yet another opportunity for (usually) right-wing loudmouths to lecture us on the decedent's responsibility for his own demise and how, as a vastly better person, the speaker would never follow the same course of action.

I had zero real feelings about the death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman; he was a fine actor and I enjoyed some of his movies. However, when I heard that the police found him with a needle in his arm I hated him for a brief moment – not because I am judging his actions, but because I knew that I had about three days of "Drug addicts are weak people, good riddance" to look forward to. People who can't stop talking about how smart and wonderful they are can lay off the unemployed for a few days and talk about how they're too strong of character to succumb to the addictions of the poor and weak.
online pharmacy desyrel best drugstore for you

I consider myself fortunate that I don't have problems with addiction. Despite the blog name I am not a heavy drinker and I was never cool enough to be into drugs, so aside from an inability to open a pint of ice cream without eating the entire fucking thing I have no ability to empathize with what a heroin addict experiences.

Nonetheless, I feel about addiction the same way I feel about poverty, which is a paraphrase of a Bill Hicks bit. It can happen to anyone; all it takes is the right bar, the right friends, and the wrong woman.

That's a comedy punchline, not to be taken literally. The reasons people get started down the road to addiction are varied and obviously it's not all about relationships gone wrong. The premise is sound, though. While empirical research suggests that some people may be more prone to chemical addiction than others, I see it as a "There but for the grace of god go I" issue. Just as the same people who condescend the poor, unemployed, and homeless fail to realize that they're about three misfortunes away from poverty themselves, talking about addiction as a sign of personal weakness sounds like a combination of raw ignorance, an inflated sense of self, and more than a bit of denial.

If it makes you feel better to revel in a celebrity death because it gives you a chance to talk about how much better you are as a person, then go nuts.
online pharmacy flagyl best drugstore for you

Who am I to tell you how to overcompensate for your fear of mortality.

It is important to recognize that you're fooling no one but yourself, though. If you're a true believer who honestly believes the nonsense about your own superiority, we'll be here waiting when you learn the hard way that this sort of thing can happen to anyone.

People hooked on drugs are sick.

Neither prison nor your condescending lectures are going to help.

The Week has a very informative, concise overview of the water problems that are becoming more central to the lives of Southwesterners. There are some amazing facts here, both positive and negative. I had no idea, for example, that Arizona is currently using the same amount of water as in 1955 despite its population having grown 1000% since then. I've written a number of times about the folly of building megacities in a desert and the explosive population growth in places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Southern California. But this isn't a problem limited to the Southwest; the Deep South has experienced similar population growth and major cities like Atlanta will be out of water in a decade or two as well unless drastic changes occur.

There's a macabre element to all of this from the perspective of a Midwesterner. As the country points and laughs at the crumbling once-great cities of the Rust Belt – More Detroit ruin porn! More Cleveland jokes! More potshots at Buffal…well, ok, Buffalo sucks. – will they be laughing in 20 years at the cities and regions they are now rushing to de-populate? The quest for cheap, compliant labor has led the nation's economy to reallocate people to Texas and Alabama and Florida and their neighbors. Will it reallocate them back to Ohio and Michigan when it's 120 degrees in July across Texas? When ten or fifteen more years of drought rob the Sun Belt of the benefit of the sacred "Low cost of living"? There are solutions to a water crisis, albeit expensive ones. Desalination is the current last resort, but I'm taking bets on the first proposal to build a pipeline to move water from the Great Lakes southward.

While American politics and public policy are hardly efficient, we usually manage to do things slightly better than China. Which I mention only because China is years ahead of us on the water crisis front, and their response has fallen just a few steps short of terraforming. Entire rivers are disappearing into massive canals built to funnel water from the pastoral south to the arid north. The "South-North Water Diversion Project" – bonus points for truth in labeling, guys – essentially robs Peter to pay Paul, diverting part of the Yangtze to replenish rivers in the north that have long since been bled dry. Interestingly, the Soviet Union once considered and partially implemented a similar project only to abandon it when they realized it was a disaster in the making. Hopefully the United States can come up with a slightly less terrible idea than shipping water south.

In the end what may save this country from doing something equally stupid is not forethought but the staggering costs. China has sunk over $100 billion into its project, and canals/pipelines/etc snaked across the country would cost as much if not several times more. Unwilling to pony up the money and faced with weather that is likely to become harsher as climate change intensifies, the next half-century may bring a slow reversal of the north-south migration of the past thirty years. If water becomes expensive and in short supply, many of the economic advantages of flocking southward will disappear and those summers, which will only get longer and hotter, will seem like a much greater cost to bear.

For as much as the media and political class talk about a future with dwindling supplies of oil, I wonder if there isn't a more obvious impending shortage right under our noses.

Here's a tip: one way to tell when a party is ready to govern what fancies itself a rich and powerful nation is to look for signs of infighting, disregard for leadership, and the absence of party discipline. Those are all good signs. Vote for that party and you can't go wrong.

The noted commie pinko rag Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on the Republican Party's inability to organize, of all things, a single coherent response to Tuesday evening's State of the Union Address. In addition to the official party response, the Tea Party (Mike Lee, the Utah Republican, even though the Tea Party is nonpartisan and totally not just an extreme wing of the GOP) and Rand Paul (just…on his own accord, I guess) will be giving responses. Then the official party strategy is to rush members of Congress out of the chamber and to "rapid response stations stocked with iPads" to encourage them to start Twittering and Facebooking and recording 6-second Vine videos.

On a tangential note, I still don't get Vine. Like, at all.

It's easy to point and laugh at John Boehner and other Republicans in "leadership" positions and call them ineffectual.
online pharmacy ivermectin best drugstore for you

So let's do that right now, shall we? Boehner and McConnell have the charisma of sea cucumbers and McConnell built his career on a tactic – threatening to withhold party financial support via the RSCC – that is no longer relevant now that every half-baked wingnut who wants to run can raise vast amounts of money from eccentric and wealthy donors. As the successive redistricting sessions make incumbents safer and safer, the ability of the leadership to do anything to rein in their members is rapidly approaching zero. So as much fun as it is to mock Mr.
online pharmacy nolvadex best drugstore for you

Boehner, he's probably doing the best he can. And Joe Cannon himself couldn't keep this mob of militiamen and sociopaths in line.

The amazing thing about this particular bit of disorganization is that giving the response to the SotU address is tantamount to political suicide in recent years. Nobody benefits from doing it. If you do well, no one will remember. The only thing you stand to achieve is failure that will haunt you forever (Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio). This is the sixth year of the Obama presidency. Even people who like him are weary of hearing the same speeches. And even what little audience sticks around until the end is unlikely to wait even longer to heard some D-list Republican give an awkward rebuttal in an empty room. There is everything to lose and nothing to gain, yet they're too full of themselves to realize that the leadership might be trying to stop them for their own good:

The response is a risky endeavor, often marred by inelegance and blunder. "There's never been a good one," said John Feehery, who was an aide to J. Dennis Hastert, a Republican and a former House speaker.
buy strattera generic rxbuyonlinewithoutprescriptionrx.net over the counter

"There's this element of getting too close to the sun. They think they're hot stuff, and their hot stuff gets melted in the glare of the lights. It's very risky."

It's a good indication of where the GOP has gone in the last decade-plus that its zealots from the Nineties now sound like the sober voice of reason in a chorus of barking hyenas. Best of luck tonight, Rand. I'm sure you're gonna do great!

Several weeks ago during the brief attention paid by the media to fast food workers on strike, one of my friends shared this grammatically inept meme on Facebook:

This is the sort of bizarro-populist right wing message that resonates with Regular Americans with no particular interest in or knowledge of politics, economics, or anything else relevant to the topic. It's a mildly amusing take on a remarkably dark undercurrent in the psyche of our business and financial elite: the yearning for some future techno-society in which robots will do everything and human beings with their pesky wages and benefits and refusal to work 24 hours per day will become totally unnecessary. Once our economic betters have figured out how to get you to work for minimum wage and without benefits, the logical next step – the only means of further Controlling Costs, in fact – is to find a way to avoid paying you at all.

Whenever I hear something that touches on this theme I cheer myself up with thoughts of the times "We'll replace you with robots!" has been tried and ended in miserable failure. Here's an example: did you know, despite this fact being absent both from Michael Moore's ultra-liberal documentary and ten thousand mainstream media accounts of GM's bankruptcy a few years ago, that the financial collapse of what was once the world's largest corporation was precipitated by Roger Smith's bright idea to replace all of the autoworkers with robots? True story. General Motors under Smith spent $90 billion on robotics and automation in nine years.

Think about that for a second. Ninety billion dollars. $90,000,000,000.00. Of course none of it worked, with factory robots breaking down constantly, painting one another, and welding car doors shut. It's easy to say that the company got what it deserved and forget about it. But think for a second about the mindset of a group of people so committed to the concept of eliminating the workforce (and the UAW) that it would piss away ninety billion dollars trying to do it.
buy lipitor online buy lipitor no prescription

Even if the Worker Bots worked flawlessly, how could that possibly make financial sense? How many decades and centuries of "savings" from lower wages to earn back those sunk costs?

buy diflucan online buy diflucan no prescription

And how much money would the Robo-Factories demand in the future for maintenance, upgrades, and eventual replacement with newer and better technology? For $90 billion, GM simply could have purchased Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and most of its other foreign rivals – several times over. Of course, in that scenario they'd still have to pay people to make cars.

The fact is that General Motors didn't go bankrupt, it committed financial suicide because its executive culture fostered a loathing for the UAW and the hourly workforce that was so extreme that it obliterated basic logic and business sense. The idea was not to replace the workers with Japanese robots (GM Robotics was acquired from Fujitsu) because it would save money; it was to replace the workers with robots because fuck the workers. Try to picture the mindset of people who would rather run their company into the ground than give their grunt employees a Cost of Living raise. It's like an airline that would rather blow all of its planes up on the runway than give passengers an entire can of soda.

But enough about Delta.

When GM finally circled the drain we were treated to hundreds of tales of largely symbolic and irrelevant white collar largesse – Executives used private planes to fly to Washington and beg for a bailout! – and uppity auto workers livin' large; the preferred strategy in most of the right-wing media was to bleat the phrase "JOBS BANK!" like a kid with Tourette's and a two-word vocabulary. No one seemed to remember that GM was doing just fine until Roger Smith, a man who had clearly watched too many episodes of The Jetsons at half-mast, ruined the corporate product line (Have worse cars ever been made in the United States than 1980s GM products?) and decided that getting rid of anyone who didn't have a white collar job was worth any cost.

Most people in charge of major corporations like fast food chains are just as greedy as Roger Smith but not nearly as stupid.

McDonald's hasn't turned its restaurants into a giant automated vending machine because they know it won't work. But I bet their boardroom is full of people dreaming of a future in which it will.

Right now it is -12 degrees F outside. Weather like this is life-threatening, but I'm lying on a couch in a t-shirt watching The Simpsons and typing on a laptop. The worst thing I have to worry about at the moment is cabin fever, as by Tuesday I'll have been stuck in the house for three days.
online pharmacy fluoxetine best drugstore for you

The weather is at worst a minor inconvenience to me because I live indoors. I assume that most of you are in the habit of taking this for granted, as I am. But a few times per year when the weather is particularly brutal I walk home from work thinking, you know, it really wouldn't be very pleasant to sleep on a park bench right now.

The older I get, the more I realize how tenuous is our hold on the basic comforts of middle-class life. Whether or not we realize it, every single one of us is three misfortunes away from being homeless. You get fired. You get sick while you have no insurance. You decide to self-medicate with cheap vodka. Your path to poverty and homelessness is smooth and clear at that point.
buy amoxicillin generic gaetzpharmacy.com no prescription

We like to think we're better than being homeless; sometimes we find out the hard way that we're not.

Over the weekend I saw a handful of news stories about one city or another is devoting resources to getting the homeless indoors during the "Arctic Blast" affecting half the country today. It's just the sort of band-aid approach Americans are good at. Certainly it's good that the homeless will have a better chance of getting indoors when it's -20. But what about when things go back to normal and it's "only" 10 or 20 degrees rather than below zero? Hundreds of homeless people die of hypothermia in comparatively tame winter weather every year.
online pharmacy vibramycin best drugstore for you

It's not a problem any of us really like thinking about. We go out of our way to avoid making eye contact with homeless people so we can pretend they don't exist or, failing that, that they're not human. If we look at them and talk to them like people ("Sorry, I don't have any cash on me" or "OK, here you go. I hope you have a good one.") then we have a much harder time pretending that we're fundamentally different. Don't get me wrong, I'm an irritable person and when a completely insane panhandler is all over me I'm doing my best to get away. But if those of us who lucky enough to have four walls and a roof treat homeless people like people it's much harder to forget that there but for the grace of god go any of us.

Maybe that's why Americans expend so much time and energy belittling and lecturing the homeless (and the poor in general). We're not afraid of them so much as we're afraid of how much of ourselves we see in them.