Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Jobs, the REAL question

In honor of Joe Huffman, who taught me to ask the One Big Question...Joe's a bit busy this weekend, so I'll iterate what he would say if someone asked him the One Big Question which has formed in my mind.

Simple question, that.

It seems that we are about to decide the policy direction of our Nation based on one little word, "Jobs", but has ANYONE stopped to ask what a "Job" actually is, how it is properly defined, how the statistics about "Jobs" are actually derived, and whether ANYONE ever checks those statistics for accuracy?

I might not be an economist, but I have dealt, to some degree, with the idea of budgeting. In budgeting, we have a concept called "Full Time Equivalent". At any sizable organization, public or private, that employs people, there is a standard definition of what it costs to have one person perform work, and that is the FTE.

Basically, the FTE is what one "standard" person draws as a wage, together with the value of that person's economic benefits (vacation days, health insurance, etc), over a period of 2,080 hours (one standard working year of 52 forty-hour weeks). My FTE, just before I retired from copping, was just over $90,0000. That was a wage of $28.56/hr, plus annual benefits running to just over $30K.

So, for full-time employees, the costs are fairly easy to break down. The tricky part is how to measure less-than-full-time work.

That's NOT tricky if fractions or decimals of an FTE are used. The average US wage (Median wage, to be accurate) last year was $26,364. Just search on "average US wage", and you will get all sorts of sites which display the statistic, and tell you how it was derived.

Why then, does the Government "play" with the figure so loosely? Here's an example of "playing". With "Job Creation" now the measure of whether a candidate "has it in him" to be President, why haven't we demanded, and gotten, a precise definition of what One Created Job actually is?

Here's what "One Created Job" ought to be: One FTE, measured against the last, accurate US Median Wage, projected as if that job lasted one year. A couple of years ago, when the "stimulus" was the big topic of discussion inside the Beltway, and "shovel-ready jobs" were being "created", I remember reading that the Obama Administration was claiming One Created Job for every job opening that lasted 15 days or more. Of course, that's crap. No two-week job ought to ever be compared to a full-time position.

Since we all have calculators, let's do the math. Taking $26,000 as the annual wage in question, and adding in, say, $10K in benefits, we have an FTE for those "shovel-ready" jobs of $36,000, or $3K/month. If those jobs only last, say, 3 months each, then each one is 0.25 FTE, and the base earning is only $9K for each job. Did YOU ever see those jobs listed that way? I didn't. That same Obama Administration (and, likely the Bush II Administration before it) claimed Christmas Seasonal workers as "created jobs" every Fall, despite the fact that those jobs never last past the middle of January, and are less than .25 FTE each. Same thing with Summer Seasonals, etc

The Government (and candidates to run it) lies, and our entire National future is being decided by this particular brand of lie.

Let's ALL go activist on the political process here, and demand that ANYONE who uses Job Creation in any sort of political statement be REQUIRED to prove out how many actual FTEs he/she is referring to, and what the actual dollar figure of that FTE actually is.

Can we do that, people? I think we can, and I expect THAT sharp saber, if universally used, would deflate a LOT of political hot-air balloons, if not ALL of them.

You have your assignments. Attend political rallies, and at the right moment, shout the One Big Question at the candidate(s): "Sir, what is YOUR definition of a Job"? I guarantee that the pretenders will NOT be ready to answer you, so YOU be ready to repeat your question.

Earth Day, 2012

There's some history behind Earth Day, you need to go to the Wiki and read it. You actually only need to read the first paragraph, because it will tell you (between the lines, I'm sure it wasn't written that way on purpose or the Wiki would have been deleted by now). Note in the Wiki that the original Earth Day was all about stewardship of the planet and it's natural environment, which is what it should be about today, but isn't.

Note also, in the Wiki, that the United Nations hijacked Earth Day three years ago. It is now just another tool of that anti-national-sovereignty body, which uses and recommends socialism as it's mechanism to destroy sovereign capitalist governments.

When the UN hijacked Earth Day, they brought in the "Mother Earth" thing. Back when the original Earth Day was proclaimed, the Mother Earth or Mother Nature thing was a joke, as in the margarine commercial. Now it is a religion, and as such, is the only religion the United Nations recognizes (overtly, they recognize Islam under the table).

So, we have had a progression here, a progressive change. It's just another one of the progressive changes that wound up as a socialist tool, but environmentalism went from "conservation", as advanced one hundred years ago by Teddy Roosevelt, to Earth Day (let's ALL save the Planet) in 1970, to today's version (we're acolytes of Gaia, the Earth Goddess).

The only true version is the original. We can use the bounty of nature, but we must conserve it, so there will always be some.

That's what your Rivrdog follows as his outdoor creed. I recycle, too, in fact, devoted yesterday morning to getting the non-curbside recyclables together to take to City Hall, where, once a year, their huge parking lot is used for actual GOOD, and becomes a massive recycling center for the hard-to-recycle items.

If you conserve nature, you've done your duty to the planet. Socialism does not count as doing your duty to the planet, nor does prostrating yourself before the false idol of Gaia.

I knew Ronald Reagan, and you may NOT compare yourself to him, Obama

I knew Ronald Reagan because being stationed in CA during the late 1960s then the late 70s to early 80s, he was the talk of the State. The much-more-respectful MSM reported more accurately on the President then.

Ronald Reagan started out as a union guy, President of the Screen Actor's Guild, but at the time, the "wild-eyed socialists"* in Hollywood were in the minority, not the majority like now. There were a LOT of WW2 veterans calling each other Brother and Sister at Union meetings then, and there was at least SOME respect for the USA amongst the members of SAG.

After his SAG stint, Reagan went on to get elected Lieutenant Governor, then Governor of California, which, at the time really WAS "paradise on earth" (yes, readers, I could easily have been a dope-smoking hippie myself, they were graciously accepted most places then, as somewhat of a side-show, but they were accepted there).

Reagan went on to become President, taking over from Jimmy Carter, who dispite being a Naval Academy graduate, and a small businessman, made a piss-poor President. I had a fellow B52 crew-member who bought a residence in Riverside in '81, and had to pay a 18% mortgage rate (and the rates were FALLING then!), IIRC. I rented, was scared out of the home-buyer's market.

President Reagan's Airborne Command Post used to land at my duty station, March AFB (Now March Air Reserve Base), which was then the headquarters for the Strategic Air Command's Fifteenth Air Force, and it was home to double-Squadron wings of both B52s and KC-135 tankers. The Presidential Airborne Command Post was a brand-new E-4 (Boeing 747), which was outfitted as the President's place to fight a nuke war with the USSR from, even before Air Force One, it was THAT important. I got a VIP tour of the top-secret aircraft, which was later featured (a mock-up of it was featured) in the HBO movie "By Dawn's Early Light".

Gawd, this is digressy, isn't it?

*The point here was supposed to be: I knew Ronald Reagan, I probably knew him better than you do, Presient Obama. He was NOT a "wild-eyed socialist", but YOU ARE. Plus, you're a liar to boot, Obama, and I never knew Reagan to lie. 

Oh, BTW, President Obama, Warren Buffet, who has put up with you to an excessive degree, has just signaled you to quit calling your "tax the producers out of existence" plan the "Buffet Rule". Do the old, sick guy a favor and stop with that nonsense. Don't bother to try to call it the "Reagan Rule", either. Reagan wanted to lower taxes for EVERYONE, not just the dependable sloths who will always vote to get their "free stuff". Oh, and quit smoking that history-revisionist crack-pipe, Mister President. It's not legal yet. If you want it to be, fire Biden from your ticket and put Ron Paul on there.... 

Genocide by Malaria?

Fifty years ago, Rachel Carson wrote "Silent Spring", the book which claimed that the widespread use of DDT was going to eliminate all the songbirds from the Earth (and eagles and all other birds). The world believed her, and followed her suggestion, which was to ban the manufacture and use of the chemical almost everywhere.

The problem was, that with the then-widespread use of DDT and long-range aircraft to spray it with, we had just about eliminated the most deadly pest in the world fifty years ago, the malaria-carrying mosquito. Once the ban went into place, the mosquito rebounded rapidly, and since then, untold millions of tropical-world residents have died of malaria, borne almost exclusively by the mosquito, with most of the victims being babies and children.

Now, if any one person, under any other circumstances at all, could be directly linked to the killing of millions of innocent babies and children, the entire civilized world (and most of the less-civilized world as well) would howl for their head.

To my knowledge, no one ever linked Rachel Carson to this form of intentional genocide.

Why not?

Answer below the fold...

Wednesday WTFs

The headlines can be self-answering questions.

WTF: Why is Michelle Obama complaining about always being portrayed as "that angry black woman"? My guess is stated in an old African proverb: "the leopard can't change it's spots". In ghetto-speak: "you bees what you is". Seriously, even when she practices, such as for set-piece TV interviews with the lefty press, she can't seem to project sweetness and light, no matter how hard she might try. Why am I the Greatest Curmudgeon of All Time? 'Nuff said.

WTF: Why do we find John Edwards so particularly loathesome? No, we DO NOT need science, and I suspect the linked article was written to give Edwards some "victim status" by saying that he physically can't hold his mouth right. John Edwards is particularly loathesome because he is a smarmy, crooked, immoral liar, and an ambulance-chasing lawyer to boot. Case closed.

WTF: Yes, Virginia, there IS a covert war going on against the Mad Mullahs of Iran. It is a GOOD war, a MORAL war, the best than can be fought the best substitute for turning the place into glass. However, there may be more to the story. Iran HAS, in the past, offed their own key people in their nuke program when it began to appear to the Mad Mullahs that they were about to defect or they were becoming religiously unreliable (couldn't tell Halal from Haram).

WTF: Bully for Ford for designing an automobile that is so efficient, but to call it "100 MPG" is bullshit. There is NO such thing as as a "miles-per-gallon" measurement to electricity, that is strictly an advertising gimmick. The electricity use in an electric hybrid car should be stated in "kilowatts per mile" or some such actual statement of the consumption of ELECTRIC power when the car is operating on it's battery. If there were any truth in car sales, and there never has been, gas/electric hybrids would carry two ratings, one for operation on the gas engine, and one for operation on the battery. In most hybrids, the cars can combine power from both sources, but that is difficult to measure and impossible to state accurately without differential equations to solve (and I can't, can you?). The simple approach would just be to say that the car gets (x) mpg on gas and will go (y) distance on battery. Even that measurement would lack total accuracy, but that's OK by the marketing divisions. The Chevy Volt is STILL being advertised as going 40 miles on it's battery, but in real life, no one goes much more than 25 miles before the generator-engine cuts in. That's a 40% difference, but Chevy, a division of Government Motors, takes after it's parent, the US Government, and is encouraged to lie. It's a "green" thing, and the rulz say that it's OK to lie about "green".

Whack-a-mole

If you go to Chuck-e-Cheese's, or whatever is the awful pizza and game arcade place in your burg, you'll usually find a full-size game of Whack-a-Mole that you can play. You can work up quite a lather swinging that mallet at those mole-heads which keep popping out of those holes.

The game is meant to not have any satisfying ending, unless your own sweat and body odor counts as a plus. Oh, I suppose you get points for mole-heads struck, and if you get enough points, a free game token, but it's not like you can win the game.

Life imitates games. In our case today, the Democratic Party has brought up a game of political whack-a-mole, and those tokens have been rolling into their slots (coffers) since summer, and those GOP mole-heads have just kept popping up to be whacked back down by the (D)onks and their willing partners on the Left, the MSM.

I blame the GOP for this stupid game, not the Democrats. It's the GOP who puts their candidates through this sort of idiocy, and it's the GOP who could put and end to the game, pull the plug on it, tomorrow, if they wanted to.

If you just got off the slow shuttle from Planet Zargon, having missed the first part of the election cycle, the game works like this: there are almost weekly "debates", held by the MSM and other orgs for the GOP candidates. After each one of these "debates" (not really debates, they are just talking-point exchanges, with no winner ever declared, just assumed), a "poll" is taken, almost always resulting in a new "front-runner" from among the 8 or so candidates. When that "front-runner" (the new "Mole") is announced, the MSM opens a salvo of light artillery, followed by the heavy artillery of the Obama war-machine. That's the "whack" in the Whack-a-Mole game. The Mole-du-jour is struck on the head, falls back down into the hole, and a new "poll" a few days later begins to show that "mole" slipping backwards in the polling. Then, another "debate" is held....and the cycle starts all over again.

Who gains what from the Game? Obama gains the most, his machine showing, time after time, that the GOP doesn't have its shit in one sock, to use an old military expression. Obama also gains from the Stupid Party being in the spotlight instead of him, since he can't stand close scruitiny. The "Mole-head" candidates get some increased exposure, brief as it may be, which usually boosts their campaign donations, but only for a brief time. The MSM gains almost as much as Obama, showing once again that their assumption of Kingmaker status is closer to the truth than not.

Let's be frank: much as we hate to think of it, the MSM, with all their apparatus for lying to us in place, is fully capable of steering this election to Obama, despite his sagging poll numbers. Therefore, if the GOP has it's head screwed on straight, it would see the MSM as it's main enemy, not Obama, and it would properly conclude that its main job as a political party is to prevent the MSM from being Kingmaker (again).

The GOP will never control the MSM, so they give up zero future gain by cutting the MSM off at the pass, to use a term that any Reagan-esque cowboys left in the GOP could understand. There's nothing to gain for the GOP in any of the MSM's propaganda apparat. In no measure would the MSM ever support a GOP political goal, at least not before claiming that they invented that goal first.

To fight the MSM properly (and thereby win the election), the GOP must make a point of denying "news" sources and political fodder to them.

That means that the GOP must leave the game parlor, having cut the cord that plugs in and powers the Whack-a-Mole game.

Yes, politics is really just that simple.

Race doesn't matter...

...if you're a Democrat.

This ayem, at 10:16 PST, I'm fixing breakfast and watching Fox News' morning show. Megan Kelly has some story to do involving one Rep. Cardoza, a CA Democrat (from Atwater, where I have been stationed back when there was a SAC base there), who criticized Obama.

So, the Fox producers whiz through their Rolodexes, and come up with a (D)onk talking head to interview on the subject of (D)onk vs. (D)onk.

That person is one Tara Dowdell, an analyst (that's pronounced ANN-al-ist, not ANAL-ist) who regularly communicates on things (d)onk-ish.

Ms. Dowdell seemed to be taken aback by Cardoza's even-tempered critique of Obama. So taken aback, in fact, that she was moved to use the old Southern (and now racist, as I've been told) expression, "the pot calling the kettle black".

Now, if Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, or Yours Truly had used that expression descriptively, we would be rapidly accused of being racist.

Let's just wait and listen. Will we hear a cry of outrage from the race-pimps of the Left? Is it snowing in Addis Ababa?

If you'll excuse me...

I'm headed for Lowe's to go Christmas Shopping, since this article tells me that the owners of Lowe's probably still support the idea of Christmas.

Dear RNC...

I'm writing this letter to you because from where you sit behind those big Mahogany desks in DeeCee, you seem to have lost sight of what this onrushing election means to us in right-of-center America.

This Election is everything.

If we lose it, the Marxist currently "occupying" 1600 Pennsylvania Ave will get to stay there, and if he's re-elected, it will probably mean he grew coat-tails, and will get the House back as well.

Were that to happen, it means nothing less then the end of America as WE know it.

Were that to happen, it means nothing less than the end of America as WE know it.

OK, I said it twice, did you GET it?

Obama.Can't.Happen.Again.

Republican National Committee, YOU stand between Obama and America, and only YOU can prevent Obama Two, the Final Solution for that pesky thing he has to call a Constitution for now.

Now that we have the motivation down cold, Why the HELL are you still sitting behiund that big desk, grinning at me like I'm your whacky brother who strips in public? GET YOUR ASS IN GEAR, MISTER!

Here's a short list of what you're currently doing wrong, together with some fixes:

• Shitcan the entire rest of the "debate" schedule, RNC. These aren't debates, they are simply opportunities for the candidates to dress well, put on makeup, and appear Stupid in front of a leftist moderator, while not having the time to actually SAY anything about their ideas. The "debates" are sound-bite politics, and we're sick to death of sound-bite politics. In case you haven't figured out this program, here it is in a nutshell: the Left sponsors "debates", waits for the inevitable goofs to happen, and then the leftist press hops on the unfortunate candidates who goofed. They also take the "front-runner" after each "debate" and give that person some "special" treatment (in Cain's case, it was a Mark one Mod Zero Bimbo attack). This process does no one on the Right any good at all, and it is just a campaign weapon of the Left. Take that weapon out of their arsenal by cancelling the "Debates".
• Make your choices, RNC. Narrow the field down to three, and do it NOW. DO NOT wait for Iowa or New Hampshire, do it NOW. You know who you want representing the Right vs Obama, so tell the others to go home and cheer. You can DO that, remember? You RUN the Party, REMEMBER?
• Quit egging on the "social" conservative vs. "fiscal" conservative wars. Most of the candidates are both social AND fiscal conservatives. When the RNC encourages the emphasizing of social conservativism, the Left cringes at the thought of "social" engineering coming from the Right (abortion controls, etc), and that adds fuel to the fire that we're standing too close to already. The social conservative aspects of the philosophy of the Right should NOT ever be emphasized. Let the Left take it for granted that we're conservatives, period, fiscal AND social, and leave it at that. RNC, you''re not going to repair three generations of Leftist social destruction by next November, so quit trying. If you gain power, just do what you want to do, but since the social engineering is actually socially UN-popular, electorate-wide, you do yourself no favors by highlighting it. Those who would being it to the fore, such as Michelle Bachmann and maybe Newt, need to be given one warning, then squashed like bugs. In this election, fiscal conservatism is an easy sell, and a winning political philosophy, unless the GOP boots it badly in the meanwhile by agreeing to let Obama print more dollars, either for here OR Europe. Stick with the winning philosophy, avoid the losing philosophies.

OK, RNC, you have your orders. Hit the road, and I expect results by mid-week. Fail me here and your face goes on the dart-board just like Obama's, and believe me, YOU don't want that, you're ugly enough as it is.

Alar Two

Remember the Alar "scare" of 1989-1990? When the enviroweenies shut down Washington's considerable apple industry for a season by hollering about the toxicity of a chemical which had been proven safe?

Read the history at the link, then open the page to "Alar Two", the current hysteria over the tiniest trace amounts of arsenic in apple juice.

The alarmists, lead by the reality-show Doctor Oz, who never saw a medical sensation he wouldn't exploit for his own personal aggrandizement, may be in for a surprise. I seem to recall, lo these 20-years plus since the Alar One scare, that apple-growing States passed some anti-disparagement legislation to hold any future scaremongers criminally AND civilly liable.

I just hope that when Washington State issues the warrants, they let us know where the perp walk is going to be so I can transport myself there and cheer the extradition agents as they haul Oz and his ilk into the jail sally-ports.

Well, there will be one good thing to come out of it: there'll probably be cheap apple juice in the stores as the demand fails. I'll buy it. I have a phase-change method to make some fine brandy out of it...