Flippin’ Burgers — Cali Workforce Field Observations

Posted on March 29, 2014 by Alaska

Our local Nations Giant Burger franchise was staffed, for as long as I can remember, exclusively with Mexican and Mexican-American women. Food was great, too.

Then two years ago, they pretty much vanished, replaced by older white women who, well, let’s just say they’d obviously led hard lives. The food quality and service was noticeably worse.

Today, we noticed all the white women are gone. Every crew member is now a college-age young man. Some probably have degrees, too.

But the food tastes great, and service was polite and with a smile.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

RNS Quote of the Day, Death is Life Edition

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Alaska

“Every day at work I declare people dead. They have no signs of life, no heartbeat, no brain activity. I sign a piece of paper knowing in my heart that they are not actually dead. I could, right then and there, suspend them. But I have to put them in a body bag. It’s frustrating to know there’s a solution.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Why I Never Ran for Public Office

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Alaska

…nor shall I ever.

As a yute, I was a political junkie of the highest water. When that Cable TV came to our town I clicked right past MTV and Madonna to C-SPAN and stayed there, with occasional digressions. I was a Joe Biden supporter in 1987, before anybody on the West Coast knew who he was.

Then, after years of volunteering on political campaigns, I interned in Sacramento two decades ago and saw what the reality of holding office was like. You think the revelations of the Leland Yee indictment (which you really should read) are movie-script-worthy? Child, that mode of operation is near-universal in California politics behind closed doors. Not gunrunning necessarily, but general casual disregard of the law, ethics, morals, etc. in the pursuit of funds is de rigueur. Cured me of thoughts of running for office myself, or being remotely involved in that world, forever.

[Of course, lawbreaking is near-universal in much of the Cali business world, too, but that’s more along the lines of what Og rather naively claims ain’t here yet. Sorry pal, it is.]

Posted in Order of the imperial upraised middle finger. | 2 Comments

Dang-y Dangy Dang Dang-y Dangy Dang

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Alaska

Can’t get Inna’s “In Your Eyes” out of my head these days. As with much Romanian-export-pop-tart material, I’m convinced the lyrics are meant to be ignored. But the chorus just makes me laugh. Crank it!

Okay, okay, as a palate-cleanser, Pentatonix’ is my favorite arrangement of “Royals” by far.

And here’s another Inna just for kicks.
Continue reading →

Posted in Kewel! | 3 Comments

RNS Quote of the Day: Germ Theory of Liberty Edition

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Alaska

…[M]alaria and hookworm… had turned generations of Southerners into “anemic, weak, and unproductive children and adults.” Not surprisingly, Thornhill believes that the collectivism of the old South—the adherence to tradition, ethnocentrism, and suspicion of outsiders that marked his childhood—stemmed from its historically high pathogen load.

Similarly, he attributes the progress he’s seen toward a more egalitarian South to the alleviation of the region’s most pernicious health problems. “You still hear people say that the old South will rise again, but I doubt it has a chance unless disease prevalence goes up dramatically,” he says.

Tracing human psychologies, both social and political, to biological germ-avoidance evolutionary response. Fascinating stuff, even if the author falls into the conservative-liberal pigeonholing trap at the end of the article.

Posted in Academia and Other Nonsense | 5 Comments

Much too trusting

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Phil Kadath

This story about a Ukrainian Marine who is feeling “betrayed” by his former friends in the Russian army after they attacked is a little bit sad.

‘Sorry brother’: Ukraine marines betrayed by Russian raid

Just a year ago, Ruslan, a marine in Ukraine’s top battalion stationed in the Crimean port of Feodosiya, helped Russian soldiers paint their armoured personnel carrier for a military parade.

On Monday, he spotted the same vehicle being used to block the gate to his base as Russians showered its barracks with tear gas and stun grenades in a pre-dawn raid that took the unarmed Ukrainians by complete surprise.

“We thought of them as our own, as our brothers,” said Ruslan, who declined to give his last name.

“We trusted them… and they trusted us,” he told AFP at a Feodosiya cafe after spending hours in Russian custody.

“And now they received these orders (to attack us), and what they did was completely inhuman. It’s not the Christian way.”

Ruslan, who is in his late 20s, said he was torn by Moscow’s seizure and annexation of Crimea as his parents live in Ukraine and his wife and children were born on the peninsula.

The Feodosiya base, where he served for six years, is one of the last Ukrainian military bases in Crimea to fall under Russian control.

But it was not the tear gas that stung these marines the most — it was the Russians who broke a promise to allow them to leave the base peacefully on Monday in exchange for their arms.

“There was an agreement that we hand over the weapons… and at noon today we were to lower the flag and drive out on our trucks to go to the mainland. But that’s not what happened,” Ruslan said.

The unit locked up its armoury and handed it over — but then was woken up by a raid at 4:00 am.

– ‘They took everything’ –

“They fired bullets at us while we were completely unarmed,” said Yevgeniy, another marine.

“My friend had his nose broken with the butt of a rifle for nothing, he put up no resistance.

“They took our military IDs, phones, money — everything they could lay their hands on.”

The marines said that if they had known this was going to happen, they would never have surrendered their weapons.

Tis a pity they forgot that the only “good guys” are the ones standing next to you with a rifle.

I would also say that I could almost understand his trust of the Russian soldiers, except for what Putin ordered his army to do to the Georgians less than a decade ago. Their commander should have better instructed them about fraternizing with anyone connected with Putin.

Posted in Evil walks the earth | Leave a comment

Last Day of the Quarter

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Phil Kadath

I’m off for a week (give or take a day). I’ve got some range time planned, and some dental work. Hit the email if you’re interested in joining me for either experience.

This quarter has been rough. Other than finishing my table, the booth-time has been brutal. The main difficulty being that welding is an art and I am not an artist. I have not got the champion-level gamer hand/eye coordination it takes to arc weld, especially vertically, so “learning” consists of me making ugly welds 25 times and then something clicks and they get almost pretty.

But like last quarter, the book learning portion of the class has put me on the Dean’s List, so I’ve got that going for me.

Since it has been so rough, I can’t justify posting anything less \m/ than this

I’m not really all that hip on Slipknot. I am more a fan of Jim Root. But this track is kicking my ass again, lately. So there you go.

Posted in Kewel!, Phil Goes to College | Leave a comment

Look for the Union Label

Posted on March 26, 2014 by Phil Kadath

The person standing next to them is a government official with the power to shut down your business.

Union representatives from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are now accompanying federal government safety inspectors on site visits to review labor complaints at nonunion private businesses, The Daily Caller has learned.

SEIU and other labor unions can accompany the government inspectors on site visits due to a quiet and contested Obama administration rule clarification issued last year in response to a request from a union representative.

SEIU agents recently accompanied an inspector from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a division of the Department of Labor, on three visits to nonunion work sites under contract with the Houston-based janitorial company Professional Janitorial Services (PJS).

…..

The visits were made to investigate OSHA complaints by SEIU-friendly employees alleging that the nonunion janitorial company did not provide workers safety goggles and gloves in some instances. Though each of the inspections found proper goggles and gloves, OSHA fined PJS for other alleged infractions related to not keeping certain safety data sheets or providing proper training information on use of cleaning chemicals.

…..

The union representatives are allowed to accompany OSHA to nonunion work sites due to an Obama administration rule clarification that was accused in congressional testimony of violating federal laws.

OSHA deputy assistant secretary Richard Fairfax wrote in a February 21, 2013 clarification letter that union agents can accompany OSHA inspectors to site visits at companies without collective bargaining agreements. Fairfax wrote his letter in response to a query from United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union health and safety specialist Steve Sallman.

OSHA’s published regulation on the matter does not refer to unions, but allows for an OSHA-approved “third party who is not an employee of the employer (such as an industrial hygienist or a safety engineer)” to accompany an OSHA inspector.

Unions: Using government’s monopoly on the use of force to get their nose under your tent flap because their product doesn’t sell in the free market.

Posted in The Government is Not Your Friend | 3 Comments

RNS Quote of the Day: 03/26/2014

Posted on March 26, 2014 by Phil Kadath

So long as I don’t give them an opportunity to go for the race card in the first few exchanges, you can argue them into silence. At least the generic ones in the PacNW.

It’s a safe bet that the next smug liberal dork you hear repeating the cheesy cliché about how “Reality has a liberal bias” doesn’t live in Ukraine.

The key to understanding liberals is realizing that they are immune to argument. The concept underlying the idea of a debate is that facts and reasoning can lead one to change his previous conclusions. But liberals begin with their conclusions; facts and reasoning that may undermine the preexisting conclusion must be at least ignored, if not actively attacked. This is why you see liberals shouting about jailing global warming deniers as blizzards rage outside.

Kurt Schlichter – Ukraine Illustrates Hard Truths Liberals Won’t Face

Ukraine illustrates the idea that bad people will do bad things no matter how well you treat them. And just like anti-gun bigots, leftists don’t understand this and will keep trying to hug their muggers.

Posted in Evil walks the earth | 1 Comment

Don’t their arms ever get tired

Posted on March 25, 2014 by Phil Kadath

They are always “up in arms” over something.

‘Demeaning insult’ in John Roberts’s Voting Rights Act decision

One of the enduring mysteries of Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion striking down part of the Voting Rights Act is which part of the Constitution the landmark civil rights law actually violated.

Roberts argued that the Voting Rights Act violated the “tradition” of “equal sovereignty” of the states. That concept is far more dubious than it might seem at first glance, according to a legal paper published by two longtime voting rights experts.

“The ‘equal sovereignty’ principle is not in the Constitution,” said James Blacksher, an Alabama attorney with a long career in Voting Rights. “It is, as the Chief Justice says, a ‘historical tradition.” Go straight past the penumbras, hang a right at the emanations.

Blacksher’s paper, co-authored with Harvard law professor Lani Guinier, argues that Roberts’s opinion in the Voting Rights Act case is a descendant of what is widely regarded as the worst Supreme Court decision in American history: The 1857 Dred Scott case, in which the high court held that blacks, slave or free, could never be citizens of the United States. That case is the “origin story” of the “equal sovereignty” principle, the authors argue, because the opinion by Chief Justice Roger Taney held that it would violate the sovereignty of the slave states to recognize blacks as American citizens. By invoking that principle, the authors write in Free at Last: Rejecting Equal Sovereignty and Restoring the Constitutional Right to Vote, Roberts was reviving “the oldest and most demeaning official insult to African-Americans in American constitutional history.”

While the Dred Scott decision is the origin of the phrase “equal sovereignity”, the idea behind it is at least 70 years older.

So, essentially, Blacksher and Guinier are idiots with an agenda.

Posted in Dare To Be Stupid | Leave a comment