Monday, November 17, 2008

To Cut Some Crap

Just to cut through some of the crap being spread around by various news outlets, it is not the fault of General Motors or the United Auto Workers that Toyota, Honda, and Subaru are allowed to pay their employees roughly half what GM employees bring home in pay and benefits. We should not be asking GM's employees to give up more than what they already have.

If you must affix blame for the need of a bailout, blame every single employee of Toyota, Honda, and Subaru that has refused to sign a union membership card. Blame the management of Toyota, Honda, and Subaru for hiring temps kept on the payroll often times longer than two years at $12/hr. with no benefits. Blame the politicians that have consistently made it more difficult for workers to organize. Do not blame people that have already sacrificed half of their wage and benefit package for the sake of the company.

Granted you could blame the UAW for not paying its striking members more to walk the picket lines, but the UAW leadership is not what it used to be and apparently they expect to win long term strikes by giving the rank and file a poverty level wage that qualifies for food stamps. This problem, however, is for the UAW's rank and file to fix, not the American Government.

Another Reason to Distrust the FSF

They operate behind closed doors in a non-democratic fashion and allow your work to be relicensed without your permission:

On November 3, the FSF and the Wikimedia Foundation jointly announced the release of version 1.3 of the GFDL. This announcement came as a surprise to many, who had no idea that a new GFDL 1.x release was in the works. This update does not address any of the well-known complaints against the GFDL. Instead, it added a new section:

An MMC [Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site] is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008.

The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing.

In other words, GFDL-licensed sites like Wikipedia have a special, nine-month window in which they can relicense their content to the Creative Commons attribution-sharealike license. This works because (1) moving to version 1.3 of the license is allowed under the "or any later version" terms, and (2) relicensing to CC-BY-SA is allowed by GFDL 1.3.

Source

Yet another underhanded and self-serving move by a non-democratic organization that wanted us to waste our time by having us waste low level employee's time in every Apple store.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Relevant Historical Quote

"It's a racket." - Al Capone when asked why he was not investing in the stock market pre-1929 crash.

When a mafioso calls something a racket, it usually is. Sadly, this quote is just as true today thanks to the bi-partisan deregulation of the financial markets.

The effects of the current crash, however, will not be felt in the same manner as the 1929 crash. Instead of being asked to dish out non-existent cash to pay for stock bought on margin, average American's are watching their retirement plans shrink into nothingness to place a further reliance on Social Security which will leave people wondering why they sat still when their politicians were systematically pillaging it to pay for things that could have easily been budgeted had they simply agreed to pay more taxes.

Sunday, November 09, 2008

Palin's Rhetoric Blamed For Death Threats

The Secret Service warned the Obama family in mid October that they had seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the Democratic candidate, coinciding with Mrs Palin's attacks.

Michelle Obama, the future First Lady, was so upset that she turned to her friend and campaign adviser Valerie Jarrett and said: "Why would they try to make people hate us?"

The revelations, contained in a Newsweek history of the campaign, are likely to further damage Mrs Palin's credentials as a future presidential candidate. She is already a frontrunner, with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, to take on Mr Obama in four years time.

Source

To answer Michelle's question, they want people to hate you because if those people made an informed decision about who should be elected to office the RNC would lose in every district. It is how the RNC wins so many seats repeatedly.

Now if we could just get the Democrats to stop using the same tactics...

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Bigotry Is Not A Thing Of The Past

The worst thing that anyone in this country that cares about equality can do is use the election of a multi-racial individual as an excuse to say that the fight is over. While it is nice that a significant majority of people can look past skin color to vote for someone, in the words of Chuck D:

"People will say: 'You guys have got a black president so it's cool. It's straight.' But it does not erase the discussion (about race) that you need to have."

For the "post-racial" people:

"An Obama presidency does not herald the end of racism in America. Obama isn't 'post-racial.' He isn't the messiah whose coming ends bigotry and inequality for all time," said Tucker, who writes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper.

"He'll just be the president," she said.

Source

If you need further proof for the bigotry that is still a fact of life in the United States one need look no further than the "most liberal" state's voters, who recently decided to strip a basic human right from homosexuals.

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

What The...

You know there is something wrong with politics in Alaska when you have to wait ten days for all of the absentee ballots to be counted before a man convicted on seven counts of corruption charges can be declared to have won or lost.

Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job

In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind.

Source

Sunday, November 02, 2008

For Great Justice?

Somebody set up us the bomb.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

A Tip for Politicians Everywhere

Here is a list of things not to say or post on your website if you want the general public to take your candidacy seriously and vote for you:

1. Global Warming is a complete hoax, can not be proven and is just simply another government scheme to raise taxes on businesses and individuals.
2. [The environmentalist's] only goal is to loot the American public while at the same time giving China and India a pass.
3. Overall, trial lawyers have made little to no contribution to society.
4. The Free Market will solve our economic problems if we could only get government out of the way, let leaders lead and creators create.
5. Affirmative Action is racist and presumes assured inferiority.
6. Seal up the border now and institute a tamper proof biometric national ID card.

Well, at least Greg Merle is not a prostitute, but he's not serving time in prison for "threatening a judge" by quoting from Deuteronomy, either.