Deafening Silence

Quote of the Week

_{"I am a Jew when synagogues are attacked. I am a Christian when Christians are persecuted for example in Iraq. And I am a Muslim when firebombs are thrown at their places of worship."}

Aiman Mazyek,  chairperson of the Central Muslim Council, Germany

Story link here.

The central council of Muslims has also condemned recent fundamentalist activities, accusing them of "perverting the name of [Islam]." Earlier this month, a number of civilians calling themselves the"Sharia police" began patrolling the streets of the western city of Wuppertal, located roughly 50 kilometers (31 miles) northeast of Cologne.

"The action day should be a sign of accord in society," Mazyek stressed.

Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Cologne, Munich and Bielefeld, along with roughly 2,000 other cities are to hold events on Friday. German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere is to attend the demonstration in Hanover, according to the central council.

Quote of the Week

From Josh Borro in Business Insider:

The only stunning thing is that anyone still looks at House Republicans and  says: "You know what would be great? Giving these people more power  over public policy."

 

Some other interesting bits from the piece:

 Roughly one-third of this caucus thinks hitting the debt ceiling and shutting  down the government are great strategies to try to stop Obamacare. The other  two-thirds of the party has realized all along that this strategy sucks, but  they could not find any way to stop their party from implementing it — even  though these "reasonable" Republicans outnumber the crazies.

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Can you imagine the situation this country would be in if Republicans controlled  both houses of Congress right now? Or if we had a President whose administration  gets jerked around by Heritage Action in the same way that House Republicans do?  It would be a trainwreck, and "reasonable" Republicans like Nunes would still be  on television saying they understand it's a trainwreck, but by golly,  operationally, they had no way to stop it.

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A party that is this bad at tactics can't be expected to be any good at  policy-making.

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Gee- ya think?

Quote of the Week

I don't always agree with David Frum, but this time he knocks it out of the park:

For most Americans, the dominant economic fact of the past 15 years has been the deteriorating market for their labor. They must work longer and harder for less pay and fewer benefits. And since the financial crisis of 2008, many have found it difficult to get work at all. Unemployment still exceeds 7 percent even as we approach the fifth anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy; nearly half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed.

Yet from the point of view of some Americans, labor remains too costly. American wages—although no longer anything like the highest in the world—remain considerably higher than elsewhere on the planet, even after adjusting for productivity differentials. People earn more than they otherwise might, just by the accident of being American.

The great unspoken question in the immigration debate is whether this “living in America” wage premium is a benefit to be cherished or a problem to be overcome. To a startling extent, political leaders agree: the wage premium is a problem—and immigration is the answer.

That point of view is seldom phrased quite so bluntly. Instead we hear concern about “labor shortages,” “skills mismatches,” and “jobs Americans won’t do.” In a market economy, however, there are no shortages. There is always a price at which supply will rise to meet demand. Sometimes that price takes the form of higher pay. Sometimes it takes the form of capital investments to reduce a job’s difficulty or danger.

What employers mean when they refer to labor shortages is “shortage at the wage we prefer to pay.” Here’s how this preference operates in the labor market. Back in the mid-1970s, meatpacking was an industry overwhelmingly characterized by native-born labor. Meatpackers earned an average of $17.41 an hour, only slightly less than the average wage in all manufacturing. (All the dollar figures I’m about to use are inflation-adjusted to 2006 purchasing power.) Over the next three decades, native-born labor in the meatpacking industry was displaced by immigrant labor, much of it illegal. Wages correspondingly collapsed. By 2006, meatpackers averaged $11.47 an hour, more than $5 less than the average manufacturing wage—which had itself declined nearly $1.25 over the same period.

What’s happened to meatpacking has happened to other occupations, both unskilled (notably janitorial) and highly skilled (software engineering).

 

I have been watching with dismay and disgust as both political parties insist on attacking American employment by either legalizing illegal labor or pumping out more and more H1B visas.  Whether you are highly-skilled or unskilled labor, you're being shafted by a political structure that caters only to the oligarchy.

It's refreshing to hear someone with a megaphone start saying what I've been thinking for years now.  It's also depressing- because it's so true, and because everyone either denies it or doesn't give a damn.

 

Quote of the Week: Gun Safety Edition

"Access to guns is a critical variable in this situation. You can't kill or wound 14 people with a knife."

--Kevin Dwyer, president-elect of the National Assn. of School Psychologists (Quoted by the L.A. times in 1999)

From a post  dated April 4, 2013 in the Huffington Post:

A student who told police he'd fantasized for years about stabbing people to death was charged Tuesday with carrying out a building-to-building attack at a Texas community college that wounded at least 14 people, many of whom were stabbed in the face and neck, authorities said.

 

Quote of the Week

Hats off to Mr. Mitch Seavey, winner of the 2013 Iditarod:

Mitch Seavey scored one for the AARP-eligible crowd Tuesday night by becoming the oldest champion in Iditarod history.

Seavey, 53, outdueled Aliy Zirkle on the final stretch of the 1,000-mile race.

“This is for all the gentlemen of a certain age who think it ends at 50, ’cause it doesn’t,” Seavey said after crossing under the burled arch with a team of 10 dogs.

I hope he's right. And I hope it counts for ladies, too.

 

 

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2013/03/12/2822951/seaveys-lead-grows-as-he-nears.html#storylink=cpy

 

Quote of the Week

From a comments thread discussing the Russian meteorite shown below:

 

(video credit: russianmachineneverbreaks.com)

 

"Yippie ki-yay, Mother Russia..."

 Well played, commenter.  Well played.

 

 

 

 

Quote of the Week

"[The Republican Party] have to be the party of reform.  We need a little more Theodore Roosevelt in us.  And that is- to return the system to the people.  A system that today lacks trust, that is full of crony capitalism, and that finds too much rent-seeking on the part of the special interest groups. 

So we should be talking about issues like redistricting reform.  That's where a lot of the deep partisanship begins.  We ought to be talking about how we finance our campaigns.  We ought to be talking about term limits.  We out to be talking about the revolving door allowing members of Congress to file right on out and become a lobbyist- to find a job with the group they just regulated the year before."

Jon Huntsman, speaking to Raf Sanchez of the Telegraph, 12/30/12.

Full audio of the interview here.

 

Quote of the Week: Gary Johnson

I'm not a Libertarian (I intend to remain a registered Independent until I die) and I disagree with Gary Johnson on some other issues, but I do agree with him on this:

 

Our country is staggering under the weight of an Oligarchy masquerading as a Meritocracy.  It's time to change that, and this could be a good first step.

Quote of the Week

Mamacita does it again:

"The sight of a little kid like me, bruised from head to toe and covered with bandaids, hanging upside down from an apple tree or calling out, “Look Ma, no hands!” on my bike would have sent some of these modern mothers into hysteria. Then again, I belong to an era when mothers didn’t faint and then sue when their kids came home from the playground with a broken arm or a gash. That’s just what happened when kids played.

It still is, but a lot of parents these days just can’t deal with such awful things. Some of them can’t even deal with dirt. Poor kids."

 

Quote of the Week

From Brendan O’Neill, writing in Spiked:

When people doll up declining linguistic standards as ‘cultural diversity’, they’re really making a virtue out of dumbness, turning illiteracy into just a variant form of literacy. Some say we shouldn’t look down our noses at the urban patois now spoken by British youth, especially black youth and ‘chavs’, nor sneer at the ‘variant spelling’ and ‘academic differences’ such patois allegedly gives rise to. But this is doubly insulting. It is insulting to assume that young people, especially poor young people, are incapable of mastering standard language, of conquering English and all its glorious complications, and so instead must be allowed to write ‘potatoe’ instead of ‘potato’. The real driving force here is the education establishment’s unwillingness to uphold standards, and its utter lack of faith in the academic capabilities of youth. The elite’s low expectations of the young are dressed up as ‘celebrating linguistic diversity’.

[I would add that, in the U.S. at least, the "unwillingness to uphold standards" is in large part a defensive crouch in the face of lawsuits, demonstrations and screams of raaaciiism from various agitators.]

The reason civilizations developed organized language in the first place was so that everyone could communicate easily and efficiently.  That dependable communication in turn helps knit together a functioning society.  Without it, chaos ensues.

(Image Credit: The Rut)