Via the senior producer at Varney & Co (Jake Novak) comes this startling statistic: “70 percent of all the jobs filled since Jan. 2010 have been filled by people 55 and older.”
Imparted in “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable,” what I’ve gleaned from my sources in the high-tech industry, by way of an example, is that this “workforce—comprised as it is of local and outsourced talent—is manned, generally, by older people with advanced engineering degrees. The hi-tech endeavor is all about (older) Americans and Asians uniting to supply young, twittering twits with the playthings that keep their brainwaves from flatlining.”
UPDATE I (9/27): Deifying Kids. Excellent point is made by Tim Malone, on the Facebook thread. How often does one meet upstanding middle-aged parents, and in waltzes The Kid, who bears no resemblance to the parents in terms of manners, work ethic, alertness, etc. Malone makes the best point ever, and that what must be implicated is liberal (and I include most conservatives here, other than hardcore homeschoolers) progressive, child-centered upbringing, in which the parent cowers before the deity, The Child. Moreover, I so often see hardworking parents who seem to think that making the child learn what they do (be it bird-keeping or working on car engines) is below the miserable child’s dignity. Why do you think “your teenager can’t use a hammer”?
UPDATE II: Thanks to his old-school dad, who insisted that he hang out in the garage, doing every single thing the old man did there—from fine wood-work to fixing plumbing and installing window frames—my old man does everything in the house. Saves tons of money; is done to perfection, but it does mean that renovations take years. So what? Check out “the shower that Sean built,” his first tiling job ever:
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow stares into the Romney foreign-policy abyss, and demolishes Obama’s challenger for going AWOL, and allowing Americans to continue to drift unmoored. In fact, from Maddow’s impassioned plea, I hazard that if Mitt Romney fleshed out the details of an Old-Right, anti-interventionist stand, exposing the immorality of Obama’s adventurism and violations abroad, he’d get her respect, and, if not her own vote, that of many of her pals on the left.
Yes, on rare occasions, Rachel Maddow does surprise with a streak of independence. If I understood Maddow’s latest televised monologue–and I do believe I am not giving her undue credit—she is challenging Mitt Romeny to say something meaningful, anything, about US foreign policy. And, in particular, about Obama’s worldwide drone assassination program, which she, like any decent human being, abhors.
That’s all you’ve got. how about this. what would you do differently if the answer is we’d be stronger, that’s not an answer. we deserve a politics that is capable of giving us choices or setting up a debate about competing reasonable ideas about handling the controversial things the government does in our names.
I know what the obama administration’s position is on Afghanistan. because he’s the president. i have no idea what mitt romney would do differently in Afghanistan, if anything. i know what the obama’s administration is on drones. i frankly find that position hair raising. i know what the obama administration’s position is on Pakistan. i know mitt romney thinks pakistan is very important. is it inconceivable somebody would ask him why, how, what his plan would be when it comes to that country? politics should move us some distance toward debate and decision making on the hardest problems we face as a country. that is not what we’re getting from our politics right now. if we’re not getting it now, when…”
Obama, says Maddow, is “using flying killer robots to do kill people all over the world.” She invites Romney to step into the void,
and his “answer is that he also thinks killing bin laden was a good idea. [and that] he wouldn’t crash [a drone] in iran. any questions? it is days like this when you realize that however important this presidential campaign is and this decision is, that we as a country have to make between these two candidates, our politics are essentially failing right now. they’re essentially impotent now for debating questions like this one. choosing between candidates is supposed to be the way we choose between policies in important thing that affect our country including national security. but our politics have been allowed to shrink if one side doesn’t want to talk about it, we’re not going to debate it as a country. let people in Washington figure it out. a new report out today says our secret drone policy, which we’ve been implementing for the better part of a decade, may be radicalizing the residents with a radical country. we’re not going to debate that at all. that’s not a policy matter that’s bort some national discussion. no competing ideas about maybe a choice in course. this is what the democratic president is doing. the republican party has no competing ideas on this at all? nothing to say? with this policy, due process that we afford people, that we kill people, the due process ultimately consists of the president of the united states making the call.
…but we are in the process of picking who’s going to be the next president and we’re not asking where these two men stand on that issue or if they think they should have that power. if that power should exist. if we’re not going to ask these questions now. look at this week. you have president obama at the UN talking about the policy of Pakistan and Hillary Clinton meeting the president of Pakistan on the same day. you have the developing story of the drone attack yesterday that killed an al qaeda leader. and you have a presidential campaign. but the conversation when it comes to this stuff is, “he seems like jimmy carter.” i read that he was a one-term president once. really? that’s all you’ve got. how about this. what would you do differently? if the answer is we’d be stronger, that’s not an answer. we deserve a politics that is capable of giving us choices or setting up a debate about competing reasonable ideas about handling the controversial things the government does in our names. i know what the obama administration’s position is on afghanistan. because he’s the president. i have no idea what mitt romney’s [is]…
UPDATE (9/26): In reply to the Facebook thread: MRP, as per usual, your position is in contradiction to mine. As I’ve replied to you many times, and in almost every post or column of mine, yours is standard anarchism, and it goes as follow: “Don’t say anything, for it is nothing really. Do not comment on policy, for it compromises precious libertarian purity. Do not apply your mind to the issues of the day to enlighten your readers and bring them closer to liberty, for no enlightenment other than the immediate and absolute application and acceptance of the non-aggression axiom can be entertained.” Pretty much. I’m sorry, Myron, but, like it or not, what Maddow said is important. Objectively speaking. And my anti-war readers are better informed for understanding how truly remiss Romney is for not breaking with the Bush-McCain axis of evil. It takes no intellectual effort whatsoever to adopt a default position of intellectual ennui and superiority.
Finally, I am unconvinced Romney is as bad a man as is Obama, on a personal level. Romney is just a conformist, and pig ignorant in terms of political philosophy.
Better late than never. The Beltway press discovers and reveals that wealth in the D.C. hood comes from, as I put it in 2010, the graft flowing into Rome from the ‘provinces.’ FoxNews.com quotes Tim Carney, columnist for the Washington Examiner, explaining why D.C. prospers as the rest of the country buckles under its weight.
“Sometimes I think that D.C. is the vortex and there’s a giant sucking sound of American wealth and jobs coming in here. It’s not free trade, it’s not commerce … it’s government. The taxpayers are the ones who are paying to build up this region.”
The American Community Survey released last Thursday found seven of the nations top 10 wealthiest counties now surround Washington, D.C. They include Loudoun County, Va., ranked No. 1, with a median household income over $119,000 dollars a year. Fairfax County, Va., was second with $105,000 and Arlington County, Va., third with just over $100,000 a year in median household income.
“All life in Washington today derives ultimately from the capitals’ own version of Rome’s annona — the continuous infusion not of grain and olive oil but of tax revenue and borrowed money. Instead of ships and barges there are banks, 10,000 of them designated for this purpose, which funnel the nations’ tax payments to the city. This ‘never-ending flow of revenue creates a broad level of affluence that has no real counterpart anywhere in America.” Says Murphy: “Washington simply doesn’t look like the rest of America.” But its residents “fail to view this as bizarre.”
America’s annona was facilitated by the Sixteenth Amendment. With its passage, in 1913, Murphy admits begrudgingly, “A Rubicon was crossed, giving Washington the unimpeded power to levy an income tax and therefore spend ever larger amounts of money.” As in Rome, D.C. grubbiness coexists with “rhetoric of high-mindedness about the duties and burdens of leadership.”
Thanks to the graft flowing into the Beltway, the average income in and around Washington D.C. is $85,189 compared to $49,777 for the hinterland, where unemployment rates are almost double. The rest of the country exists to serve its masters in modern Rome.
As for America’s fondness for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — which combined, account for close to half of the federal government’s budget — …only 7 percent of the country will consider slashing the first two welfare programs. And a mere eleven percent of those living in the “Land of the Free” are prepared to pare down Medicaid.
Keep the government out of my Medicare! For a while — and in all seriousness — Dick Morris even promoted a similar slogan on Fox News. It was this Republican hack’s ploy to alert seniors to the dangers to Medicare from Obamacare. The sink-hole of debt into which this country has slid, because of state spending, scares its citizens. But not sufficiently to seriously motivate them to dent “defense” spending. Just a fifth will entertain trimming the estimated $1 trillion which the United States blows on defending to the death borders not its own.
Unless the people of the “provinces”—you out there—are willing to do something drastic, like repeal the American annona, we will all have to learn to live forever after as the Beltway’s bitches.
“There are rich people everywhere, and yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries” was the obscene comment made by Hillary Clinton, at the Clinton Global Initiative, on Monday.
Contrary to such beliefs, in the modern world in which we actually live, the wealth of the capitalists is simply not in the form of consumers’ goods to any great extent. Not only is it overwhelmingly in the form of means of production but those means of production are employed in the production of goods and services that are sold in the market. Totally unlike the conditions of self-sufficient farm families, the physical beneficiaries of the capitalists’ means of production are all the members of the general consuming public who buy the capitalists’ products.
…the wealth of the so-called one percent is the foundation of the standard of living of the so-called ninety-nine percent … the “greed” of those who seek to become part of the one percent, or to enlarge their position within it, is what serves progressively to improve the standard of living of the ninety-nine percent.
To comprehend what Reisman wrote you’d have to, first, have a mind. And second, be in possession of moral fiber such that you were not jealous of those who have what it takes.
