Unmitigated Gall

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

They’re Taking Our Jobs!

Holy Shit!Lead Pipe CrueltyUnmitigated Gall

First it was the Irish, with their mining and their farming. Then it was the Slavs, those factory-dwelling scum. Then it was the Latinos with their ambition and willingness to spread mulch and cook your steak frites for little pay. Then it was the Indonesians with their endless garment factories. Then it was the Indians, who have apparently limitless capacity to take shit from irate helpline callers while producing flawless C++ code. And now it’s the damn Chinese, taking the job of insane mass murderer away from the white, Christian American males to whom it is their birthright.

No. Seriously. Check this amazing shit out! Media whore Debbie Schlussel is an early frontrunner in the contest to say the least appropriate, most reprehensible thing possible about yesterday’s shootings at Virginia Tech, and she’s come up with a doozy. Wow!

So, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre is a Chinese national here on a student visa. And, today, this alien did “the job that Americans just won’t do.”

If you really want to be put off your lunch, kite over to her site and check out all the people who somehow agree that yesterday’s tragedy is somehow an argument for tighter immigration laws (or evidence of a Great Yellow Conspiracy of unexplained provenance or purpose). Also go to her site if you somehow think I’m taking her out of context or misrepresenting the thrust of her argument. ‘Cos I ain’t.

Hat tip to Outside the Beltway

[Wik]... and check up the to this post, which I found via qando. Just awesome!

**** UPDATE #3, 04/17/07: The shooter has now been identified as a South Korean national. ****

**** UPDATE #2: The shooter has now been identified as a Chinese national here on a student visa. Lovely. Yet another reason to stop letting in so many foreign students. ****

**** UPDATE: Shootings appear professional, says expert; VTU Alum on school’s “Asian” Population; 2nd Amenment-Free Campus/VTU lobbied against students having guns on campus for personal protection ****

Here’s what we know about the murderer of at least 32 students and maimer of at least 28 more at Virginia Tech, today:

* The murderer has been identified by law enforcement and media reports as “a young Asian male.”

* The Virginia Tech campus has a very large Muslim community, many of which are from Pakistan (per terrorism investigator Bill Warner).

* Pakis are considered “Asian.”

* There were 2 attacks at least half a mile apart.

* There have been at least two bomb threats to this campus in the last two weeks.

And dig her rebuttals to the comments:

Posted by: Old Atlantic [TypeKey Profile Page] at April 16, 2007 04:48 PM

Pakis are considered “Asian.”

I believe the correct term is “Pakistani”.

YOUR BELIEF SYSTEM IS FLAWED. EITHER TERM IS CORRECT. WHAT IS THIS--THE IMUS THOUGHT POLICE?
DEBBIE SCHLUSSEL


Posted by Johno on 04/17/07 at 11:22 AM
Holy Shit! • Lead Pipe Cruelty • Unmitigated Gall • Permalink

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

On government-mandated actions

Just So You KnowUnmitigated Gall

However well intended, however laboriously justified, if you look closely enough, you’ll often find that the results of grand government plans don’t always match the rhetoric.  Or worse, that the rhetoric was, well, bullshit.

Take, for instance, the recent goofy shift in the timing for switching back to Daylight Saving Time.  From Brad Feld’s blog, “Feld Thoughts”, have a look at his initial take on the DST firedrill just recently encountered, if not endured, by Americans. Mr. Feld said:

I wrote a post on March 12th titled Daylight Savings Time is Stupid.  A bunch of people agreed with me, but some didn’t, suggesting that (a) I was missing the point and it was more fun to have light at night than in the morning or (b) the “authorities” insisted that we’d get GDP gains, (c) there would be big energy savings helping save the world, and (d) restaurants and stores would make more money due to sunny night shopping.  Oh – and I also learned DST = daylight saving time, not “savings.”

After the event, about which a manageable but still non-trivial amount of media ink was spilt warning us of the second coming of Y2K (and ignoring completely, or being so misinformed as not to have known, what a complete non-event that was in the real world), Mr. Feld checked in with one of his colleagues, “Ross the IT guy”, for a real-life opinion on the matter.


Posted by Patton on 04/11/07 at 01:53 AM
Just So You Know • Unmitigated Gall • Permalink

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

What’s the opposite of chosen?

Holy Shit!Unmitigated Gall

The Palestinians, infamously, are a people that bad things happen to.  Whether from the perfidy of others (Jews), natural causes (Jews) or their own tragic flaws (planted there by Jews) calamity seems to stalk the Palestinian people like some loathsome stalking thing.  Latest in a long line of humiliations and embarrassments is this: “Five dead in Gaza ‘sewage tsunami’”.  Many people get hit by tsunamis.  But only the Palestinians would get hit by a sewage tsunami.

[Wik] I am truly sorry for those who perished, and for their families.  But I can’t help seeing this as one admittedly noisome piece of a larger picture.


Posted by Buckethead on 03/27/07 at 06:09 PM
Holy Shit! • Unmitigated Gall • Permalink

You are hurting me with your words!

Unmitigated Gall

Via Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings, the greatest student complaint ever recorded. Just a taste:

I appreciate you taking your inconvenience to instruct us but I really had some problems in your class and I would like to explain them to you now.  Every day I wanted to discuss with you about the way you grade my papers and the way you teach the class, but I could not because the things you say in class and your words disturb me so much I can not.  You make me completely uncomfortable with the little things you say in the class like how you talk about television or how you talk about when you are grading our papers and trying to be fair.  You do not seem to care about our grades only that they are up to your too high standards and I can not talk to you because you make me completely uncomfortable.  For example, you say you will talk to us about our grades but you really will not because of how uncomfortable you make me feel with your words and what you say.

I will plan to contest the grade you have given me in this class when I get it because I know it will be much higher with any other teacher.  I am a very religious man and you are not a bad person but you do not choose your words with enough care like a teacher should.  You try to be objective and the very attempt becomes your flaw because you try so hard to grade fairly and comment wisely that you become biased to your own ideas.  You criticize our writings because we are college students and young but do not realize that you offend most of us when you do this.  I am always offended when I go to your class and have been on many occasions but I never tell you of my offense because you make me completely uncomfortable so I never say a word.

--snip--

I am a very religious man and I love every one but I will forward this letter to the head of your department so he can see that I am a serious student who does not deserve the grade you will give him because I write so very well.

According to the person who shared this partially redacted note (so as to protect the innocent), the writer of this missive, who writes so! very! well! is indeed a native speaker of the language, indeed one whose background suggests access to the very best schools. So, any lack of command of the language is entirely his or her fault, as is the stunning lack of socialization or introspection.

Let’s all point and laugh!


Posted by Johno on 03/27/07 at 10:30 AM
Unmitigated Gall • Permalink

Friday, March 16, 2007

How the mighty continue to fall

Unmitigated Gall

NASA admits that even the effing chicoms could get back to the moon before they can.  Sad, sad, sad. 


Posted by Buckethead on 03/16/07 at 10:47 PM
Unmitigated Gall • Permalink

Saturday, March 10, 2007

The Short Bus Theory of Federal Staffing Policy

Partisan PoliticsUnmitigated Gall

People who know me well know that my political views are a hybrid - I’m incredibly socially liberal (in fact I’m buying heroin from a gay BDSM enthusiast right now while putting the finishing touches on my homemade beer sales business) but economically variable.

You see, I’m a knee-jerk fiscal liberal. How can it possibly be that there are limits to what the richest, most powerful nation in the history of the world (and how good it feels to write that, ya know!) can accomplish?  But of course, this lovely theory crashes and burns in practice. I would love, in an ideal world, for our government to handle feeding the poor and clothing the naked and fighting all the good wars and making peace in all the bad ones, but here in the real world, the list of low points in government competence just in recent years is longer than King Kong’s member and growing. Therefore all available evidence suggests that, no matter what my candyland fantasies are, the government is really bad at doing anything even slightly more important than deciding on which Thursday Thanksgiving should fall.

Let me share with you a story I heard recently. It’s a funny story, if by funny you mean “sad,” and it’s a perfect parable for why our government is not to be trusted under any circumstances.

You see, the small seaside town I live in is home to a National Park Service historical site, which as I’m sure you’re all aware means there’s some land, a brown building, and some signs around telling people what it’s all about. As far as parks go there’s a lot of cool stuff to draw on, including a fullsize working replica of a cargo ship from the great age of sail, numerous historic homes, and the good (?) luck to have been the site of a major event in early American history that still brings in tourists by the busload.

But for all the potential, the tours and interpretation at this park (“interpretation” in the public history sense of ‘helping people understand what they’re looking at and why it matters’) are kind of for shit, and I’ve always wondered why.

Back in the 1980s, my small seaside town was not as gentrified as it currently is, and very close to downtown there existed some pockets of serious sketchiness. At that time, the lead protection ranger (the guys with guns) at the Park was a guy whose name I’ll say was Duke. Duke’s job was to enforce the laws of the USA and the Commonwealth on the grounds of the park and in all the adjacent buildings it owned. He had a team of armed rangers who helped him with this important mandate.

One day, the local police force turned up in great numbers to a house owned by the National Park Service, and proceeded to invade the upstairs apartment, which was rented out to civilian tenants. It turned out that this raid was the culmination of a three-year investigation into a major drug trafficking ring operated out of that apartment, which I remind you was owned by the United States of America. Among the parties convicted of felonies were two of the park’s protection rangers, who had participated in drug transactions while armed, on duty, in the employ of the Federal government, on the grounds of the very park they were being paid to protect.

Duke was taken entirely by surprise by the raid; nobody had thought to tell him. It soon emerged that this was deliberate – the drug activity had gone on for so long, and so blatantly, that the local police were convinced that he was either in on it or spectacularly, stupendously, incompetent.

This being the US Government, Duke was not fired from his job for being stupendously incompetent at doing it. Instead, he was placed on a brief administrative leave and then moved to another department. That’s right… Duke, a dangerously incompetent law enforcement officer whose training was nonetheless in the area of law enforcement, was put in charge of the Interpretation department, with the historians and tour guides, where he remains to this day. That is why the tours for the most part suck at the National Park in my small seaside town.

In another more recent case, it took four years for the National Park Service to terminate the employment of a ranger at the same park who was convicted on child porn charges, including, I believe, some based on evidence found on his work computer.

So, as I prepare my 1040s this year, I thank the deity of my choice (“none of the above”) that the business of running our country is in good hands. Clearly the US Government is using my little National Park site as a holding cell for all the morons and misfits, the drain circlers and mouthbreathers, the nebbishes and ne’er-do-wells, who they accidentally gave jobs to and now feel too sorry for to fire. With all of them here, everyone else can go about the business of managing our nations’ affairs with the intelligence, decency, and wisdom that such weighty matters deserve.

Clearly.


Posted by Johno on 03/10/07 at 03:57 PM
Partisan Politics • Unmitigated Gall • Permalink

Friday, March 09, 2007

Went out like a bitch

Lead Pipe CrueltyUnmitigated Gall

Comic book hero Captain America has been killed off by his corporate masters.  With a sniper bullet.  From my title, please don’t think that I am speaking ill of Captain America.  Cap was always, after Batman, one of my favorite comic book heroes.  I think that putting him down in this manner is cheap.  It’s Captain America, fer chrissakes.  Cap should have gone down, if at all, in a blaze of glory saving us from a certain doom.  Martyrdom, if anything.  Heroic sacrifice.  Not a pot shot on the streets. 


Posted by Buckethead on 03/09/07 at 07:17 PM
Lead Pipe Cruelty • Unmitigated Gall • Permalink

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

“Thurmond and Sharpton: Past is still present”

Just So You KnowUnmitigated Gall

Old story - ancient, in fact.  Didn’t this come out last week some time?  The week before?  Whatever.

What makes it new again, at least for me, is the commentary in today’s hometown Houston Chronicle by the Miami Herald’s Leonard Pitts, Jr.:

Somewhere, the gods are amused.

Sharpton is not. He has pronounced himself torn by conflicting emotion: humiliation, anger, pride and, above all, shock.

The reaction from Thurmond’s family, meanwhile, has been characterized by that curious shrug of shoulders, that ambivalence and eagerness to change the subject, one often finds in white people when slavery gets personal.

“I don’t feel one way or the other,” Thurmond’s 74-year-old niece, Doris Strom Costner, told the Washington Post.

“I have no comment,” Paul Thurmond, the senator’s youngest son, told the New York Daily News.

Somewhere, all the other the race-baiters like Al “Tawana Brawley” Sharpton are also amused. 

Note: Strangely missing from the Wikipedia entry linked above is the Sharpton Jew-baiting incident which resulted in riots and dead Hasidim in Crown Heights during 1991. Also missing, the incitement to burn Freddie’s Fashion Mart in Harlem during 1995, resulting in yet more deaths. So much for Wikipedia’s previously impeccable reputation for completeness.  Oh, it also omits his 1983 brush with the FBI, reported in 2002 along with his apparently still-unsuccessful $1 billion lawsuit against HBO for having aired the tape of the event, after which he allegedly turned into an FBI informer to avoid investigation for involvement in drug transactions on behalf of Don King and the NY Mob. A complete and total piece of shit work, this guy.

Anyway, Pitts seems surprised to find that Thurmond’s descendants don’t feel personally responsible, or even embarrassed, by the actions of people whose lives predate their own by 100 years or more.  Imagine that!  What the hell’s wrong with those people?

Sharpton feels humiliation (as though Thurmond had owned him?), anger (for what, I don’t know), pride, and shock.  Those last two, I can understand - it’s not often that a demagogue of his stature is handed an issue, on a silver platter, that his mouth-breathing fellow travelers in the “professional outrage for shake-downs, fun, and profit” community, if nobody else, can take seriously and run with.  So he’s equally shocked and proud.

Normally, you see, such agitators have to incite or invent their own, well, agita.

Pitts continues:

Of course, by this point, maybe he has stopped listening. Maybe you have, too. Mention of that 350 years tends to have that effect.

Hence the ambivalence — “nervous chuckles,” reported the Orlando Sentinel of a visit to Thurmond’s hometown — that greeted last week’s news in some quarters. Small wonder. It removed the shield of abstract. It put a face on the thing. And the danger is that if we can imagine that face, we can imagine others.

Condoleezza Rice purchased as breeding stock.

Oprah Winfrey raped on a nightly basis.

Will Smith, his back split open by a whip.

Sen. Barack Obama living with the same rights under the law, the same expectation of dignity, as a horse or a chair.

We spend a lot of time running from this. But we never escape.

Lost on Pitts is the utter absurdity, in today’s world or any world that’s existed in the past 50 years, for ANY of the things he lists as bogeymen to actually occur. So we’re “running from” putative, but completely imaginary, future shit that would never, ever occur anywhere but in the fevered brains of those who can’t bear to see the racial divide bridged.

And if Pitts, Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the myriad others who make all or part of their livings being the agents for the perpetually aggrieved have their way, damned straight, we’ll never escape.


Posted by Patton on 03/06/07 at 03:31 AM
Just So You Know • Unmitigated Gall • Permalink

Monday, March 05, 2007

Lies, Damned Lies and Hockey Sticks

The Miracle of ScienceUnmitigated Gall

Here’s something I find interesting.  And by interesting, I mean offensive and retarded.  Lately, the category of “Global Warming Skeptics” - nomenclature that affords a degree of dignity to those lumped under its rubric - has seen a subtle but significant change.  They are now “Global Warming Deniers.” This, I assume, is meant to put those who wonder whether or not we are actually headed toward a local anti-Fimbulwinter, or even whether if we are headed toward that grim fate we have ourselves or nature to blame, into the same mental box as Holocaust deniers.  Now, Holocaust denial is offensive and retarded.  Anyone who doubts the historical reality of the holocaust is a malevolent delusional fuckwit.  Some people would have us feel the same about something that might happen in the future - or, being generous, even if it’s certain to happen is not at all certain where to point the unerring finger of blame.

The National Post of Canada has a series of articles up on these Global Warming Deniers.  I’ve read a couple, and the tone of the stories is odd.  Go read them, and see if you see what I see.  I’ll talk more on this later. 

[Wik] It seems that this sort of thing is in the wind, as BBC 4 is about to run a big documentary on the subject this Thursday.  I wonder if we’ll be able to see that here in the States.


Posted by Buckethead on 03/05/07 at 09:01 PM
The Miracle of Science • Unmitigated Gall • Permalink

Mapgirl uses cheap trick to gain readers

Just So You KnowUnmitigated Gall

Ministry Crony and finance guru Mapgirl has the great honor to be the hostess of the 90th Carnival of Personal Finance.  It’s great to see Maps pushing the boundaries like this, and tackling subjects far afield from her usual material.  You will also note that she has cleverly arranged the material in the carnival into several categories, an innovative and, dare I say, useful new blogging practice.  With this sort of blog acumen, there can be little doubt that MFC will soon be one of the brighter stars in the blog firmament. 


Posted by Buckethead on 03/05/07 at 04:20 PM
Just So You Know • Unmitigated Gall • Permalink

Friday, January 26, 2007

Area Organized Crime Families Fearful of FBI Anti-Mob Investigations

Crazy ForeignersUnmitigated Gall

Reuters reports that in the aftermath of the recent round up of hundreds of illegal undocumented aliens workers, known to me as scofflaw foreigners, some people in California are fearful.  Why are they fearful?  Let’s hear what Rosa Maria Salazar has to say.  She is a cook at a Salvadoran cafe in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles:

“We’re terrified. The police could come for us at any time and deport us.”

As an aside, she made the above comment in Spanish.  Reuters helpfully translated.  But why is Rosa Maria frightened?  Because, well, she’s an illegal alien.  She is here in this country illegally, and she is working illegally.  I am sure that Rosa Maria is a nice woman, hard working and eager to make a better life for herself.  No doubt that was difficult in her native Guatemala.  But I am not overly moved by her terror.  She has every right to be concerned that agents of our government will come and send her away, because, that’s their job and she is a utterly and completely legitimate target for their scrutiny.  She’s breaking our laws just by being in Los Angeles.

This Reuters article is full of not so sly bias toward the “victims” of this latest sweep.  Observe:

The 55-year-old undocumented worker from Guatemala is among many Hispanics deeply shaken by recent immigration raids at the heart of Latino communities in southern California.

I imagine that most of those frightened Hispanics are also illegal aliens.  American citizens of Hispanic descent really don’t have to worry, now, do they?  Should we be concerned that criminals are “shaken” by police patrols?

The-seven day Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sweep, dubbed “Operation Return to Sender,” targeted jails across five counties in the Los Angeles area, where police took 423 of what they called “criminal aliens” into federal custody for deportation, after being held on charges unrelated to their immigration status.

And look, more than half of the people rounded up were already rounded up, albeit for other crimes.  Is the Hispanic community, and indeed concerned citizens throughout this great nation expected to weep for shame because 400 people already in jail are deported?  Sheesh.

Federal agents from seven teams also fanned out in local communities, where they nabbed 338 undocumented immigrants, more than 150 of whom were classed as “immigration fugitives”—foreign nationals who ignored final deportation orders.

And of the other half, almost half of them were not merely here illegally, but were actively running from immigration officials.  These aren’t the grey masses of illagals, people who are in this country but under the radar.  These are people who we have specifically told to go home, and for some reason are still here.  Why were these “final deportation orders” not accompanied by a Federal Marshall and a plane ticket?  Of the others, these undocumented immigrants yearning to be free, well they are 188 out of an estimated 2.5 million in California alone.  It’s a start, but hardly a solution.

“We hadn’t seen anything like this here before, and it came as a shock,” said Antonio Bernabe, a community worker who runs a day labor program at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

Why the fuck would this come as a shock to you, Antonio?  The fact that we haven’t enforced our laws for decades might have lulled you into a false sense of security, but the writing has been on the wall for a little while now.  And why aren’t you in jail for helping criminals evade justice?

“The police didn’t just take people with deportation orders, they took anybody ... guys who were just hanging out in the street and even from a Jack in the Box restaurant ... and now people are afraid to go out,” he added.

Well, damn, that’s just like, terrible.  They took anybody who wasn’t here legally.  How… fascist. 

“We used to feel secure here,” Nicaraguan electrician Manuel Salomon told Reuters as he sipped coffee in a Mexican bakery in the city. “But it looks like that honeymoon is over.”

I certainly hope so, Manuel.  I hope that you get arrested and deported.  And then I hope that you turn around, and make your way back to this country legally.

This article, and many like it, are ridiculous in the euphemistic treatment of this issue.  Calling Manuel, or others, “Undocumented Workers” or some other truth dodging phrase does not erase the fact that they are people who are breaking our laws, and have been showing contempt for laws since the moment they slipped across the border.  They are illegal aliens – a nicely accurate phrase that has almost completely disappeared from the major media.  I am not against immigration.  I do not hate Hispanics.  I am against illegal immigration, and I think that most people on this side of the issue realize that they are different issues despite the efforts of some on the other side to conflate them.


Posted by Buckethead on 01/26/07 at 02:28 PM
Crazy Foreigners • Unmitigated Gall • Permalink

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Wait a minute, now

Filthy LucreUnmitigated Gall

Apple to impose 50% fanboy sucker tax on iPhone consumers, reports AppleInsider.  (h/t to gizmodo) It seems that it’s only going to cost about $250 to manufacture the iPhone, and so Apple gets the 50% profit margins that in the past have made it rich, yet contributed to its marginal status in the computer industry.  And Cingular gets a two year lock for free, since they ain’t subsidizing shit.  This is as annoying as it always is.  It’s why I’ve never purchased a new Mac computer. 

I think I might wait a little bit until the fanboy rush subsides and competition, hopefully, forces Apple to lower prices.  But competition from Dell, HP and a thousand others never forced Apple to lower Mac prices.  Will competition from Nokia, Samsung, Sony/Ericsson and others come to the same?  Or will Cingular try to convince Jobs to lower the price to keep people coming?  You’d think Jobs would have learned by now that if you sell a hundred computers at a 10% margin, you make a lot more money than selling five at 50%.  (Assuming about the same price to manufacture, you make twice as much.)


Posted by Buckethead on 01/18/07 at 05:16 PM
Filthy Lucre • Unmitigated Gall • Permalink

Monday, January 08, 2007

Seen about town

Unmitigated Gall

A 1972 (or thereabouts) Chevy pickup, nicely restored, with a “Nixon/Agnew” bumpersticker.  I wish I had had my camera handy. 


Posted by Buckethead on 01/08/07 at 04:21 PM
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Wednesday, December 20, 2006

More Moving Trauma

Lead Pipe CrueltyUnmitigated Gall

It took me several hours to finally assemble the table, and to repair the desk.  After that intensely annoying labor, my office was looking nice.  I was feeling good.  So, I took a break from work to go hook up the washer and drier.  Turned on the washer, and it leaked through what is apparently a huge hole in the bottom of the washer.  It must have broke in the move.  And there’s no drain in the basement.  I am pissed.  Mrs. Buckethead is pissed, because she’s going to have to go to a laundromat to wash the clothes.

But hey, at least I’ve got high speed internet.


Posted by Buckethead on 12/20/06 at 08:13 PM
Lead Pipe Cruelty • Unmitigated Gall • Permalink

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Please pardon me

Unmitigated Gall

For thinking this was quite witty:

Kevin Federline, Wife Divorce

The Onion

Kevin Federline, Wife Divorce

The superstar rapper is currently seeking sole custody of the two children he had with his estranged wife, a singer and sometime actress.

And in typical Onion fashion, they don’t just throw the horse out into the ring, they then beat it to death.


Posted by Patton on 12/19/06 at 02:12 PM
Unmitigated Gall • Permalink
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