March 30, 2013

Scott Walker & Paul Ryan Take Wisconsin from 37th in Job Creation to 44th.

Wisconsin falls to 44th in private-sector job creation

As the national employment recovery slowly has begun to brighten, Wisconsin struggles to keep pace, according to the latest credible government jobs data.

Wisconsin ranked 44th out of the 50 states in private-sector job creation in the 12 months from September 2011 to September 2012. The state's position has deteriorated progressively from a revised rank of 41st in the previous 12-month period through June 2012; and from a rank of 37th in the 12 months through March 2012.

"Wisconsin is falling behind," said Abdur Chowdhury, an economics professor at Marquette University.

The data, released Thursday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, is called the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. It's based on a census of 96% of all American non-farm employers, public and private, which makes it the most exhaustive and credible information available on job creation. Because it is so complete, the quarterly data always comes with a half-year time lag.

Its publication Thursday coincided with other sobering economic news for Wisconsin, including estimates that the state's unemployment rate rose for a second consecutive month in February.

The Rest: http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/wisconsin-private-sector-job-creation-ranking-declines-799bcsa-200435291.html

Press play for audio recording of conservative economic policies:

March 30, 2013

Find Thing You're Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights & Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life

I have always been a big proponent of following your heart and doing exactly what you want to do. It sounds so simple, right? But there are people who spend years—decades, even—trying to find a true sense of purpose for themselves. My advice? Just find the thing you enjoy doing more than anything else, your one true passion, and do it for the rest of your life on nights and weekends when you’re exhausted and cranky and just want to go to bed.

It could be anything—music, writing, drawing, acting, teaching—it really doesn’t matter. All that matters is that once you know what you want to do, you dive in a full 10 percent and spend the other 90 torturing yourself because you know damn well that it’s far too late to make a drastic career change, and that you’re stuck on this mind-numbing path for the rest of your life.

Is there any other way to live?

I can’t stress this enough: Do what you love…in between work commitments, and family commitments, and commitments that tend to pop up and take immediate precedence over doing the thing you love. Because the bottom line is that life is short, and you owe it to yourself to spend the majority of it giving yourself wholly and completely to something you absolutely hate, and 20 minutes here and there doing what you feel you were put on this earth to do.

Before you get started, though, you need to find the one interest or activity that truly fulfills you in ways nothing else can. Then, really immerse yourself in it for a few fleeting moments after an exhausting 10-hour day at a desk job and an excruciating 65-minute commute home. During nights when all you really want to do is lie down and shut your eyes for a few precious hours before you have to drag yourself out of bed for work the next morning, or on weekends when your friends want to hang out and you’re dying to just lie on your couch and watch TV because you’re too fatigued to even think straight—these are the times when you need to do what you enjoy most in life.

The rest, FROM THE ONION: http://www.theonion.com/articles/find-the-thing-youre-most-passionate-about-then-do,31742/

March 30, 2013

Breaking: NORTH KOREA SAYS TO ENTER "STATE OF WAR" AGAINST SOUTH KOREA

Per Reuters: https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/317788568351289344

SEOUL, March 29 (Yonhap) -- North Korea announced Saturday that it has entered a state of war against South Korea.

In a special statement, the North said it will deal with every inter-Korean issue in a wartime manner.

Link: http://live.reuters.com/Event/North_Korea

ETA: Kim Jong-un signed off on the order at a midnight meeting of top generals and "judged the time has come to settle accounts with the U.S. imperialists in view of the prevailing situation", the official KCNA news agency said

March 29, 2013

Snopes has already tackled the "Monsanto Protection Act" claim.

Snopes doesn't let me copy & paste so here's the link to the claim: The Monsanto Protection Act creates a "precedent setting limitation on judicial review of genetically-engineered crops".

Snopes gives it a rating of: Mixture

Link: http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/mpa.asp
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Then there's this:

“Monsanto Protection Act” is a bullshit, made-up term. There is no such thing.

Link: http://badskeptic.com/?p=123

March 26, 2013

Texas Lt. Gov: “Over our dead bodies are we going to let this state turn blue”

-snip-

“Our core values are being attacked on a daily basis … by government fiat in our courts and in our schools, “ said state Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels. “They want to redefine marriage between a natural man and natural woman the same way the want to redefine the Constitution. It’s just not going to stand with me.”

Campbell said these values had to be defended here, “because there is no other Texas to move to.”

“The hope of America is Texas,” said Sen. Ken Paxton.

“Over our dead bodies are we going to let this state turn blue,” said Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who said Texans’ conservative values were under steady assault from President Barack Obama and his administration.

Link: http://www.statesman.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-politics/gop-leadership-texas-will-defend-conservative-valu/nW4rQ/
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Texas leads the country in LOWEST voter turnout of any State. If the Dems could mobilize the TX Dem voters, that State can easily turn Blue.

March 26, 2013

A Visualization of Drone Strikes In Pakistan Since 2004

http://drones.pitchinteractive.com/

The site uses Flash. May take a moment to load.

March 26, 2013

A photo that makes North Korea look a lot less scary.

-snip-

Now, it’s possible that this computer – encased in a giant metal box, looking very retro – does something amazing. But note some of the environmental details: the dining room chair, the consumer desktop keyboard and Logitech mouse. None of those really scream “advanced military computing technology” so much as they suggest “we should put an old Dell in this metal box to show to Dear Leader.”

If you’ve been spending a lot of time reading about North Korea’s recent flurry of threats and provocations, apparently edging right up to the line of starting a war, perhaps it will ease your mind a bit to glimpse the technology and leadership behind its million-man army.

The Wall Street Journal’s Tom Gara tweeted, “North Korea appears to have crossed a dangerous threshold and developed a fully-functioning calculator.”

The rest: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/03/25/a-photo-that-makes-north-korea-look-a-lot-less-scary/
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March 25, 2013

Marx’s Revenge: How Class Struggle Is Shaping the World.

Karl Marx was supposed to be dead and buried. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s Great Leap Forward into capitalism, communism faded into the quaint backdrop of James Bond movies or the deviant mantra of Kim Jong Un. The class conflict that Marx believed determined the course of history seemed to melt away in a prosperous era of free trade and free enterprise. The far-reaching power of globalization, linking the most remote corners of the planet in lucrative bonds of finance, outsourcing and “borderless” manufacturing, offered everybody from Silicon Valley tech gurus to Chinese farm girls ample opportunities to get rich. Asia in the latter decades of the 20th century witnessed perhaps the most remarkable record of poverty alleviation in human history — all thanks to the very capitalist tools of trade, entrepreneurship and foreign investment. Capitalism appeared to be fulfilling its promise — to uplift everyone to new heights of wealth and welfare.

Or so we thought. With the global economy in a protracted crisis, and workers around the world burdened by joblessness, debt and stagnant incomes, Marx’s biting critique of capitalism — that the system is inherently unjust and self-destructive — cannot be so easily dismissed. Marx theorized that the capitalist system would inevitably impoverish the masses as the world’s wealth became concentrated in the hands of a greedy few, causing economic crises and heightened conflict between the rich and working classes. “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole,” Marx wrote.

A growing dossier of evidence suggests that he may have been right. It is sadly all too easy to find statistics that show the rich are getting richer while the middle class and poor are not. A September study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington noted that the median annual earnings of a full-time, male worker in the U.S. in 2011, at $48,202, were smaller than in 1973. Between 1983 and 2010, 74% of the gains in wealth in the U.S. went to the richest 5%, while the bottom 60% suffered a decline, the EPI calculated. No wonder some have given the 19th century German philosopher a second look. In China, the Marxist country that turned its back on Marx, Yu Rongjun was inspired by world events to pen a musical based on Marx’s classic Das Kapital. “You can find reality matches what is described in the book,” says the playwright.

The rest: http://business.time.com/2013/03/25/marxs-revenge-how-class-struggle-is-shaping-the-world/
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Seriously, it's like the Communist Manifesto could have been written yesterday.

March 25, 2013

The 1800's Wild West Had Stricter Gun Control Than We Have Today.

-snip-

Today’s anti gun control forces count their strongest support among society’s leaders from the states that once formed part of the Old West. The actual Old West pioneers of historical fact viewed matters differently, however. They would certainly hail the campaign to protect an American right to bear arms, but the record puts them behind "moderate, common-sense measures" for gun control --

-snip-

Pioneer publications show Old West leaders repeatedly arguing in favor of gun control. City leaders in the old cattle towns knew from experience what some Americans today don't want to believe: a town which allows easy access to guns invites trouble.

What these cow town leaders saw intimately in their day-to-day association with guns is that more guns in more places caused not greater safety, but greater death in an already dangerous wilderness.

By the 1880s many in the west were fed up with gun violence. Gun control, they contended, was absolutely essential, and the remedy advocated usually was usually no less than a total ban on pistol-packing.

The rest: http://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~rcollins/scholarship/guns.html

other source: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/23/nation/la-na-tombstone-20110123
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It's kind of comical to think that even back then townspeople would have loved the 2nd Amendment so much they wouldn't have minded bullets flying around, dead children & family members being killed. Because love & wanting to live are 21st century concepts I guess?

Other articles state that guns were banned in public and in many towns you had to hand over your guns before entering. There would literally be a line in the sand you couldn't cross with a gun.

March 21, 2013

Strange headlines coming out of Korean news agency within past hour.

within the past couple of hours there was this:

N. Korea warns of military response to U.S. B-52 bomber

SEOUL, March 20 (Yonhap) -- North Korea warned Wednesday that it will take a military action should the United States deploy B-52 strategic bombers again on the peninsula.

"We are keeping close tabs on the activity of the B-52 strategic bomber," a spokesperson for the North's foreign ministry said, according to its official news agency KCNA.

If the bomber appears again over the Korean Peninsula, it won't be able to avoid a strong military response, added the unnamed spokesperson.

The U.S. sent at least one B-52 based on Guam to Korea for ongoing joint military drills, apparently in a show of firepower.

link: http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/news/2013/03/20/39/0200000000AEN20130320000300315F.HTML

AND then THIS just now:

(URGENT) N. Korea issues air raid alert, orders military to take immediate actions

link: http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/news/2013/03/21/12/0200000000AEN20130321002400315F.HTML
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This is a site of a news agency where immediate reports come in and then fed to other news outlets. Usually only journalists and news media monitors these type of sites. News media will usually receive alerts from news agency sites like these. So this could be a false alarm or it could be a breaking story.