Quick Hitts

Emily Ekins, a student at UCLA, conducted a study of the signs at a Tea Party rally.  She took pictures of about 250 signs and then categorized them.  She discovered that a quarter of them expressed anger at Obama, but only 5% mentioned his race or religion, and just 1% questioned his citizenship.

With the exception of a single article in the Washington Post   the mainstream media completely ignored her findings.  Bias?  Naw, not them.

The 5% number is telling.  A minimum of 10% of any group will be oddballs and misfits.  That goes for any organization, not just political ones.  I’ve served on the boards of two organizations that relied on volunteers, and about 10% of the people who showed up to help were creepy freaks you’d never choose to associate with.

In a recent interview with Bill O’Reilly, the president of the NAACP said they’d been monitoring Tea Party rallies for racist signs for the past six months.  They’d found one offensive t-shirt.  One.

As I’ve mentioned before, standard operating procedure for the left is slapping a “racist” tag on any groups, individuals, or even ideas they don’t agree with.  It makes it easy to ignore and dismiss them, which is soooo much easier than addressing the issues being raised.  They’ve been smearing the Tea Party since its inception.  Their “proof” consists of about two dozen tasteless signs they’ve found among the hundreds of thousands that have been displayed at rallies.  They post these pictures over and over again, at every opportunity.

This study isn’t definitive, and needs a follow-up.  It should include more signs, from different rallies, and several people with different political ideologies should rate them.  But this is a good start, and debunks the oft-repeated charges of TP racism.

I’ve got several problems with the Tea Party, which I’ll address in a later post, but it’s clear, from this study and the NAACPs inability to find racism at the rallies, despite their diligent search, that the most common smear on them is completely without merit.

I’m about to ruin a classic rock song for you, but I’ll give you a fair warning first.

If you click play, you will never be able to listen to this song again without thinking of this.

…is to make fun of them.

Or, perhaps, put them in a sack and hit them with sticks.

New York State, whose government has been completely dysfunctional for the past half-century, is looking to shrink its huge state work force.  Too few workers have taken an offer of early retirement, so the state is planning on laying off at least 2,000 of them.  That sounds like a lot until you discover they have about 131,000 official state workers and 163,000 other workers, including contractors who have often been hired to do the work state workers won’t.

It’s only a guess, but based on my direct observation it would be possible to fire at least 40% of them with no impact on state services.  Here’s a simple four step plan that will do it quickly and easily.

1. Grow some balls.  Great big ones.  This step is necessary to implement step 4.
2. Make unannounced visits to every office of every state agency.  Carefully note who is playing solitaire, doing crossword puzzles, reading the newspaper or Harlequin romances, playing lotto scratch-offs, etc.  Record their names.
3. Make a second unannounced visit on a different day, at a different time of the day, and repeat step 2.
4. Compare the two lists of names.  Call in everyone who is on both lists and fire them, immediately.

Step four is going to piss off the union, which is why step one is so vital.

I’ve worked as a contractor in state offices and seen, first hand, some of the most amazing goofing off.  Sure, everyone goofs off once in a while (which is why my plan incorporates two visits instead of one) but some of these people have raised it to an art form.  If they were eliminated from the work force the state would save a substantial amount of taxpayer money with no adverse effects.

The amount of goofing off varies widely from agency to agency and between departments in the same agency.  I’ve been places where there just about everyone was working (or at least looking busy) and others where half the staff were goofing off.  (Sadly, one of the busiest offices, where I observed virtually no goofing off, was the Department of Taxation.)  In general, in my very unscientific estimation, 25-50% of the people in most state offices are just using up oxygen.

Even in agencies with very high goof off rates there are still a lot of people working. They don’t have to, because the union makes it virtually impossible to get rid of anyone, but they want to, and do. Not excessively hard, because promotions are based on seniority and test taking ability instead of merit, but sill, they put in a good day’s work.  These are the first people to leave on their own, out of frustration, or get laid off, because of seniority.  The goof-offs, despite all their whining and bitching (yet another way they pass the time) know they’ve got a good thing going and are not about to leave.

In one instance I was hired as part of a team to image and install 50 computers, a job that should take two people two to three weeks.  The state hired four of us on a six month contract.  We were being paid about 50% more than the prevailing wage for that type of work, and were hired by an outside agency, which was also getting a substantial cut.

We worked as slowly as possible, but still got the job done in a week and a half.  Then we discovered the real reason we were hired.  We were there to do the help desk’s jobs.  The help desk was fully staffed, but very few people there were actually working.  At least, not for the state.   One was working on building his Amway down-line.  Another was concentrating on turning his band into The Next Big Thing.  One was trying to master Othello at the highest computer level. All were being paid by taxpayer dollars, and so were we.  NY was paying their “workers,” and us, and our agency, to do the job that their workers should have been doing in the first place.

One day I need to do some hardware repairs but had forgotten my tools at home.  I borrowed a set from someone at the help desk.  They were pristine, without the slightest bit of wear on any of them.

Because the number of actual workers varies dramatically among different agencies, and because I don’t know what all these people are being paid, I can’t say with any certainty just how much this will save.  But it’s a good bet that at least 25% of the work force in most agencies, and up to 50% in some, can be let go without anyone noticing except the nearby vendors who sell coffee, paperbacks and lotto tickets.  It would be at least several billion dollars, and that’s a yearly savings, not just a one shot deal.  And all it takes is for the state to grow big enough balls to stand up to the union.

Which means, of course, that it will never happen.

The debate is going well for you.  Your opponent is from the far left, so it’s pretty easy to counter all his canned talking points.  As you back him further into a corner he fires back, “Obviously, you don’t like brown people.”  Bam!  He’s trying to shut you down with the left’s favorite weapon: The Race Card.

It’s designed to derail the conversation.  If you deny it you’ll look defensive, and most denials resemble clichés that are used by real racists.  (“Some of my best friends are…”)  If you ignore it the lefty will just re-spew the accusation.  If you point out this is a common scummy trick, they’ve succeeded changing the subject.

It’s also designed to discount you as a worthless person. Real racists are rotten, ignorant people, so if they can smear you with the label, and believe it themselves, it’s easy to discount anything you say, because who cares about a racist’s opinion?

Do you disagree with any of Obama’s policies?  Racist!  Think illegal immigration is a problem?  Racist!  Dislike Islam?  Racist!  (It doesn’t matter how many times you smartenize them to the simple fact that Islam isn’t a race.)  Oppose any social programs?  Racist!  In the mind of a hard core lefty any opinion that disagrees with theirs is somehow racist.

But now you have a solution.  Just send them to this handy page.  Better yet, reply with the short URL (http://bit.ly/9KGwlS ).  If they keep repeating their nonsense, keep sending them there, and announce that their participation in the conversation is over since they’ve lost the debate.

This is an attempt to put an end to their tiresome, predicable, trite, deeply dishonest nonsense.  It won’t solve the problem, but it should help, at least a little.

You’re welcome.

It’s time to put the blame for the threatened Quran burning squarely where it belongs: on the media.

The “pastor” at the center of this nonsense has a congregation of about 50 people.  No one had paid much attention to him before this, although there is documentation proving he’s a worthless whack job.  The appropriate response would have been to ignore him and move on.

But August is a slow news month, and the hungry media picked up this guys torch, as it were, and gave him national, and then international, attention.  Even though he backed down, he inspired others to mimic his asshattery.  As of today three incidents of Quran burning have been reported, although not with nearly as much fanfare as was given to this schmuck.

The right wing media (Fox) and the left wing media (nearly everyone else) universally condemned him, as they should have, but a much better approach would have been to completely ignore him.  He’s the kind of clown who loves to be hated, and the media played right into his hands.

Here’s a suggested guideline for all the “news” organizations to follow the next time something like this happens.   If the attention whore driving the story doesn’t have enough followers to fill a T.G.I. Fridays, ignore him. Treat him as if he didn’t exist.  For the lefty media I’d add “treat it the way you treat Muslim honor killings in the US.”  No coverage, no mention, no nothin’.  Give clowns like this all the attention they deserve – absolutely none.

I’m not quite ready to admit to being old, but I can see it on the horizon, getting closer with each passing birthday.  The signs are unmistakable – I’m stiffer and slower than before (and I was never very speedy in the first place).  I’ve caught myself making old man noises when I sit down.  (Vocal, not farts.)  If I didn’t dye my beard it would be Santa Claus white.  (I use “Just for Dave.”)  Although I can still party late into the night, recovery the next day takes much longer.

Since oldness will arrive sooner than I’d like, I’ve been watching old people to see how I should behave when I get there.

After spending two years trying to find another IT job I’ve given up and gone back to my first career: selling.  You know those annoying pitch men doing road shows at your local warehouse stores?  Yeah, that.  It’s not only fun and lucrative; it gives me the opportunity to watch lots of old people in action.  Here are a few things I’ve learned.

If your shopping cart doesn’t fit between two things, back up and jam it forward again.  And again and again and again.  Eventually enough things will fall down for you to get through.  Oh, and be sure to bitch while you’re doing it.

When cruising the parking lot always look to the left and the right, but never straight ahead.  This is good practice for highway driving.

When a pitchman is in the middle of his pitch walk up to the booth and loudly demand “How Much Is It?”  When the pitchman says “I’ll answer that in just a minute sir” raise your raspy voice even louder and say “I want to know right now!”  When the pitchman says “just one moment, sir,” yell, “You just lost a sale” and storm off.  Then run your cart into a display of cherry tomatoes and curse as they scatter all over the floor.  Ignore the crowd that’s laughing at you.

I’m not old enough to do any of those things now, but I’ll get there.  I’m almost looking forward to it.