Vote Barefoot and Pregnant

As you may well now, I’m not a big fan of Mitt Romney.  Mainly because I’m tired of wealthy people claiming they want the best for poor-ish folks like me and then getting into office and making the country such a nicer place for their wealthy friends.  I’m lookin’ at you, too, Mr. Obama.  But Romney’s biggest problem is that other Republicans can’t get behind him, because he’s too moderate, which is a fancy way to say that he compromises in arguments instead of the natural Republican defense of, “I’m right an’ yer wrong, so I’s shoot yo ass or pray fer bad things t’happen to ya!”  Of course I’ll give Romney this much…Obama lied to us and said he was all about the ‘little guy’.  At least Romney admits he’s all about the wealthy folks.

Well...at least Romney's honest in what he wants. Our Money.

But there’s someone in the world who really could get to vote for Mitt Romney.  And no I’m not talking about Corporate Assassins who are out to protect the oligarchs and aristocrats of America.  It’s Rick Santorum…

That’s right, Rick Santorum, the new crusader (and I do not use the term figuratively) of the religious ‘right’.  He basically supports putting women back in the kitchen, preferably barefoot and pregnant, and following a biblical ideology of how the country should be run.  He’s gone so far as to say that the Constitution is just an ‘owner’s manual’ to tell us how to run the country using the Roman Catholic Bible as a guide for what should and should not be law.

This is the same man who bilked Pennsylvania out of $60,000 to educate his children in charter schools, even though his primary residence was in Vriginia, then refused to pay the money back (even though he’s worth upwards of 3 million dollars) and forced the charter school to sue the state itself to get back some of the money it was owed.  But remember folks…it isn’t like lying, cheating, and stealing are forbidden by some ancient holy text that Rick Santorum follows or anything, is it?

Oh, right...that book.

 

Well, I have news for Mr. Santorum.  Women fought hard to get the rights that he thinks they don’t seem to deserve.  And they’ll fight him pretty hard, too, to keep them.  And to get even more, until there is no job a woman can’t do or can’t have, just because it requires a penis.  Well…except gay porn model, I suppose…but that makes up for the limited roles men had on the show Baywatch, I think.

I saw this picture last night on my Facebook account and decided that it was certainly worth a few shares.  Just to warn Santorum and his nutjob supporters what’s in store for themselves if they think they’ll win anything, at all.  It’s from a Tumblr account called The Riot.

~RCS

Grassroots Marketing

So, after a mind numbingly boring day watching the Academy Awards’ Red Carpet on CNN and a documentary about the bumfuckery of the Branch Davidian Sect’s Waco Compound Siege by the ATF in the early ’90s, also on CNN, I left work and headed for home.  But lo and behold…I was low on fuel for my van.

Yeah, I’m that cool…I drive a minivan and don’t have any children.

I also have a puppy...

So anyway…I pulled into the gas station and got everything ready, only to find the pump I pulled up to was not working.  The LCD screen was magnetized and wouldn’t change screens.  So I turned the van around and pulled in to another pump.  While getting out the gentleman on the other side of the pump saw the url located on the side of my van.  He took a picture and said he was going to put it on twitter.

I relished the free advertising, to be honest.  Then he and I discussed the Dick of the Month feature we have here and he gave an impromptu submission for Dick of the Month: Himself.  He told me that the guy who fired him a year ago just committed suicide…and that he felt like a dick, because he couldn’t help but not feel bad.  But then he disqualified himself for admitted that he felt a little bad since the guy had a wife and daughter when he died.

I’m sorry sir, you were born with a conscience and therefore are disqualified for the position of Dick of the Month.  The good news is that makes you a productive member of society!

I so love the chance at grassroots marketing, even if he did catch me as I was getting off work and half asleep/ravenously hungry.  Because that means the twelve dollars I spent to put that sign with my url on it was worth it.

~RCS

My Mistake and New Post

Whoops…I set up the post scheduling  wrong and none of them posted this week.  I accidentally set them all up for next week.  So, uhh…I’ve moved them around some.  This post was supposed to be Monday the 20th’s post.  I’ll catch up to myself here.

At my newest posting I start 3:30 pm and I, along with my colleague, replace the day shift woman.  My new manager has told me that the day-shift woman complains if she doesn’t get to leave on time.  So he urges us all to show up early, if not on time.

I did a week’s training, and then began full-time.  It was about my second full-time week there and I was working with the guy I basically replaced (he’s semi-retired now, only works part time as a fill-in).  We went to the desk to take over the post at 3:27 and she chewed us out for being too early saying, “You’re not supposed to be here until three-thirty!”

My semi-retired colleague replied, “Ma’am, it is three-thirty.  Three-twenty-seven to be exact.”

And she glared at him, “I don’t need smart ass comments.”

She’s lucky she snapped at him, because I was one foot out the door at the first complaint.  Considering she gets paid more than I do, has a better shift than I do, and does half as much work as I do…I don’t intend to put up with her shit.  Especially since the little bitch and I hadn’t even been officially introduced.  I didn’t even know her name, yet.

So now I show up on time at best, if not a few minutes late.  So folks, take that as a lesson…if your departure time at your place of work is dependent on somebody else, you probably shouldn’t be a dick to that person.  Especially if they’re new and have relatively little to lose by changing jobs.

~RCS

Turn Me On Parody

For this of you who haven’t heard David Guetta and Nicki Minaj’s song Turn Me On, I highly suggest it if you’re into that kind of music.  That being said there is a Pokemon parody out there and I think that if they’re going to keep making crappy Pokemon cartoons, they should use this as the opening so that it is at least somewhat bearable in even the slightest sense.

And this is the original video…which is even stranger than the parody, if you can believe that.

~RCS

She Won’t Be Shooting The Breeze On Her Laptop, Anymore

Summary: teenage girl posted some self-important gibberish on her Facebook wall and blocked her parents from seeing her wall.  Her father works in IT and has apparently chastised and punished her for similar things before.  Oh and they are all middle-class rednecks, which I personally adore.

Personally, I would have confiscated the laptop for my own use, or sold it.  But I do enjoy his panache and insensible sensibility.

~RCS

We CAN Erase Homelessness, Too

I was running a few numbers recently and came across a surprisingly depressing thing.  Fighting homelessness/hunger/poverty is not as expensive as most people who can afford to fight it make it out to be.

My ultimate goal in life is to create a self-sufficient society where those who cannot function in society, even if only temporarily, can find a safe place to grow and live; for life or for a short while.  Without getting into too much detail, basically we would welcome the homeless, especially veterans who can’t function well because of PTSD or something, from all over the country into the organization.

Ideally everyone would receive a room of their own, but even if living space had to be shared it would still give people food, shelter, clothing, and a job.  Those who are strong and virile would farm the property owned by the foundation, those who were too weak or inept to farm would be given other tasks such as doing laundry or cleaning the property.

Everyone would have a place in the society, whether for life or only for a short time.  As such we would also welcome battered spouses who have nowhere else to go but back to their abusers, runaway children who do not feel safe or loved at home, and people who are simply fed up with the way society is structured and wants a healthy alternative.

No alcohol, no drugs, no guns, no fiscal castes, just people living together to benefit each other.  I suppose you could call it Socialist, but it’s designed for people that are forgotten or disenfranchised by a Capitalist society, so I guess that’s not a bad thing.  It’s a place that exists without the constraints of money.

Of course you’d need a lot of money to get it to work, cordoning it away from the money-driven, Capitalist society that surrounds it.  Hence why my poor ass hasn’t started the process, yet.

But on a shorter term, I like to look at what it would cost to feed, clothe, and shelter people without creating an off-branching society.

And I was quite depressed to find out how cheap it would be to do so.  Especially since it isn’t being done…not nearly enough.

~RCS

Dick of the Month: Capt. Francesco Schettino

Anybody who has ever been on a cruise knows the deal.  You go to the port, get on the boat, and have a week or so of pure, unobtruded luxury.  The biggest fear you have is that your spouse will kill you in your cabin.

But now we have to worry (I say we, like I have the money to go on a cruise…haha) about Captains who don’t know how to pilot boats.

Such is the case on the Carnival Cruise Line’s subsidiary company Costa Cruises in Italy.  The captain of the Costa Concordia was one Capt. Francesco Schettino.  And apparently he was a pretty schetty captain.  He brought the vessel too close to the shoreline so that the crew could wave to family and friends on the island.

Or is Schettino actually a pretty good captain and he’s just getting the short-end of the stick?  That’s the question we’re going to try to answer here.

Spoiler Alert: We're pretty sure he's a shitty captain.

So the ship sailed too close to the island, and struck a projection of rocks.  Schettino then pulled a hard turn and ran the ship aground to keep it from sinking or capsizing, giving the people on board enough time to get off the ship.

He then abandoned ship and left his unprepared and uninformed crew to handle things without him.  Although Schettino said that he fell into a lifeboat.  But during a wiretapped phone call to a friend he admitted that when he realized how bad the situation was…he decided to get the hell out of there.

Schettino seems to be mostly looking at manslaughter for the deaths of the people trapped on board, abandoning ship during an evacuation, and some other general malfeasance stuff.

But the people who survived are looking at about $1,400 in compensation for lost luggage and emotional distress.  A group of passengers have already started a class-action suit seeking damages of about $460 million, though.

If we assume the lawyers will get 50% of that, there’s between 6 and 10 plaintiffs for the suit.  So that’ll give them all about $29 million apiece.  But if we add in half of the 4,000 passengers to make it a worthwhile class-action suit, then we’re looking more at about $115,000 per person.  That’s a pretty acceptable amount, to me.

All in all…I’d say that Capt. Schettino should definitely some good charges.  His captain’s licensing should be revoked, some jail time, some fines, maybe even restrict him from even being allowed to get a fishing license.

Why should he go through all these things?  Because he’s a Schett-head, but mostly because he’s a really bad captain.  And although it has no legal bearing on anything…I’ve still adopted Capt. Francesco Schettino as the January Dick of the Month.

~RCS

Teleflwhorea?

I saw a report that parent watchdog groups are upset about the Teleflora ad because the woman in it (Adrianna Lima) is wearing a low-cut, sexy dress and stockings.  The same kind of outfit that many women wear out on a Friday night, and less skimpy than many teenage girls wear to school every day.

Now, people are right to hate that commercial.  But it has nothing to with her outfit.  It’s the commercial’s message, which says: “Men; if you give a woman flowers, she will have sex with you.”

Happy Valentines, ladies…teleflora just obligated to put out for a $30 bouquet.  As long as he’s got flowers he doesn’t even have to buy you dinner, just walk up to a stranger’s door, hand her some flowers, and she’ll spread her legs.

Behold the power of flowers!

Didn’t see the commercial?  Don’t believe me?  Here you go…

Teleflora?  They might as well just call their company Misogyny.com.

Sidenote: Misogyny.com is not a real site, thankfully.

Nothing like putting women back a few hundred years just so you can get a nice bouquet that will die two days after Valentine’s Day.

My fiance always yells at me when I bring home flowers, she prefers for me to bring home potted plants.  At least that way they survive the week (although admittedly not much longer, just between us).

~RCS

We CAN Erase The Debt, Easily

You all know that I hate quoting myself, right?  Well I touched on a subject in my last post, but didn’t go really into depth with it.  Now I’m going into a deeper hole to mine some more information.  Follow along with me as I configure these numbers and come to the conclusion that…the nation is bought and owned by the wealthiest members of the nation.  And that there aren’t many ways to change it.

Here’s where the thought started in the last post to recap:

“And look at Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney, who makes about $20,000 every 8 hours.  That’s equivalent to making $2,500 an hour if he worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year; that’s a grand total of $21.9 million a year in income.  He pays a little less than $3.3 million a year in taxes.  If he paid the same 22% that I do on my hard-earned money, that’d be a little more than $4.8 million.

And both Romney and my million-dollar CD only pay 15% taxes, whereas I pay closer 22% tax on the money I bust my ass for.  In other words, he pays a little less than $3.3 million a year in taxes.  If he paid the same 22% that I do on my hard-earned money, that’d be a little more than $4.8 million.  Whereas I pay a little more than $4,600 in taxes, but if I only paid 15% in taxes, I’d pay a little more than $3,100.”

Now if we follow along with those numbers…

And if we assume that all the .1% top income earners earn Romney’s amount and pay his level of taxes and that the lower 50% of the nation that make less than $26,000 a year all make the cut-off of 26k and pay my effective tax rate of 22% than we can look at the following results.

Top .1% Population: 300,000 people

Top .1% Income Gross: $6,570,000,000,000 (that is 6.57 trillion dollars)

Top .1% Tax Payment (at 15%): $985,500,000,000 (that is 985.5 billion dollars)

Bottom 50% Population: 150,000,000 people (that is 150 million)

Bottom 50% Income Gross: $3,900,000,000,000 (that is only 3.9 trillion dollars)

Bottom 50% Tax Payment (at 22%): $858,000,000,000 (yup, 858 billion dollars)

 

Now if we switch those tax rates around we find these numbers…

Top .1% Tax Payment (at 22%): $1,445,400,000,000 (a mighty 1.4 trillion dollars)

Bottom 50% Tax Payment (at 15%): $585,000,000,000 (still a comely 585 billion dollars)

So if we just switch the tax rates, we wind up with the top .1% paying 459.9 billion dollars a year more in taxes and the bottom 50% pays 127.5 billion dollars a year less.

In total that is an increase in $332.4 billion in taxes for the government.  In a period of 4 years we would increase tax revenue by more than $1.3 trillion dollars.

So if we can cut spending by 1.5 trillion dollars a year, that’d cut the budget deficit by 100 Billion dollars (i.e. .1 trillion dollars) a year, so after 4 years we would lower the national debt by 1.7 trillion dollars in 4 years just by making respectable cuts to the wasteful government spending and forcing 300 thousand people to pay the same tax rate as 150 million people who, combined, make less than the aforementioned 300 thousand people.

 

Now before you rant and rave at those numbers…keep in mind that we’re only looking at .1% against 50%.  If we look at Mitt Romney’s cronies among the top full 1% and realize that they must make around similar amounts as him.  So if we assume that the remainder of the top 1%, the other .9%, make marginally less than him we can create an even fancier number.

We’ll calculate it like this: We’ll assume that the top 1% makes, as a combined average, 20% less than Romney’s income per person.  That gives us the following numbers…

Top 1% Population: 3,000,000 (million) people

Top 1% Income Gross: $52,560,000,000,000 (that would be 52.6 trillion dollars a year)

Top 1% Tax Payment (at 22%): 7,884,000,000,000 (7.9 trillion dollars a year in taxes)

Top 1% Tax Payment (at 22%): $11,563,200,000,000 (yes…11.6 trillion dollars a year in tax income)

So if we raise effective taxes from 15% to 22% on the top 10%, using our numbers, we raise tax income (after accounting for lowering taxes on the bottom 50% from 22% to 15% tax) by $3,551,700,000,000.  In other words: 3.6 trillion dollars a year.

After 4 years, we’d have 14.4 trillion dollars a year, even without the spending cuts.  If we manage to cut spending by $1.5 trillion a year, we’d end up with $14.8 trillion dollars more than we get every year, now, in four years’ time.

So in the term of one single president, we could pay down over 97% of the national debt.  In the same president’s second term, we would erase the national debt in the first few months of his (or her) second term and by the end of the second term we would have a national surplus of 14.3 trillion dollars.

So in 8 years’ time we would not only erase the debt, but acquire a surplus almost equivalent to the debt as of writing this post ($15.2 trillion).

Now explain to me why we can’t have universal free health care and have this huge deficit, again?

~RCS

Jagged Alliance: Pseudo-Preview

I have just recently discovered excellent news.  For anyone who may be fans of the Jagged Alliance series of computer games, apparently BitComposer Games and Kalypso Media have gotten the rights to the series.

As such, they have made a new game which will come out on February 14, just a few days away.  It is a graphically improved retelling of the original Jagged Alliance 2, which I’m perfectly fine with.

It also has a new system, it’s no longer turn-based strategy; it is now real-time strategy.  But you can pause it and issue commands in a tactical mode which lets you assess your squad-members, the viewable enemies, the terrain, etc.  The actions you command your squad members to perform will then be carried out in sequence, you can even link events together, like waiting for someone to shoot before moving ahead to draw a guard’s attention, or having two guys move into position and to pincer an enemy and coordinating their shots to make sure both are in position, first.

It sounds like a really good improvement…sadly my computer’s graphics card seems to be the bane of my existence right now and I’m having trouble running the demo.  So, I’m looking for an improved graphics card and will try to get one in this chittering box beside me very soon.

At that point expect an actual preview about the game and hopefully I’ll get Kalypso Media’s attention and get a free review copy (yeah right).

~RCS