Sorry the entire world can’t all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type. Sorry some people like to have fun. Sorry I’m standing in the way of your minimalist Bauhaus-esque fascist snoozefest. Maybe sometime you should take off your black turtleneck, stop compulsively adjusting your Tumblr theme, and lighten the fuck up for once.

Comic Sans.
Posted without comment until I get some much needed minor adjustments out of the way re: clumsily hanging right justified quote attribution text.

Company Store

BP is housing hundreds of oil-spill clean-up workers on the Louisiana coast in “flotels” – 40-foot-long corrugated steel boxes that contain dormitory style beds

I hope they’re deducting a generous room and board allowance from what is inevitably temporary and benefits-free pay, which, of course arrives in the form of scrip. Spendable at company stores everywhere! Ask your employer about scrip!

You suck 16Bbl, and what do you get? Why, it’s great, and great looking and can be towed to an oil spill near you. Who says they’re not innovating?

UI issues

thebroadermarket:

by Jordan Eizenga


…research by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank has found that the current link between high UI benefits and poor job search efforts is weak. Researchers found that unemployed workers who qualify for UI benefits have been unemployed for only 1.6 weeks longer than those who do not qualify for such benefits. This suggests that the persistently high level of unemployment is not so much a function of labor supply, but rather labor demand. In other words, workers are willing to work, but employers are not very interested in hiring them.

Read More

Yep, yep, yep, a thousand times: YEP. While it’s always convenient and even mildly masturbatory to blame the victim, the fact is people want to work. And, like the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, the Welfare Queen with Her Cadillac is was and always will have been a figment of Reagan and the right wing’s id-maginations.

Sorry, but it’s true.

If I’m going to die, I’m ready. But I’m going out playing ‘Sophisticated Lady.’

Charles Mingus, in response to a bomb threat at a 1972 Yale University concert.
He continued to play, and “coming from inside [the otherwise evacuated hall] was the sound of Mingus intently playing Ellington’s dreamy thirties hit […] going on and on and getting hotter. In the street, Ellington stood in the waiting crowd just beyond the theatre’s open doors, smiling.”
Wow.

Invest in energy research and development. […] Find a way for utilities to make money from the CO2 produced by their coal plants.

Lamar Alexander, fucktard. Why didn’t The Democrat think of this years ago. Think of all the lost revenue on that CO2 we’ve just been tossing out into the atmosphere. Unforgivable.

BP’s Oyster

According to the New York Times, the oldest oyster-shucking operation in the country shucked its last oyster on Thursday. Towards the end of the piece is this quote from the requisite owner/operator:

We were just hopeful they would have capped that thing by now [such that we wouldn’t be forced to shutter the business]

Uh, even if they had completely and forever capped it yesterday, your business model (harvesting food products from the gulf) is over. Probably for decades. Remains unclear to me why the media, so obsessed with idiotic minutiae, utterly fails to comprehend The Big Picture. All these gulf-based industries except oil are going away. And in terms of those living on the Earth today, they are likely going away forever. Oh, right, “obsessed with idiotic minutiae.”

MSM: If you want a guvmint-should-be-doing-more story, how’s about the guvmint should be actively retraining these folks, starting now for some sort of useful job that they’ll be doing for the rest of their lives, because shrimping, shucking oysters, and the various other food-related gulf industries are over. Forever. It’s just that the media, and by extension America, doesn’t seem to grasp this yet.