Entries Tagged 'economic collapse' ↓

What’s new about FAILure?

Failure has been part of the human condition ever since the Fall of Man. Every one of us learns of the ubiquity of failure, almost from birth. Failure generally means that you tried something that didn’t work, with consequences all too often catastrophic. In a larger sense, you can also fail by not bothering to make an adequate effort in the first place.

Failure, actual and impending, of every stripe, is celebrated hilariously on an ever-growing cornucopia of blogs and websites, such as The Darwin Awards, Fark.com, There, I Fixed It, The Smoking Gun, numerous demotivational poster sites, and one of my own favorites, the Lords of Logistics series on Dark Roasted Blend.

During the past decade, the familiar word “failure” has become the Internet meme “FAIL”. The infamous Urban Dictionary defines Fail in various ways, including “The glorious lack of success.” The FAIL meme has propagated in tandem with the seemingly exponential growth of FAILure in the world at large.

I’ve occasionally experimented with the FAIL meme myself, both on deviantART and on 1389 Blog. The following example suddenly became more relevant after John McCain won the 2010 Arizona Republican primary election:

The unfortunately leftist online Slate Magazine contends that the growth of the FAIL meme reflects Schadenfreude, defined as pleasure at the misfortunes of others:

Slate: Why is everyone saying “fail” all of a sudden?

the good word
Epic Win: Goodbye, schadenfreude; hello, fail.
By Christopher Beam
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2008, at 11:55 AM ET

…What’s with all the failing lately? Why fail instead of failure? Why FAIL instead of fail? And why, for that matter, does it have to be “epic”?

It’s nearly impossible to pinpoint the first reference, given how common the verb fail is, but online commenters suggest it started with a 1998 Neo Geo arcade game called Blazing Star. (References to the fail meme go as far back as 2003.) Of all the game’s obvious draws—among them fast-paced action, disco music, and anime-style cut scenes—its staying power comes from its wonderfully terrible Japanese-to-English translations. If you beat a level, the screen flashes with the words: “You beat it! Your skill is great!” If you lose, you are mocked: “You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!”

Normally, this sort of game would vanish into the cultural ether. But in the lulz-obsessed echo chamber of online message boards—lulz being the questionable pleasure of hurting someone’s feelings on the Web—”You fail it” became the shorthand way to gloat about any humiliation, major or minor. “It” could be anything, from getting a joke to executing a basic mental task. For example, if you told me, “Hey, I liked your article in Salon today,” I could say, “You fail it.” Convention dictates that I could also add, in parentheses, “(it being reading the titles of publications).” The phrase was soon shortened to fail—or, thanks to the caps-is-always-funnier school of Web writing, FAIL. People started pasting the word in block letters over photos of shameful screw-ups, and a meme was born.

The fail meme hit the big time this year with the May launch of Failblog, an assiduous chronicler of humiliation and a guide to the taxonomy of fail. The most basic fails—a truck getting sideswiped by an oncoming train, say, or a National Anthem singer falling down on the ice—are usually the most boring, as obvious as a clip from America’s Funniest Home Videos. Another easy laugh is the translation fail, such as the unfortunately named “Universidad de Moron.” This is the same genre of fail that spawned Engrish, an entire site devoted to poor English translations of Asian languages, not to mention the fail meme itself. A notch above those are unintentional-contradiction fails, like “seedless” sunflower seeds or a door with two signs on it: “Welcome” and “Keep Out.” Architectural fails have the added misfortune of being semipermanent, such as the handicapped ramp that leads the disabled to a set of stairs or the second-story door that opens out onto nothing. Even more embarrassing are simple information fails, like the brochure that invites students to “Study Spanish in Mexico” with photos of the Egyptian pyramids. These fails often expose deep ignorance: One woman thinks her sprinkler makes a rainbow because of toxins in the water and air.

The highest form of fail—the epic fail—involves not just catastrophic failure but hubris as well. Not just coming in second in a bike race but doing so because you fell off your bike after prematurely raising your arms in victory. Totaling your pickup not because the brakes failed but because you were trying to ride on the windshield. Not just destroying your fish tank but doing it while trying to film yourself lifting weights.

Why has fail become so popular? It may simply be that people are thrilled to finally have a way to express their schadenfreude out loud. Schadenfreude, after all, is what you feel when someone else executes a fail. But the fail meme also changes our experience of schadenfreude. What was once a quiet pleasure-taking is now a public—and competitive—sport.

It’s no wonder, then, that the fail meme gained wider currency with the advent of the financial crisis. Some observers relished watching wealthier-than-God investment bankers get their comeuppance. It helped that the two events occurred at the same time—Google searches for fail surged in early 2008, around the same time the mortgage crisis started to pick up steam. And the ubiquity of phrases like “failed mortgages” and “bank failures” seemed to echo the popular meme, which may have helped usher the term out of 4chan boards and onto blogs.It’s rare that an Internet fad finds such a suitable mainstream vehicle for its dissemination. It’s as if LOLcats coincided with a global outbreak of some feline adorability virus. The financial crisis also fits neatly into the Internet’s tendency toward overstatement. (Worst. Subprime mortgage crisis. Ever.) Only this time, it’s not an exaggeration….

Read the rest.

Somebody else’s troubles may be our own

As with the gapers block phenomenon, we can never quite look away from failures that are not our own. Whether trivial or spectacular, whether humiliating or oddly heroic, whether well-deserved or the outcome of pure happenstance, failure gets our attention, and well it should.

I don’t think it’s always schadenfreude. Sometimes we laugh out of relief because the troubles belong to somebody else this time around, even though we know it could have happened to us.

Other times, we laugh about failure even when the failure DOES embroil us in its consequences, as with the ongoing political, social, and economic debacles in the US and the EU. (If you need a good laugh right now, check out the Sunday Funnies political cartoon series on Flopping Aces.) When we can share a good laugh, it not only underlines the lessons that we can learn from these failures, but also lightens the burdens that we all must bear as we work our way through.

Originally published on 2.0: The Blogmocracy

Guests at Minnesota’s oldest hotel could request a cuddly cat for the night

My husband and I stayed at the famous Anderson House Hotel in Wabasha, Minnesota a few years ago. The female tabby we chose spent most of the night cuddling with my husband. But I didn’t mind. The room was picturesque and the food at the restaurant was good.

Petside.com blog post from November 29, 2007:
Wanted: Friendly, Warm, Affectionate Ambassador for Minnesota Cat House

Arnold…How may I help you?

Okay…I know it’s a family website. But it’s not what you think. So shame on you!

Actually, The Historic Anderson House in Wabasha, Minnesota is, according to innkeeper Teresa Smith, the state’s only legal “cat house.” And for a very good reason. The staff of the 151 year-old bed-and-breakfast includes five friendly felines who, upon request, will come to your room evenings, warm your bed, and keep you company. What’s more, the hotel provides a litter box, toys, and food with each “kitty-to-go.” Most guests reserve a cat with their room, Smith says, and many put their dibs in early to ensure their favorite will be available. Poor souls with allergies can request a no-cat room.

Read the rest.

A casualty of the Obamaconomy

I recently looked up the hotel’s website and was disappointed to find that the domain name was being “parked.” It turns out that the famous landmark hotel that had been established in 1856, had failed to survive the Obama administration. At least all of the cats who once provided companship for the guests still have homes.

Anderson House, Minnesota’s oldest hotel, closes

Last Update: March 23, 2009 – 7:19 PM
By: Kerry Westenberg

A voice-mail message at the storied hotel in Wabasha starts out with a promising welcome.

Then comes a sigh, and these words, “We are sad to say that due to the bad economics that are going on, the Historic Anderson House has had to close its doors.”

Until it stopped operating Thursday, the Anderson House had been the longest running inn in the state. It was built in 1856 when Wabasha was a bustling Mississippi River town.
…
The building is on the National Register of Historic Places, but may be more famous for its collection of cats that guests could bring into their rooms for the night.
…
Fancher said that the more than dozen cats that resided at the hotel have been adopted by friends and former employees.

Read the rest.

Also see:

• Strange Travels: Get a Cat with Your Room at Minnesota’s Anderson House
• Visit Americanaville: The Historic Anderson House in Wabasha, Minnesota
• Wikipedia: Historic Anderson House Hotel

Originally published at 2.0: The Blogmocracy

Underemployment: Obama’s dirty little secret

Even the best-qualified, highest-skilled, and hardest-working Americans are up against it these days. Yes, even those Americans who still have jobs! We all know that the official unemployment statistics are vastly understated, in that they focus only on claims for unemployment compensation. The stats do not properly account for older workers who have taken early retirement after losing a job; young workers who cannot enter the labor force; “discouraged workers” who are still looking for work, but whose unemployment benefits are exhausted; disabled persons who could work to a limited extent, but who aren’t being hired; and American citizens who have had to travel overseas, often at great sacrifice and financial loss, to find work.

But perhaps the biggest of the dirty little secrets hidden by the official unemployment statistics is underemployment. I know about this from personal experience. Despite all of my qualifications, I have not been able to find full-time employment in over two years. The reason? With all of the hidden ramifications of Obamacare looming over everyone’s heads, along with the other past and future attacks on private enterprise, nobody wants to hire full-time people at all if they can help it. Certainly nobody wants to hire someone over 55 for a full-time job where the employer will be forced to provide overpriced health insurance or be fined for not providing it. Some people may call it age discrimination, but it’s the government that is causing it, not the prejudices of private employers.

There’s no need to take my word for any of this. Look at any job board or want-ad listing and notice the proliferation of part-time, temporary, and contract assignments, and the relative absence of full-time jobs with benefits. For example, a retail store that would normally hire two or three full-time employees will instead hire five part-time employees for 15 to 30 hours per week, at minimum wage, perhaps with commissions, but no benefits. A recent Gallup Poll also reveals large-scale underemployment in the form of part-time workers who want, but cannot get, full-time employment.

The liberal elite wants it that way

Of course, the liberal establishment pretends not to know why unemployment remains so high. Case in point: NYT: Mystery for White House: Where did the jobs go? [H/T: Rodan]

That conundrum, which reclaims center stage in Washington this week, is this: Why is unemployment so high?

The whodunit has flummoxed economists in both parties for a year. In 2009, as the new Obama administration grappled with the financial crisis, joblessness rose nearly two points beyond customary recession forecasts.

Part of the uncertainty concerns why. More consequential now, as the administration and Congress determine what to do, is whether the unemployment spike reflects a short-term or permanent shift in demand for workers.

But seriously…

I have studied economics and I know this for certain: All they have to do is repeal Obozocare, resume drilling, seal the borders, and end the H-1b program, and unemployment will drop three points within a month. I guarantee it!

But none of that will happen until we somehow muster the political will to force our government to do that. Or until enough States secede and decide to govern themselves in the interest of their own citizens.

One way or another, we need to free ourselves from the predatory liberal elites who flout the will of the people and who serve only their own interests and those of our foreign enemies.

The Obama administration, together with the liberal establishment in academia, the mainstream media, the NGOs, the foundations, the Ivy League, and the UN, all have reason to want unemployment to remain high. Why? Because, though it may make the Obama administration look incompetent in the short run, as it did with FDR, it will create more dependency on the government and increase centralized government power in the long run.

Dependency, the Liberals’ Natural Resource explains how this nefarious system works:

A Heritage Foundation report shows that thanks to multiple government programs, the proportion of Americans in some way dependent on government largess has suddenly jumped by 31.2% since 2001 after decades of much slower increases. Even in inflation-adjusted dollars, America now spends thirteen times more on public welfare than it did in 1965. Dependency has snowballed in health care, public welfare, and housing, and the upward trend seems likely to continue as Obama’s statist polices take hold and baby boomers retire. Indeed, the president plans to spend some $10.3 trillion in welfare over the next decades. In a nutshell, Uncle Sam is replacing the family, the church, private charities, and all other non-government sources of assistance, and this means regular jobs for the new caregivers. And it feels good to work for Uncle Sam: Benefits included, the average federal workers in 2008 earned double what those in the private sector took home. So it is hardly unexpected that since about January 2008, some 7.9 million private sectors jobs have disappeared, while 590,000 public sector jobs were created — and this trend seems to be multiplying. It’s a thoroughly modern ménage à trois of dependent citizens, well-paid government employees ministering to them, and harried taxpayers footing the bill.

…

Here’s what makes this “new wealth” so attractive: In today’s uncertain economy, it far outshines the old wealth of building things and selling them at a profit. For one, jobs ministering to the dependent are labor-intensive and immune to mechanization. Government jobs are also wonderfully secure. It is inconceivable, for example, that a counselor working with Vietnamese gangs in Los Angeles will be replaced by an industrial robot or that under-employed social workers will also be asked to direct rush hour traffic to trim labor costs. This is not the cost-cutting-obsessed airlines where passengers make their own reservations, print boarding passes, stow their own luggage, and bring their own food. Nor can these interventions be outsourced to foreign competition. Helping the less fortunate has a permanent “Made in USA” label attached — Toyota has no interest in tackling the pathologies of those living in Detroit.

The supply of these jobs-generating assets is also inexhaustible. America will never, never run out of this newly discovered “wealth.” We may deplete our oil and ravage our forests, but what are the odds of drug addicts, the mentally ill, young unwed mothers, and others needing intervention vanishing? Those mired in pathology are a truly renewable natural resource. Social problems do recede, but rest assured, replacements are easily found (e.g., sex addiction). In a pinch, just open the borders and receive a bountiful fresh supply. And compare the ease of setting up an in-school clinic to mentor anorexic, non-English-speaking adolescent girls with low self-esteem versus building a factory. The former is instantly shovel-ready.

Read it all.

In other words, if the government stops the private sector from offering relatively secure, remunerative, full-time employment to American citizens, that will eventually leave the government as the only source of good jobs on American soil. This is how the federal government creates a new class of Soviet-style apparatchiki. Of course, those jobs ONLY go to those who actively support the regime and do their part to enhance the careers of those already in power, while keeping everyone else down.

Now what?

Our goal is to re-empower ourselves and our families, and decentralize and take back control over everything that has been usurped from us. That means we need to go on the attack to discredit the liberal establishment and all its pomps and all its works, anywhere and everywhere it appears.

We must overcome not only economic underemployment, but the underemployment of the human spirit.

To that end, please turn your attention to this excellent article: Read the rest of this excellent article at America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution. [H/T: doriangrey]

… Consider: The ruling class denies its opponents’ legitimacy. Seldom does a Democratic official or member of the ruling class speak on public affairs without reiterating the litany of his class’s claim to authority, contrasting it with opponents who are either uninformed, stupid, racist, shills for business, violent, fundamentalist, or all of the above. They do this in the hope that opponents, hearing no other characterizations of themselves and no authoritative voice discrediting the ruling class, will be dispirited. For the country class seriously to contend for self-governance, the political party that represents it will have to discredit not just such patent frauds as ethanol mandates, the pretense that taxes can control “climate change,” and the outrage of banning God from public life. More important, such a serious party would have to attack the ruling class’s fundamental claims to its superior intellect and morality in ways that dispirit the target and hearten one’s own. The Democrats having set the rules of modern politics, opponents who want electoral success are obliged to follow them.

…

Reducing the taxes that most Americans resent requires eliminating the network of subsidies to millions of other Americans that these taxes finance, and eliminating the jobs of government employees who administer them. Eliminating that network is practical, if at all, if done simultaneously, both because subsidies are morally wrong and economically counterproductive, and because the country cannot afford the practice in general. The electorate is likely to cut off millions of government clients, high and low, only if its choice is between no economic privilege for anyone and ratifying government’s role as the arbiter of all our fortunes. The same goes for government grants to and contracts with so-called nonprofit institutions or non-governmental organizations. The case against all arrangements by which the government favors some groups of citizens is easier to make than that against any such arrangement. Without too much fuss, a few obviously burdensome bureaucracies, like the Department of Education, can be eliminated, while money can be cut off to partisan enterprises such as the National Endowments and public broadcasting. That sort of thing is as necessary to the American body politic as a weight reduction program is essential to restoring the health of any human body degraded by obesity and lack of exercise. Yet shedding fat is the easy part. Restoring atrophied muscles is harder. Reenabling the body to do elementary tasks takes yet more concentration.

The grandparents of today’s Americans (132 million in 1940) had opportunities to serve on 117,000 school boards. To exercise responsibilities comparable to their grandparents’, today’s 310 million Americans would have radically to decentralize the mere 15,000 districts into which public school children are now concentrated. They would have to take responsibility for curriculum and administration away from credentialed experts, and they would have to explain why they know better. This would involve a level of political articulation of the body politic far beyond voting in elections every two years.

If self-governance means anything, it means that those who exercise government power must depend on elections. The shorter the electoral leash, the likelier an official to have his chain yanked by voters, the more truly republican the government is. Yet to subject the modern administrative state’s agencies to electoral control would require ordinary citizens to take an interest in any number of technical matters. Law can require environmental regulators or insurance commissioners, or judges or auditors to be elected. But only citizens’ discernment and vigilance could make these officials good. Only citizens’ understanding of and commitment to law can possibly reverse the patent disregard for the Constitution and statutes that has permeated American life. Unfortunately, it is easier for anyone who dislikes a court’s or an official’s unlawful act to counter it with another unlawful one than to draw all parties back to the foundation of truth.

Read it all.

By 1389

As I have pointed out earlier, the damage that has been done by outsourcing our technical know-how to India and China, ever since Reagan left office, is irreparable.

• Starting with the Clinton Administration, we GAVE a wealth of technological access to the Chinese, allowing their military-industrial complex to progress much faster than would otherwise have been the case.
• Through the H-1b program and the tax and regulatory advantages of offshoring, the federal government has made it more and more difficult, verging on impossible, for Americans to make a decent living in high-tech careers. Young people aren’t going into those fields, and older folks are finding low-paying jobs outside their fields, or are retiring on inadequate incomes because they can’t find work any more.

This gives the high-tech companies (run by tranzi progressives, and sometimes by immigrants from Muslim countries, who contribute heavily to the Dems) an excuse to claim that we need to outsource and offshore even more, because of the a shortage of home-grown high-tech help. Of course, it is a lie, but in the future, this shortage will indeed exist, simply because nobody born here can hope to make a living in high-tech fields.

Creating TWO underclasses of indentured servants

1. Managers and CEOs at high-tech firms aren’t offshoring and outsourcing in order to enhance America’s competitiveness by recruiting “the best and the brightest.” It’s all about short-term self-interest. What they really want are poorly-paid, compliant, and easily intimidated foreign workers who will make no demands and who will do exactly as they are told, with no thought given to pesky matters of conscience such as loyalty to the US or to Judaeo-Christian standards of ethics in the workplace.
2. Adding insult to injury are all of those efforts to get American youngsters interested in studying for high-tech careers. That includes one of the three things that Obama tasked former NASA director Charles Bolden to do: to inspire children to learn math and science. Even the most talented children will seldom put the effort into studying math and science unless they think there’s something worthwhile that they will be able to do with that knowledge.
   
   By the time they reach college age, those youngsters are being induced take out student loans that they will never be able to pay back, because there will be no jobs in those fields for Americans. The sneaky thing here is that student loan debts cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, so the federal government gets a permanent class of people in peonage and debt-slavery. The federal government can then promise to forgive some part of the student loans if the victim agrees to spend a certain number of years doing menial tasks promoting the interests of those currently in power.

Raising vipers in our bosom

On the other hand, the offspring of our jihadi enemies have enough petrodollars that they need not trouble themselves about unpaid student loans. Instead, they come to the US on student visas, accumulate the technical knowledge that their own benighted societies cannot produce, and take it back to their compatriots at home and abroad to use against us. It never occurs to the members of the leftist-jihadist convergence who run our universities that it is a bad idea to provide technical training to our avowed enemies.

Here’s my advice:

If you want a high-tech career, don’t borrow money to learn it and don’t plan on living in the US.

As everyone outside of the liberal establishment has already figured out, the anthropogenic global warming (AGW)/Climategate scam has nothing to do with “saving the planet.” Instead, it serves the interests of:

• Corrupt public figures such as Al Gore, who profit from government support of dubious “green energy” initiatives;
• Socialists who work toward a collapse of all western economies, hoping to gain power after the collapse as the new apparatchiki;
• Our jihadi enemies, who stand to lose if the US or any western economy becomes energy-independent.

Because it serves his interests, and ignoring the fact that the basis for it has been thoroughly debunked, Obama is still pushing the cap-and-trade legislation. This, in itself, is enough to show whose side he is actually on, not that there was ever any room for doubt.

On my other blog, 1389 Message Blog, I have collected a wealth of links to blogs, articles, websites, and other information sources that debunk the AGW/Climategate/cap-and-trade scam.

Here’s the link:

Climate information on 1389 Message Blog

Here you can arm yourself with the information you need to refute the nonsense that is still being repeated on this topic.

Have at it, everyone!

Quite the contrary.

The UK, Germany, and other G-20 countries are cleaning house while the US, under George Soros and the Obama regime, is trying to drag the rest of the world, along with itself, down into the abyss.

See for yourself:

• Soros wants to collapse German economy with debt
  

  Transnational Totalitarian Progressive George is well known to be Barack Hussein Obama’s puppet master. He is a supporter of Islamic-Imperialist groups like Hizballah and Hamas. Soros despises American allies like Colombia and Israel and through his funding of International Leftist NGO’s. In short Soros is the perfect Bond villain, an evil sinister man who had no qualms taking the property of fellow Jews during the Holocaust.

  Barack Hussein Obama recently lectured the G20 nations to not balance their budgets. Instead he wants them to keep spending and borrowing. The reason for this is very simple, he is doing his master’s bidding. George Soros and his buddies collapsed the US economy in Sept. of 2008 so the Progressives can seize power. That was not enough however, now they want to bankrupt the whole world starting with Germany. Soros had the audacity to try to lecture the German government into spending more money… Read the rest.

• Defying opposition from within the Coalition, Tories to shut the open door for migrants
  

  Theresa May will unveil the country’s first ever cap on migrant workers on Monday – finally ending Labour’s open door immigration policy.

  Despite opposition within the coalition Cabinet, the Home Secretary will impose a strict limit on the number of non-EU work permits that can be handed out.

  Eventually, it is expected to lead to a sharp reduction in the more than 100,000 migrants and their family members who are told they can work here each year… Read the rest.

  In other words, the UK is working to roll back all forms of immigration, legal and otherwise, especially from Third World countries. The US should be doing the same.

• The Hill: US Isolated on Spending at G-20
  

  …Germany, France and Great Britain have all launched austerity campaigns designed to reduce public debt. They’re motivated in part by the Greek debt crisis, which continues to scare countries across Europe.

  “In the run-up to the summit, a clear plurality of G-20 countries has come up on the side of fiscal consolidation and not stimulus spending,” said Dan Price, a senior partner at Sidley Austin and former President George W. Bush’s “sherpa” for G-20 summits.

  Japan has also introduced a strategy to reduce its budget deficit, while Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who is hosting the summit in Toronto, has challenged G-20 members to cut their deficits in half… Read the rest.

What does this mean?

Why can other countries begin to turn around, while the US seemingly cannot?

One problem is that the system of checks and balances in the US Constitution is broken. When we are foolish enough to elect a truly horrible legislature and President, we have no effective means of rolling back, or even of reining in, the abuse and the usurpation of power, until irreparable damage has been done. The Clinton Administration taught us that the threat of impeachment is toothless. The Supreme Court has too much power, and all too often, it uses that power to reaffirm unworthy laws and regulations as being Constitutional.

What now?

Since 1865, the States have feared to assert their right to annul any federal law or regulation that clearly flouts the Constitution. But that is beginning to change. We can only hope that enough citizens in enough States will realize that the federal government is not our protector, but a socialist tyranny that neither has nor deserves the consent of the governed.

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Hold their feet to the fire!

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