Posts from — December 2011

To: ‘The Phone Company’
From: PO’ed Customer

Re: Spelling out support web site addresses while customers are on hold

It’s real simple, you miserable cretins, if I could get on the Internet, I wouldn’t be calling your support number and waiting for ‘the next available technician’!

Is that concept too much for you to handle?

Yes, it is the day that kindly old Saint Nicholas fills the footware of good little girls and boys with treats [or his assistants beat the evil out of bad children, depending on the local customs – they didn’t just leave the sticks, in some places they use them.] Don’t forget the carrot if he rides a horse in your area.

He is the patron saint of Russian merchants and pawnbrokers.

Dr. Cole explains why the media is misreporting the Egyptian elections. The most important point is that the Salafis [fundamentalists] and the Muslim Brotherhood don’t like each other even a little bit. Their visions of Islam do not coincide, and they won’t form a coalition. The second point, is that this was an election for only a segment of the parliament, and there are two more segments to be elected, with candidates running without party affiliation. It is not a standard parliamentary system, so there is no way of actually knowing what the results will be until the dust settles and they get down to work.

In the Russian election Putin’s United Russia party suffers poll setback

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party has seen a sharp drop in support in parliamentary elections.

With 96% of votes counted, electoral officials said United Russia had just under 50%, down from 64% in 2007.

The vote is being seen as a popularity test of Mr Putin, who is running for the presidency in March.

United Russia will still form the government, because the threshold for representation is a high 7% of the vote to receive the first seat in the Duma [parliament], so United Russia will get a majority of the seats, but they don’t have the power to muck about with the constitution, as they have had since the last election.

All of the other parties took votes away from United Russia, even with some creative vote counting techniques, and a number of magically appearing ballots.

Putin’s ‘campaign workers’ are going to have to work harder to ensure that he wins by the established margin.

The deal was so suspicious that the Federal government took notice: Feds open probe into Miami Marlins stadium deal.

The same rip off that taxpayers see all the time, the owners of professional sports franchises con local governments into building them stadiums. This time is was the Miami Marlins baseball team that is getting a new stadium with 80% of the costs being borne by the taxpayers of Dade County and the city of Miami, who are both broke. We are talking hundreds of million of dollars for this ‘beast’, and no guarantees that the team will hang around for the decades it will take to pay off the bonds.

To make matters worse, the way the deal was structured, the city of Miami is apparently going to be liable for county property taxes, because the team is getting exclusive use of parts of some of the structures. To be tax exempt, the entire thing must be public.

It is becoming apparent that the local government failed to investigate the books of the team, to verify claims about ability to pay their share of construction, and failed to have the contract reviewed properly which would have caught the property tax problem before it was signed.

Among the areas that the Feds are interested in are the political contributions of the team ownership.

Juan Cole writes about a new ad campaign: Israeli Ads against Marriage with American Jews are Part of a Population War. As Dr. Cole notes, this isn’t the first time Israel has addressed this problem.

In 2004 the Jewish Daily Forward reported Germany Is Moving To End Mass Immigration of Jews From Russia. The Israeli government lobbied for the changes in German law to stop the majority of Jews from the former Soviet Union from immigrating to Germany, rather than Israel. For Germany to take the step gives you some idea of how hard the Israeli government pushed it.

As the BBC noted there was a US Jewish outcry over Israeli expat ‘return’ ads. The portrayal of American Jews in the ads was not complimentary.

The Lukudniks have been so noxious that US urges Israel to end ‘isolation in Middle East’. When the US Secretary of Defense starts telling an ‘ally’ that they need to start getting along with their neighbors, you can assume that the ‘ally’ is being a major jerk.

With the budget cutting that is going on in Washington, this is not a time for the largest recipient of US aid to be stirring up trouble. Given the prospect of cuts in the Defense budget, reducing or eliminating the large chunk of US military assistance that goes to Israel would look very enticing to the Pentagon bean-counters.

The drop in the unemployment rate is better that ‘a sharp stick in the eye’, but really isn’t anything to be thrilled with, as Robert Reich explains in The Jobs Report: Don’t Break Out the Champagne.

Over 300,000 have giving up actively looking for a job as of this report, but the drop will probably cause some of them to return to the hunt, causing the rate to jump back up in the new year. There is no reason to be optimistic and many reasons to be worried.

… and how can Santa Claus visit every house, go down chimneys, leave toys, all over the world in one night?

One of the answers is found on European Christmas trees.

Read about Finland’s version of the Julbock, Joulupukki.

Note: Don’t try this at home unless you have the kidneys of a reindeer. It also explains why gnomes are so cheerful. [This is one of my most searched for posts, almost as big as the Shi’ia oil map, or the Alaska-Russia border. It is a bit disconcerting to see the number of people around the world whose interests are as weird as mine, but they are all hits on the counter.]