Posts from — April 2013

The Local Puppy Trainer identifies the Post Office advertisers:

The Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee has drawn attention from residents recently as volunteers set up shop in front of local post offices with signs promoting their controversial and varied platform and messages.

“Lyndon LaRouche and LaRouche PAC are what stand between you and an otherwise inevitable collapse of civilization,”the PAC’s website states.

Buried among the “impeach Obama” signs, they are calling for the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act to rein in banks. There are points where their universe intersects reality.

BFF

Zzzz…zzzz…

[Editor: Lutu and Mini-Sox continue to sleep together, as they have since they were littermates.]

Friday Ark

For years it seems I have read and heard about the ‘fabulous’ inventory control system that the behemoth of Bentonville has installed in its gazillions of stores that allows it to do real ‘just-in-time’ deliveries to effectively eliminate warehousing of goods.

You buy something and that item is deducted from the store’s inventory and it is automatically entered for replacement with the next truck. Nothing sits around gathering dust, and non-moving items are eliminated.

Then Nature started acting up and a major weakness of the system became apparent – there was no back-up if bridges went down, or stores were flooded. There was no warehouse of goods to replace what was lost.

Recently Bloomberg had an article on empty shelves at the stores, and the resulting flight of customers to other retailers. Of course, MalWart officials denied there was a problem [disgruntled employees, a few isolated cases].

Today I got roped into another trip to the lair of the beast, and apparently, the local store is one of those ‘isolated cases.’

My Mother worked in grocery stores for most of 45 years. I have worked in them to help out and pick up some spare cash. Keeping shelves stocked is the ‘prime directive’. If the customers can’t find it, you can’t sell it. Even if there is still product on the shelf, if you are stocking you ‘front the shelf’, i.e. you move the product forward so shoppers can see it.

There were gaping holes on those shelves, there were empty slots in the dairy cases, in the meat cases, in every section of the store except produce and the ‘deli’ area. This is bad management. A competent manager would never let this happen.

About that ‘lowest price’, that’s crap. I know about cat food, and MalWart does not have the lowest price on name brand cat food, and their price on their store brand isn’t that great. You have to check the weight and price the dry by the pound and the wet by the ounces. A number of their seeming ‘deals’ are due to reduced quantity.

So, President Obama will write a check to the Treasury for 5% of his salary, while Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and his deputy, Ashton Carter are writing checks equivalent to the 14-days of furlough that their subordinates are facing under the ‘sequester’.

So far, Congress hasn’t shown any interest in giving up anything. I would note that a 14-day furlough represents more than 10% of the work days that the House has scheduled for this year, which is around 130. Other than sitting on a board of directors for a major corporation it is hard to find a part-time job that pays better than Congress.

Recently Charley Pierce posted a picture of a bottle of cough syrup that had been sent to him. It appeared to be a 19^th century ‘patent medicine’.

From looking at the ingredients, after a half teaspoon, a cough wouldn’t have a chance. After a tablespoon, disembowelment wouldn’t be a problem, but you might get the munchies.

They didn’t mess around if they found something that worked.

Nice catch by Susie Madrak of a post at Think Progress. The Arkansas spill is covered by the Oil Spill Fund but, because the pipeline was carrying tar sands / diluted bitumen, not oil, Exxon wasn’t required to pay the tax that funds the clean-ups.

The Keystone XL will be in the same category, they won’t have to pay into the Oil Spill Fund. Their spills will be paid for by other people because the tar sands corporations bought the right Congresscritter to put in an amendment to exempt them.

Over at the CBC Neil MacDonald has a look at Canada’s ‘Cyprus solution’ for bank defaults.

Same plan, to seize deposits to bail out banks that gamble and lose. Once again the investor-class is protected while the 99% get screwed.

The US and UK are talking along similar lines about doing to their depositors what the ‘troika’ did to depositors in Cyprus. They must really think that taxpayers are a totally separate group from bank depositors.

In the US state and Federal government programs have been pushing people towards banks and direct deposit for years. Many of the subsidy programs are now available only on debit cards that banks are profiting from issuing. They are shutting down printing of Social Security checks and tax refund checks, and soon if you don’t have a bank account of your own you will receive a debit card that will deduct fees for every month it is active and every time you use it.

It is well past the time when the states had their own banks, like North Dakota does, and the Federal government had its own bank. These threats against depositors don’t seem to take into account that unless there is a state bank, local governments have to keep their money in a commercial bank. They will be among the depositors who will be screwed, and all of their money is tax money.

This evening as I was preparing the food for the ferals my home phone rang. It doesn’t ring often because it is the landline that I’m required to have to obtain DSL. The voice said they were conducting a short survey, so I listened. It was a commercial for the Keystone XL pipeline.

All of the standard lies were there. Helping Canadian oil companies move their product to Gulf Coast refineries does nothing for US ‘energy independence’. The price of oil will not come down because of this pipeline, and a number of studies indicate that the price will actually rise in the Midwestern states as the pipeline reduces an oil over-supply in that area. There aren’t going to be 47,000 US jobs created. Oil sands are an environmental disaster from start to finish, and exacerbate global climate change.

The Arkansas pipeline spill also involves oil sand being sent to Gulf Coast refineries and it will be much harder to clean up than crude oil. It sinks, it doesn’t float on water like crude oil.

Charley Pierce notes that Everything’s Worked Fine Since The Last Catastrophe.

Understand what is going to be moving through this pipeline – oil sand. That is sand, as in sand paper and sand blasting, suspended in a tar-like substance. To get it to flow, it has to be diluted, heated, and moved under pressure. IOW, a hot pressurized fluid with abrasives in it moving through a metal pipe, the sort of systems that some metal shops use to cut thick steel plate. What could possibly go wrong? 😈

To paraphrase Cicero, as others have done, the oil companies believe that:
Pollution in pursuit of profit is no vice, and caution to avoid disasters is no virtue.

These are corporations whose very existence is predicated on two things – maximizing profits and limiting liability. They are creations of the government, not the market, and violate the most fundamental principle of capitalism that the risk justifies the reward. If the risk is limited, so too, should be the reward.

I realize that I’m supposed to pull off some sort of bogus post that will get people upset, and then I jump out and yell “Gotcha!”, but I don’t think it’s possible anymore.

Duncan has the link to the classic example, the BBC’s Spaghetti Harvest. Google put in some effort with the ‘Search by smell’ option, and the Treasure Map overlay for Google Maps. Really, Fox News destroyed all of the reasonable goofs, because they report the Onion as if it was straight news.

How is a blogger supposed to compete with the editorial pages of the New York Times and Washington Post when it comes to absurd claims. Remember, a good wheeze requires that it can be exposed with a minimum of effort, otherwise it’s just another conspiracy theory. Who can actually prove that the whole moment that arose over Obama’s birth certificate didn’t start as a joke and then took on a life of its own? You have to be careful around small children, the Village, and conservatives – they’ll believe almost anything.