Last day of the month, people -- make it count

Traffic this month has been solid but not exceptional. It was slow early, probably due to my lack of posting, but has been respectable-to-pretty-good the second half of the month as I have posted more and gotten lucky, probably, as Russians search for porn. Weird, considering how much of the porn online comes out of Russia. Or so I've heard. So, anyway, big push, let's make May 2014 an even better month than it's already been. Tomorrow, it starts all over again.

The new White House press secretary has a high mountain to climb

It will be difficult for the ironically named Josh Earnest, the new White House press secretary, to reach the pinnacles of prevarication scaled by his predecessor, Jay Carney, who resigned yesterday. Jay, after all, is a lyin' fool, better at it than Baghdad Bob.

As you might expect, somebody compiled Carney's top nine lies. Must have been a tough list, with so many to choose from, but here is a small sampling:

2) In mid-May 2014, Carney announced that the American Legion had praised the Department of Veterans Affairs for the "resignation" of top VA health official Dr. Robert Petzel. Carney was only off by 100%. The actual American Legion statement was, "the move by VA is not a corrective action, but a continuation of business as usual. Dr. Petzel was already scheduled to retire this year, so his resignation now really won’t make that much of a difference.”
3) Carney told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012: “Those [Benghazi] talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened. The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.” But six months later, in May 2013, ABC News reported the edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted, as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.
4) In April 2012, Carney said the President had never argued the so-called Buffett Rule would solve the country’s deficit problems. Perhaps he didn't remember when the Buffett Rule was first introduced in September 2011: President Obama claimed the tax would “stabilize our debt and deficits for the next decade.”

By all means, go to the link and read them all. Frankly, they could have done a Billboard Hot 100 of Carney lies and never run out of material or had to move into mere spin. That boy wouldn't tell the truth to his mother. As for Jay's future, he has not yet announced his next career move, but I think he has aspirations to be the ambassador to Russia. But only if Vladimir Putin is actually able to resurrect the Soviet Union. In that case, Jay already has the artwork for his Moscow embassy office:

I still don't believe he's just a collector.

Sri Lanka -- it's not just for breakfast any more!

That's right, people, Sri Lanka came by! Officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka is an island nation off the southern tip of India that was called Ceylon until 1972. Usually, the quickest way to determine whether a country is democratic is to see if they put the word in the name of the country. If they do, it isn't. That doesn't seem to be the case with Sri Lanka, which is a multi-party democracy with two main parties, one leftist, one conservative. Anyway, about 20 million people live there, about 70 percent of them Buddhist.

Sri Lanka's main claim to fame for a good long while was its long-running rebellion/civil war, with the Tamil Tigers actually controlling a pretty good chunk of the country. The national military finally ended the 30-year rebellion in 2009 by launching a major military push and just whooping up on the Tamil rebels. Not clear why they didn't do that earlier.

For a long time, the civil war limited the appeal of Sri Lanka as a tourist destination. Let's face it, even gorgeous tropical islands are less attractive with a war going on. Since the end of the rebellion, though, Sri Lanka is growing its tourist trade quickly.

So, Sri Lanka, welcome to the Eff You family. Keep coming by, and bring your friends.

I got Slovakia, and you can't stop it

Slovakia, the Slovak Republic, Slovenská republika, however you want to cut it, spell it or pronounce it, I got me some Slovakia. Their neighbors and former countrymen, the Czech Republic (remember Czechoslovakia?) have been coming by Eff You for a while, but this is the first time for our Slovak friends, so we offer a big Eff You welcome to the Slovak Republic!

The Slovak Republic is a landlocked nation right next to the Czech Republic, Austria, Poland, Ukraine and Hungary. I supposed they could throw a rock at Germany if the Czechs ducked. Something just under 50,000 square kilometers, the nation's largest city is the capital, Bratislava. About 5 million people live in Slovakia, which is a member of the European Union, NATO and other even more worthless international organizations, like the UN. They speak Slovak, a member of the Slavic language family (think Russian for similarity). They spent a long time as part of Hungary and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Sounds like lots of historic places there, so Eff You followers planning a trip to Europe should drop by. Support our readers and enjoy their culture and heritage. Welcom, Slovak Republic! Sorry about that whole landlocked thing.

Heads up on upcoming food porn

I got a pelmini pan, which arrived today from the manufacturer in Ukraine. Should have some pelmini food porn this weekend as a result. Can't wait.

Concensus? Well, no.

We keep hearing that there is a concensus among climate scientists -- along the lines of 97 percent or 98 percent -- that mankind is driving catastrophic global warming through carbon dioxide emissions. The primary source of this "97 percent concensus" argument apparently is based on a graduate thesis that was somewhat less than rigorous. Recently, a study of the studies claiming concensus found that those studies dramatically overstate the number of climate scientists that view mankinds contribution to the greenhouse effect as a problem:

The main pillar of the warmist argument is the contention that a "consensus" exists among scientists that global warming is caused by man and threatens catastrophe. But a Canada-based group calling itself Friends of Science has just completed a review of the four main studies used to document the alleged consensus and found that only 1 - 3% of respondents "explicitly stated agreement with the IPCC declarations on global warming," and that there was "no agreement with a catastrophic view."

Just for starters, science is not about concensus. It is about putting forth a theory or hypothesis and then trying to disprove it. Failure to disprove the hypothesis tends to support it. Climate alarmists have never done that. Their models are terrible, but every claim they make is based on climate models, not actual data. So they claim concensus. Just like their models, the claim is wrong and repeatedly based on horseshit studies.

Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.
One frequently cited source for the consensus is a 2004 opinion essay published in Science magazine by Naomi Oreskes, a science historian now at Harvard. She claimed to have examined abstracts of 928 articles published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and found that 75% supported the view that human activities are responsible for most of the observed warming over the previous 50 years while none directly dissented.
Ms. Oreskes’s definition of consensus covered “man-made” but left out “dangerous”—and scores of articles by prominent scientists such as Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Sherwood Idso and Patrick Michaels, who question the consensus, were excluded. The methodology is also flawed. A study published earlier this year in Nature noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren’t substantiated in the papers.

Please not that the Oreske paper was an opinion essay, not a peer-reviewed paper. There's some rigorous research. She failed even to make clear what her claimed concensus was agreeing on. And the survey that gave us the 97 percent number? Ouch.

The “97 percent” figure in the Zimmerman/Doran survey represents the views of only 79 respondents who listed climate science as an area of expertise and said they published more than half of their recent peer-reviewed papers on climate change. Seventy-nine scientists—of the 3,146 who responded to the survey—does not a consensus make.

If you are trying to sell me a scientific conclusion, sell me on the science, not on the conclusion. The vast majority of people who "believe" in global warming don't understand the theory. They can't explain it, which makes discussions with them on this pointless. Believe me, I know. Disagree? I defy a global warming believer to explain the actual theory to me in the comments. Trust me, I will be abso-fucking-lutely brutal when you get it wrong. Which you will.

If the science were so settled -- please name another field of scientific research where that expression is used -- why would climate alarmists feel the need to get medieval on everyone who disagrees with them?

News that Lennart Bengtsson, the respected former director of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, had joined the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), sent shockwaves through the climate research community. GWPF is most notable for its skepticism about climate change and its efforts to undermine the position of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The tremors his decision sent through the scientific community shocked Bengtsson.
The scientist said colleagues placed so much pressure on him after joining GWPF that he withdrew from the group out of fear for his own health. Bengtsson added that his treatment had been reminiscent of the persecution of suspected Communists in the United States during the era of McCarthyism in the 1950s.

So, Der Spiegel, not exactly a bastion of conservative thought, is running this article. AGW skeptics -- that's anthropogenic global warming, for those believers out there who don't even speak the lingo -- actually get quoted here without being called "deniers," a term normally used to describe the nutbags and Islamist killers who insist the Holocaust never happened. Apparently, even suggesting that the AGW theory might not be right is too much for the alarmists to accept. But the debate is finally getting noticed:

Climate researchers are now engaged in a debate about whether their science is being crippled by a compulsion to conform. They wonder if pressure to reach a consensus is too great. They ask if criticism is being suppressed. No less is at stake than the credibility of research evidence for climate change and the very question of whether climate research is still reliable.
Bengtsson said in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE that he wanted to open up the climate change debate by joining GWPF. He said that in view of large gaps in knowledge, the pressure to reach a consensus in climate research "does not make sense".

What, exactly, is the argument against a healthy scientific debate? I can think of a number of excellent reasons to dismiss the alarmists -- their models fail to predict the past, none of their models agree with each other and all of them have failed to predict the future based on their performance since 1988. Why listen to someone who is always wrong and whose main argument seems to be that they know lots of guys who agree with them, evidence be damned? The global mean temperature, to the extent that means anything, has been flat since 1998. No warming. What are you worried about? Maybe if the alarmists didn't claim that AGW causes pretty much everything  -- and I do mean EVERYTHING -- they would have more credibility. As it is, fuck 'em.

Huh. 90,000 visitors. I guess that means something.

Probably not much, because that's probably less than one visitor per f-bomb in the time this blog has been active, but it is something. Anyway, sometime today, we passed 90,000 visitors. Not unique visitors, I don't think, but still, people come back, I guess. Anyway, thanks for coming by, and I'll keep trying to make it worth the effort you put out. Thanks, folks.

Well, I guess I'm not unemployed anymore

It's not the greatest gig -- market rate or so, no overtime, only going to last about a month -- but it beats sitting at home for no money. Not crazy about having to go downtown today to interview at the firm itself -- not the agency, the firm -- but I guess that's the price you pay with a small firm that doesn't hire temps much. Apparently I clean up OK, because I got the job. On the other hand, I apparrently have to wear a suit everyday, which could get old, as I don't have a lot of suits I can still wear. It's been a while since I had to wear a suit daily, kids. Oh, well. It's work

Always a little hard to accept that Democrats might tell the truth, but then they go and do this

Just when you figure Democrats don't even know how to tell the truth, you get something like this: 

CNN's John King reports that Democrats are privately calling President Obama "detached," "flat footed," and "incompetent."

So, finally, Democrats and the media -- but I repeat myself -- are noticing that the administration is incompetent, with Obama at the head of the list of administration types who know fuck-all about governing.. Wow. They called Bush stupid almost from day one. Took nearly six years to  suggest that somebody clearly less able might, in fact, be less able? Doesn't matter what you thought of Bush -- I thought he spent like a drunken sailor and was no conservative -- the media was never slow to criticize him. And, with two terms as a governor, Bush knew how to be an executive. You might not like the way he governed, but he knew how to be an executive. Barry, no. He had no experience doing so at any level, and now it shows. Why the delay in genuinely criticizing Obama? Hmmm. Can't figure it out.

Unless, of course, it is the soft tyranny of lowered expectations -- the worst kind of racism. The truth is, conservatives have no problem accepting and supporting a competent black person -- Mia Love, Alan West, Ben Carson, Condoleeza Rice -- regardless of gender, and have no problem rejecting a flawed black candidate -- Herman Cain (personal issues), Colin Powell (actually a Democrat) -- because they are flawed, not because they are black. Democrats are unable to accept that a black candidate might be flawed, and so are unable to reject out of hand a fatally flawed black candidate -- Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton -- no matter how badly that candidate might be flawed. As for Obama, they simply pretended he had no flaws whatsoever (with meduia cooperation) until it became clear that fuckchops had no idea how to actually govern. Now, they are starting to talk about it, apparrently, because it is threatening their own individual ability to remain  in office. Not exactly a principalled position, but exactly what I expect from Democrats.

No, of course they don't want to make your guns illegal -- that's just paranoia

But, as world-famous pedophile and beloved-of-the-left director Woody Allen used to say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. And so it is here. New Jersey, that bastion of the Second Amendment, has  passed a law that would make common hunting rifles illegal. Hat tip to Hot Air on this, but it would appear that this law is now on Gov. Chris Cristie's desk. Of course, this means libtards everywhere, especially in New Jersey, think Christie should sign the bill. Not if he wants the Republican nomination for president, of course -- not that he'll get it anyway -- but because it is somehow the "right thing to do."

Nobody ever explains how limiting magazine size will cut down on gun crime -- rifles in general, and large-capacity-magazine rifles in particular, are almost never used in crimes. It is simply high profile crimes when they are used. More people are beaten to death with bare hands and feet than are killed with rifles. So shut the fuck up.

So what would this bill do? It would ban most common small-caliber, fixed magazine hunting rifles that people use for hunting small game and target shooting. I personally own two .22-caliber rifles that this law would ban, and I really don't think anyone believes these models are a threat to society. But the law would ban them for reasons not entirely clear to me:

The gun ban that has gone to New Jersey Governor Christie for signature has been described as a “gun magazine restriction“, but it bans numerous common sport and hunting rifles. The ban has no exemption for rifles with fixed magazines, including most common .22 rimfire rifles that are used for sport and small game hunting…and almost never used in crimes. Assembly Bill 2006 bans rifles that meet this definition: (4) A semi-automatic rifle with a fixed magazine capacity exceeding [15] 10 rounds . . .
The bracket and underline show the existing and proposed laws. There are no exemptions for grandfathering. Anyone who possesses such rifles after the ban goes into effect will be guilty of a felony. This has already happened at least once, when the owner of a .22 Marlin that he won at a police raffle was convicted for owning the firearm. The model owned was either the one pictured below a very similar Marlin. It is an “assault weapon” under current New Jersey law, as it has a magazine capacity of 17:

 This, apparently, is the kind of "common sense" gun control the president loves to talk about. Never mind that common sense never enters into the equation. And note the lack of a grandfather clause. If you live in New Jersey, today your kid's rifle that he is learning to shoot with is legal. Tomorrow, unless Gov. Christie has some nuts, you and your kid are felons. Ah, common sense.

Fuck you and all yur gun-grabbing horseshit. Molon labe, bitches.

Whoops

As Instapundit would say, the country is in the best of hands:

The CIA’s top officer in Kabul was exposed Saturday by the White House when his name was inadvertently included on a list provided to news organizations of senior U.S. officials participating in President Obama’s surprise visit with U.S. troops.
The White House recognized the mistake and quickly issued a revised list that did not include the individual, who had been identified on the initial release as the “Chief of Station” in Kabul, a designation used by the CIA for its highest-ranking spy in a country.

Pretty much in keeping with the administration's incompetence in foreign affairs, I suppose. Not sure that makes the CIA station chief in Kabul feel better.

World surprised to find that Paul Ehrlich is still alive (and calling for cannibalism, apparently)

From Newsbusters via Hot Air, we have more utter horseshit from Paul Ehrlich, who has been so badly discredited for so long it is amazing anyone even writes down what he says anymore. Nothing Ehrlich has predicted ever has come to pass -- and he has a pattern of foolishly predicting that his calls for doom-and-gloom will come true in just a few years, which, of course, makes it much easier to debunk his horeshit and mock him mercilessly -- but he's at it again:

Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist famous for his widely debunked book “The Population Bomb,” doubled down on his climate change and overpopulation fear-mongering with HuffPost Live on May 21. Ehrlich warned host Josh Zepps that the dangers of overpopulation are growing, blaming Republicans and the media for failing to take action. While hawking a new book called “Hope On Earth,” Ehrlich’s co-author Michael Tobias praised Ehrlich’s older, outrageously wrong predictions and said they underestimated the problem.
. . .

Ehrlich, after falsely predicting human “oblivion” 46 years ago, told Zepps humans must soon begin contemplating “eat[ing] the bodies of your dead” after resources are depleted (fava beans and a nice Chianti optional, apparently).

For those not familiar with Erhlich's, um, body of work:

Ehrlich is widely known for his 1968 publication of “The Population Bomb” which called for “population control” to prevent global crises from overpopulation. In this book he predicted that “In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” and “[our children] will inherit a totally different world, a world in which the standards, politics, and economics of the 1960’s are dead.” (Would that the politics of the 1960s finally die!)
Even HuffPost’s Zepps pointed out that Ehrlich’s previous predictions “didn’t eventuate.” Tobias quickly defended Ehrlich, though, saying his “projections, in fact were correct.” In fact, he “not only got it right, [Ehrlich and his wife], in some ways, underestimated.”

I must have missed the widespread famines of the 1970s. I guess disco distracted me, but I feel like I would have noticed if a prediction of "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death" had proven to be an underestimation. On the other hand, The '70s is the decade when I started getting laid, so maybe it wasn't just disco that had me not paying attention.

Ehrlich is a complete hack -- and yes, one of his old colleagues, John Holdren, is Barry's national science adviser, which explains a lot -- and I'm pretty sure he only spouts this shit to get noticed. Ehrlich famously bet against economist Julian Simon in 1980 that the price of five commodity metals would be higher in 10 years. Ehrlich was wrong on all counts in inflation-adjusted dollars, and on three of the five in non-adjusted dollars. The Wikipedia entry on this contends that Ehrlich was basically right, because if the bet had been for 30 years, all five metals were more expensive. Over at Forbe's, though, a blog post points out that Simon wasn't lucky, he was right:

Simon won: but that’s not quite the end of the matter. With different commodities, or over different timescales with the same ones, Ehrlich could have. Which is something that Mark Perry notes here:

“It will surprise no-one that the bet’s payoff was highly dependent on its start date. Simon famously offered to bet comers on any timeline longer than a year, and on any commodity, but the bet itself was over a decade, from 1980-1990. If you started the bet any year during the 1980s Simon won eight of the ten decadal start years. During the 1990s things changed, however, with Simon the decadal winners in four start years and Ehrlich winning six – 60% of the time. And if we extend the bet into the current decade, taking Simon at his word that he was happy to bet on any period from a year on up, then Ehrlich won every start-year bet in the 2000s. He looks like he’ll be a perfect Simon/Ehrlich ten-for-ten.”

For the underlying argument though this is the important point:

I’m not so sure that Simon was just lucky. If Simon’s position was that natural resources and commodities become generally more abundant over long periods time, reflected in falling real prices, I think he was more right than lucky, as the graph above demonstrates. Stated differently, if Simon was really betting that inflation-adjusted prices of a basket of commodity prices have a significantly negative trend over long periods of time, and Ehrlich was betting that the slope of that line was significantly positive, I think Simon wins the bet.

For Professor Perry shows us the all commodities index over the near century that we have data. And it is indeed declining. Sure, there are periods where the alarmists would win, but the general move over time favours the cornucopians.

Look, kids, people have been predicting calling for the starvation of mankind since Thomas Malthus in the early 19th century (if not longer) and they're always wrong. Our capacity to grow food is nowhere near its peak. Malthusians always predict based on their belief that people are too stupid to survive on their own and so the important choices -- like whether to have children, where to live, what to drive, etc. -- must be left up to the experts and, more particularly, government. Naturally, they always consider that they will be among the experts telling people what to do, and not on the receiving end of those directives, which they will, of course, not apply to themselves. Anybody checked Al Gore's carbon footprint lately. When these people start acting like they believe what they're saying, I'll start considering the possibility they might be right. Big Al's jetting around the world telling us how evil carbon dioxide is while creating tons of it doesn't have me convinced. As for Mr. Ehrlich -- is he growing food in his back yard? Yeah, probably not. Fuck him.

If, on the other hand, we are forced into cannibalism, I will have to work up some decent recipes. I see opportunities for food porn.

Memorial Day

It isn't just an excuse for furniture sales and such. If you can't visit a national cemetery today, spend a moment reflecting on the meaning of the day and the sacrifices of thousands of men and women whom the day is intended to honor. They gave everything for us. You can at least quietly express some gratitude.

Damn, I envy my dog

Not sure where Mrs. Wolves came across this, so I can't give a hat-tip, but she wanted to know why Jeb the Wonder Dog was kissing this woman:

My initial answer was, "because he can." Then I realized that "this woman," of course, is Amanda Seyfried, a famous, beautiful actress. So I don't think that is Jeb, which means it is unlikely that he actually can kiss her, but it sure as hell looks like him, doesn't it? If it is him, my question is, why is Jeb kissing that woman while I am not? Life is most unfair.

There's some irony for you

Exactly one month to the day after I decided the project was healthy and said so on the blog, the project was declared over. For months before that, I was sure we were days away from getting sent home. Then I gained confidence, and, naturally, Rule No. 4 bit me on the ass with a vengeance. I hate it when the rules I came up with are actually right. That'll teach me to ignore the rules I invented.

Yeah, we been farming

Not much left to do on the farm except wait for shit to grow, but there were a few things for me to do yesterday. Still, Jeb was ready to play with his buddy, Willy.

Yes, the car was in motion when I took that picture and I did. in fact, risk death and dismemberment to get the shot. Problem?

Anyway, wasn't expecting to have to do much, but would up spending two hours at the farm. Put up the deer fence around the squash/zucchini bed, since the squash are coming up:

I transplanted some beans to fill some dead spots:

I noted that the potatoes really don't need my help at this point:

Same for the cukes:

I assisted some peas in grasping the trellis:

I noted that the radishes and spinach are doing well, and then I harvested some spinach:

We really are in wait-for-harvest mode at this point, and the radishes and spinach are the only things in the harvest cycle at this point (they grow fast). Everything else is quite a ways off. We'll see how that works out. Might be a while before we see another farm post. Yeah, I don't see that being a problem for most folks. Please see the title of the blog.

Jeez Louise, that's a shitty gig

Because my project ended today, and I've been home sick (cough, cough) the last two days, I've been looking at pretty much every project posting out there, whether it is Posse List, Craig's List or wherever. I saw one that makes me fear for the future:

[An agency I've never heard of] is now hiring licensed attorneys for a new project starting THURSDAY, May 29 and lasting about 4 weeks (but possibly longer). The pay rate for this project is $22/hour and overtime, if available, is paid at time and a half. Review will take place at our client's facility in DC.
If interested, please submit your resume via email. All further communication about this project will be via email.

Dear Lord, I hope no one is interested in that. What does "licensed" mean? Is that "any bar membership," or DC bar? I can only assume it is any bar, but that is below even the JD-only rate. Speaking as a guy who is currently out of work, I can understand the temptation to take anything to bring some money in, but please. people, don't stoop this low.  It can only drag everyone down.

Hook a brother up, people. Father's Day is coming

You should always remember that shopping through the Amazon gadget over there on the right brings a little bit of jack back to some hungry wolves and doesn't cost you anything. Plus, you could find some cool Father's Day presents if you did that. So do that. Or click on that link back there a sentence or two ago. You'll be glad you did.

This is just freaky-deaky

I was talking with my neighbor the other day when he informed me that he had chased down a ginormous snake working its way through everybody's back yard. He spotted the snake in his back yard and, recognizing it as non-poisonous, tried to catch it to relocate it. It went under fences through two neighbors' back yards before it emerged out from under the fence of the end unit of our row of townhouses, and that's where he caught it. Black snake or corn snake, I'm not sure, but it was fucking huge:

Given the width of the sidewalk, that's a 6-foot snake. Any herpetologists in the audience, feel free to chime in on what kind it is. Mostly what it is now is free somewhere else. Don't know where my neighbor took it, but he said it was not close by. Wow.

I think the VA scandal proves, most of all, that the president is a steaming heap of shit

Don't like that? Too strong? Fine. Let's walk through it. Careful not to get shit on your shoes, people.

First, in 2007, Barry was just all about making sure veterans got proper care:

"Barack Obama has fought to improve veterans' care, to reduce homelessness among veterans, and ensure fair disability benefits," said Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who served as a United States Air Force intelligence officer. "As President, Barack Obama will continue his leadership for the rights and benefits of veterans. He will stand with veterans -- just as they have stood up for us."
"I'll be a President who ensures that America serves our men and women in uniform as well as they've served us, and that's why I'm proud to have the support of these veterans advising me on the issues facing our troops and veterans," Obama stated. "After seven years of an Administration that has stretched our military to the breaking point, ignored deplorable conditions at some VA hospitals, and neglected the planning and preparation necessary to care for our returning heroes, America's veterans deserve a President who will fight for them not just when it's easy or convenient, but every hour of every day for the next four years."

There was more campaign trail horseshit from Barry back then, but we won't get into it. So, when Barry got elected, having contended during the campaign that veteran were getting shafted, he got told veterans were getting shafted:

The Washington Times is reporting that officials at the Veterans Administration briefed the Obama transition team thatVA hospitals were reporting inaccurate wait times and scheduling failures that was costing veterans timely treatment.
Veterans Affairs officials warned the Obama-Biden transition team in the weeks after the 2008 presidential election that the department shouldn’t trust the wait times that its facilities were reporting.
“This is not only a data integrity issue in which [Veterans Health Administration] reports unreliable performance data; it affects quality of care by delaying — and potentially denying — deserving veterans timely care,” the officials wrote.
The briefing materials, obtained by The Washington Times through the Freedom of Information Act, make clear that the problems existed well before Mr. Obama took office, dating back at least to the Bush administration. But the materials raise questions about what actions the department took since 2009 to remedy the problems.

What did he do? Fuck all, that's what. After all, he didn't know shit until he saw it on CNN, or something:

Transition briefing? Nah. Whatever information he was talking about during his 2008 election campaign? Nah. He knew Jack and shit before he heard that the VA was fucking awful on the news. Not clear why he campaigned in part on fixing the VA if he knew nothing about the problems, but hey. He's the smartest guy in the world, right? Right. But let's face it. This president knows fuck-all about anything. He only finds out about stuff right after we do. Is his staff really that incompetent? (I think they are incompetent, but I don't believe he never knows about this stuff.)

Somebody, at least, is finally noticing that the president apparently is not paying attention to anything. Face it. I knew the VA was fucked up. How come he didn't?

Has there ever been a president in the history of America who knew less than President Obama?
With each new crisis and scandal, Mr. Obama tells Americans that he just didn’t know.
He didn’t know the Veterans Administration was letting America’s veterans languish and die unattended — he learned about it in the newspaper.
He didn’t know the Justice Department was trolling phone records of members of the U.S. media. He didn’t know the ATF was running guns into Mexico; didn’t know the NSA was spying on the German chancellor; didn’t know the Obamacare website was a disaster; didn’t know the IRS was targeting conservative groups.
With every scandal, the president — the CEO of the United States, if you will — said he first learned about it in the papers. If he were head of Apple or IBM, he’d have been fired years ago, because in business, it’s your job to know, and ignorance is, frankly, even worse than failing. Fail = fired.

The media has largely given Barry a pass on this shit. Most of you know nothing about Fast and Furious, the IRS scandal, Benghazi, or this latest VA shit, although I will grant that the mainstream media is paying attention to the VA stuff, at least for now.

But mostly, the mainstreams just make excuses for Barry. Finally, somebody in the mainstreams is criticizing that tendency. Ron Fournier, used to be of the Associated Press and is definitely a mainstream puke, blasted Obama administration butt boy Ezra Klein, who was too deep into Obama's pants even for the Washington Post and had to leave, rips Klein for helping turn Obama into the superhero of excuses:

The inconvenient truth is that Klein's kind of thinking lets the president off the hook, unaccountable for promises broken and opportunities lost. Rather than change Washington's culture of polarization, zero-sum game politics, and spin, Obama surrendered to it almost immediately. On health insurance reform, government debt, and loosening immigration laws, Obama shares blame with obstinate House Republicans for fumbling potential compromise. On climate change and gun control, Obama knew (or should have known) his rhetoric was setting up voters for disappointment. Rather than roll back Bush-era terrorism programs that curb civil liberties, Obama deepened them.
The launch of the Affordable Care Act and the worsening of conditions at the Veterans Affairs Department are emblematic of Obama's inattention to the hard work of governing. He is slow to fire poor-serving Cabinet members and quick to dismiss controversies as "phony scandals." To the Obama administration, transparency is a mere talking point. The great irony of his progressive presidency: Democrats privately admit that Obama has done as much to undermine the public's faith in government s his GOP predecessor. The Green Lantern Theory is an excuse for failure.

Barry, of course, has refused to fire anyone at the VA to get things fixed. I don't really care about that. The problem here is not that VA Secretary Eric Shinseki has or has not been fired. Shinseki has been every bit as good a VA secretary as he was an Army chief of staff, which is to say, he sucks fucking balls. He was an incompetent moron then, and he's an incompetent moron now. But Barry doesn't fire people for being incompetent. And he can't afford to fire Shinseki now, because the VA will still suck nuts regardless of who is running it, because this is what government-run health care looks like.  It is God-awful, fucked up, people die who shouldn't. Barry, the father of Obamacare, can't afford to expose the fact that government-run health care will always be awful, because he wants that for everyone. If he fires Shinseki and nothing gets better, what does that say about government-run health care? Barry doesn't want people drawing conclusions from actual evidence.

As Ace reports, the mainstreams are trying to pump up how wonderful VA care is to prove that socialized medicine is the answer. The obvious failures of government-run health care don't matter to them. It is a matter of ideology.  Government must provide health care for all, and so when it does, it doesn't matter how awful it is; that is, ideologically, a good thing. Whether it helps people is irrelevant. That is how liberals/progressives think. What matters is not whether the program helps people, but whether liberals feel like they are helping people with the program. How else do you explain the ludicrous failure of but continued funding of  Head Start? Results don't matter. Feelings do.

Well, fuck a bunch of feelings. Can we please start doing things because they work instead of doing things that make people feel like they're doing something good even if it isn't good? Government does too much of the latter, and then does it inefficiently. And when government fucks it up, Barry is the first in line to be mad as hell and the last in line to do anything. Barry's mad about the VA, too, but don't hold your breath on action:

Obama said Wednesday that he doesn’t want the matter to become “another political football,” and that’s understandable. But his response to the scandal has created an inherent contradiction: He can’t be “madder than hell” about something if he won’t acknowledge that the thing actually occurred. This would be a good time for Obama to knock heads and to get in front of the story. But, frustratingly, he’s playing President Passive, insisting on waiting for the VA’s inspector general to complete yet another investigation, this one looking into the Phoenix deaths.

He won't do anything. He doesn't give a shit. He's always mad as hell at whatever his administration is fucking up, but he can't be bothered to do anything about it. I think, maybe, this time that bites him on the ass. Maybe, finally, the media cares. Or maybe not.

Please, please, Mr. President -- stop trying to throw a baseball in public

Dude grew up mostly in Indonesia and Hawaii, so I understand why he doesn't have a big baseball background. I went to high school in Hawaii at the same time he did, and the only guys who were any good at baseball were from the Mainland (the rest of the U.S., mostly military kids), Japanese kids and, to a lesser extent, Taiwanese kids. Most of the cultures that make up the population in Hawaii are not big baseball folks, so I understand that he never played as a kid.

Given that, though, could he please, please, please stop embarrassing the country as an adult? Stop the madness and step away from the baseball. Apparently, the other day Barry "dropped by" a Little League baseball game and joined with the kids in a moment of camaraderie, or something like that. Some "news" outlets, like Yahoo, didn't bother to mention that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, who is now officially the world's worst liar, had a child in the game. Most news outlets also didn't bother to mention that Barry still throws like a girl:

And I am not trying to disparage girls here. But he looks a lot like Miss America 2008, Kirsten Haglund:

Not enough for you? Fine. Let's compare Barry to the Evil George Bush, which Bryan Allain does nicely:

Comparing Presidential First Pitches

Assessment of Mechanics

Grip: 2-Seam Fastball, will cut down and away…typical strikeout pitch.

Posture: Power-T to generate hip drive for maximum velocity.

Face: Eyes locked on the target.

Hands: Pitching hand cocked back to hide ball from batter.

Probable Outcome: Fastball that catches the outside corner for a called strike three.

Grip: Palm Ball. Comes in slow and doesn’t move.

Posture: No Power-T. Right hand hanging down towards dirt.

Face: Eyes and mouth show fear that the batter will hit the ball over 600 feet.

Hands: Pitching hand open so batter can see ball during delivery.

Probable Outcome: Ball will be hit so far it will need FAA clearance & a flight attendant.

Comparable Deliveries

11-time All-Star, Roger Clemens

So there you go. Even at a Little League game, he's the worst player there. Please, please, Mr. President, just avoid baseball. The nation is embarrassed enough about you as it is.

All good things gotta come to an end

. . . and it's the same with the wild wood weed. Today we got the word that the project that would not end is in fact ending on Friday. Oddly enough, I predicted this sequence of events months ago when the client got bought by another firm. This does not make me feel better about being right. The only thing I got wrong was how long it would take to reach this point. Anyway, we're done. Folks are rushing to use up sick days, since you lose them if you are gone from the agency for too long. Not sure how long too long is, but anyone with a brain (which does not include everyone on this project) is going to use a couple sick days this week Yeah, me too. Anyway, the scramble is on to find anothe gig. Life as a temp is always what it is: one day away from unemployment. Time to find a new gig, because all good things gotta come to an end. So I leave you with this:

Well, of course it was a federal employee who tried to fuck things up!

Oh, dear God, it's food porn! And dessert porn at that!

Oh, the humanity! Yes, I made a pie over the weekend, and I documented it, and I intend to subject you to it. For those of you who like good pie, get out your notebooks, people, 'cause you're going to want to make this one. You will start with two large bananas, two cans of sweetened condensed milk (yes, I know only one is pictured - the two for the recipe are undergoing the treatment that turns them into this delicious treat), and a packet of graham crackers. (Sometimes called a sleeve -- it shoudl be 8 to 12 graham crackers.) You will also need about a half stick of butter (not pictured):

The first thing you need to do is take two cans of sweetened condensed milk, remove the labels (so it won't get messy) and boil those suckers for about three hours. Maybe four.

While that shit is going on, you need to make a graham cracker crust. I will not jack you up too bad if you buy one, but, really, you should make your own. Start with that sleeve of graham crackers. Melt a half stick of butter:

Totally crush the graham crackers in the blender or food processor until they are nice, fine crumbs:

Slap those suckers in a bowl:

and pour that melted butter in:

Mix it up right, people. If the butter is not enough, you can add a teeny tiny bit of water to make the crumbs stick together. Then you need to line a pie pan with the crumbs, like so:

Bake that crust at 350 for about 10 minutes. Some recipes say don't bake the crust. Both work. Up to you. Assuming you didn't buy a crust and short-circuit the whole argument. Fucking Philistine. I never said this blog would not judge you. But I digress.

While your stuff is boiling, slice those bananas. Once you have reached the 3 (or 4) hour mark, go ahead and pull the sweetened condensed milk from the boiling water.

When you open those cans, be careful -- they are under pressure and have a tendency to squirt. Keep your face clear.

Anyway, pour a can of the condensed milk into a bowl:

Toss in half of the slice bananas:

Mix it up right, then pour in the second can of condensed milk and the other sliced banana. Mix it up right:

Put that stuff in the pie crust and refrigerate for at least 4 hours. Then eat the living shit out of it:

Yes, I did farm this weekend, it just took me a while to get around to it

Yeah, I went to the farm this weekend, and I did some stuff, and I'm not posting about it until two days later. Sue me. I went Sunday, did some farm-ey stuff for an hour or two, and then went home. But I took pictures, so you guys have to suffer through that shit. As it is, we have now entered a watch-it-grow stage, so you probably won't have to suffer through this shit for a while. Today, however, I subject you to this torture. And here it is:

First, the beans are coming in nicely, as are the peppers. The peppers are in the front half of the nearest bed; beans are in the back half of that bed and in the far bed. They are supposed to be bush beans and so should not need a trellis. On the other hand, I have been lied to by seed packages before, so we'll see.

The cucumbers are in and doing well:

 The second bed of peas also is moving along nicely:

Of course, that means I had to put up a trellis, which I did:

The spinach and radishes also are doing well:

As are the spuds:

With pretty much everything in the ground, and trellises up, we now are in watch-it-grow mode. I'm sure I'll put some stuff up over the coming weeks, but we now are waiting for harvest. This is not a good activity for the need-it-now generation. But I'll keep you posted.

A belated post on rain and flooding -- as if you cared

Last Thursday and Friday we had a huge amount of rain, which led to some pretty good flooding. I missed taking pictures of the best of the flooding, much of which occurred Thursday night and Friday night and made my way home from work a little tricky both nights, and my trip to work Friday morning equally dicey. I had to change my route both days, as certain roads I normally used were underwater. Didn't manage to get pictures of that. However, water was still high Saturday, so while I was out Saturday morning doing my errands, I managed to get a few pictures of the Monocacy River at the Route 355 bridge -- which was closed Friday morning due to high water. Here's what it looked like Saturday morning. This is the east side of the bridge:

And this is the west side:

You can see that the trees on the north bank are swamped. I wasn't able to take a picture of the fields on the north side of the river, which were flooded even almost 12 hours after the peak flood stage.

This probably isn't interesting to anybody but me. If that's the case, please refer to the title of the blog.

What? Another temp conversation? Oh, yeah.

As I pointed out previously, the sick leave policy of the agency I work for, largely driven by District law, is not helpful if you work overtime, as this project has in the past. The agency took advantage of a loophole in the law and set a policy that allows sick days only to bring you up to 40 hours for the week, which is not very helpful if you routinely work more than 40 hours per week. On the other hand, such a policy can -- and will -- lead some people to work fewer hours per week so they can take advantage of the sick days, even under the agency's restrictive policy.

Now that this project has been cut to 40 hours per week, the sick days are back in play with no sacrifice for the temps. Guess what is happening? Yeah, for those of you slow on the uptake, I give you this actual temp conversation:

Temp 1: Now that we can use sick days, I think I'm going to be sick Friday.
Temp 2: You know, you can be sick two days in a row before you have to have a doctor's note.
Temp 1: I know. I have to find out how many sick days I have before I decide how many days I'm going to be sick this week.

Yeah, folks are planning to burn their sick days, and then bail for a better project. Shocker. This might not have happened if the agency and/or client had allowed people to work 40 hours in 4 days, but under the circumstances, it makes total sense for people with stored-up sick days to use them. After all, if you leave the agency, you lose the sick days. I am predicting a mini-epidemic of unspecified illness to hit this project, starting Friday.

Yeah, it's another temp conversation

The hours cut led to a lot of interesting conversations today. Because the window to get 8 hours is only 9 hours, and you are required to take a half-hour break (even if you don't) there isn't much margin for being somewhere other than at work during the window. This morning, several people came in well beyond the point at which they could still conceivably reach 40 hours for the week. Naturally, they received a bunch of ragging about being "part-time."  This conversation resulted when one person came in at 11 am -- pretty much ruling out even reach 40 hours:

Temp 1: We figured you were so disgusted you quit.
Temp 2: If disgust was enough to make me quit, I'd have been gone long ago.

I think that sentiment applies to pretty much everyone on the project.

I been wanting this bumper sticker for a while now

I assume you've seen the "Coexist" bumper stickers that spell the word out using the symbols of various religions, like so:

I was not aware that "peace" or "ecology" were religions -- actually, I did know that the environment had become a religion for some people, but that is a topic for another day -- and I don't know what the "I" is for, but the "S" looks like Ying and Yang, which aren't exactly a religion so much as a philosophy. But what the fuck do I know? The one thing I am sure of is that of the three religious denominations depicted in that bumper sticker, one of the three wants to eliminate the other two. Feel free to guess who falls into what camp. Hardly sounds like the poster boy for coexistence.

My new bumper sticker, on the other hand, features entities that have no problem working together. They compete in the marketplace, but none of them has sworn to annihilate the others through use of force -- something at least one of the religions represented in the ironic "Coexist" bumper sticker can't say. My bumper sticker? Looks like this:

That's right, bitches. Gun manufacturers. They compete in the marketplace but do not attempt to kill each other. And let's face it -- your neighbor will be much more willing to coexist with you knowing that you are armed. Just sayin'.

Look, it's just an actual temp conversation

This conversation took place, ironically, only hours before we got fucked by The Man. As so many temp conversations are, this one was driven by job dissatisfaction:

Temp 1: I really don't want to do this anymore.

Temp 2: Me neither.

Temp 1: You know how you can tell this is real life and not the movies?

Temp 2: How's that?

Temp 1: If this were the movies, right about now we would all break out into that scene in "The Replacements" where they're in the jail cell doing a line dance and singing "I Will Survive."

Yeah, real life doesn't work that way. But without further ado:

They coulda kissed us first . . .

. . . . . . because the client on my project just fucked us really hard. The grapevine has it that the agency sent everyone an email at their work email address at 6 pm Friday, believing that no one would get it until Monday morning when everybody came back to work, since everyone is gone by 6 on Fridays. Somebody was there to get it and spread the word. I guess somebody at the agency considered this possibility and decided that outrage delayed was still outrage, so they then sent an email to our personal email addresses at 5 pm today that reads:

Good evening,
Thank you for your continued work with [the agency I work for] and [the firm that has hired the agency I work for]! Effective Monday, May 18th, the review will be limited to a 40 hour work week. Overtime will no longer be permitted, and the review center will be open from 9:00am to 6:00pm.
Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns, and have a great weekend!
Best,
[Some employees of the agency I work for.]

Hard to say where to begin with the lovely missive. I always, of course, love the opening with a "thanks, guys!" with an exclamation point. The very next sentence, of course, cuts out 20 hours of overtime (why, yes, that is a 43 percent pay cut, thank you very much). The next sentence then establishes that we will still have to work five days a week to get 40 hours, meaning we will have to travel at peak rush hour traffic both ways. Thanks for that, and for the 13 percent increase in Metro costs, since rush hour rates are higher. My commute will be longer because of increased traffic, and it will cost more, but at least we'll be making a lot less money! What's not to love?

Finally, having dropped an entire bucket of turds in our punchbowl, they tell us to "have a great weekend!" Yes, with an exclamation point. A four-sentence email telling us we will no longer be making enough to live in this area, and two of those sentences end in exclamation points.

Does anyone wonder why workplace shootings occur?

You can't make this shit up

I believe I have mentioned before (and if I haven't mentioned it before, you may now consider it mentioned) that my project is laid out in four interconnected rooms, lined up side-by-side, each with a doorway opening out into the hall. Between each of the rooms is a garage-door type entryway, roughly the same size as the door on a single-car garage. These doors are operated with heavy pull chains in a loop over a pulley. Very industrial. The relevance of this will become clear soon, trust me.

As I believe I have also mentioned before (and, once again, if I haven't mentioned it before, you may once again consider it mentioned), there are serious climate-control issues from room to room. At times, some of the rooms have gotten quite warm. Ours used to be consistently comfortably chilly until some shithead complained about it and the temperature promptly was changed to "sweltering." After complaints about that, we finally have settled somewhere in the "I guess I can live with it" range. Not truly comfortable, but no one is dying of heat prostration.

The people in the room next door -- think of it as room A in the four-room progression from right to left facing the rooms from the hallway, with my room as room B -- unfortunately seem to believe their room is too cold. First of all, I've been in there quite a bit, and they are simply wrong. Second, though, is that they have forgotten the first rule of temperature: if it is too cold, you can add clothing until you are comfortable, but if it is too hot, you can't get but so naked. The dress code here might be lax, but it does require that you actually stay dressed. So you know they are asking for trouble -- I have no doubt it will get hot in there real quick.

But that apparently still is in the future. For now they are doing stupid things with doors. Yesterday, they decided it would improve the temperature in their room if they kept the door to the hallway closed. This is, naturally, the easiest door to use for most of us in my room to go into the hallway and down to the restrooms. That makes it the easiest door to use to return, as well -- except you have to enter a code into a keypad to enter the room from the hallway, so we go around to the room that enters Room B from the hallway. Longer, but less of a pain in the ass.

To the surprise of no one sitting anyplace other than Room A, this tactic did not work. The problem, apparently, was not Arctic winds sweeping into Room A from the hallway. Shocker.

Next up in their bag of stupid temp tricks was to convince management that the thermostat in Room B somehow controls the temperature in Room A, even though there is no evidence this is true and Room A has a thermostat of its own. So a couple admin pukes came into Room B a little while ago and announced that our thermostat was going to be adjusted from its setting of 65 (it isn't cooling the room to 65 because of the concentration of breathing bodies and head-emitting devices we use to do our jobs -- it struggles to keep things under 75) to a balmy setting of 75 so that Room A would be warmer. The cries of outrage from Room B scotched that plan immediately.

The Whiners then concluded that the problem actually was the Arctic winds sweeping into Room A from Room B, and they convinced the admin pukes (who actually are nice people) to close the garage door between Room A and Room B. The loading-dock style, corrugated steel, controlled-by-heavy-chains-looped-over-a-pulley industrial door. That one. (I told you the doors would become relevant.)

Within minutes of the door clattering and rattling down, one of the admin folks came back into the room and raised it again. Somebody must have figured out that might constitute a fire-safety hazard.

So I don't know if the Room A Whiners have further plans to influence the temperature in their room. Personally, I'm in favor of going back to their earlier attempts and closing the loading-dock door and the hallway door. And locking both of them. From the outside.

I keep trying to tell you people. Temp Town is a strange place.