Dvorak News Blog

Should Unemployment Benefits Be Extended Again?

By Uncle Dave Monday February 15, 2010

Click pic to embiggen

With so many companies having learned to do with fewer workers, moved offshore or no longer exist we’re told we’re heading into a “jobless recovery.” Doesn’t that imply that for many/most of these people there won’t be jobs in the foreseeable future, if ever? Doesn’t that mean unemployment benefits will have to be extended forever?

Should it be extended, or should the already heavily indebted government not spend money this way? Not doing so, of course, would drastically increase the number of homeless since the states can’t really afford their portion now.

Back in December, the qualification dates for existing tiers of unemployment benefits were extended for an additional two months. Time is up at the end of February. Now another extension is needed or millions of workers will lose benefits over the next few months.

The National Employment Law Project (NELP) released a new report last week showing that …

1.2 million jobless workers will become ineligible for federal unemployment benefits in March unless Congress extends the unemployment safety net programs from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). By June, this number will swell to nearly 5 million unemployed workers nationally who will be left without any jobless benefits.
…
Currently, 5.6 million people are accessing one of the federal extensions (34-53 weeks of Emergency Unemployment Compensation; 13-20 weeks of Extended Benefits, a program normally funded 50 percent by the states).

What All the Fashionable Fighter Pilots are Wearing this Year

By Uncle Dave Monday February 15, 2010

21 Comments

Is there a video game-playing kid who wouldn’t buy a consumer version of this that works with PS3 and Xbox? It would make million$.

This is how the next generation of RAF fighter pilots will look. And with piercing green eyes staring out from behind the visor, it’s no surprise that the helmet has been compared to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s killer robot in The Terminator.

Pilots flying the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will have an astonishing array of technology encasing their heads – enabling them to see right through their own aircraft fuselage to the ground below.

A series of cameras on the outside of the stealth warplane feed high-resolution images into the helmet, including infra-red images at night, which are then projected on to the inside of the pilot’s visor. Special sensors inside the cockpit track the movement of the helmet, so that when the pilot turns his head his view of the skies or ground outside changes accordingly. When he looks down he sees not his own feet on the cockpit floor but the ground below, slipping past at hundreds of miles per hour.

On-board computers also feed in essential flight and combat data on to the display, as well as superimposing target symbols to locate enemy and friendly aircraft or ground targets, even if they are too far away to see with the naked eye.

CA Sobriety Checkpoints Are Becoming More About Profit Than Drunk Driving

By Uncle Dave Monday February 15, 2010

29 Comments

They can confiscate your cash if you’re carrying “too much” because, obviously, only drug dealers carry cash. Your laptop, iPod and other electronics can be confiscated at the border because you might have illegally downloaded music or videos. Remember the days when it was only cops in Northern Mexican towns shaking people down for bribes and you thought, that could never happen here?

Sobriety checkpoints in California are increasingly turning into profitable operations for local police departments—operations that are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed motorists than catch drunk drivers. An investigation by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley with California Watch has found that impounds at checkpoints in 2009 generated an estimated $40 million in towing fees and police fines—revenue that cities divide with towing firms. In addition, police officers received about $30 million in overtime pay for the DUI crackdowns, funded by the California Office of Traffic Safety.

In dozens of interviews over the past three months, law enforcement officials and tow truck operators say that vehicles are predominantly taken from minority drivers, often illegal immigrants. In the course of its examination, the Investigative Reporting Program reviewed hundreds of pages of city financial records and police reports, and analyzed data documenting the results from every checkpoint that received state funding during the past two years. Among the findings:

• Sobriety checkpoints frequently screen traffic within, or near, Hispanic neighborhoods.
• The seizures appear to defy a 2005 federal appellate court ruling that determined police cannot impound cars solely because the driver is unlicensed.
• Departments frequently overstaff checkpoints with officers, all earning overtime.

BNP Drops ‘Whites Only’ Policy to Comply with Court Ruling

By honeyman Sunday February 14, 2010

48 Comments

The British National party today voted to scrap its whites-only membership policy in a move dismissed by anti-racist campaigners as “cosmetic”.

At an extraordinary general meeting held in Essex, members of the far-right party voted in favour of changes to its constitution that would theoretically allow black and Asian people to join.

Following the result, the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, said he expected a “trickle, rather than a flood” of applications. “Anyone can be a member of this party. We are happy to accept anyone as a member providing they agree with us that this country should remain fundamentally British,” Griffin told Sky News.
[…]
Asked whether the BNP was no longer racist, [BNP spokesperson] Darby said: “Let’s put it like this: if, as a result of this, a court rules that we are now a bona fide party, that’s a great stamp of approval. If anyone says we are racist, we can say ‘no we’re not, it’s been proved in court’.”

As for whether the BNP would genuinely welcome members of “all colours and creeds”, Darby said: “I’m not prepared to even say that until we have the court ruling. I’m not going to stray into the realms of that sort of terminology.”

Earlier Griffin said ethnic minority members would be accepted if they agreed with the party’s aims.

He told the BBC: “They’ll be accepted, they’ll be welcomed, providing they’re there to do the things that we want to do, and providing they accept and agree with our principles, which is that multiculturalism, we believe, has been a failure. It was imposed on the British people without any consent, by the political elite. It’s still going on, it’s madness and it’s time to shut the doors.”

Ha! We’ll accept you and welcome you, as long as you agree with our policy of having you kicked out of the country. The BNP apparently doesn’t have the cojones to fight the ruling.

Filmmaker Kevin Smith Ejected From Southwest Flight for Being Fat

By McCullough Sunday February 14, 2010

38 Comments

Kevin Smith’s most famous role is a guy who rarely speaks. But he’s got a lot to say – much of it profane – after being kicked off a Southwest Air flight because he didn’t fit comfortably into the seat. “You [messed] with the wrong sedentary processed-foods eater!” Smith, whose next film, Cop Out, comes out Feb. 26, posted on Twitter.

Smith, 39, originally purchased two tickets “as he’s been known to do when traveling Southwest,” the airline noted, but when he decided to fly standby on an earlier flight, only one seat remained. Although he had been seated, he was asked to leave. Smith, who played Silent Bob in his Clerks movies and who has battled his weight for years – “I know I’m fat,” he confesses – was given a $100 voucher and arrived in Burbank on a later flight. But he was in no mood to accept an apology.

“I broke no regulation, offered no ‘safety risk’ (what, was I gonna roll on a fellow passenger?)” he Tweeted. “I saw someone bigger than me on THAT flight! But I wasn’t about to throw a fellow Fatty under the plane as I’m being profiled. But he & I made eye contact, & he was like ‘Please don’t tell…'” Smith added that while the ordeal was embarrassing, his “Jersey Girl training” (the 2004 flop starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez) was helping him cope.

Well, at least he didn’t pull the “don’t you know who I am” routine. And please…no “Silent Blob” jokes.

Pissed Off Bird

By hhopper Sunday February 14, 2010

29 Comments

Found by Cináedh.

Caption This Photo

By Uncle Dave Sunday February 14, 2010

47 Comments

“Sweeeet! I aced my Walmart-ology class!”

By Uncle Dave Sunday February 14, 2010

29 Comments

This and the experience working at Walmart should look good on their resumes when they look to step up to a management position at Sizzler.

Walmart has been widely condemned for offering its employees only low-paying, dead end jobs. Even President Obama criticized Hillary Clinton during the 2008 presidential campaign for having served on Walmart’s board and stated that the firm ought to pay “a living wage.”

In inner-city Detroit, however, where the unemployment rate is estimated at an astonishing 50%, the prospect of a Walmart job may appear far more attractive.

Four inner-city Detroit high schools have decided that employment with Walmart is an opportunity worth training their students to pursue. The schools have teamed up with the giant merchandiser to offer a for-credit class in job-readiness training that also includes entry-level after-school jobs.

According to the Detroit Free Press, the principal at one of the schools optimistically suggested that “the program will allow students an opportunity to earn money and to be exposed to people from different cultures — since all of the stores are in the suburbs.”

The announcement of the program outraged Donna Stern, the Midwest coordinator for the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights And Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). “They’re going to train students to be subservient workers” she told the Free Press. “This is not why parents send them to school.”

Sorry we couldn’t rescue you from the freezing river. We’re just the police.

By Uncle Dave Sunday February 14, 2010

27 Comments

First it was the guards who phoned in for help instead of helping a 15yr old girl who could have been stomped to death. Now this. What’s next?, Too dangerous (ie, they might be sued) for cops, firemen, etc to leave the station house? Oh, right. They’re too busy breaking into people’s houses to do real police work.

The five-year-old girl, her-six year-old brother and their father Chris Grady were in the car when it plunged into the river Avon in Evesham, Worcestershire, on Thursday morning.

Mr Grady and his son Ryan, managed to escape from the submerged car. They were helped clear by police officers on the riverbank. However, Mr Grady’s daughter, Gabrielle, was trapped inside the vehicle for 97 minutes before the closest police dive team, based in the next county, could arrive. The divers then took a further 12 minutes to rescue her.

The officers already on the scene were prevented from diving in earlier to rescue her by police safety regulations.

The little girl remained in a critical state in hospital yesterday while her brother yesterday began to make a recovery. He was well enough to sit up in bed and talk to family at his bedside.

West Mercia police admitted last night that safety regulations barred normal police officers from jumping into rivers to try to save people.

Oddly Enough, You Can Actually Stop Smoking Without Taking Big Pharma’s Drugs!

By Uncle Dave Saturday February 13, 2010

37 Comments

Of course, you would be robbing them of their much needed profits. So start smoking (to help tobacco company profit), then take your costly medicine to stop. Then start smoking again and…

“Smokers are never told that up to 75% of successful ex-smokers quit unaided,” said a public health expert, who reviewed hundreds of studies into quitting smoking and is now calling for more effective campaigns and policies worldwide.

Drug companies, tobacco control advocates and public health professionals are over-promoting nicotine replacement therapy and other smoking cessation drugs, according to Simon Chapman and Ross MacKenzie from the University of Sydney, Australia.

The pharmaceutical industry is influencing public health practice away from methods that are proven to help the majority of smokers to quit, they said in their review in the journal PLoS Medicine.

“For obvious reasons (a $1.7 billion market in 2006) the pharmaceutical industry is intent on pathologising a process that for decades saw millions of people quit unaided,” Chapman said.

Liquid Galaxy — Google Earth on Steroids

By Uncle Dave Saturday February 13, 2010

8 Comments

Google’s Liquid Galaxy is engineer Jason Holt’s 20% time project, a wraparound view of 8 LCD screens providing a truly immersive experience of Google Earth and Street View.

Fatwa Declared on Airport Body Scanners

By McCullough Saturday February 13, 2010

24 Comments

SOUTHFIELD, MI (Michigan Radio) – A group of Muslim religious scholars has issued a religious document saying that airport body scanners violate Islamic law.

The Fiqh Council of North America issued a Fatwa telling Muslims to avoid the scanners because of Islamic teachings regarding nudity.

There are currently 40 scanners in U.S. airports. The Transportation Security Administration plans to add over 400 more this year, after the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day. The suspect in that case, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, is a Nigerian Muslim.

Dawud Walid is Director of Michigan’s Council on American Islamic Relations. He supports the fatwa because scanners violate Islamic standards of modesty. “We’re not allowed to be seen by people of the opposite gender, unless it’s for an extreme emergency, like a medical emergency,” Walid says.

Walid says an acceptable alternative would be a pat-down by a same-gender security guard. The TSA says it already offers that option.

It will be interesting to see if the Politically Correct crowd gets behind this.

Blackwater Put Hookers and Blow on the Gov’t Tab

By McCullough Saturday February 13, 2010

37 Comments

WASHINGTON — Two former employees of Blackwater Worldwide have accused the private security company of defrauding the government for years by filing bogus receipts, double billing for the same services and charging government agencies for strippers and prostitutes, according to court documents unsealed this week.

In a December 2008 lawsuit, the former employees said top Blackwater officials had engaged in a pattern of deception as they carried out government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The lawsuit, filed under the False Claims Act, also asserts that Blackwater officials turned a blind eye to “excessive and unjustified” force against Iraqi civilians by several Blackwater guards. The documents detailing the Davises’ accusations were unsealed after the Justice Department declined to join in the case against Blackwater, which last year changed its name to Xe Services. A Xe spokeswoman did not return a message seeking comment about the case. According to the lawsuit, Ms. Davis raised concerns about the company’s bookkeeping with her bosses in March 2006, when she was handling accounts for the company’s contracts with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. The lawsuit claims she was told to “back off,” and that she “would never win a medal for saving the government money.”

Ms. Davis also asserts that a Filipino prostitute in Afghanistan was put on the Blackwater payroll under the “Morale Welfare Recreation” category, and that the company had billed the prostitute’s plane tickets and monthly salary to the government.

Outraged yet? Do we have a President that will remedy this? Probably not.

Does Obama Want to Be a One Term President?

By Uncle Dave Saturday February 13, 2010

62 Comments

If he’s thinking that and acting on that, does that mean he’s already a lame duck? The Republicans seem to be acting like it to boost November. They’re watching out for themselves even more than usual — if that’s even possible for a politician — no matter what it does to the country.

There is, I think, an amazing political fact right now that is hiding in plain sight and is rich with implications. It was there in President Obama’s Jan. 25, pre-State of the Union interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, who was pressing him about his political predicaments. “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” he said. “And I—and I believe that.”

Now this is the sort of thing presidents say, and often believe they believe, but at the end of the day they all want two terms. Except that Mr. Obama shows every sign of meaning it, and if he does, it explains a lot about his recent decisions and actions.

A week after the Sawyer interview, the president had a stunning and revealing exchange with Sen. Blanche Lincoln, the Arkansas Democrat likely to lose her 2010 re-election campaign. He was meeting with Senate Democrats to urge them to continue with his legislative agenda. Mrs. Lincoln took the opportunity to beseech him to change it. She urged him to distance his administration from “people who want extremes,” and to find “common ground” with Republicans in producing legislation that would give those in business the “certainty” they need to create jobs.

While answering, Mr. Obama raised his voice slightly and quickened his cadence. “If the price of certainty is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression . . . the result is going to be the same. I don’t know why we would expect a different outcome pursuing the exact same policy that got us in this fix in the first place.” He continued: “If our response ends up being, you know . . . we don’t want to stir things up here,” then “I don’t know why people would say, ‘Boy, we really want to make sure those Democrats are in Washington fighting for us.'”

More about the Pharma issue from the video above here. Change you can believe in!