If you're in Portland and can make it away from work, come on down to the rally at the North Park Blocks starting at 2:30pm or the march after the rally at 4:00pm. If you have young children that you don't want to bring, the IWW will be providing child care during the event.
It's almost as if we were being lied to. Imagine that.
This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown.Full story here.
Of course, WMD's weren't the issue. Nor were human rights, terrorism, or any other such pretext proffered by the criminals in Washington, DC. It's all about needing an excuse to funnel an economic stimulus to the capitalist system (which as Keynes showed needs such stimuli if it is to be stopped from periodically lapsing into depressions), plus the desire to have an effective propaganda device for controlling people. Militarism solves the problem: you get military spending, and an excuse to spew jingoistic claptrap and herd the lemmings into thinking that the interests and institutions of should be mindlessly supported. And there's none of those pesky social programs redistributing economic power and partially undermining the authority of the elites.
Really, now, why do you think there was no "peace dividend" after the USSR fell? (Check the figures; the average level of military spending, expressed as percentage of GDP, during the Clinton years was higher than the average level of such spending for the entire Cold War period!) If the supposed cause of an effect vanishes but the effect remains, the only logical conclusion is that the supposed cause was not a cause after all.
The former, of course, is up to their old antics of leaving UPS Spoors, which are a poor substitute for delivery. Well, I'm being somewhat unfair in linking to that journal entry, since this time UPS actually did attempt to ring my condo. Trouble was, they also used the sixth sense that all UPS deliverymen are equipped with to sense when I would be in the laundry room and not hear the phone ring.
The latter is to blame for ignoring my request to send the item via the mail. I specifically requested fourth-class mail since UPS is such a royal pain: since I have a life, I have better things to do than sit around all day waiting for a UPS delivery, and since I don't have a regular job, there's no saying exactly where in the city I'll be on a given day, and I have no work address to send the thing to.
In fact, I don't expect to be at home for the rest of the week to accept the package (I'll be at home some of the time, of course, but see above about UPS and their sixth sense). That means postponing it until next week. If those idiots had actually followed the customer's instructions and sent it fourth class, I wouldn't have to worry: the postman would just leave it above my box in the lobby and I'd probably be collecting my much-awaited book at my convenience this evening.
I just called UW Press and they professed ignorance that the book had even been shipped! They claim to be shipping another copy via the mail. We'll see. Maybe as a compensation for my troubles I'll get two $70 books for the price of one.
I'll close by pointing out that the only reason I'm going through this whole hokey-pokey is that Powell's changed their minds and refused to place a special order for the book. Thanks, guys.
About 60% of those in attendance applauded after I made my points, then the architects of the plan all spoke to defend it in one way or another. I don't think one of them failed to denounce the "extremist" (heh, heh) in the back of the room. But in the end a resolution (watered-down more than I like) against it passed. Apparently the City Council doesn't like to pass plans that don't have the full support of the neighborhood association that represents the area the plan in question covers, which augurs well for Wednesday's Council meeting. I'll be raising a stink there, too.
And you can spare me the rhetoric of how the garage will solve parking problems because "people will be circulating looking for on-street spaces less". People circulate thus mostly on the residential streets. Those aren't the ones that are choked and gridlocked. Twenty-first and Twenty-third have the bad congestion, because they have lights feeding on to Burnside and people use them to arrive and depart the neighborhood. It's pretty obvious what the problem is, and it ain't "circulating".
I'm hoping it won't be too big a deal to run down to the county building and get a spare ballot for her and a spare envelope for myself tomorrow morning. Then we can both drop ours off in person before they stop accepting them at 8:00pm tomorrow evening.
And I thought this vote-by-mail stuff was supposed to simplify things.
Now it's off to the Multnomah County Elections Department to straighten up the little mess caused by the Postal Service goofing up on something.
Thank you for submitting your resume/application to Firm.Do you see the words "not chosen", "not selected", or "we chose someone else" anywhere? It's bad enough that it's become standard practice to have to read most of a letter to get to those words. Now wishy-washiness has apparently reached a new pinnacle by not even stating anywhere that the recipient of the rejection letter was, well, rejected.We have sent your resume to the interviewing committee and they will be selecting applicants who best match their needs to continue on in the interviewing process. We will keep your resume on file for one year, but I would encourage you to reapply if you are interested in any other job openings in the future. This may be the only communication you receive from us unless you are called for an interview.
Our jobs are advertised in the Sunday Oregonian and on our website: www.Firm.org.
I appreciate our interest in our agency, and wish you luck in your job search.
Firm
Human Resources Department
Whatever happened to honesty and straightforwardness?
And I'm supposed to ignore that and whine about there being no fancy-pants digital timers or self-cleaning feature on the oven. Dream on, appliance marketeers.
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