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"OK- I switched out photographs at the last minute"
A long awaited executive order was signed by this President today. President Obama undid an executive order that George Bush instituted in 2004. This order restores the long standing custom at least in this country, of paying people who work more than forty hours per week, guaranteed time and a half for all hours worked overtime. Things had gotten so out of hand that if you were on Salary rather than hourly wage and earned more than $23,600 per year, not exactly swimming in money - - in fact barely above the poverty level, that you not only did not get paid time and a half but you got zip for all those added hours. As the President stated in his speech today (photograph above) such a Salaried worker could conceivably be earning less than minimum wage. My own father was the victim of such a system when he was "kicked up stairs" and given an "executive position" where he was now on salary. This was at some time prior to early 1967. We won't talk about how his secretary he had for a number of years caused stress on the marriage. I met her. She's a nice woman and pretty good looking, too. (More in the "Arimid" file if we ever post that) President Obama did say that "This tradition was originally for high salaried corporate executives". Of course no need to guess how the Right will judge this. No doubt they will say "It's the government paying people not to work again". Of course why they would be expected to be made about this order in particular is that it will actually HELP the jobs market, and there are few things conservatives hate more than an easing of the labor market. What they would like to see, and by in large have now, are a bunch of wage slaves. If you don't like providing all that free overtime you can always quit your job, which they would love, but know you won't do. Hence people would tend to hang on to a bad job they don't like, which of course prevents someone else from getting that job, even if they are more desperate than you are for it.
I was watching Senate speeches on Live C-Span this afternoon. And Senators Sessions and Cruz are concerned that rather than simply supply the Ukrainian government with money, the United States Senate wants to institute International Monetary Fund Reform, which according to Ted Cruz, would actually decrease the US "decision making" with regards to the IMF, and actually give Russia powers that they didn't have before. As to the disparaging remarks about Majority Leader Harry Reid, these were extranious to the issue at hand, no matter whether it was Reid or the Republicans who raise the issue about the IRS or C-4 or what have you. Both Democrats and Republicans expressed confidence on the floor or a deal being able to get worked out soon, and I have no reason to doubt them. I think as long as you can keep Pat Buchanon out of the senate chamber, both sides can work out a deal which penalizes Russia- - and makes it clear which side of the conflict the United States is on. (And World Net Daily be damned)
I was originally intending to make this the lead paragraph (like "Celebration of the Lizzard" and we know what happened to that idea) The overall theme is "Through diversity there is both health and strength". This is true in nature. We have told you that the number of verities of produce out there is vastly diminished now from what it was a hundred years ago in the era of the Mom and Pop farm. This is not good because genetic diversity was a part of nature because nature knows that genetic diversity guards against plague and disease, so your whole crop doesn't get wiped out. This may not be the most "efficient way to evolve" but this idea of the Primacy of one "top dog' species, is an invention of the Social Conservatives late in the nineteenth century, and isn't borne out in nature. Of course we know now that these people like the Creation Institute believed all the millions of species we have today came from seven thousand different "kinds" or families of animals, and double that to fourteen thousand for both sexes. So really, as I've hinted at earlier, these people on the fringe right by necessity must have more "Faith" in evolution than I have. I do not believe for example that every kind of cat from your generic tiger cat, to your leopard or osselot or lion or cheetah came from one primal species of saber toothed tiger, since they've been extinct for a half a million years or something. But after I roused from having dozed off after lunch today- - I heard Thom Hartman's voice talking about shopping malls, and how you used to see all of these local Mom and Pop shops in each local mall, and there may be fifteen different stationery stores, each with their own accountants and printers and what not. I looked up the Sherman Anti Trust Act because Hartman said that President Reagan just declared the act null and void when he became President, and presumably the rest of the country just went along with it. This is a pretty straightforward article, and not particularly complicated. But it seems at the tail end of the seventies- - plaintiffs were given a bunch of new hoops to jump through that they had not been subjected to in ninety years of the law. (So whatever became of "established case law") It's funny how Conservatives can suddenly decide to throw out a hundred years of tradition just because they feel like it, and nobody is expected to object. But just like with nature- - inefficiency can be a good thing. There is advanced the argument that increased volume and agrigate output or whatever- -consolidations- - firing employees right and left- - can increase corporate profits, and in their line of argument drive down prices the consumers pay. But we know that's not how it works. They drive the prices at first way DOWN to drive all of the competetors out of business and then jack up prices to way above what they were, and now there is no business competetion to stop them. It's kind of like the Unions. Larry Elder can screach all he wants to about "let the free market handle it" but he knows that without the Unions there as watch dogs on wages- - the whole "climate of higher wages" would not exist. And ditto for the civil rights laws. If Larry Elder is so in love with the pre 1964 Segregated South, let him go back in a time machine and live there himself, if he's so in love with it. (If I were God, this is the example of a punishment I would come up with) We liberals have always been fans of diversity, be it intellectual, or in the genetics of the produce we eat, or in business endeavors, or in racial and cultural contributions. The conservatives on the other hand classically have looked to this Mono- - - well, Autocratic sort of "ultimate despot authority" to whom they look to for everything.
It'd like to talk a little about math and "Matter". People forget some basic facts. Like picture a one foot cubic block of concrete. Now picture one that's three foot cubed- - solid concrete. Now what if you wanted to put files all around the whole surface of this yard cube and each tile was exactly one foot square, how many tiles would you need. Hold on - - the answer is fifty-four. That's because there are six sides to a cube and each side would take nine tiles to cover it. In case you are wondering about a four dimensional 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 ninety degree cube- - the number of tiles needed to cover that would be 162, which means that each such cube has eighteen sides where all of the corners and edges are ninety degrees. By my formula that number is eighteen. People may wonder how a four dimensional world could exist. According to those people into string theory, the number of dimensions is dictated by the number of "holes" in the strings, and most strings of quarks have three such loops or "holes" producing three dimensions. It's hard to picture that it's "just that simple" because poly-dimensional thinking kind of bends your mind out of shape. The argument thus goes that - - - space really is connected to the nature of the matter IN that space. It's kind of like they say an important man "creates a need for what he has" just as with a new product you sometimes have to "create a need for it". To people like you and me, we reason "Well if there is four dimensional space it either exists or it doesn't exist", but modern string science tells us it's not that simple. Since we've never lived in poly-dimensional space, it's darn near impossible that we could even conceive of living in such a world.
We had pastrami on a bun for lunch with three bean salad, and we had lazagna for dinner, and raspberry sherbit. Actually I started up the stairs and them remembered I was out of cigarette and headed back down and poked my head in the dining room just in time to hear Dora call out "seconds" and so I got a big second portion of lazagna. This paragraph isn't pasted from my file. I'm typing it here in this posting fresh, because i feel like it.
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