Outsourcing

The Walt Disney company has been accused of laying off employees, and contracting out their work to companies that hire foreign workers for a fraction of the cost. 

Disney uses contractors to replace higher paid American workers, often with illegal immigrants, and has been doing so for over 20 years. The fact that they use contractors has enabled the company to have "plausible deniability" that the workers are illegal.

How do I know this? Two data points:

In 1996, I had a job working at Disney as a technician working on the robotic figures (animatronics) at the Magic Kingdom theme park in Orlando. we had a meeting one night between our department and management, and we were told that it was the company's goal to eliminate all permanent, full time positions in the park by the year 2010 and replace them with contractors. They claimed that the $90 million a year that the company was paying for health care benefits was too much.

One of my coworkers pointed out that Michael Eisner, then the CEO of the company, received $270 million in pay, benefits, and other perks the year before, and asked why didn't the company just cut HIS pay to "only" $180 million, and let the employees keep their benefits. The manager running the meeting then claimed that the meeting was over, as we were not going to discuss executive pay.

The second data point came in 2000. I was dating a woman from the Czech Republic by the name of Ivana Horakova. She had come to the US a year before on a tourist visa, and overstayed her visa. She was an illegal immigrant. She was working as a customer service representative for a contractor that provided staffing for hotels that were on and around Disney property. Since she spoke 5 languages, she was a great person to have at the front desk to greet customers. Her pay? She was being paid with a three bedroom apartment to share with 5 other girls, and $40 a week. 

But it's the happiest place on Earth, right?

Communist agitators

Look at this picture of the riots in Baltimore:

The sign there is made by the "Peoples Power Assembly." Just who are they? Well, according to their Facebook page, they are supporters of the World Workers Party, which is a Communist Organization.

This is what the PPA has to say:

It is time for us to make it very clear that things are only going to get worse. And the only way we can stop things from getting worse — the only way we can win a society that we dream for, not only for ourselves, but for our children and our grandchildren and the children that we don’t know, not only here but around the world — is to overthrow this brutal system.

Their stated goal is to overthrow the government and replace it with...

There is a dual crisis at play. One aspect is the crisis of the economic system, which is global. More than merely a crisis of the financial markets, it is of the system of capitalism itself.

Here is a pamphlet (pdf) for one of their conferences:

With all of these riots, the people of those cities keep claiming that the people who live there are not the ones who are rioting. They claim that 'outsiders' are showing up to these cities after a police shooting, and they are deliberately agitating and causing trouble. Not one person has decided to investigate who these agitators are, where they get their funding, or who is organizing them.

There is revcom.ushttp://revcom.us/  - which is the source of many of the posters in the protests. What is that site? It is the official site of the Communist Party of the US, and the site is advocating for revolution and overthrow of the US government.

These people are Communist agitators. They are engaging in a Nationwide push to overthrow the Government. What I want to know is where and from whom are they receiving funding.

This movement is well organized and well funded. The same professionally made posters appearing in protest after protest.

Seattle:

New York City:

Ferguson:

I know that this has been the subject of many fiction stories, but countless dictators have used civil unrest such as this as an excuse to suspend civil rights and assume total power...

Either way, there is certainly more to this than meets the eye.

Racism

President Obama makes an incredibly racist speech at the White House Press dinner, and then the White House posts it to its Facebook page.

Have you met Luther, President Obama's anger translator? #WHCD #KeyAndPeele
Posted by The White House on Saturday, April 25, 2015

One of the first lines in the speech is "Hold on to your lilly white butts."

Can you imagine a Republican saying "Hold on to your black ass" in an official speech? He would be crucified.

Then there are statements about Fox News scaring old, white people.

After that, I couldn't watch any more. The press pretty much lets this guy do as he pleases without questioning it.

Cops are revenue generators

So the State of Florida recently had a two day event called "Operation Green Light." What this event was, was all of the offices for the state's county clerks would waive the collection fees for people who had old traffic tickets whose fines had been sent to collection agencies. Watch the report here.

Orange county alone has 400,000 unpaid traffic tickets, which they claim is millions missing from the county's budget. Did you get that? Counties admit that traffic tickets are about getting more money. The police departments' primary mission is bringing money into the county coffers, not preventing crime or catching lawbreakers.

I am one of the people who is in collections for an old ticket. I got a speeding ticket in Melbourne in 2001, 14 years ago. I went to the clerk's office when I got the ticket and paid the fine. Ten years later, I got a letter from a collection agency, claiming that I had underpaid my fine by $45.50. I sent them a letter, telling them that I had paid the fine that I was told to pay at the time, and the fact that the clerk miscalculated the fine when I paid it was not my problem, as I had a receipt.

They responded by saying that fines from a government agency are not subject to the statute of limitations, nor are they subject to the Federal Laws on Collecting debts. They can continue to hound me about it until the end of time. What I DID discover, however, is that they cannot suspend my license, nor can they place it on my credit bureau reports. I sent them a letter telling them that I was not going to pay it, and that there was nothing that they could legally do to force me to do so.

In other words, all they can do is continue to send me letters every month, which they have done since the summer of 2012. In other words, they have spent more in postage trying to collect this fine than the amount of the fine would net them.

This is why government is so wasteful: they just don't understand money. Even with armed collection agents that can force you to participate, the ability to force you to pay or go to jail, and exceptions to the law that allow them to abuse the system, they still can't make money.

Special ed racket

Did you know that a child who is diagnosed with things like ADD can get special privileges in school like extra study guides, extended time on tests, and other perks, but that the student's school transcripts and diplomas will not reflect that fact? Did you know that schools are paid more for having these students under their care? For instance, New York State spends an average of $14,413 per year more to educate a disabled student than a regular-enrollment student. 

There are students who actually need these things, but as you can imagine, there are schools and parents that will take advantage of this system. The benefit to the school is increased funding, and the benefit to the student is a slanted playing field.

There are even schools that children attend that allow them to ride horses as a part of their "therapy." A large number of disabled students and their clever parents, critics allege, have managed to get public schools to pay for attendance at expensive private schools like the one just mentioned. The San Francisco Chronicle describes the case of a student with learning disabilities and an anxiety disorder whose parents “enrolled him in a $30,000-a-year prep school in Maine—then sent the bill to their local public school district.”

In the last three decades, special-education programs in the United States have grown at a tremendous pace. Much of this growth reflects a growing incidence of students diagnosed with the mildest form of learning disability, called a Specific Learning Disability (SLD), and thus the hardest to distinguish from an ordinary cognitive deficit. Between 1977 and 2006, the proportion of public school students diagnosed with SLD trebled, from 1.8 percent to 5.6 percent. By the end of that period, 40.7 percent of all students enrolled in special education had been identified as having an SLD. A limited but growing body of research suggests that financial and other incentives may be responsible for a portion of these increases.

Read more here

Best headline ever

Man shoots armadillo, hits mother in law.

Heh

Women's bodies throughout history

I actually found an interesting article over at HuffPo:

Women's Ideal Body Types Throughout History.

The "ideal" woman's body type has taken on a number of forms over the past 3,000 years. In ancient Egypt, it was slender shoulders and a narrow waist; during the Italian Renaissance, it was a round stomach and fair skin; in the 1980s, it was an athletic build with curves.

I, robot

Fast food workers continue to protest, despite the fact that they received a twelve percent raise from $8 an hour to $9 an hour, paid time off, and educational benefits, with a promise of another twelve percent nest year to $10 an hour. Why? Because they claim that they want fifteen dollars an hour. They further claim that the money they get forces them to decide whether to pay the electric bill or the rent, but doesn't allow them to pay both.

Looking at the pictures in the article, it seems like many of them have smart phones and designer clothes:

The money quote?

“If we want people to stop selling drugs, stop murdering, robbing, raping and killing … then we have to pay them something to keep them vitalized and civilized,” added Rev. Rideout III.

So this is essentially a threat, that unless we pay up, they will kill people.

There is another option: Employers can simply replace them with robots, like these. At some point, the cost of installing and maintaining a robot will be less than the cost of salary, training, paid time off, Obamacare, and loss from theft, botched orders, and waste. When employees price themselves out of the market and the robots take their jobs, there will be no going back.

CCW prevents mass shooting

You won't see this on MSNABCCBS:

On March 22 a man who opened fire on children and adults in a Philadelphia barbershop was shot and killed by a citizen with a concealed carry permit.
The armed citizen had been walking by the barbershop when he heard gunshots. He ran inside and shot the gunman.

Illegal immigrants being hired as cops

From the USA today, illegal immigrants are being hired as cops:

Law enforcement agencies struggling to fill their ranks or connect with their increasingly diverse populations are turning to immigrants to fill the gap. Most agencies in the country require officers or deputies to be U.S. citizens, but some are allowing immigrants who are legally in the country to wear the badge. From Hawaii to Vermont, agencies are allowing green-card holders and legal immigrants with work permits to join their ranks.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said he has no problems with green-card holders becoming police officers because they've made a long-term commitment to the country and have undergone extensive background checks. But he worries about the security risks associated with allowing any immigrant with a work permit to become an officer, especially considering that the Obama administration has given hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants work permits.
"We're handing over a gun and a badge to somebody whose background we don't really know a lot about," Krikorian said.

Read the whole thing, and think about the ramifications of a heavily armed, militarized police force, who have no loyalty to our nation, our laws, or our Constitution.

10 longest range sniper shots

Here they are.

Nursing homes are taking people

Paramedics refer to nursing homes as 'God's waiting room.' In Florida, they are almost universally filled to the bursting point with patients who are largely catatonic, and are poorly cared for by an overworked and underpaid staff. What this means is that the staff that doesn't quit for a better job are stuck there for one reason or another, and the usually begin viewing their patients as a burden.

During my 20 some odd years as a Paramedic, I would frequently walk into a nursing home and see patients who had been left there for hours, lying in adult diapers that were filled to capacity. I learned to associate the smell of unwashed bodies, human excrement, and disinfectants as the "smell of nursing homes." 

They hide these conditions from prospective clients and their families by putting the most healthy and most frequently visited patients in the front of the building, and hide the most neglected in the back. If you found a patient in the last room on the left as far from the nurses' station as possible, in the back hallway of the building, you could bet money that the patent was the one that the nurses found to be the most bothersome, and the patient was most likely being ignored.

I once responded to a call for a patient because the staff claimed that they could not take his blood pressure. I asked when the last time his BP was taken, and they told me just 2 hours before, and that it was fine then. When I got there, it was obvious from the advanced state of rigor mortis that this particular patient had been dead for at least four hours.

Why does this happen? Because nursing home care for a patient who is on Medicare is a cash cow. The goal here is to keep the patient alive and under the care of the nursing home for as long as possible at the lowest cost possible, so that profits are maximized.

I know a physical therapist who was instructed to stop rehabilitating patients for walking unassisted once the patient could walk a certain distance. It seems that once a patient can walk a certain distance (IIRC it is 30 feet, but I may be wrong) they are no longer eligible for the higher amounts paid for nonambuilatory patients. 

That brings us to today's article:

But one day last summer, after he disputed nursing home bills that had suddenly doubled Mrs. Palermo’s copays, and complained about inexperienced employees who dropped his wife on the floor, Mr. Palermo was shocked to find a six-page legal document waiting on her bed.&nbspIt was a guardianship petition filed by the nursing home, Mary Manning Walsh, asking the court to give a stranger full legal power over Mrs. Palermo, now 90, and complete control of her money. Read the article, and it will open your eyes as to how the Medicare system is being played, and how this is causing people to be treated like cargo.  

I once had a supervisor at an ambulance company tell me that it was our job to treat the customer well, but that the patient was not the customer, the nursing home and hospital was. "You see," he explained, "the nursing homes and hospitals called for us, not the catatonic patients. The patients were just cargo, and no one cares about whether or not cargo is happy."

Another supervisor at a different ambulance company and I had a conversation where I was explaining that what we were doing was Medicare fraud. During this conversation, I was told: "We are making money, the nursing home is making money, and the patient doesn't even remember his own name. We all win here, so don't rock the boat. You want to keep your job, don't you?"

You don't need that

One of the most common things that you hear in Central Florida when you carry a concealed weapon is that you don't need to carry a gun to the theme parks, because they are for kids, and no crime happens there.

The place is, of course, a target rich environment for all sorts of criminals. Child molesters, for example:

The report states when deputies searched Jiang's phone, they found numerous inappropriate pictures of children between 4 years old and 7 years old taken inside of the park -- including one in a bathroom stall.

Global Warming exaggerated

From the Times of India:

 Two of three scientists at a session on climate change and society at the Indian Science Congress on Tuesday felt fears of man-made global warming were greatly exaggerated...Singh said that if climate change was the cause of glaciers retreating, they should all be retreating at the same rate. "But in reality they are retreating at different rates, and some were advancing," said Singh. "Despite the melting of glaciers, only at some places the sea level is rising, whereas at others it is constant, possibly due to the sinking of land," he added.

Obama plays Robin Hood?

The Hill claimed on January 19 that Obama was playing 'Robin Hood' because he is offering free college to one group by taking money from another. That is NOT Robin Hood.

The common misconception of Robin Hood says that he was stealing from the rich to give to the poor. That is NOT what happened in the story. In the story of Robin Hood, the Sheriff of Nottingham was taxing the people of the kingdom into poverty, and using that money to the benefit of people who did not earn it. In other words, Robin Hood was stealing from the government's tax coffers and returning the money to the people.

In essence, Obama is the Sheriff of Nottingham. He is taxing the people of the kingdom to enrich himself and the people that he is counting upon to make him the king.

Not an accident, negligence.

An Ocala, Florida corrections officer was killed in an unintentional shooting at the correctional facility's firearms range at 3:30 this afternoon.

Officer Jared Forsyth, 33, was rushed to a Ocala Regional Medical Center in critical condition and immediately taken into surgery, but he later died from his injuries.  According to a police spokesperson, the accidental shooting happened just before 3:30 p.m. at the shooting range at the Lowell Correctional Institution

The article calls this an accidental shooting, but I disagree. This was not an accidental shooting, it was a NEGLIGENT shooting. If a shooter is following the four rules of firearm safety, there can be no one unintentionally shot. In order for an unintentional shooting to occur, two or more rules must be violated. That makes ANY unintentional shooting an act of negligence, not an accident.
The four rules are:

1 All guns are always loaded. (Treat them so!)
2 Never point the gun at anything you are not willing to destroy.
3 Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on target (and you have made the decision to shoot).
4 Be sure of your target and what is beyond it.

The future of medicine is in your smartphone...not

The Wall Street Journal claimed on January 9 that the future of medicine is in your smartphone. The claim:

Let’s say you have a rash that you need examined. Today, you can snap a picture of it with your smartphone and download an app to process the image. Within minutes, a dedicated computer algorithm can text you your diagnosis. That message could include next steps, such as recommending a topical ointment or a visit to a dermatologist for further assessment.

The article goes on to claim that there are already doctors that will see you and prescribe medicines to patients for the same amount of money as a typical copay. I disagree that this is the future of medicine for one reason:

profit.

The entire medical profession revolves around money, and the medical profession is not to blame. The blame lies with the government. Right now, I have no insurance, and it is cheaper for me to travel to Mexico for care than it is to stay here in the States. Why? Because the government is sticking with an outdated system where the only people who may compete in the medical sector are people who do things the way that they have always done them. This stifles competition and innovation.

Who profits the most from this model? The education industry and the insurance industry.

NYC in 1949

Here is an interesting flashback of New York City in 1949: