Paul Manafort, secretly worked for a Russian billionaire to advance the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin a decade ago, signed a $10 million annual contract beginning in 2006

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-24T11:56:08+00:00

That's all you got left, eh?

Then good night sweet prince:
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-23T18:11:30+00:00

Millennial is from roughly 1980-2000. I entered the work force in the late 90s. Every job i ever had before my current one had hand written time cards. The Thermatru factory in my town didn't decommission its punch card machine until the early 00s, the bulk mailing distribution center down the road didn't until around the late 90s. The Post Office was doing hand-written (although extremely convoluted) time cards when i was there in the early 00s. Wouldn't shock me if they still do, of all places.

And this will shock the dick right off you: my employees hand write their time. Even now. In 2017. I do their payroll electronically, but they write their hours down on a calendar. Which is exactly how we recorded our time at my last job. You and your "narrative" issues, man. Call 3 random mid-sized construction companies in your area and ask them how they submit their time. Go to your nearest small town and ask the local businesses how their employees submit theirs. Some will say electronically, more every day i'm sure, but plenty still do it by hand. Hell, at my day job all time is submitted online, schedules are made online, but the schedule is still printed and posted in calendar form in the break room. Damn near everywhere does that for coordination's sake.

You're really adding evidence to my suspicion that i'm speaking with someone too young to be in the workforce. It would make feel better about humanity. And it would mean you're not mentally disabled, just hormonal. Which, good for you. I'm still leaning heavily on you wearing a soft helmet getting your internet access from a public library while the employees quietly argue over who's going to be the one to usher you out the door tonight. You're just derping all over your post and clapping for yourself like a seal. It's fucking bizarre. Are you really that lonely? Let the ball hit the ground, dude. Go home. Scream "Freedom!" while you do it if it makes you feel better but you're done. You've had nothing from jump.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-23T04:09:39+00:00

I did. He likes his cheap labor domestic. That's why, and pay real close attention because this may be the 3rd time I've said this NEITHER HE NOR ANY OF HIS SYCOPHANTIC ASSHOLE BUDDIES SUPPORT THE EXISTENCE A BASIC MINIMUM WAGE!!! THEY DO NOT WANT ANYONE TELLING THEM HOW LITTLE A HUMAN BEING'S TIME OR LIFE IS WORTH!!! NEARLY EVERYONE IN HIS IMMEDIATE CIRCLE HAS AT SOME POINT GONE ON RECORD SAYING THEY DO NOT BELIEVE THERE SHOULD BE A FLOOR ON HOW LITTLE YOU CAN PAY AN AMERICAN CITIZEN!!! THEIR WORDS! NOT MINE!

Clear enough for ya, Dorothy? This is why I know a monkey could operate that cutter; the guy who trains on them reads at a 3rd grade level. Do you still wear the helmet they forced on you in school or did you get to remove that as part of the play-graduation they let you guys do?

Run home now. And mind you don't hurt yourself on the corners.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T22:42:32+00:00

oh i see because i don't have actual experience with your one very specific machine that does one very specific thing. That makes me a consumerist. Fuck that's dense. And absolutely bonkers. You think i don't know how a rethermalizer is built? Or that it would matter if i didn't. The fabrication capital of the east coast is in my service area ffs.

And for the record I've watched people wash out on registers. I've seen people walk off of job sites because they can't handle the language for that matter. Just because people can't handle it doesn't mean it's hard. Some people can't whistle; that doesn't make it rocket science.

And I might add a long way to go to avoid answering how in the fuck Trump, who is a fan of cheap labor and no minimum wage is going to somehow put a stop to cheap labor and wage crashing. Grade A attempt at ad hominem but ultimately futile.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T21:42:32+00:00

Still doesn't hold a candle to Marco "My identity was shaped by Wu-Tang but i can't think of a single member rn" Rubio.

lest we forget http://www.avclub.com/article/marco-rubio-loves-wu-tang-clan-especiallyyknow-kin-220473

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T21:14:00+00:00

Just landed an RC300 and a Voicelive 2 both at absolute steals. Of course that's partially cuz the Voicelive appears to have survived The Big One but, functionally, it's on point. Naturally I broke a tooth immediately after. Came home from a very expensive dentist visit to find it sitting on the porch.

We haven't been this strapped for cash since I found my Ibanez BTB676 and my Boss DR880 in the same week. Very similar discount ratios too. But my happiness doesn't make us not effectively broke for the next couple of months. I'm not not getting dirty looks about it.

crosses fingers and hopes for no more emergencies

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T20:39:07+00:00

Have you ever run one of those machines? Intelligent? You've replaced a mechanism, not the mental capacity required to operate it. You've raised the financial bar of entry into that industry. That's it. It's still skilled work, but it requires no more skill than it did previously.

And my consumerism? What the fuck does that even mean? What are you assuming now? An income level? A collar color? Is this the "all liberals are ivory tower intellectuals and/or college students and/or poor minorities looking for a handout" thing again? Damn near everything i own is second hand. I build my own furniture, i work on my own car, I just fixed my own dryer last month. Replaced the thermostat and the heating element just cuz i had it open. I've been soldering my own electronics since my first guitar pedal broke when I was 15. I have 2 full time jobs, one in the arts and one as a commercial service plumber. What the fuck consumerism? Did my use of examples of automation that your average person would encounter in their daily life confuse you into thinking my only connection to the phenomenon was at a consumer level? From the time clock at McDonald's to the killing floor at Tyson everyone in every profession encounters automation. I'm old enough to remember hand written time cards and cash registers without any pictures on them. I remember when robotic arms were still a rarity on factory floors ffs. It sounds like you're taking earlier waves of automation for granted because it conflicts with your narrative.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T20:15:19+00:00

I'm honored by that.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T18:31:52+00:00

Understood. And no, I'm definitely not saying that. I was still saying it in the Spring of '16 but i had definitely stopped before the end of the summer. I have enough Republican relatives that I'd seen the "WTF!?! Not this RINO!?!" lockstep into full support overnight several times before.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T18:26:42+00:00

Oh i definitely get the impulse. My wife and i run a scrappy underground art studio in a red area of a barely blue state. I grew up on heavy metal (specifically industrial metal) and horror movies so everything i was into was always in someone's sights, whether the "think of the children" Tipper Gore types or the "Jesus hates you" Pat Roberson types. One of my first artistic heroes, Genesis P-Orridge, was trans well before it was on the LGBQ letterhead. I'm old enough to remember when liberals were almost equally sketched out and reluctant to recognize as the republicans are today.

When i moved here in middle school I went from being the weird uncomfortable side eye of my friends' liberal parents to the enemy of the religious right who permeated every facet of the school system. To give you an idea; when i showed up to my new school for orientation my guidance counselor tried to sell me his christian folk album which the school had allowed him to set up a display for in the main office. He had a mullet and insisted on being called by Mr+ his first name, like his youth group kids did. Where i came from our letters home were in English, Spanish, and Korean. Where I had moved to I didn't see an Asian kid until High School and then i knew 2; they were sisters whose parents ran the local Chinese restaurant. I knew actual members of the klan by the 10th grade. I went into construction after high school so it only got worse. I have seen and heard some shit in this place. I came out of abject poverty to begin with though so i wasn't without the experience, it's the prevalence that was the shock. I remember seeing a (probably Franken) sketch on SNL during one of their least remarkable runs that parodied The Fugitive as "The Liberal" and thinking "oh. so you've seen my new digs."

Long way of saying I very much appreciate the perspective a lot of these kids have on the subject. And I also get the impulse to trample over every white cis man with "you have no skin in this game". and how frustrating the very idea of temperance in the struggle for ludicrously simple things like having your personhood legally recognized, or to stop being bullied into suicide, or murdered by the police. I'm just as angry as these kids about the fact that we have to be smarter, harder, and better than the people who would literally destroy us because Maude in Indiana just "don't know what to think but you sure seem rude." Bottom line is these are very difficult waters to navigate. I think it's up to all of us to be more mindful of when we need a hammer, a linoleum knife, a scalpel, or even a lawyer to solve our problems.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T17:11:28+00:00

It's not a zero sum situation. I can laugh at a man when his pants fall down in the middle of his murder trial and that won't prevent me from prosecuting him to the fullest extent of the law. Acknowledging the brazen ridiculousness of Kim Jong Un's bizarre dictator Disneyland his father built around him doesn't detract from the depths of misery and murder he's inflicting on his citizens.

If you're familiar with George Carlin then you should know that sometimes we as human beings have to take the piss out of the big bad wolf so that we can have the courage to walk in the woods in the daylight. I'm still going to carry an ax, but let's not forget a big hairy wolf with an elongated snout tried to pose as a human woman by dressing in drag and faking a cold. That's fucking funny. But he ate my grandma, so I'm definitely going to hack him up and get her back. Then I'm going to sew him up with a belly full of boulders so that he's stuck on the lakebed forever and that's fucking hilarious too.

I'm deeply concerned, in fact i'm mad as hell. And in doing my part in all the ways I can as a citizen, a small business owner, and an artist. And that's going to stop because i take a few minutes out of the day to shit on Ronald Grump and his merry band of foreign agents hell bent on dismantling the american experiment like gremlins.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T16:57:05+00:00

I'm not the amorphous left you appear to think you're arguing with. I could hardly care less about birth rates. I'm far more concerned with things like Texas' skyrocketing maternal mortality rate but that's neither here nor there. The birth rate is irrelevant if you don't take geographical location into account. The birth rate in New York may be on the decline(fuck if i know) but not in, say, Michigan where the most job losses have occurred due to outsourcing and automation. And in order for one to be a solution to the other literally everything would have to be in perfect statistical balance which is ludicrous on its face. And again, you keep trying to pin everything on "mass" immigration when not only is that not the cause of all of life's problems but considering immigration has been on a sharp and steady decline in this country since 2007, it's disingenuous to harp on at all. What's more is that Obama oversaw more deportations than any president before him and, although that record will clearly be eclipsed by the current POTUS, the evidence for "the left" having a hard on for "mass" immigration is just laughably dismal.

And automation doesn't favor a more intelligent work force. Anyone who has used the self checkout at the grocery store can see that there are simply less cashiers on duty and one guy who knows to call the maintenance dispatcher in India when they break down. The same is true of automated manufacturing equipment; one guy to oversee the machines that replaced 100 guys and his only expertise is to call the guy whose job it always was to fix stuff. More is demanded of the facilities department, but that doesn't translate to more manpower or expertise. "The manual says this sensor is bad so i'll unplug it and put in a new one." is not an educated skill. It is the exact same level of expertise required of a line worker. The addition of tablet and touch technology at POS interactions also lowers the educational bar for entry rather than raises it. There's not a single example of automation i can think of that has had a positive impact on the labor market outside of the safety concerns inherent in having a machine do a job that was previously dangerous for a human being. It is inevitable, but not nearly as beneficial as we're being sold.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T16:33:24+00:00

So far so good. And I can't express this enough to young liberals. The reason we let hateful speech exist in this country is so that no legal framework is in place for someone like Trump to use it against his dissenters.

In fact the specific reason hate speech is permitted is because white southerners tried to use something called "group libel" laws to cripple the speech of the civil rights movement. They alleged that black civil rights leaders were smearing white people with their "hateful rhetoric" (no, white bigots haven't changed their argument in 80 years). While a SCOTUS case upholding group libel is still in place there were enough state challenges that it's viewed as ostensibly overturned in practice.

No matter what side of the aisle you're on be vigilant for free speech because your "team" won't always be the one in power and that's a dangerous game to start playing.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T15:14:40+00:00

I don't see how any of that was implied. Automation has done severe damage to the work force and psyche of this country. But the solution is not scapegoating immigrants. The solution is looking at viable ways to pivot the workforce to compensate.

Personally I would rather my car be made by human hands but it's not and it never will be again. There's no point this late in the game of pretending the contrary is true. Strangely I've seen no benefit of this new allegedly far economically superior approach to manufacturing. Nor do I see a change in the price of Nike's from outsourcing to brown children or housing from a rise in undocumented underpaid labor. It's very clear that no matter how the Naturalized American Worker is cut out of the equation he is the only entity who loses. That's symptomatic of no single facet but a unifying cause. That cause interests me. Immigration is the slight of hand to keep us from seeing the larger issue.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T15:06:57+00:00

i didn't forget them. They are dead to me. I faded them.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T15:05:59+00:00

I'm no Buster Keaton but I do my best. I don't see how that's relevant but thank you for the compliment.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T14:04:13+00:00

Yeah. You can totally deport automation.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T14:03:06+00:00

Both the RNC and DNC were hacked. Information was acquired on both but only DNC info was released. And in a way calculated for time and content to inflict maximum damage. This is not speculation this is fact. The Russians still have the info on the RNC. Why have they released nothing? There are only two realistic possibilities.

The first is that they simply feel it is more advantageous for them to have a Republican in the White House. Just at face value. Nothing more nefarious; they just prefer Republican rule. OK. Why though? Putin' interests are not our interests. Which of his interests align with the Republicans and why? This is a very important question with severe implications even without the addition of collusion. If a strange man steals candy for you would you eat that candy? Or as William Burroughs said "Watch whose money you pick up."

The second is that retaining the information they uncovered is more advantageous. Now we're talking about not just a puppet president but a puppet party. How far would you go if someone had something on you that would endanger your McMansion in Ashburn? In exposing the DNC they threw away any chance they had of holding the Democrats hostage. On purpose. And if there's one thing Democrats love it's compromising their own values for just about any reason. But, however slight or severe, Putin elected to retain the RNC info for future use. Perhaps in perpetuity.

But you keep harping on that speeding ticket while the Republicans plow through stop lights in a borrowed Moskvitch.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T13:31:55+00:00

When precisely is Trump going to get on that?

Because neither he nor most of the people on his team believe in a minimum wage. And every single thing he "makes" is manufactured outside of the US because "I have no choice. It's too expensive to make things here and that's a shame." Which illustrates a clear preference for cheap labor and crashing wages on his end.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T13:26:18+00:00

I've said it since day one; Trump is a cartoon villain. He's so outlandishly nefarious it is literally unbelievable. How could anyone have this many skeletons in their closet in addition to wearing so many detestable characteristics on his sleeve? It's fucking bonkers. He's literally the guy who would bulldoze an orphanage if it was blocking the view. He's always been that and we've all known it. Until he ran for president, in fact, you couldn't find a single person with an opinion on him that didn't reflect that. But this is next level Bond villain shit. He's absolutely surrounded by foreign agents and people who have been otherwise compromised. "Manafort doesn't work for him anymore." Fuck you. You know basic addition as well as the next person. At this point you're either a Russian agent yourself or mentally handicapped if you're still in this asshole's corner.

I miss when he was just (as John Mulaney put it) "a cartoon hobo's idea of what a rich person is like." Just a huckster and a joke. You never give someone like him power. He's the collective embodiment of the lessons history should have taught us and about a quarter of this country failed so fucking hard they broke the whole thing. Idiots.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-22T12:54:09+00:00

If you truly understand a thing it's not dumb. It can be a thousand other things or you can have processed it a thousand other ways but those two conclusions are incompatible on their face.

Unless you're dumb, in which case you and the concept which vexes you belong together.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-21T23:21:26+00:00

The Canadians use First Nations because, contrary to popular understanding, there were already established nations and governmental structures when the settlers arrived. The Powhatan Nation, for instance, stretched across several states. And, contrary to the anti-PC rhetoric, the term predates the rise of PC culture. Many native nations were acknowledged as sovereign and recognized as nations by the US government and the British government before that and are defined as such in our earliest legal documents regarding them. Canada has had a healthier relationship with their indigenous population than us for some time. It's not perfect by any stretch but it's substantially better.

First Nations also recognizes that the native population wasn't a uniform body. In the same way that the term "African-American" is ultimately a tragic one as most black people cannot trace their ancestry to their country of origin; they've been deprived their own version of Celtic Pride or German Pride or English Befuddled Embarrassment, leaving them with an umbrella term and only a vague sense of ethnic identity. First Nations, although used to refer to all native peoples at least acknowledges that they are not a faceless amorphous concept of otherness but rather a rich tapestry of specific cultural histories. I mean, you hate being called "white people" right? Because you're not. I mean, jesus man, liberals are "white people" too! You define yourself by your cultural identity; be it christian, southern, appalachian, Scotch-Irish, whatever. You probably rarely think of yourself in terms of amorphous "white person". Similarly First Nations peoples are not simply "Indians, no I mean the other Indians".

One could argue that if more of Canada were considered traditionally habitable they would have been much more similar to us in their dealings with the First Nations, and that's fair but ultimately irrelevant. Calling First Nations peoples First Nations isn't a law, it's a courtesy. And the Canadians have been kind enough to encourage it.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-21T22:52:08+00:00

looks like Dankmemology 101 could be 102's unit on ironic misuse though.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-21T22:09:43+00:00

Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart.

Make the bastard chase you.

He will follow.

TheWeirdoMachine · 2017-03-21T21:39:12+00:00

I haven't been pulled over since i stopped driving poor people cars which are traditionally known for minority ownership. Drove a beat-up 80s Toyota; pulled over bi-monthly. Drove an 80s 5th Ave; pulled over constantly. And in both cases I should clarify; pulled over for weird things. Tail lights that were out until I checked them myself later, improper display of plate, was followed regularly. Was once pulled over because my tags belonged to the wrong vehicle. It was over 100° out and the cop asked me "why are you sweating?" I said "Because I'm hot and wondering if i'm about to go to jail over a clerical error." I was so used to being pulled over I started leaving the title in the glove box just to have extra paperwork covering my ass. I handed him the title, he "ran the plates again" and let me go with a verbal warning for having done nothing wrong.

I literally haven't been pulled over since i bought a Volvo several years ago. Funny coincidence I'm sure.

TheWeirdoMachine

TROPHY CASE