Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

“They all knew.”

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Innocent people do not delay justice.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

How stupid are these people?

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

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Archives for 2014

Boyhood

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Richard Linklater’s latest film is a coming-of-age story for a boy who’s exactly the same age as my kid, and it was filmed over a twelve-year period so we get to see the boy, his sister and his parents grow up. Since it was a nostalgia-fest for me, of course I thought it was great, even though there was a little bit of the stilted dialog that plagued his last movie, Before Midnight. Make your own judgment on the aesthetic merits of the movie, but I will say that it is a pretty accurate reflection of the mostly white middle-class teenagers that I know.

The main character, Mason Jr., is a bit of a slacker, so he’s subjected to a few “listen here young man” talks from adults in his life. I don’t know if Linklater intended those talks to model the kinds of commentary one hears from olds when the topic of “kids nowadays” come up, but they reminded me of the low opinions of the current generation of kids held by some adults.

I think that’s backwards. From what I’ve seen, these kids are members of the most sensible generation in history, and make better choices than the teenagers I grew up with. As shown in the movie, alcohol use is down (actually at an all-time low), but smoking pot is more popular. As far as I’m concerned, that just reflects a group of kids who are pretty smart about how they want to get high. Another indicator of this group’s maturity is that teenage pregnancy is also way down.

If anything, the way Mason Jr approaches college, which is a little skeptical and on his own terms, is also a reflection of the general intelligence that I see with my kid’s friends who aren’t sure about their career goals. College doesn’t make sense for everyone, and probably is a wash, income-wise, for kids who will end up in the bottom quartile of college-educated wage earners. Mason might well end up in that group, so he makes what’s probably a smart choice for him, even if it isn’t what his other friends are doing.

Since this movie is above all honest, I’m sure that the same people who are constantly bitching about the current group of teenagers will see it as a document of decline, but the only decline I see when I look at kids born in the early 90’s is a decline in the opportunities available to them.

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Saturday Night (Alright for Fighting) Open Thread

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The Watertown Meetup at Donahue’s came off splendidly, as far as I can tell — everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, and the people who had to leave early sounded genuinely regretful. My personal thanks to Sean/ Qkslvrwolf, JimB, Mary/Lahke, Ken & Betsy, Tom L, John & Ilana, Peter/ EFGoldman & Marilyn, and especially SiubhanDuinne, who gave us a reason to herd cats! (And apologies to those whose names I left off the list, I’m sure there are one or two people I’m forgetting.)

There was even talk of doing another meetup, at somewhere with round tables. The Helmand, across from the Galleria, was mentioned as a possibility. Also The Friendly Toast, in Kendall Square…
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In other Boston-centric entertainment, recently Kim Costa, Mayor of Medford (home of Tufts, one town over from Harvard) posted a Facebook rant that entertained a great many non-student residents. I spent fifteen years at a major Midwestern state university town before moving out here, and the residents of Lansing shared exactly the same resentments towards the bipedal cash crop:

Real quick reminder to all the college students coming back to Boston to continue their higher education. This is really important. This is something you are going to carry through your entire academic career in the 617 area code: nobody likes you, you’re a visitor here; an interloper. I want you to keep that in mind when you’re strutting through the crosswalk in Harvard Square with your pink popped collar and your fucking Banana Republic, date-rape slacks. You have been obsolete to me since my 21st birthday. No need for yah. I’m sure when you graduate you’ll want to move here cause it’s so awesome—and you’re right, we’re awesome. But people like you will be contained to places like Lexington and Concord, where you can live, and wear Tevas, and recycle, and have a kid when you’re 50 years old. And you know what, we probably won’t like them either. And with that, welcome back.

(via Boston Magazine)

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Safer in Jail

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It takes a special sort of blue falcon to do this kind of shit to your mates:

Navy SEALs divide their own into two groups. As they see it, there are the good mugs you can count on, and then there are the 10 percenters, the minority who slip through the screening process and bring disgrace on everyone else. Jason Mullaney might have started off in the first category, but after conning 11 fellow SEALs out of more than $1 million, he’s decidedly in the second.

When police caught up with Mullaney in 2012, he’d run through the money he bilked from his friends and the last of his own. After making it onto the SEAL teams and enjoying a lavish lifestyle after he got out, he was found near a freeway offramp, homeless.

In a San Diego County courtroom Monday, Mullaney, 42, pleaded guilty to grand theft and fraud in a trial that had dragged on for two years. He’s scheduled to be sentenced on October 7 by Superior Court Judge Frederick Maguire and could face nearly 13 years in prison, according to a Fox News affiliate that covered the trial in San Diego. Not so bad compared to the 34 years he could have received if he’d been convicted on all the charges he originally faced.

He just took their money and lived high off the hog until the money ran out. Just unbelievable someone would do this to their brothers.

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MBA’s Will Be The Death of Us All

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This is a crime:

Hedge fund Starboard Value delivered the mother of all food reviews this week with a 294-page slide presentation tearing apart Darden Restaurants, the struggling parent company of Olive Garden. It charges the Italian chain with all manner of incompetence—from serving too little alcohol to serving too many breadsticks—but the most powerful accusations are reserved for its pasta.

Here’s why: Olive Garden has stopped salting its pasta water.

The reason is PRICELESS:

“According to Darden management, Darden decided to stop salting the water to get an extended warranty on their pots,” Starboard, which is in a proxy fight for control over Darden’s board, explains.

Even if they salted their pasta, the food would still be inedible as far as I am concerned, but this is just the most perfect example of what the MBA mindset is like. This time, it’s about the food, so people are noticing, but usually this is the mindset that screws workers and customers in the pursuit of immediate profit.

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Long Read: “Dignity: Fast-food workers and a new form of labor activism””

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“Fight for Fifteen” is officially a Serious Topic. In the New Yorker, William Finnegan follows a minimum-wage NYC McDonald’s worker:

…. I asked Arisleyda Tapia who she thought could raise her pay. “Bruce,” she said immediately. “He’s rich.”

She meant Bruce Colley, the owner of the McDonald’s where she works. Colley owns twenty-nine McDonald’s franchises, including nineteen in Manhattan. He grew up in Westchester County, and graduated from the Trinity Pawling School and Cornell. When he joined the family business, in 1980, his father, Dean, owned more than a hundred McDonald’s franchises in the Northeast. Dean was master of foxhounds of the Golden’s Bridge (New York) Hounds. Bruce is a polo player. His net worth is not a matter of public record. Still, you can see where Tapia got her impression…

… There was a national conference of the fast-food workers’ movement coming up, in Chicago. The union was sending a couple of buses from New York. Maybe she could go….

Did she really believe that Bruce Colley could unilaterally raise the pay of all his employees to fifteen dollars an hour?

Tapia looked down. “He used to give us just one shirt,” she said, finally. “We tried to give a petition to La Dominga about people getting their hours reduced, but she wouldn’t accept it. Then Bruce came and had a meeting with us. He came because we have a strong union committee. He didn’t go to any of his other stores. He listened to us. Then they gave us each a box with four uniforms. That was a real strike victory.” She sighed. “But we know who our real opponent is. It’s the corporation. McDonald’s.”

The space between franchisees and a parent company is nowhere more opaque than at McDonald’s, where the price of admission is exceptionally high: applicants must show at least seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars of unborrowed money even to be considered for a franchise, and the investment costs go up from there. Very few franchisees fail to observe the code of omertà that governs their relationship with the corporation. One disgruntled franchisee in California recently broke the silence, telling the Washington Post that McDonald’s executives had advised her to “pay your employees less” if she wanted to take home more herself. Two former McDonald’s managers recently went public with confessions of systematic wage theft, claiming that pressure from both franchisees and the corporation forced them to alter time sheets and compel employees to work off the clock.

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