Tuesday, August 22, 2006

i have a job

yes, everyone, i have a job! actually, since the time i posted the last post, i have gotten one job, lost it, and got a new job. on wednesday last week i got a job at a factory, making electric motors for vacuum cleaners. it was 3rd shift, 11 pm to 7:30 am. i only had that job for one night. on thursday i got a call from the temp agency that got me that job, saying that the factory didn’t need me anymore. now today (tuesday) i was in at a different temp agency, taking the typing test, and i set a new record at that agency for the fastest typist with no mistakes! sweeeeeet! on monday morning at yet another agency i had taken a typing test and while i had made zero mistakes, my speed was only slightly better than the minimum required to pass the test. it was 6113 characters per hour, when what was needed was 5000. i don’t know what the speed measured today was, but it was fast! so anyway, i also had to take a drug test, and they tested my urine. unfortunately, i had just taken a piss prior to the test, so i did not have much urine left for the drug test. but luckily, the little bit of urine that did come out turned out to be enough for the test. huzzah! so my new job in data entry starts tomorrow at 3 pm. the hours are 3 pm to 11:30 pm, second shift. this is going to be great! i am going to get paid $7.42 an hour. now, what i would really like is if those damned politicians raised the minimum wage. cuz i could use some more money. on every major issue that matters to ordinary americans like me, republicans are wrong and democrats are right. president bush says that the american troops are staying in iraq as long as he is president. well guess what mr. president? go fuck yourself! those are the same words your vice president, that little dick, said to a senator who had dared question how little dick v.p. was still getting paid by halliburton while halliburton got to price-gouge the government with its sweetheart deals referred to as no-bid contracts. republicans are so corrupt, when tom delay was indicted and had to step down as majority leader, they couldn’t find anyone who wasn’t a completely corrupt crook to replace him. temporarily the post went to roy blunt, and eventually john boehner got the job. both of them, complete crooks, though neither as bad as tom delay. and don’t get me started about those other republican crooks, duke cunningham and bob ney. or jack abramoff. or michael scanlon. republicans are basically completely lacking in any morality whatsoever. how do i know this? well, they go around parading their morality and their holier-than-thou attitude, and call us “godless” and such, and then it turns out they were hypocrites and corrupt criminals all along! it is bad enough that they are criminals, but what makes it worse is that they always go around pretending to have such high moral standards! they should at least shut the fuck up about moral issues if they decide to become corrupt and give out taxpayer dollars to their campaign contributors. and yeah, there was one single corrupt democrat in congress, william jefferson. but he was one of those right-wing democrats who mostly votes with the republicans. so he was basically a democrat in name only anyway. he wasn’t anything close to being a left-winger. and oh yeah, there is a corrupt democratic senator, too. his name is joe lieberman. fuck it, the dude actually brags about how corrupt he is. he was in a debate with ned lamont, and he was like, look at all this useless pork-barrel spending i got the government to spend, by inserting it into supplemental appropriations bills, getting the government to finance stupid projects in the state of connecticut, the wealthiest state in the union! hey guess what dickwad? those projects you had the federal government spend money on? they were all in your home state of connecticut, and they had nothing to do with the responsibilities of the federal government! if the people of connecticut really wanted that shit, they should have gotten the connecticut state government or local governments to do those projects, instead of dragging the federal government into the mess! this lieberman guy is best friends with karl rove and sean hannity, for crying out loud! ann coulter loves him! if that isn’t an alarm signal, i don’t know what is. so joe lieberman is now saying don rumsfeld should be fired. this he is doing as some sort of fake-ass demonstration that he is not really a republican in disguise. well guess what joe? everyone knows george w. bush does not listen to what anybody says, and that don rumsfeld is keeping the job as defense secretary. so, when you say that, it is just political posturing, to try and keep yourself from being framed as a republican in disguise. why don’t you actually name a substantive way you oppose the bush administration in its policies on iraq or terrorism or national security? like, for example, you could join senator russ feingold in calling for bush to be censured for breaking the fisa law! a federal judge recently found that bush is, indeed, a criminal, and has violated the fisa law on many occasions! in other words, george w. bush ought to be in a prison cell, not the oval office. so, senator lieberman, i implore you to actually prove you are a democrat, by calling for bush to be sent to jail where he belongs. these terrorists in england were caught by the british authorities, not us, and they were caught based on british intelligence. and even if that terror plot had somehow succeeded (which would have been impossible unless they chose different chemicals to use for the explosives), it would do very little to change the fact that the statistical likelihood for a random person to be killed in a terrorist attack would still be minutely small, only a tiny fraction of 1%. what the hell are we so worked up about and scared of? i am not scared of terrorists, not one little bit. they pose virtually no threat whatsoever. yes, they might be able to increase the probability of me getting killed by a small fraction of a percentage. but who the fuck cares? what the terrorists want is for us to be afraid of them. that is why they are called terrorists. so anyone who tries to make us afraid of the terrorists or who takes advantage of the fear of terrorism for political gain is basically a terrorist themselves. president bush is the #1 terrorist because he tries to make us afraid of terrorists attacking us, to bolster his sagging poll numbers, because he knows that is the only issue that the public actually agrees with him on. on every other issue, bush is a radical right-wing extremist, and his views are shared only by a small minority of the population. like who the fuck actually opposes stem cell research? well, president bush, and a small minority of the american population. but not anybody with a brain. i do not really understand how these right-wing loonies managed to brainwash so many people, but it is really sick how they have tricked so many millions of americans into voting against their own best interests, into voting for policies that make the quality of their lives worse, instead of better. now i am all for fighting terrorism, but what i oppose is people exploiting fear of terrorism for political gain, and trying to increase that fear so that there is more of it to exploit. republicans keep running single-issue campaigns about terrorism, to try and hide the fact that they are wrong about every single issue besides terrorism. and it is because of them that the economy is so bad, and that there are so few high-paying jobs being created for young people like me. i see a direct connection between republican policies and the bad state of affairs in my own life. all republicans know how to do is to take the wrong position on every issue and make the world a much worse place. like their stances on economic issues: tax cuts for the rich, corporate welfare for large corporations (this means the federal government is actually giving out your hard-earned taxpayer money to large corporations, for free, no strings attached), and cutting social programs for the poor, while keeping the minimum wage stagnant despite continued inflation. any attempt to simply point out these obvious facts is labeled “class warfare”, but the real class warfare is how we are letting the super-wealthy fuck us up the ass with these republican economic policies. and on social policies, they want the federal government telling people what they can and cannot do in their personal life. that is what it all comes down to. do you want to decide who to marry, or who to have sex with, or whether to give birth, or do you want some corrupt hypocrite in washington, d.c. telling you what you can and cannot do in your personal life? i want to make my own fucking decisions, thank you very much! i know how to use my penis a lot better than some viagra-popping old fundamentalist bastard who took bribes from jack abramoff! these assholes thought it was vitally important to save terri schiavo’s life and get her the best healthcare despite her being totally brain-dead, yet they could give a fuck less about millions of americans with no health insurance who actually have functional brains, who need medicine and doctors or else they might get sick and die. i will only have health insurance until next june, and then it expires, and i need to find some kind of job that comes with health insurance. otherwise, i am totally screwed, and i could die because of crooked politicians who cared more about helping out the assholes who bribed them than helping out millions of americans who need some fucking health care thank you very much! anyone in congress who does not take action to make universal health care the law of the land is a murderer, because thousands of americans die every year from lack of insurance! who killed them? congress! republicans disgust me, with their phony morality, and lack of any real morality. they are worse than scum. no word is loathsome enough to describe them. i am ashamed to be from the same universe as them, let alone the same galaxy, solar system, planet, continent, or country! and when i talk about republicans, please understand i am talking about the politicians in washington, not the poor, innocent, everyday americans who are brainwashed into being republicans. those people are not evil. they are just sad and pathetic. i just feel sorry for them. the evil ones are the ones who control all 3 branches of the united states federal government. and there is no other word for them besides evil. pure, dagnasty evil. like darth vader. except worse. these people are SATAN evil. hell, some of them are probably even eviler than satan! goddamn evildoers! anyway, the company i work for, doing data entry, the customer we are doing this for is the government. the new york state government. yes, we are doing work for one of those liberal government programs to help poor people. the particular liberal government program we are working on generates a lot of paperwork, and the company i work at scans documents and digitizes them, to make everything electronic, so the paper copies can go off and rot in some warehouse. so basically i will be helping this process to digitize all of these old-fashioned analog documents, for the 21st century. and without this liberal government program, this job to digitize documents would not exist. of course, that is from the state government, not the federal one. since, as we all know, grover norquist is busy drowning the federal government in a bathtub. now this job is not a very high-paying one of course, and i would like to have a high-paying job writing computer programs. but guess what? all of those jobs were outsourced to india, to people who do the same work for a fraction of the price! now there are some software jobs left, yes. i see them listed in the newspaper as openings. but they are all ones for experienced workers with years of experience and whatnot. not for rookies just out of college. the jobs for people like me have all left this country, thanks to free trade. just think... if all the people with entry-level jobs in programming that require no experience are in bangalore, india, then someday all the people with high-paying jobs in programming that require lots of experience will be from bangalore, india. something tells me i should move to bangalore, india. because i sure as hell can’t find a job in my field anywhere near where i live! this shows the failure of the free-market economic system. it does not plan for the future, only the short term. having companies lay off workers to cut costs might work in the short run, but in the long run, companies need to have lots of consumers out there with disposable income to spend. but since capitalism only cares about the short-term, these kinds of long-term structural problems with the economic system get completely ignored. the only way capitalism can survive is by spreading like a cancer into new markets, because otherwise, there are no existing ones that can maintain the necessary level of economic growth indefinitely. capitalism is so concerned with using up all the resources as quickly as possible, it forgets the need for sustainable development, the need to put in place a system that will continue to work for generations to come. if you are the ceo of a company, your job performance is measured by how well you can increase profits, and it has nothing to do with whether you put in place policies that will allow the company to keep doing business for hundreds of years. and profits can’t keep increasing forever, unless your company keeps growing and gobbling up other companies and expanding into more and more countries forever. of course, that is impossible, since this is a finite planet with finite resources and a finite amount of people it can support. which is why, in the long run, capitalism is a suicidal economic system for humanity to adopt, as a species. it might maximize per capita income and gross domestic product, but at what cost? at the cost of having a future for our species on this planet. now i do not think humanity will self-destruct so badly that the planet itself will be destroyed, or that all life will be destroyed on the planet. but, i do think that most, if not all, of the human race will be destroyed sometime soon, within the next century or two. this will be no biblical armageddon, but instead an apocalypse caused by human stupidity, lack of planning, ineptitude, and arrogance. i am not sure if it will be a nuclear war or something else, but one thing is clear: the ultimate reason for our destruction will be ourselves. all of us. you, me, everyone else. we have all failed. we have failed to act to stop this from happening, failed to adequately make plans so the human race can continue to thrive indefinitely. is it perhaps possible that we may change our ways and avert such a bad scenario? yes, but such an outcome is highly unlikely, if past behavior of humanity is any indicator. we would have to mend our ways quite drastically if we really wanted to survive. good luck. but, for now, at least i have a job, so i can pay the bills. that is, of course, very much a short-term concern: even someone as concerned with these long-term issues as me is only acting to fulfill short-term needs. it is rather pathetic that we humans are so concerned with fighting amongst ourselves that hardly any of us pays much attention at all to the dangers posed towards our collective survival as a species. this is one issue i think the republicans are really weak on, since they control all 3 branches of government, and they have done virtually nothing to advance the cause of saving humanity from certain doom. of course, superheroes in cartoons have done a great deal to save humanity from certain doom, and so have a lot of characters in movies, but that is all make-believe, and in real life, hardly anyone does it, which is what is so pathetic. we should all be doing our part to save our species. forget “save the whales”! how about “save the humans”? we can save the whales too, but they are less important.

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