I'm betting "no".
...but if they do hear it, and if Obama's birth certificate turns out not to show him to be a citizen of the US, then there will be an epic shitstorm across the country. Forget what happens next; just expect to see a massive wave of riots in the inner cities.
Which is why I'm betting "no".
* * *
Pretty much all congresscritters believe this. All money is the government's; they just let us use some of it for our own purposes.
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WTF is going on in Southeast Asia? It just goes to show that commies can't even get along with other commies. They'll help each other out only if both sides can get some advantage of it (eg Hitler and Stalin) but otherwise, it's "troops at the borders!" for all. WTF.
So A) the North Koreans are massing troops near its border with South Korea (ie our friends, the guys who make Hyundais and stuff); and China has massed troops near its border with North Korea.
All this because Kim Jong-il, Gargoyle in Chief, is seriously ill. When he kicks it, there ain't gonna be no "Raul Jong-Il" to replace him--there's going to be chaos in NK. I think China's actual plan is to ensure that NK isn't seized by SK, thus turning the entire country into a capitalist powerhouse a la Germany 1992 (or how Germany would have been if it wasn't so heavily socialized that even BMW needed to start making cars in the US).
I think China liked having the NK buffer zone between it and capitalism--it kept the Chinese from leaving China. That stuff about preventing a flood of refugees is just an excuse.
* * *
For the moment, the City of Chicago will not build a segregated high school specifically for gay students, though the Chicago Board of Education (CBoE) has promised to try again next year.
That's good, because you know a bunch of straight kids would end up being forced to go there, and they'd be the laughingstock of everyone: "Ha ha! You go to the GAY high school! You're GAY!" It won't do a damn thing to prevent discrimination, either.
I thought one of the entire points behind "civil rights" was that "seperate but equal" was a no-no. Now CBoE is talking about having "seperate but equal" facilities for gay students, and one of two things will happen:
1) It'll be a well-funded ghetto, where people focus more on identity politics than the basic function of a school. (Hint: "The Three R's".) The students of the school will have lousy test scores but everyone will hail the thing as a triumph of inclusion and tolerance.
2) Once the place is built, the whole "gay school" crap will be scrapped and it'll become a run-of-the-mill regular crappy-ass Chicago high school.
Either way, the students and taxpayers lose. As always.
And by the way--"inclusion and tolerance" for a segregationist school? You got it--that's how these idiots work.
* * *
An interesting take on transsexualism. For what it's worth, I agree that Thomas Beattie is not a man; at best he's a hermaphrodite--a surgically-created one.
Sex is not a social construct. A man has penis and testicles and LACKS A UTERUS. A woman has a uterus and a vagina and lacks a penis. A human with both functioning uterus and a penis is a hermaphrodite.
Because of this, Thomas Beattie occupies a middle ground which formerly was only occupied by people with congenital birth defects. One would presume that since he can get pregnant, that he also menstruates; and if that's so, one would think he'd have a vagina or at least some way for the endometrial fluid to drain. (Leaving the vagina intact would be better, for a myriad of reasons, than installing some kind of drainage tube.)
As Herbert Garrison discovered on South Park, a "sex change" operation does not result in the patient becoming a fully-functioning member of the opposite sex. That is flatly impossible with today's technology. A transsexual is a simulation of the opposite sex, one created with plastic surgery and hormone treatments.
In a saner world, people who believe they are the wrong sex--the condition is known as "gender dysphoria"--would receive counseling and medication rather than hormones and surgery. In a few hundred years, people are going to look at our society's creation of transsexuals with the same horror we reserve for things like Chinese foot binding.
* * *
Stupid girl goes berserk when fired. When you get fired, yelling things like "You don't know where I'm from" and "I'll mess you up" are not conducive to furthering your career. Also throwing a temper tantrum and causing property damage, enough to get arrested for it--she'd better get herself a good lawyer to deal with those charges, because otherwise they'll stick to her like glue.
I have to wonder what the reality of this girl's job performance was. I doubt that the reason given to the press by the station was the actual reason she was fired; it smells of HR double-speak to me. Clearly, though, she wasn't getting done the job for which she was hired, and in the real world people do get fired for things like that.
After having her head filled with socialist nonsense all her life, though, I suppose it's not at all surprising.
* * *
...it's Thursday morning, and we still don't have a working sink in the kitchen, damn it.
I want to make yakisoba; and chocolate chip cookies. I'd like to be able to take salads to work. I'd like to be able to wash a dish or two once in a while without having to do it in the bathroom, and I'd like to stop using foam plates and plastic utensils.
I'm getting tired of McDonald's being the default for food. I want real eggs and bacon for breakfast, not synthetic Mc-Food.
Argh etc.
* * *
One week from today is Thanksgiving. Holy crap.
I have no idea whether or not the store is going to meet its sales projections. As I said Tuesday it turned out that the truck on Monday, 11/10, was the one that was canceled. Patrick has been there about 7 years and he said that was the first time he ever remembered a weekday without a truck.
We hired 18 fewer seasonal people than last year.
We have two aisles in the stockroom which were cleared out (in early October!) specifically to make extra room for toys and seasonal merchandise. These aisles are still completely empty. (Or were as of Tuesday morning, anyway.)
...so I hope that the people who make the projections took this sort of thing into account. More likely they took last year's numbers, added 10%, then subtracted that 10% to compensate for the weak economy, and said, "This is your sales projection!" *sigh*
I guess we'll see how things go.
* * *
I have been impressed with a couple of the seasonal people, though. If it were up to me, I would strongly recommend keeping them. Good work ethic, good personality, etc--but it's not up to me.
In the past some people were retained who should not have been, based on the fact that they were friends with the right people; but most of those people are no longer at our store due to the way Target moves executives around. I'm hoping that the current executives are less prone to nepotism.
* * *
Did I mention that gas is now selling for $2 per gallon in Crete? $1.999 says the sign, and it means it cost me $1 more to fill up the Jeep than it would have if I could have waited a day--but of course if I had waited a day the price would have stayed at $2.08, because "they" are indeed out to get me. WTF.