I know it's incredibly sexist of me...

...but has Ms. Janeane Garofalo ever considered wearing a dress, getting a pair of contacts, not to mention a shower and a shave?

Methinks that forcing Ms. Garofalo to adhere to such societal norms, including marrying a nice white investment banker, staying home and raising his kids and ironing his shirts would be living Hell on Earth for her.  I could produce a ratings-winner reality-TV program, to boot.

Ah, one can dream.

Then someone share this pic:

Come on folks.  It's only fair that the rest join in me in seeing what we had for dinner last night.

Hooray for engineers

Guess what, folks?  It wasn't government that stopped the oil spill.  It was a team of engineers at BP.  A cap is in place.  For the moment, we can breathe a collective sigh of relief.

For the moment.  Then we've got to get back to cleaning up what leaked out.

So what are we doing?

Bobby Jindal was using barges to collect the oil from the water.  Until the U.S. Coast Guard briefly shut them down for not having proof that they had enough life preservers!

Bureaucrats.  Enough said.

Jindal has also pushed for constructing sand berms to protect the Louisiana coastal wetlands from the oil coming on-shore.  The federal government response?  "Let's conduct an environmental impact study first!"

Like I said, bureaucrats.

Then I saw Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night.  Olbermann and his guest, Len Bahr, criticized Jindal's building of the sand berms.  Bahr was an advisor to Jindal until being asked to retire last year.  Bahr's got a 9-point argument against the berms here.  From what I've seen, the man is a coastal science expert.  But what he's got is a theory, not evidence that the berms will compound the problem.  In the midst of a crisis, we can ill afford to be academic about things.  Jindal knows that, and "trained academics" like Bahr strike me to be much like our current Chief Executive:  Incapable of making imperfect decisions based on limited facts in a limited amount of time.

Contrast Bahr's theory with the experience the Dutch bring:  They've excelled at reclaiming land from the North Sea.  And they've held it back.  If anybody knows how to build berms and levees, it's the Dutch.

Experience vs. academic theory.  If you're a leader and everybody's looking to you to lead, what do you do?  Take action that might be wrong in the long term, or paralyze yourself with fear and do nothing?

Bahr wants us to continue to use straw to soak up the oil from the water instead of building berms.  OK, why can't we do BOTH!  A good leader hedges his bets, especially in the absence of the facts.  Does Bahr not understand this?

Unemployment

You know, I try to see things from different perspectives.  As I've aged, I like to think I've become just a little bit wiser and more willing to accept a different point of view.

That being said, when I read the Huffington Post, I realize that to see things from their authors' point-of-view, I would have to stick my head far up my ass.

Unemployment.  I've been there, and it's not fun.  I count myself lucky that I was effectively out of work for only five months, my job essentially terminated by Mr. Hope and Change.  Still glad I didn't vote for him.

There's a story about the Republican challenger to Harry Reid characterized those collecting unemployment as lazy.

To be fair, in Minnesota, you qualify for unemployment only as long as show that you're actively seeking a job.  So that part of the article is accurate.

Where the author and the chorus of group-thinkers get it wrong is that all of these jobs have disappeared.

The article cites there are 15 million unemployed people, and that only one-third of them are collecting unemployment insurance.  The group-think chorus spouts the "conventional wisdom" that the jobs are gone.

Wait a minute.  I believe there are at least 10 million jobs available for American citizens.  Know where I'm going with this?  Enforce our immigration laws.  Herd the illegal immigrants back across the border and tell the governments of Mexico, the nations of Central America, and various little shit-holes around this world to solve their economic problems themselves.  And if they've got too many people, tell them the solution is not to smuggle them into our country, but to do 2 things:

• Eliminate corruption and foster a business-friendly environment
• Educate their populations to not breed like wild rabbits

And those citizens' original jobs?  They'd come back if the government would get out of the way and let us recover from this recession.  Instead, this litany of stimulus spending has been nothing but digging us into a deeper hole.  We were promised unemployment wouldn't rise above 8%.  Yeah, shame on anybody that bought that line of crap.  Reagan once famously said that you cannot spend your way into prosperity.

And I realize it's anecdotal evidence, but I recall attending a 2008 election party with an unemployed software engineer.  She'd been unemployed for 3 years at that time.  I couldn't comprehend that.  I still can't.  Three years?  She ain't trying hard enough.

During my unpaid "vacation", a former colleague observed that, amongst us engineers, any of us could get a job in a couple of weeks if we looked outside Minnesota.  To many, that's outside a personal comfort zone.  I have some advice for the habitual whiners who can't find work where they live:  Move.  I did.