Author Topic: The Bleachers  (Read 113020 times)

Jes Beard

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Re: The Bleachers
« Reply #795 on: December 14, 2011, 06:48:50 am »
A married couple had been out shopping at the mall for most of the afternoon, suddenly, the wife realized that her husband had disappeared.

The somewhat irate spouse called her mate’s cell phone and demanded, "Where the hell are you?"

He replied, "Darling, do you remember that jewelry shop where you saw the diamond necklace and totally fell in love with it and I didn't have money that time and said 'Baby, it'll be yours one day,'"
 
"Why, yes," she replied with an embarrassed blush in her voice, "I remember that my love."

"Well," he responded, "I'm in the pub next to that shop."

 

JeffH

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Re: The Bleachers
« Reply #796 on: December 14, 2011, 07:39:13 am »
A new scam is one where a caller says the victim has won $10,000 on a gift card from Wal-Mart or another store, White said. The victim is to go out and buy a gift card, put $500 on it, then call back with the card's number so the $10,000 can be added. Within minutes of that call, the $500 has vanished.

Loosely related words of wisdom from George Carlin:

"Whatever happened to natural selection; survival of the fittest? The kid who swallowed too many marbles doesn't grow up to have kids of his own. Simple as that. Nature knows best. We're saving entirely too many lives in this country of all ages. Nature should be allowed to do its job of killing off the weak and sickly and ignorant people without interference from airbags and bating helmets. Just think of it as passive eugenics."

BearHit

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Re: The Bleachers
« Reply #797 on: December 14, 2011, 09:08:59 am »
But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever,  EVER be fixed.

It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.

Because the owners, the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.

Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying,  lobbying, to get what they want.  Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: 

They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests.

Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting **** by a system that threw them overboard 30 **** years ago. They don’t want that!

You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this **** place! Its a big club, and you ain’t in it!  You, and I, are not in the big club.

By the way, its the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich **** suckers who don’t give a **** about you….they don’t give a **** about you… they don’t give a **** about you.

They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL.  And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Thats what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick thats being jammed up their **** everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth.

Its called the American Dream,because you have to be asleep to believe it.



Read more: http://shoqvalue.com/george-carlin-on-the-american-dream-with-transcript#ixzz1gWQYlOHl

CurtOne

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Re: The Bleachers
« Reply #798 on: December 14, 2011, 10:31:16 am »
Hey, Davep, you stinkin ****, you rat-fink ******-******, you shorted me a hundred bucks on the Walmart card.  That's low, dirtbag.  I hope someone shafts you up the *** like that.  What am I supposed to do with just $400?

AZSteve

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Re: The Bleachers
« Reply #799 on: December 14, 2011, 10:34:40 am »
Bear that is a great piece by the late Carlin...pretty much how I see things these days...

BearHit

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Re: The Bleachers
« Reply #800 on: December 14, 2011, 10:59:55 am »
Yeah - he was in the comedy business - but I became a follower of his philosophy

davep

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Re: The Bleachers
« Reply #801 on: December 14, 2011, 11:10:09 am »
Hey, Davep, you stinkin ****, you rat-fink ******-******, you shorted me a hundred bucks on the Walmart card.  That's low, dirtbag.  I hope someone shafts you up the *** like that.  What am I supposed to do with just $400?

Man - I thought that the people running the scam were just dirty, rotten, evil, nasty scumbags, but they are even worse than I thought.

They're Lutherans.

Jes Beard

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Re: The Bleachers
« Reply #802 on: December 16, 2011, 08:57:15 am »
Bank Robbery In Minnesota!

A hooded robber burst into a Minnesota bank and forced the tellers to load a sack full of cash.

On his way out the door, a brave Minnesota customer grabbed the hood and pulled it off, revealing the robbers face. The robber shot the customer without a moments hesitation.

He then looked around the bank and noticed one of the tellers looking straight at him. The robber instantly shot him also. Everyone in the bank, by now very scared, looked intently down at the floor in silence.

The robber yelled, "Well, did anyone else see my face?"

There are a few moments of utter silence in which everyone was plainly to afraid to speak. Then, one old Norwegian named Ole' from Minnesota tentatively raised his hand and said, "My wife got a pretty good look at you."

AndyMacFAIL

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Re: The Bleachers
« Reply #803 on: December 16, 2011, 06:35:45 pm »
Rudy!  Rudy!  Rudy!

Quote

Notre Dame Underdog Rudy Nabbed for Stock Scam

Another childhood dream, crushed.

Daniel Ruettiger, the scrappy underdog football player immortalized in the movie “Rudy,” was charged in a pump-and-dump stock scheme, according to the SEC.

The SEC says Ruettiger founded a sports drink company called Rudy Nutrition, and he and a dozen other people used the company in a scheme to sell shares of the penny stock and rake in $11 million in illicit profits.

The SEC says the group circulated misleading claims about Rudy Nutrition products, including that the sports drink outsold Gatorade two-to-one in a major southwest test. Meanwhile, stock promoters pumped up the stock to inflate its price. For awhile, Ruettiger and a buddy ran the company out of South Bend, Ind., the home of Notre Dame, before it moved to Las Vegas.

more at: http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2011/12/16/notre-dame-underdog-rudy-nabbed-for-stock-scam/





Jes Beard

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Re: The Bleachers
« Reply #804 on: December 17, 2011, 02:17:41 pm »
"stock promoters pumped up the stock to inflate its price"

In other words, folks "sold" it.

From the link: Ruettiger agreed to pay $382,866 in the settlement.

Considering the cost of defending such a case, that's not a particularly dambing settlement.


Cactus

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Re: The Bleachers
« Reply #805 on: December 19, 2011, 01:10:20 pm »
Google Chrome overtakes IE8 as most used browser (there is one small catch)

http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/16/technology/chrome_internet_explorer/index.htm?iid=SF_BN_River

CurtOne

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Re: The Bleachers
« Reply #806 on: December 19, 2011, 02:10:56 pm »
I'm still using Firefox

Cactus

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Re: The Bleachers
« Reply #807 on: December 22, 2011, 08:12:38 am »
The Sun-Times has been sold and will be going to a pay-wall like the Daily Herald.  The Minneapolis Star Tribune has one too.

Jes Beard

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Re: The Bleachers
« Reply #808 on: December 22, 2011, 10:45:44 pm »
In addition to the reasons mentioned in the article below, it is important to remember when and where it was the story set Scrooge to live in -- England at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution, at a time when capitol for investment was at a premium, and when the capitol which was invested offered the possibility of increasing productivity, and the goods and services the increased productivity represented, by leaps and bounds.  Capitol investment, such as was allowed by misers such as Scrooge, did more to improve the lives of those at the time than any philanthropy ever could, and spending money on doctors for Tiny Tim at that time would likely have meant paying someone to put leaches on him -- medical science was very short on science at that time.

Though his character now is ridiculed and reviled, the Scrooges of that era, who literally financed the Industrial Revolution, should in fact be heroes.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/holidays/2004/12/what_i_like_about_scrooge.single.html

What I Like About Scrooge
In praise of misers.

By Steven E. Landsburg|Posted Thursday, Dec. 15, 2011, at 10:15 AM ET

    81

During the holiday season, most people seem to believe that giving is better than hoarding. But in an article published in 2004, and reprinted below, Steven E. Landsburg argued that Ebenezer Scrooge, contrary to belief, is as generous as any philanthropist.
Illustration by Nina Frenkel

Here's what I like about Ebenezer Scrooge: His meager lodgings were dark because darkness is cheap, and barely heated because coal is not free. His dinner was gruel, which he prepared himself. Scrooge paid no man to wait on him.

Scrooge has been called ungenerous. I say that's a bum rap. What could be more generous than keeping your lamps unlit and your plate unfilled, leaving more fuel for others to burn and more food for others to eat? Who is a more benevolent neighbor than the man who employs no servants, freeing them to wait on someone else?
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Oh, it might be slightly more complicated than that. Maybe when Scrooge demands less coal for his fire, less coal ends up being mined. But that's fine, too. Instead of digging coal for Scrooge, some would-be miner is now free to perform some other service for himself or someone else.

Dickens tells us that the Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his 50 cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor's household should—presumably for a houseful of guests who lavishly praised his generosity. The bricks, mortar, and labor that built the Mansion House might otherwise have built housing for hundreds; Scrooge, by living in three sparse rooms, deprived no man of a home. By employing no cooks or butlers, he ensured that cooks and butlers were available to some other household where guests reveled in ignorance of their debt to Ebenezer Scrooge.

In this whole world, there is nobody more generous than the miser—the man who could deplete the world's resources but chooses not to. The only difference between miserliness and philanthropy is that the philanthropist serves a favored few while the miser spreads his largess far and wide.

If you build a house and refuse to buy a house, the rest of the world is one house richer. If you earn a dollar and refuse to spend a dollar, the rest of the world is one dollar richer—because you produced a dollar's worth of goods and didn't consume them.

Who exactly gets those goods? That depends on how you save. Put a dollar in the bank and you'll bid down the interest rate by just enough so someone somewhere can afford an extra dollar's worth of vacation or home improvement. Put a dollar in your mattress and (by effectively reducing the money supply) you'll drive down prices by just enough so someone somewhere can have an extra dollar's worth of coffee with his dinner. Scrooge, no doubt a canny investor, lent his money at interest. His less conventional namesake Scrooge McDuck filled a vault with dollar bills to roll around in. No matter. Ebenezer Scrooge lowered interest rates. Scrooge McDuck lowered prices. Each Scrooge enriched his neighbors as much as any Lord Mayor who invited the town in for a Christmas meal.

Saving is philanthropy, and—because this is both the Christmas season and the season of tax reform—it's worth mentioning that the tax system should recognize as much. If there's a tax deduction for charitable giving, there should be a tax deduction for saving. What you earn and don't spend is your contribution to the world, and it's equally a contribution whether you give it away or squirrel it away.

Of course, there's always the threat that some meddling ghosts will come along and convince you to deplete your savings, at which point it makes sense (insofar as the taxation of income ever makes sense) to start taxing you. Which is exactly what individual retirement accounts are all about: They shield your earnings from taxation for as long as you save (that is, for as long as you let others enjoy the fruits of your labor), but no longer.

Great artists are sometimes unaware of the deepest meanings in their own creations. Though Dickens might not have recognized it, the primary moral of A Christmas Carol is that there should be no limit on IRA contributions. This is quite independent of all the other reasons why the tax system should encourage saving (e.g., the salutary effects on economic growth).

If Christmas is the season of selflessness, then surely one of the great symbols of Christmas should be Ebenezer Scrooge—the old Scrooge, not the reformed one. It's taxes, not misers, that need reforming.

dogstoothe

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Re: The Bleachers
« Reply #809 on: December 23, 2011, 01:26:07 am »
Step #4 -- "Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves."  This is paramount in Dog's theories on diet and health.  Unfortunately there are some who are incapable of doing so, in which case they will not benefit from these theories, and will be left by the side of the road.  Next up we must admit to ourselves, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs.  For instance the foolish notion that the stomach has to be fed three times a day, at the same times of day, and that the stomach is the end-all of digestion.  Wrong.  We must concentrate on the intestIne, for it is the instestIne that means business, not the stomach.