Vincent Ferrari

Oh man… This is brilliant in so many ways…

via dilbert.com

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Unrest in Iran?

Attempted plane bombing in the US?

The gigantic and growing deficit?

Skyrocketing unemployment?

Health care confiscation?

You would think any of those issues are first and foremost on the mind of a man who reported for doody a few years ago, right?

You’d be mistaken. John Kerry’s priorities are not quite the nation’s priorities…

“Fox and Time Warner need to strike a deal – millions of football fans are depending on it,’’ said Kerry, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on communication, technology, and the Internet. “Having screens go dark because two parties couldn’t come together in time is no solution. New Year’s Day and football are synonymous in households across the nation. Private industry negotiations cannot disrupt a fundamental American tradition.”

Thank God we have John Kerry. Keeping America safe for college football.

Reporting for doody indeed.

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via politicalcompass.org

I’ve always said I’m a right leaning and (mostly) libertarian guy.

I’d say this is pretty accurate.

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The Washington Wizards never told the NBA that an all-star player and his teammate drew guns on each other in the team’s locker room during a fight over a gambling debt, the New York Post reported.

The league reportedly found out about the Dec. 21 incident after the Post inquired about it. The alleged gun duel now threatens to end not only the careers of the two players involved, all-star Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton — but also of general manager Ernie Grunfeld, the Post reported.

“This is gonna cost Ernie Grunfeld his job,” a former NBA team president told The Post. “Because the buck stops at the top.”

Neither player nor Grunfeld have been suspended.

The incident occurred inside the locker room at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C. Arenas, 27, reportedly went for his gun first after a verbal fight with Crittenton about a gambling debt. Crittenton, 22, allegedly brandished a firearm as well, the Post reports, citing unnamed inside sources.

It was unclear whether other teammates saw the standoff, the Post reported.

The irony (an irony that won’t be missed by NBA fans) is that the Wizards used to be the Bullets, but the name was changed after the left-wing nutbars running the city couldn’t get gun violence under control (turns out that passing laws against guns doesn’t really stop them; apparently people willing to murder will ignore gun laws too. Who knew?) and they decided that having an NBA team called the bullets was a bad idea that sent the wrong message.

That worked out real well for ‘em, huh?

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I’ve always said analysts are full of crap, and the ones you pay are even moreso.

I’m a big fan of Om Malik. I read a few of the GigaOm blogs and trust what he has to say. That doesn’t mean, however, that he gets it right all the time, and sometimes he makes a miss so catastrophically bad I wonder if he’s asleep at the switch.

Today there’s a post on GigaOm that has a retrospective of Apple’s key milestones for the decade, and a chart meant to demonstrate why he believes Apple is the company of the decade.

Here’s the chart.

I can’t help but feel something is missing from this chart… It seems that there’s a big gap there, right around October 23, 2001…

A little something called… Oh, I don’t know… The iPod?

Now granted, he does have a video embedded of the announcement of the first iPod, but can we be realistic for a minute here? The iPod, more than any other device, technology, achievement, or acquisition changed Apple’s fortunes from a mediocre computer company that was for artsy people to a technology company that was designing products consumers wanted.

More than the Intel transition, more than the insanely popular iPod Mini, and even more than the iPhone, the iPod changed Apple forever. To make a chart of key milestones and not include the most important product that, even up until now, Apple has ever produced seems to me to be a bit like making a company history of Ford and ignoring the Model T but focusing on how great the Taurus is.

He pays short shrift to the iPod in an article meant to highlight a company over a decade. To me, that’s an unforgivable mistake, especially when you call yourself an analyst and make people pay to hear what you have to say.

Holy crap, this was uncomfortable. Every year (for the last few years) they wheel out Dick Clark, prop him up in front of a camera and let him mumble out the countdown as the ball drops in Times Square. The last 3 years he’s been barely coherent. Last year he effed up the count good. This year, an utter disaster…

I didn’t think much of it (after all, it was expected) until I realized that this was the 38th Annual Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. What does that mean? It means if they have to pull a Weekend at Bernie’s situation and bring his corpse in for the next two years, he’ll make 40 before they officially hand it over to Ryan Seacrest.

It’s so uncomfortable to watch. I’m sorry, Dick. I understand you’re a legend, and I understand your importance to the industry and all that, but this isn’t the way you want to be remembered; as a mumbling old dope that can’t count backward from 20. Step aside and let Ryan do it. It’ll be fine. Really.

This:

Of course, he later corrected himself. You know. When the truth was told.

By someone who wasn’t a self-absorbed Twitter-douche.

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Brilliant. Best video I saw all year.

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“Today, the Transportation Security Administration issued new security directives to all United States and international air carriers with inbound flights to the U.S. effective January 4, 2010.

The new directive includes long-term, sustainable security measures developed in consultation with law enforcement officials and our domestic and international partners.

Because effective aviation security must begin beyond our borders, and as a result of extraordinary cooperation from our global aviation partners, TSA is mandating that every individual flying into the U.S. from anywhere in the world traveling from or through nations that are state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest will be required to go through enhanced screening. The directive also increases the use of enhanced screening technologies and mandates threat-based and random screening for passengers on U.S. bound international flights.”

Remember a long time ago when Bush was President and we had alerts like this that set the left off into a tizzy of “fearmongering!!!” because, as we all know, every terrorism alert under the Bush admin was fake and designed for political reasons.

Amazing how things change…

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via boingboing.net

Demi Moore contends that this picture has not been photoshopped.

In any way.

On both covers.

With her in the same position.

Both photos are unretouched.

Now excuse me, but a pig just flew by and a monkey is making its way out of my ass.

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Would you believe that one out of every six Americans is “going hungry”?

You shouldn’t, because it’s not true.

Nevertheless, the liberal group MoveOn.org claimed something close to that in an end-of-the-year appeal for donations to Feeding America, the national anti-hunger charity. MoveOn’s message said: “This winter, a record 49 million Americans are going hungry because of the economy.”

Now, 49 million would be a lot of hungry people. Consider first that the total U.S. population is just over 308 million. Divide 49 million into that, and it works out to be one in every 6.3 Americans. We agree that hunger is a real and serious problem, but could things be that bad?

Of course they couldn’t, but Moveon.org never lets facts get in the way of a whine…

Go read the rest to see how they tortured the actual numbers to get them to say what they wanted.

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There’s no way to spin this as Obama doing anything but lying. Period.

Transparency my ass.

Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.

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Found this site, and apparently the whole point is that you’re randomly connected with someone and you can chat with them anonymously. So I clicked the link and this is the conversation that ensued…

For once I got to make someone’s day instead of ruining it. Nice change of pace

Just so you know, Rudy Giuliani is as dumb as Dana Perino.

President Obama yesterday took personal responsibility for failures in the Christmas day terror plot, but Rudy Giuliani still isn’t convinced.

I spoke to the former mayor of New York City this morning on GMA, who assailed the Obama administration’s decisions on national security.

“What he [Obama] should be doing is following the right things that Bush did — one of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama,” Giuliani said. “Number two, he should correct the things that Bush didn’t do right. Sending people to Yemen was wrong, not getting this whole intelligence thing corrected.”

Giuliani isn’t quite correct in his assessment. The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks happened during the Bush administration, as well as the case involving shoe bomber Richard Reid.

I wish you could imprison people for criminal stupidity.

via gothamist.com

Ooof… That’s gonna leave a mark.

I guess the sanctity of marriage isn’t damaged by in-breeding.

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Hysterical… This is why Jim is one of my favorite comics EVER…

If you really want to increase employee morale, don’t give in to employees who complain just to get their wheels greased. This video is crossposted at Insignificant Thoughts.

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Today’s article is from KnowHR contributor Vincent Ferrari. Vinnie’s not in HR. He’s a regular working guy. Smart, tech-savvy, straight shooter, and a friend of ours. — Ed.

During the campaign season of 2008, Harry Reid referred to then-candidate Obama as a man being “light-skinned” and having “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” In essence, Reid, using a term to describe black people from a segregationist south, asserted that Obama was a black man of convenience and could turn on and off his blackness at his leisure.

How tasty, right?

As could be expected, since this wasn’t a right winger that said it, we’re being told again and again that we had to take it context. After all, when you’re a left-winger, like Reid, and you make a racist remark or use a racially derogatory term, the context must be discerned and true intent must be deciphered. Context in other cases, of course, is irrelevant, because if you’re a right-winger or a non-approved white person, you’re a racist; context-be-damned.

To be clear, there has been nearly no universal outrage at Harry Reid’s remarks, and he hasn’t distanced himself from them. In fact, he not only admits having made them, but he has apologized to President Obama who called for Trent Lott and Don Imus’ heads on a platter after Lott made a remark that could only be interpreted as racist (it wasn’t outwardly racist no matter how tortured your look at it is) and Don Imus’ “Nappy Headed Ho” remark. Needless to say, Obama immediately accepted the apology because, as stated earlier, Reid is an approved white person. Apparently, in context, with the benefit of being Black Approved^tm, you can call the president a Negro of Convenience without fear of repercussion.

I find it funny that this is all going on amidst another controversy in the use of the word Negro.

A fiery blast from the past is conjuring controversy in the new millennium. The word “negro” is now featured on an official U.S. document and now many are questioning if the Census Bureau is being insensitive.

It’s a word that many African Americans associate with segregation, so imagine how shocked many were to see it on the 2010 U.S. census form.

“The fact that it’s 2010 and they’re still putting ‘negro,’ I am a little offended,” said Secaucus resident Dawud Ingram.

Question #9 on the this year’s census asks about your race. One of the boxes you can choose is “black,” “African American,” or “negro,” all placed next to the same box. Ingram said it’s not a word he uses to identify neither himself nor anybody else.

“African Americans haven’t been going by the term ‘negro’ for decades now. It’s really confusing,” he said.

But census officials disagree, saying they found some older African Americans identify themselves that way and they’re trying to be inclusive. In a statement, they said: “Results from the census in 2000 showed that a number of respondents provided a write-in response of ‘negro’ when answering the question on race.”

In fact, Congress approved the form more than a year ago. Newark resident Jabbar Ali can’t believe it.

“I thought it was something we left behind a long time ago – the word ‘negro,’” said Ali.

Chanou Wilshire said the census form doesn’t give her an option since it’s got “African American,” “black,” and “negro” next to the same box.

“It’s highly offensive,” she told CBS 2.

The mere mention of the word is “highly offensive.” In fact, this story has been playing out quite a bit in the local New York media to the point that it’s near inescapable. Every two-bit hack local news reporter is cramming a mic into the face of the first black person they can get to to get their reaction to the word Negro being on the census form. The universal reaction, of course, is outrage, and the outrage is that the word is dated, and hails from the darkest times of Antebellum America.

The word being on the census form is offensive to the point of mobilizing outrage.

A Senator using it to discuss a black man running for President? Not so offensive.

I’ve heard a lot of talk about double standards between right and left and the use of racially inappropriate terms, but this isn’t even a left-right issue. This is a curious issue of manufactured outrage versus subdued reactions or a lack of reaction at all.

Incidentally, I don’t think the term Negro on a census form indicates racist intentions. I also don’t think that Harry Reid was being racist just in his use of the word Negro, but that’s because I’m smart enough to see that using a word one time doesn’t necessarily equate to racism / hatred. I’m not part of the offenderati culture, and I refuse to be, but it’s hard to reconcile offense at a word with no target against lack of offense at use of that same word when aimed at a specific target, to whom it would likely apply. If context is indeed important, than shouldn’t using the word as a derogatory term carry more weight than using it on a form for voluntary classification purposes?

Unless, of course, we’re just talking purely about using the word as a club of convenience with which we can beat our political opponents over the head, in which case we’re doing just fine.

Very interesting video from Hank explaining what Ecosystem Services are. Sounds much less interesting than it is, trust me.