Free market in action
Posted by Joe on February 18th, 2009 filed in Civil Liberties, Government, News, PoliticsComment now »
I’ve read about the huge prison industry in the United States, but I was surprised to hear that now the judges have gotten in on the action.
Two US judges charged with taking more than $2m (£1.4m) in kickbacks from a privately-run detention centre have pleaded guilty to fraud.
Prosecutors say Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took the money in return for giving young offenders long sentences to serve in the centre. - BBC
Fraud?! That’s just product promotion! This wise investor had a captive audience. Poor kids:
A spokeswoman for the non-profit Juvenile Law Center said 1,000-2,000 juveniles who came before the judge between 2003 and 2006 received excessively harsh sentences.
Many of the children were first-time offenders and had no lawyers to defend them.
Get Tough on Crime! Make Millions!
So how screwed is Canadian healthcare?
Posted by Joe on February 15th, 2009 filed in Health, Meh, News, PersonalComment now »
So I’m reading a news story about American hospitals and their struggles to retain nurses. It’s a struggle almost everywhere, for sure - to call it an extremely stressful job doesn’t really do it justice. And in Ontario, thanks to two decades of neoconservative and neoliberal leaders, things are imploding. Cutbacks in the hospitals in the 1990s meant a decline in quality of care and poor working environments for professionals, and cutbacks to education have raised tuition costs and have made it difficult to attract new people to the field. It costs at least $25,000 to study to be a nurse, and there’s about a 1/4 odds that your $25,000 degree will be useless a year after graduation and you’ll be working in a warehouse, self-medicating for job-related PTSD. ( 
But I digress!) Add the baby boomer retirement schedule… and you get the picture.
So I’m reading this article and I had to laugh because AMERICAN HOSPITALS can’t keep nurses! AMERICAN HOSPITALS! What they’re trying to do is introduce a residency-style program for new nurses. I have to say it makes sense. Emphasis mine!:
The Versant plan pairs new nurses with more experienced nurses and they share patients. At first, the veterans do the bulk of the work as the rookies watch; by the end of the 18-week training program, those roles are reversed.
The new nurses must complete a 60-item checklist. They must learn how to put in an IV line and urinary catheter; interpret different heart rhythms and know how to treat them; monitor patients on suicide watch and do hourly checkups on very critically ill patients; know how to do a head-to-toe physical assessment on a patient, as well as how to inform families about the condition of their loved one.
For Yaima Milian, who’s currently in the program at Baptist, this is markedly different from the preparation she got at her first hospital in New Jersey. She left after a six-week orientation because she didn’t feel ready to work solo. - AP
18 weeks. Four and a half months. And the nurse mentioned left after a six-week orientation program at a hospital in New Jersey. I can believe it. I would say two month minimum. A nurse might have the skills, but every floor is different and requires a whole lot of learning.
My orientation at the Sudbury Regional Hospital lasted three days. And they weren’t 12 hour days, they were 8 hour days, as I recall. At the end of the three days, I told them I was wholly unprepared, so they generously extended it for another six days or so. I quit after a few months - just couldn’t handle it.
Suddenly I feel less guilty about leaving the profession. No wonder I felt unprepared - it wasn’t even a cushy American hospital (I’m kidding about that America, don’t worry, I know your hospitals aren’t that cushy, unless they don’t allow poor people in). I think a residency-style program would work wonders for retention - unfortunately it’s that kind of creative thinking that our political parties despise. Sounds like it would cost tax-dollars, doesn’t it? That might make it hard to cut taxes and raise MP pay again.
Private healthcare, here we come. 
Best f’in’ lyrics evah!
Posted by Joe on December 24th, 2008 filed in Entertainment, Music1 Comment »
I didn’t get Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! right away - The first few times I thought it sounded completely off. Then I remembered I felt that way about pretty much every Bad Seeds album. It was “Moonland,” “Night of the Lotus Eaters,” and then “We Call Upon The Author” that quickly turned me around - the lyrics in the latter are hilarious and awesome:
——-
We Call Upon The Author
What we once thought we had
We didn’t
And what we have now
Will never be that way again
So we call upon the author to explain
Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets
We’ve shunned them from the greasy-grind
The poor little things, they look so sad and old
As they mount us from behind
I ask them to desist and to refrain
And then we call upon the author to explain
Rosary clutched in his hand
He died with tubes up his nose
And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals
Chanted his name in code
We shook our fists at the punishing rain
And we call upon the author to explain
He said everything is messed up ’round here
Everything is banal and jejune
There is a planetary conspiracy
Against the likes of you and me
In this idiot constituency of the moon
Well he knew exactly who to blame
And we call upon the author to explain
Prolix! Prolix!
Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!
Well, I go guru-ing down the street
Young people gather ’round my feet
And they ask me things
But I don’t know where to start
They ignite the powder-trails
Straight to my father’s heart
And once again I call upon the author to explain
Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing
That mediocres my every thought?
I feel like a vacuum cleaner; a complete sucker
It’s fucked up and he is a fucker
But what an enormous and encyclopaedic brain
I call upon the author to explain
Well rampant discrimination
Mass poverty
Third world debt
Infectious disease
Global inequality
And deepening socio-economic divisions
Well, it does in your brain
And we call upon the author to explain
Now hang on, my friend Doug is tapping on the window
“Hey Doug, how you been?”
[...]
Brings me back a book on Holocaust poetry
Complete with pictures
Then tells me to get ready for the rain
And we call upon the author to explain
I say prolix! Prolix!
Something a pair of scissors can fix!
Bukowski was a jerk
Berryman was best
He wrote like wet papier mache
Ah but he went the Hemingway
Weirdly on wings
And with maximum pain
We call upon the author to explain
Down in my bolthole I see they’ve published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish
“Well the waves, the waves, were soldiers moving.”
Well, thank you. Thank you! Thank you!
And again I call upon the author to explain
Yeah, we call upon the author to explain
Prolix! Prolix!
There’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!
————-
“This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.”
Posted by Joe on December 20th, 2008 filed in Politics, Reading, WarComment now »
He’s a hero. They should put those shoes on display in an Iraqi museum. Unfortunately they were blown up by the bomb squad. Really. I guess they were worried the shoes might be thrown again and not blow up again. There’s nothing more dangerous than a non-exploded non-explosive.
It sounds silly to deify a shoe-thrower (seriously, who throws a shoe?!) but it certainly worked as an attention getter as he called Bush a bitch and reminded him of all the people he’s murdered with his neoliberal crusade to remake the Middle East. I hope this reporter lives a long and healthy life and gets to enjoy all the benefits of being ‘the guy who threw a shoe at Bush.’ But not before the goons torture him and we have the obligatory false confession - pretty much the regular War Against Terror Treatment:
He said he visited his brother Sunday and found him missing a tooth and with cigarette burns on his ears. He also said his brother told him that jailers also doused him with cold water while he was naked. - AP
So rest assured, America, that your pResident will not be harmed by this shoe-thrower ever again. If he survives American-sponsored torture and sexual assault and imprisonment he’ll certainly be traumatized and possibly very very angry at those who’ve ruined his country and his life.
And here’s exactly what he said, and why it matters. Who else has gotten away with ten seconds of truth with this pResident?:
Contrary to most media coverage, the 28-year-old TV reporter Muntadhar al-Zaidi made history not by merely throwing a pair of shoes, the highest expression of insult in Iraqi culture, at the US president, but by what he said while doing so and as he was smothered by US and Iraqi security men. He groaned as they dragged him out of the press conference. They succeeded in silencing him - and according to his brother he was beaten in custody - but he had already said enough to shake the occupation and Nouri al-Maliki’s Green Zone regime to their foundations.
Strip the words away, and his and the Iraqi people’s cry of deep pain, anger and defiance would amount to no more than a shoe-throwing insult. But the words were heard. “This is the farewell kiss, you dog,” he shouted as he threw the first shoe. The crucial line followed the second shoe: “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.” Once those words were heard, the impact of a pair of shoes became electrifying. A young journalist has put aside the demands of his profession, preferring to act as the loudest cry of his long-suffering people. If one considers the torture and killings in Iraqi and US jails that Muntadhar often mentioned in his reports for al-Baghdadia satellite TV station, he was certainly aware he risked being badly hurt. - The shoes we longed for
Dethklok on how to come up with a ‘hook.’
Posted by Joe on September 28th, 2008 filed in Entertainment, Fun, Media, MusicComment now »
Murderface: Here we are, shut out of the writing process again! Same old song and dance. Same old song and dance, my friend! They’re in there with writers block and we’re out here brimming with ideas. It’s just not fair. We can save this band with our music. Our music.
Toki: Whats we going to writes about?
M: [pause] There’s a lot of stuff - think about it. Like, uh, food… sleeping… kicking the s**t, you know just regular stuff!
T: Yeah there aints no songs about just takin’ it easy!
M: [pause] Back up. Wha-what did you just say?
T: I says there aints no songs about takin’ it easy!
M: Taking it easy. Takin’ it easy.Takin’ it easy! Man, you’re a genius Toki! Get a pad of paper! We’re going to write a hit mutherf**king song!
It’s actually not a bad song, sort of a Motorhead-style ditty. Here’s a short sample.
BTW, I love that Malcolm McDowell did a character on season two of Metalocalypse. He plays a Rasputin-esque connection to the dark underworld that controls the board of shadowy figures (or whatever they’re called). What a voice…
oh dear god
Posted by Joe on September 27th, 2008 filed in Government, Media, PoliticsComment now »
The Sarah Palin swimsuit competition video has finally surfaced.
Words cannot describe how much I despise her. She’d bad even for a politician. She’s another vicious greedy psycho, just like Cheney, but without a brain - a female version of Bush, basically. She’s going to rip her face off one day and it’ll be GW underneath with that stupid grin and Jon Stewart’s GW-laugh. “Heheheheheheh. I wanted a third term.”
160 bus drivers strike - dozens of commuters stranded
Posted by Joe on September 25th, 2008 filed in Fun, Meh, Personal, WorkersComment now »
Here’s an odd Toronto story: An irate bus driver threatened to have me arrested because I didn’t know that I needed a $3.00 fare to get OFF the bus in York Region. The TTC has to pay that particular section of Toronto extra money to prop up Viva and the other bus service that operates there. Now that I know, I can see that they post a little note on the route maps to let us know that it’s a double fare, and sometimes those screens on the exterior of the bus flash a “double fare” message. But I wasn’t paying attention - when I mapped it out online it looked like I would still be in Toronto.
I was going to a job interview way the heck up Keele street, and the bus driver made an announcement saying it was $3.00 to exit the bus north of Steeles - but of course he makes the announcement as he leaves the stop at Steeles street, and I assumed the NEXT stop would, naturally, be the ‘last chance.’ I wasn’t carrying any cash, just tokens, so I wanted to jump off and just walk there. I tried the back door, but it was locked..
“You have to exit at the front of the bus.”
“Ok…”
“It’s $3.00.”
Rummaging. “… I only have $1.00.”
“Then I’m calling the police to have you arrested. I made an announcement. I HAVE WITNESSES!” (waving towards the other passengers)
He picked up his phone and started dialing.
Oh sure. Call the cops. I know mistake was mine, but it’s trivial, and I almost want to know what exactly the police would do about it. Slap handcuffs on me and take me to the station? Or just force me to ride the bus forever? Part of me really wanted to push it. Hell, if I’m going to get “arrested” over two measly bucks, I at least have to make my feelings known. So I opened my stupid mouth. “Look, you made the announcement north of Steeles, I thought this was the last…”
“WHAT????!”
I stopped myself from going down that dark road. Another strategy:
“Um, I’m really sorry - I must have misunderstood your announcement. Hold on. I only carry tokens.”
“Oh. Tokens are good. You can use tokens, but not passes.”
“Just one?”
“Yes.”
“Can I keep riding? I wanted to get to Langstaff.”
“No, get off the bus. Now. Before I call the police.”
“Thank You. Have A Great Day.” (I actually said it with capital letters)
“You’re the one who needs it, Buddy.”
I swear I did not make that up. Weird scene. I was tempted to vandalize a nearby Viva touch-screen ticket terminal, but someone had already messed it up. Oh well.
Anyways, this morning I woke up extra early because Viva has gone on strike. Something to do with management screwing them over. I can understand that and don’t hold it against the workers, even if they insist on picketing the passengers and not their managers (um?). But I have no use for Viva, and neither do a lot of other people, apparently. I arrived at Downsview full 10 minutes early (I had hit snooze like a dozen times) expecting to find a crush of Yorkians, cursing Viva under their breaths, clambering to get on the TTC’s 107. Nope. It was me and a dozen other people, just like most days. I figured we’d get a lot of people connecting to the bus at Finch and Steeles. But nothing. Apparently almost nobody uses it. The Toronto Star is running an article with the headline “Viva strike causes few delays.” If there’s ever a sign that a service is just slightly redundant… Yeeesh. I guess some people use it as an express route, but there are at least three bus companies running down the same roads. Seems kind of silly.
Meanwhile, part of the subway shuts down for emergency maintenance, and because the whole line is designed as a U instead of an O, and there’s no way to reroute any trains, thousands of people suddenly have a loooong walk.
Funny place to live, Toronto is.
Linux is funny
Posted by Joe on August 1st, 2008 filed in Fun, Meh, TechnologyComment now »
I went to clear out my history in Nautilus (GNOME’s [far superior] answer to Windows Explorer) and I got this warning message. Hehe.
Probably the best part about it is that it’s programmed to come up randomly or every X times a user clears out the history. Normally it’s a boring old computer-type message.
Tom Waits’ Press Conference
Posted by Joe on July 29th, 2008 filed in Entertainment, FunComment now »
Another Victory in the War on Drugs
Posted by Joe on July 20th, 2008 filed in Entertainment, Music, War on DrugsComment now »
Poor Steven Page. He’s looking at five years in a US prison. We’ll see if Canadian Celebrity Status carries any weight in NY. The National Post had the most tasteful headline:
‘Yeah, it’s cocaine,’ Page told police
Innocent until proven guilty, I say. And if guilty… well, it’s just a bit of cocaine. Is it worse than drinking ten Red Bull and a bottle of Jägermeister? From what I’ve seen at the hotel/nightclub where I work, no. Cokeheads don’t vomit on the bar while ordering another shot. They just rent rooms, paint various surfaces with their drug residue, and do anything but sleep.
At least he looked good in his mugshot.
