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This is an amazing article from CNN Money about “Name discrimination”.
Ok, let me break this down for you:
- If your name sounds weird, people will assume you are not American
- Yes, American companies tend to try to hire Americans first
- If you have a thick accent it will be more difficult to land a job that values communication
- If your name is hard to pronounce it will be more difficult to land a job that values name recognition
- Do not, I repeat, DO NOT list ‘PartyDude@BeerU.Com’ as your email contact (on second thought… please do)
Now here comes the best advice anyone could ever give around this issue:
- It is totally legal (and easy, and cheap) to change your legal name in the USA
Phew!
Well, you tell me.
I tried 5 times… and picked Bing 3 times, Google once and Yahoo once.
Ah, the wisdom of our trustworthy media once again shows its colors:
Remember the lost war? Our new Vietnam? Hmm, not looking so bad now… By the way, July is turning out to be a new record low for US troops’ casualties: 7
Funny how winning a war is an incredibly quiet event for the media. They just stop talking about it.
Oh, now remember the “war we should focus on”? Not so easy uh? How about old cat Bin “Obama will capture you soon” Laden? Not going so well either, right?
Nah, let’s not talk about war, peace of even beer summits. The real important thing to report is that a 7 year old stole Mom’s car to escape church. We can’t miss that one!
Isn’t it a bit funny that the bank meltdown last year happened in September/October? Isn’t it even funnier how that little fact never got correlated to the famous political tool called “October surprise” which is so often used in Presidential campaigns?
I am not saying that the Democrats fabricated the crisis but what happened is that they used it to win the elections. And far from being a harmless political tool, what they did actually increased the severity of the problem big time.
And of course, they were only successful in this endeavor because they had an immense amount of help from their most powerful ally: the Big Media.
I will not be surprised if that a few years from now we see some studies on how the panic instigated by the media was one of the major factors behind the severity of this recession.
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Maybe one miscalculation the Media and the Democrats made in this whole thing was their power in reverting the damage they caused during the campaign with all the fear mongering. Maybe they thought that a “new message of Hope” would be enough to get people back on track.
At least until now, it looks like they were wrong. It will take a while to revert all the pessimism and lies about the end of the world they pushed down into the public’s mind. In one way or another, Obama will pay for it. Maybe that would still be a price they were willing to pay (don’t underestimate politics) but at least they might be punished enough to be a bit more careful next time.
—x—
Since no one seems to believe the Media anymore, it looks like some individuals are deciding to take issues on their own hands:
Ad campaign wants you to think positive during recession
“The name given to a billboard campaign urging Americans to worry less about the recession.”
If only people read this blog more often… 
Morning Show Anchors Marvel At Obama’s Fly Swat
For a bigger video of this highly news worthy event, see this one:
Tough guy! How do you like that Gibbs? Oh boy.
The Obama Infatuation
Is the press giving the president a free pass?
“Obama has inspired a collective fawning. What started in the campaign (the chief victim was Hillary Clinton, not John McCain) has continued, as a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism shows. It concludes: “President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House.”
The study examined 1,261 stories by The Post, The New York Times, ABC, CBS and NBC, NEWSWEEK magazine and the NewsHouron PBS. Favorable articles (42 percent) were double the unfavorable (20 percent), while the rest were “neutral” or “mixed.” Obama’s treatment contrasts sharply with coverage in the first two months of the Bush (22 percent of stories favorable) and Clinton (27 percent) presidencies.”
Truly a shocker.
I was really surprised by Obama’s choice for China’s envoy. I know this is a way to get Huntsman out of 2012, but still, he is a financial conservative and I was expecting for the worse when dealing with China (i.e. protectionism).
As one of the articles about this choice says:
“He knows the importance of keeping government off the backs of businesspeople and out of their wallets. He knows how to strike a balance between providing government services and allowing businesses to grow and create jobs,”
But that is not all. Obama has also changed his mind recently about two huge issues for the left: he will not allow the release of detainee abuse photos and he will maintain military tribunals.
It is funny though to see how the left is dealing with these “issues”. Frank Rich from the NYT has this truly pathetic article where he basically says that Obama’s change of mind is “irrelevant” because Bush has done so many bad things that eventually the photos (and much more!) will come to light anyhow. Keep moving people, nothing to see here!
Most of the times though, the left is just playing dead on these flip flops. I searched for comments on Huntsman’s choice on some of the famous lefty blogs I visit (Crooked Timber, Daily Kos, etc) and… nothing! Deafening silence!
Apparently, the only people allowed to criticize Obama are Republicans and lefty comedians:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M – Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Moral Kombat | ||||
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It is weird though that the whole gay thing is a surprise to Jon and the funny boys. I mean, since the campaign Obama sounded just like the (in)famous Miss when the subject was gay marriage:
Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean’s comments on same-sex marriage mirror Obama’s
Fun, fun times.
Why does this matter you ask? Well, just read the NYT article about it. Golden quote:
“The thick-lined drawings of the Earth, a factory and a house, meant to convey the cycle of human consumption, are straightforward and child-friendly. So are the pictures of dark puffs of factory smoke and an outlined skull and crossbones, representing polluting chemicals floating in the air.
Which is one reason “The Story of Stuff,” a 20-minute video about the effects of human consumption, has become a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation.”
The joys of public education. Seriously , this is beyond pathetic ideology. Showing this to kids should be a crime.
Swine flu warnings ‘totally overblown,’ some say
“Officials fear skeptical public will be hard to warn if virus returns deadlier”
Thanks again all members of the chicken little club of the world. Once again you made a bad situation worse with your stupid negativism.
Despite Promises, Elderly Evicted From Housing
Who does not get upset about old people being kicked out of their home, right? I feel bad even to write anything at all related to this. But I cannot help it.
Putting all the emotion aside, what was really the problem here? Is it that old people are being tricked by oral promises? How does anyone propose to solve this? Should we record every single conversation old people have when they sign contracts? Private contracts are essential to any financial operation, how are we supposed to teach people that if something is not in paper it is not enforceable?
Or is real problem here that this company serves old people and therefore needs to behave differently than other companies?
The real kicker is the part where they said that the Myers couple went through their savings during their 3 year stay at that facility, making this sound like a crime. Again, what is really the problem? Was the contract illegal? If we are saying that this is unfair because old people don’t understand money, how come the sons and daughters of the Myers were ok with the whole thing during 3 years? And how about the stock market mention? Are we saying that old people should not be able to lose money when stocks go down? We have to decide what is allowed or not, you can’t have it both ways.
This new fetish around regulation scares the crap out of me. This is becoming a codeword for big government doing very stupid things. What regulation could have changed this? Why do you think other assisted living companies have ‘stayed away’ from serving middle class? Would the Myers be better off if they had to spend those last 3 years in the nursing home they so clearly did not like?
I know with all these bailouts and deficits things get cloudy, but make no mistake: if we keeping eating our cakes and trying to keep them too, one day there will be no more cake.
I thought Lula had topped the scale with his comment on “white blue-eyed man” causing the crisis. But yet again, I was wrong. Alex explains to us all that Lula didn’t really mean that our current crisis was created by white blue-eyed individuals but by “white blue-eyed nations”.
First of all, even though it is plausible that Lula really meant to generalize his racist rant, he was pretty specific with his words when he said that “I do not know any black or indigenous bankers”. So, before getting to the main point, let’s introduce Mr.Squid to some nice “black bankers”, many of them who had their fair share on the current mess:
Stan O’Neal – Currently serves on the board of Alcoa Inc. and is the former President, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Merrill Lynch & Co.
Richard Dean Parson – Citigroup Inc. Chairman
Franklin Delano Raines – Former Fannie Mae CEO
Kenneth I. Chenault – American Express Chairman and CEO
Ephren Taylor – CEO of City Capital Corporation
Clearly, the fact that these powerful people are black is completely unrelated to the financial crisis. After all, we have many other black people commanding companies of other kinds, like:
Don Thompson – McDonald’s USA President
John W. Thompson – Symantec Corporation Chairman and CEO
Ursula M Burns – Xerox Corporation President
Ronald A. Williams – Aetna Inc. President and CEO
And many, many more.
Now, if we do have blacks CEOs, a black President, black Supreme Court judges, generals, governors, mayors, etc, how can we really still be a “white blue-eyed nation”?
Of course Alex will tell me that the problem is that we don’t have enough powerful black people! That the proportion of poor black people is way high, and that Obama is just an exception.
Isn’t that’s a nice copout? I mean, no matter how many times we break a stereotype, how much we advance as a society, anything but perfection (which would mean what? The exact same proportion on every single aspect across all races?) we are a white nation and that is it.
I can understand Lula’s ignorance. After all, he is an uneducated person who speaks what he has been told all his life. He probably doesn’t have a clue of what the American people look like besides what he sees on TV and the few top politicians who come to visit him. It makes sense that he has never seen a “black banker”, or a black doctor, or a black lawyer, etc. It is also very easy to prove Lula wrong. Nothing more than a 15 minute Google search on black CEOs.
Now Alex’s rationalization is much, much worse. First because it is impossible to prove right or wrong. But most importantly, because it shows the kind of crap that is being fed to American teenagers who pay thousands of dollars to go to universities to supposedly be educated and understand better the world. The kind of crap that goes from theory to practice really quickly, and with the help of our media, becomes the unchallengeable truth. I mean, Maureen Dowd even thinks white brown-eyed people suffer with the blue eye discrimination.
Am I saying that the US is a perfect nation? Of course not. But stupid myths like this one actually makes progress harder, not easier.
Ah, the press…
When Bush lied, well, he really lied. Obama? No… Obama doesn’t lie! Obama “glosses over some realities“…
When Cheney was tough he was the Evil Emperor. How about Joe? Well, “Nobody messes with Joe” Biden my friend!
Moving from politics to the corporate world, remember last month when Microsoft had its first lay off? Remember how the press described the company as cruel and desperate? Well, now that same company is not laying off anyone. How does that get reported? As a “failure to announce more cost cuts, sending its shares to an 11-year low.”
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Is it just me or Obama’s speech yesterday was one of the most amazing examples of double talk ever?
Really… I think somewhere in there, between promising cutting the deficit in half while providing free health care, free universities, pollution free energy and the end of all wars he said something about curing cancer.
Good times!
Apparently I was not the only one to see how dishonest the whole “2008 is the worst year for jobs since 1946” fallacy. Here is Alex Tabarok and James Hamilton commenting on it. This is my favorite graph:
As you can see the job losses are nothing different (at least at this point) from what we’ve seen in other recessions.
Take a quick look at this picture and tell me what is wrong with it:
I got this from CNN, but the fallacy is being told all over the place.
Clearly, you could *never* compare job losses in different years without considering the overall size of the work force. I mean, you don’t even have to go and try to figure this out – we already have something called unemployment rate exactly for that reason. And the unemployment rate is not even close to be the “worse since 1945” (it is the worse since 1993).
So why does the press want to scare the public? Is it just to sell newspapers? I don’t think so. The end goal is to force politicians to over react and increase the size of government. Which is really ironic, since the government says it needs to intervene to “break the cycle” of a depression.
Obama should look into bailing out the papers after all. Maybe then they would stop with this garbage scare tactics. The benefits could be really huge, Keynes would love it.
The benefits of having elected the new God on earth continue to surprise me.
For instance, before Obama we poor saps looked like this:
“If you ask citizens of other countries to paint a portrait of the average American tourist, it would look something like this: a loud, chubby sight-seer wearing a fanny pack, baseball cap, printed T shirt, jean shorts and sneakers. It may seem like a funny, if harmless, image, but combined with the imprint of the outgoing president, the fashion-challenged cowboy in chief, the stereotype of the ugly American has become intractable.”
Now after the Messiah takes over, we can look like this!
“When Obama takes office Jan. 20, Americans will, with luck, create their own new New Look, modeled after his elegantly simple and straightforward wardrobe and manner.”
That’s not all! Michelle “Cruiserweight” Obama will also help out our hopeless women:
“And women everywhere will be watching carefully as the new First Lady, Michelle, tries to find the elusive balance not only between work and family but between practical and stylish dressing.”
But enough with the fashion thing. Now comes the real challenge: Can all Americans look up to their hero and work hard enough to have these rock hard abs?
Ah ha! It is clear now why we elected this man. He has all the needed qualifications to make us look good in Europe! Take that Putin and Sarkozy!
Happy new year everybody! 
Now this is just too good to be wasted:
And this is only what fits the screen. Within the page there are golden nuggets of holiday cheer like “Are Your Packages Being Stolen Off Your Doorstep?”, “Official: Calif. could be broke in 2 months” and “Health dept. sickened by own Christmas party”
Bad business is our business. Merry Christmas MSNBC!
Fixer is in the house!
The love affair continues. Newsweek just can’t stop itself from slobbering all over Obama even though the guy has not even started to govern. Seriously, Fareed Zakaria’s article is truly pathetic. It has gems of wisdom like these:
“No doubt the national-security team Obama is announcing this week will be quick to tackle the many issues in their inbox, and will likely do so with intelligence and competence.”
“Strategy begins by looking at the world and identifying America’s interests, the threats to them and the resources available to be deployed. By relating all these, one can develop a set of foreign policies that will advance America’s interests and ideals.”
“How to think strategically? Dick Cheney provides an example—a negative one.”
All absolutes based on the most primal and unchallenged bias that Newsweek seems to be specializing on: Democrats – good; Republicans – bad.
But what puzzles me the most is how this “Grand strategy to fix the world” talk sounds so much like the “neocon” theories Bush was so criticized for… Are we saying that all that matters now is execution? Is the “change” here that we will be out of Iraq just so we can move those troops somewhere else?
Time might prove me wrong but I think that once the lefties wake up from their pink slumber they will find that Obama is not the peace loving/modern day reformer that they think he is.
In many ways, this might be JFK all over again.
UPDATE
In his own crazy and distorted way, Frank Rich agrees with me.
I’ve been working way too much but I couldn’t let this one pass.
Get to know Martin Eisenstadt. This is brilliant stuff. You can go to you tube and search for his videos, you can read his blog, and damn, you can even visit the fake Harding Institute website.
The most amazing part of this story to me is not just how these guys could trick the mainstream press into believing this character existed with all this naive content and low budget tech, but the amount of time they were able to keep this charade going. And realize that this was done during the election season, a time when the press is (or should) be extra careful. Even Dan Rather could tell you that much.
These guys were smart enough to play the Obama bias tune in ways that are really funny (if not tragic). I mean, can MSNBC really continue to pose as a serious and independent source of information after this?
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I just finished reading “Rainbows End: A Novel With One Foot In The Future”, and one of the cool ideas Vernor Vinge writes about is that in the future a group called “Friends of Privacy” spreads false information throughout the web just to protect regular citizen’s privacy. After all, if you can’t control what information is published about you, the best you can do is to mix up truth and lies so no one really knows in what to believe.
Well, apparently we just took the first step to this not so distant future.
If you don’t believe me, maybe you will believe ABC’s Michael Malone. Best parts:
“The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game — with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.
The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.
But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer,” because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist.
…
But what really shattered my faith — and I know the day and place where it happened — was the war in Lebanon three summers ago. The hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia, only carried CNN, a network I’d already learned to approach with skepticism. But this was CNN International, which is even worse.
I sat there, first with my jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah missiles raining down on northern Israel. The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of the story … but it never happened.
…
But nothing, nothing I’ve seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.
Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass — no, make that shameless support — they’ve gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don’t have a free and fair press.
…
If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.
That isn’t Sen. Obama’s fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media’s fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.
Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven’t we seen an interview with Sen. Obama’s grad school drug dealer — when we know all about Mrs. McCain’s addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden’s endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?
….
Bad Editors
Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power … only to discover that you’re presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn’t have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you’ll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.
In other words, you are facing career catastrophe — and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway — all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.
And then the opportunity presents itself — an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.
With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.
And besides, you tell yourself, it’s all for the good of the country … “
Since the market went up last Friday, this morning you had this one:
Why stock market doesn’t reflect the economy
Now since the market was down today, you go back to the old news:
Stocks hit by recession fears
Is it surprising then that the majority of Americans think we are in trouble?
Poll: 3 out of 4 Americans believe country’s economy in recession
Who needs real data when all we need is the press right? Who cares if GDP is not negative or unemployment still around 6%?
Maybe we have to wait until The Messiah wins to have our “confidence” back.
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