[This post is dedicated to the Kaboom Kids out there. You know who you are.]

His Majesty the King drives his dread chariot of DOOM out into the arena, dragging the poor abused corpse of the economy behind it. King Barack the Self-Involved shouts, "ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?"

Let's start this shit-show with the recent unemployment report. The jobs numbers showed a drop in the unemployment rate to 7.3%, and a jobs-growth of nearly 170,000 jobs. That's good news, right? Well, not so much. It turns out that the reason the unemployment rate went down is because the labor participation rate sank yet again. The US labor participation rate is now at 63.2%, about where it was in...1978. And the worst thing is that this phenomenon isn't being driven by the increasing rate of Boomer retirements; the demographics of the collapse are full-spectrum. This was a horrible, no good, very bad jobs report, and the prospects for improvement any time soon are dim.

Ye gods and little fishes: 96% of the jobs created this year were part-time jobs. (Or 59%, depending on which sources you use and how you count.)

Teens are one of the demographics hardest-hit by the structural changes in the workforce. By some accounts only a little over 30% of teens between 16 and 19 are working, as compared to more than 50% in 1999. One of the more interesting findings is that teens from wealthier families are more likely to be employed than teens from poorer families. I'm sure leftists would spin that fact in some neo-Marxist classist way, but to me it simply shows that the traditional bourgeois values -- responsibility, drive, the fabled "work ethic" -- tend to get passed from parents to children.

Poland just nationalized the nation's private pension funds. (Well...half of them.) Polish politicians are tying themselves in knots trying to explain how this nationalization of private assets is not, in fact, a nationalization of private assets. I'd point and give a Nelson Muntz-syle "HA HA" if it weren't for the suspicion that His Majesty the King will try to do the same thing here before long. more...

Posted by: Monty at 04:15 AM | Comments (170)
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A healthier breakfast than Kaboom cereal.

Posted by: andy at 03:40 AM | Comments (275)
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Don't even talk to me about the Cowboys. You can't say anything that could crush my spirit more than a six year deal..

Just, shut it.

Have some football. And pointy elbows.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 08:40 AM | Comments (380)
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Hidden somewhere in this beautiful autumn foliage are the last remaining shreds of ace's dignity and self-respect. Can you help him find them?

Kaboom!

Good morning morons and moronettes and welcome to AoSHQ's stately and prestigious Sunday Morning Book Thread.

Comment on Comments

Those of you who are able to post comments without difficulty can skip this section.

OK, so The Landlord showed up in last week's book thread to razz me about autumn being a downer, which led to an e-mail exchange wherein I took the opportunity to complain to him about not being able to post comments. Ace suggested I might be able to get around Pixy's strict anti-spam measures by using one of the anonymous proxy services such as Anonymouse that are freely available.

D'oh! Why didn't I think of that?

So I tried Anonymouse and... it didn't work. I posted a test comment and got Pixy's 'this IP address has been banned' message. So I tried HideMyAss.com and... it also failed. Cute logo, though. My comment never appeared, which is what happens when I don't use any anonymizing proxy. So I thought, oh crap, maybe this isn't going to work after all. But I persisted and experimented with a number of the other proxies, and found that some work, some don't, some are flaky, and some only work sometimes.

So for those of you, like me, whose comments simply never show up no matter what you do, and you don't see the 'banned' message (I'm looking at you, Tammy al-Thor!), there is hope. However, I'm not going to tell you which sites I found that seem to work because (a) they may not work for you and (b) I don't want to make it easy for any spammers who may happen to be eavesdropping. So you'll have to conduct your own experiments.

Start out by going to a site that maintains a list of free proxy services. I used Proxy4Free.com, but there are a number of others. Then pick one out at random and try it. If it doesn't work, try another. Build up a list of working proxies, and bookmark them. That way if one suddenly starts to fail, you have a backup plan.

Why would it suddenly fail, you ask? Well, I don't know, but some of them are sporadic and inconsistent. A number of them will suddenly start complaining that an AoSHQ comment thread (for example 'http://minx.cc/?post=343088') has an invalid URL. But if you close the browser and then reopen it, it will sometimes start to work again. Or, it will work the first couple of times, then it will decide you're banned, kind of like in those ST:TNG episodes where they'd have to fight the Borg, and in the beginning Worf and Riker could shoot them with their hand phasers and they'd go down, but then a new batch would show up, and they'd all have these little adapto-shields that could stop the phasers, and so w. and r. and the other redshirts have to beat feet. Sometimes the anon. proxies are like that. And as I said, I don't know why, but sometimes you can get around failures by doing a page reload, or just closing the browser and reopening it.

But there's one other failure mode, more sneaky than the others, that you have to watch out for. You'll see your comment post to the thread, just like normal, and everything looks fine, but then after a couple of screen refreshes, poof, it's gone, like it was never there. When I first saw this happen, I thought ace was goofing with me, since he knew I was experimenting with proxies, but now it appears to me that Pixy has put in some after-the-fact, one-last-time comment checking and whatever I post fails this final test, so it gets poofed. You need to do a few screen refreshes after you post your comment to make sure it stays put. You should be OK if it's still there after approx. 2-3 minutes.

So using this experimental method, I've been able to compile a small list of usable free proxies, and so happy happy joy joy, I've been able to post comments for the first time in months. Hopefully, those of you in the same boat can make this work, too.

-...-

And speaking of Tammy al-Thor, she sent me a link to an article about the high cost of e-books lent out by public libraries. The numbers tell the story:
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Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:30 AM | Comments (132)
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Now out on DVD and available for PPV.

Director Louis Leterrier (Clash of the Titans, The Incredible Hulk) summons the spirit of the TBS heist series "Leverage" and picks the pockets of the magical puzzle movie The Prestige and combines them to stage an audacious illusion: A very dumb movie inside which is hidden a clever movie, which itself conceals a movie which is actually even dumber than you first thought. But dumb in a fun way.

Somehow managing to levitate a premise-heavy gimmick movie into the air, he conjures up a fun, dumb, fast-paced, dumb, outrageous, dumb, compelling, dumb, watchable, dumb, and tricky (but in dumb-tricky sort of way) enjoyably dumb thriller/con caper movie, a veritable Feast for the Eye-Rolling.

The movie starts by introducing four street magicians of varying levels of success. Danny Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg) is the "hottest" magician at the moment, sort of like David Blaine when he was just on the cusp of becoming truly famous and Annoying Everyone. Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson) is a once-famous mentalist now on the downward slide of living hand-to-mouth off petty blackmail shakedowns. Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) is a former assistant to Danny Atlas (and yes, it's the sort of movie where people are named "Danny Atlas" and "Henley Reeves" and of course must have had some kind of former romantic involvement, despite her being hot and him looking like Mark Zuckerberg, because Shut Up It's The Rule). She's now a magician on her own, doing some kind of Underground/Rave Circuit escapology act that the Hipster Kids really love, because if there's one thing Hipster Kids really love, it's enjoying magic acts in a non-ironic way.

Meanwhile, a guy who's barely in the movie, played by Dave Franco (James Franco's brother), is named, and I'm not even kidding about this, "Jack Wilder," and yes, as a matter of fact he does do a lot of interesting tricks with playing cards, why do you ask? In addition to being a specialist in pickpocketing and sleight-of-hand and being named Jack Wilder, he's also a petty thief.

This Ocean's Four are recruited by a Mysterious Figure in a Gray Hoodie, a man (???) whose face is never seen, for Unknown Purposes, but it seems to have something to do with the old Egyptian hieroglyph for the Eye of Horus. It's actually all kind of fun and silly in a Dr. Who sort of way.

It's the kind of movie where people explore dark and mysterious apartments with flashlights they Just Happened to Be Carrying (because Shut Up) but you kind of don't notice because Hey Look at the Cool Holographic Images That Are Playing Now.

Cut to One Year Later -- and this cut to One Year Later is where the entire trick of the movie resides, as I'll talk about in a second -- and these four have now joined forces as the "Four Horsemen," who appear to be a wildly-successful magic act playing for an ecstatic crowd in Las Vegas. And tonight, they have a very special Trick, apparently one they've been promising for months during their rise to fame-- they're going to pick a random person out of the crowd and rob that person's bank for him, right from the stage.

What? Wait a minute, Movie, did you just drop me into the middle of an Absurd Ridiculous Premise without so much as giving me the smallest amount of foreshadowing, explanation, or rationalization for it first?

You sure did, Movie. You sure did. And I can't even hold it against you too much, Movie, because now I want to see how they're going to do this.

Let's skip ahead and just note they do in fact seem to rob a bank -- halfway around the world, in Paris -- right from the stage. And while it's not a crime to pretend to rob a bank as part of a magic act, it is a crime to really rob that bank... which, the FBI soon learns, is sort of what actually happened.

Those three million Euros they dropped on the crowd at the end of their "illusion"? Yes, it turns out those three million Euros went missing from the Credit Republicain bank at the exact moment they claimed to be robbing it, using... um, "magical teleportation."

Or maybe they're lying about that. Yes, they're almost certainly lying.

But then how did they do it?

And why? They're now in-demand entertainers. Why rob a bank? Looks like they're selling out major auditoriums. They're on the path to becoming rich.

What the hell is going on? Fifteen minutes in and already nothing makes sense. Most movies don't start not making sense until the middle of Act II.

This movie is so incredibly dumb, but it's so well-meaning in its dumbness. It's like a Big Dumb Puppy that's clumsy on its feet and just keeps bopping you in the groin with its big dumb puppy head and it slobbers all over you and sometimes it chews the furniture or drops a Puppy Poop but it's actually Trying, it its own dumb, relentlessly ingratiating manner, and simply trying puts it several steps above many other movies they're making these days.

They're not heavy hitters. They don't hit any home runs. What they do instead is make contact with the ball and get on base and then begin stealing bases left and right, ultimately stealing home, or perhaps getting called out at the plate by Your Brain, but you'll have to umpire that call yourself.

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Posted by: Ace at 01:46 PM | Comments (216)
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First, we have this:

The footage could be vital in the administration's quest to convince Congress and the American public that the U.S. must launch punitive strikes against Syria, former U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson said.

"That video will sensitize the American people that this isn't just an intervention, that this is a military strike to stop that type of atrocity," the former congressman told CNN.

Not to sound callous, but there've been something on the order of 100,000 deaths in Syria's current conflict. Certainly there are some women and kids included in that number, and even though they were killed by bullets, rockets and the like, they aren't any less dead than the ones in the video.

You could show video of a kid bleeding out from a bullet wound and it'd tug the heartstrings like a Sally Struthers infomercial, too. Yet to this day no one is arguing that the mere fact of war in Syria warrants our involvement.

The administration's argument reminds me a lot of this scene from Idiocracy:

Pvt. Joe Bowers: What *are* these electrolytes? Do you even know?

Secretary of State: They're... what they use to make Brawndo!

Pvt. Joe Bowers: But *why* do they use them to make Brawndo?

Secretary of Defense: [raises hand after a pause] Because Brawndo's got electrolytes.

Everyone: Why do we need to intervene in Syria?

Obama: Chemical weapons are a "red line".

Everyone: Why are chemical weapons a "red line"?

Kerry: Because they're the things that cause us to intervene.

And then there's this aspect of it ...

Ummm ... yeah. Spare me.

So Obama plans to follow the leaked video footage up with this:

I saw some criticism of the fact that the interviews are being taped rather than broadcast live, but, honestly, I want them to get as many takes as they need to make sure he sticks to the script. Straying from TOTUS is what got us into this mess to begin with.

And if that isn't enough for you ...

For a guy who's supposedly such a great orator, he seems to have a hard time convincing people to get behind his ideas. Of course, it isn't that the ideas suck, it's that the people who oppose them are all racists.

Or something.

Related: VDH - If It WasnÂ’t Syria, It Would Have Been Something Else

Posted by: andy at 04:10 PM | Comments (251)
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I love classical music, and one of my favorite performers of that music is Texan pianist Van Cliburn. His fame has diminished in recent years as he withdrew from public performances, but for a while he was one of the most famous musicians in America. His recording of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 was the first classical-music album to go platinum (in fact, it eventually went triple platinum). I've been aggravated in recent years because finding some of Cliburn's back catalog on CD has proven difficult as different pieces go in and out of print, and many of the CD reissues suffered from sub-par mastering.

Well, if you love classical piano music and/or are a fan of Van Cliburn, rejoice! RCA has reissued twenty eight of his albums in re-mastered editions on CD. The massive compilation (which includes a booklet and a DVD documentary) weighs in at just over sixty dollars, but that's a fabulous value given the amount of music this set contains.

I haven't listened to the entire set yet (that'll be a project of weeks if not months), but so far I couldn't be happier with the mastering. I recommend it wholeheartedly -- even the packaging is superb.

The second set I want to mention is RCA's re-issue of ten of Julian Bream's albums. Julian Bream is one of the premier classical guitarists of the age, perhaps second only to the master Andres Segovia. Bream was not just a master of the standard classical guitar repertoire, but he also introduced many previously-unknown lute pieces into the standard guitar repertoire. He was instrumental in bringing lutenist John Dowland back to the attention of modern audiences, and actually formed the Julian Bream Consort to play the pieces on period instruments. He also extended the guitar repertoire by commissioning new pieces, most famously the Nocturnal by Benjamin Britten.

The only downside to this set in my opinion is the contribution of tenor Peter Pears. He's never been one of my favorite singers, and I find his vocal work to be fairly stilted and rather odd. Still, it's a small part of the set, and it doesn't really detract from Bream's stellar guitar work.

If you're a fan of classical guitar music, I also recommend this set very highly.

(If you're interested in buying these sets, please hit Ace's sidebar link so he can wet his beak a little.)

Posted by: Monty at 09:55 AM | Comments (139)
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Man, if we go forward with a military misadventure into Syria, I think that it would crack the top 10 on this list of worst military decisions in history especially if some of the worse case scenarios develop after the strike. Already, the President is micromanaging the Syrian target list as LBJ did (#2 on the list) in Vietnam. more...

Posted by: CDR M at 06:00 PM | Comments (551)
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This is a very funny, very clever commercial, but I can well understand why Mercedes-Benz absolutely did not want to have anything to do with it:

And here's another one on the same theme: more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 12:37 PM | Comments (148)
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I figured the Aussies would eventually start coming to their senses and pull the eject handle on that lunatic Labor crew...and they did. ~52% majority. Not an overwhelming win, but a damned good start.

...Abbott, 55, built up a strong opinion poll lead on the back of promises to rein in government spending, scrap an unpopular tax on carbon emissions, and stop the flow of refugee boats arriving in Australia's northwest...

Here's the problem -- Americans aren't nearly as willing to call abject failure what it is as Aussies are. We've come to embrace the fail, perhaps even celebrate it to a degree. It takes Weiner class fail before Americans start to blanch a bit.

The funny thing about getting good service from any provider/supplier of goods, services, govt, etc is if you don't constantly expect it, and demand it, you gonna be getting the Weiner pretty much every time. Most people deliver what you'll tolerate, not what you actually want. If you want good service, don't tolerate bad service.

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Posted by: Purple Avenger at 08:17 AM | Comments (140)
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