I read an article today by Mandy Locke in the News and Observer about Johnny Gaskins, a Raleigh defense attorney, who was convicted October 9th of the crime of depositing and paying taxes on legally earned income but doing it in quantities that were too small. Bullshit, you say?  In our retarded effort to keep people from doing things that they want to do the federal government has passed a whole series of laws that are designed to combat a problem that exists only if you’re a government bureaucrat or peddler of ‘legal drugs’.

This is the case here. The government makes, let’s say, pot illegal. People still want to smoke pot. Some enterprising capitalist will provide them with pot. Now, said capitalist has cash income for which he has no legal source. In order to catch this “criminal” who’s providing the exact same service as the convenience store on the corner (except that the pot industry doesn’t have enough high paid lobbyists lining the pockets of Congress), a law must be passed to catch people depositing the “illegal” income. Which they did. It’s illegal to deposit sums under $10,000 for the purposes of causing the bank to evade reporting you for depositing $10,000. Got that? Read it again.

So that’s what happened to Johnny Gaskins. At this point, a paranoid person would point out that he has built his career on defending persons engaged in drug trafficking (of the “illegal” sort). Therefore, this could be the government’s attempt to rid itself of somebody trying to stop them from eliminating RJ Reynolds/GlaxoSmithKline/Guiness UDV North America’s competition. I’m not that person because I generally think government employees are too stupid and lazy to engage in that kind of behavior. What it most likely is, is a bureaucrat blinding adhering to the letter of the law. Again, Johnny Gaskin’s “crime” is depositing money that he legally earned and paid taxes on but did it in insufficiently large quantities. Are you frightened yet?

There are times that I despair for the Republic because something like this can happen and the people aren’t in the streets asking why the government has any right to tell this man how he can deposit his money. The article seems to question why he would break the law or indicate that he might be mentally unstable from dealing with criminal defendants all these years. What if he just doesn’t think it’s any of the government’s fucking business how much he’s depositing.

Photo by Trevor DeVincenzi.

Larry Thursby, who is apparently Nationwide’s vice president of Personal Auto,  is an asshole. During one of their radio commercials, he’s talking about accident forgiveness and specifically teenagers when he says it’s not a question of if but when they get in an accident (paraphrased because I couldn’t find the commercial online anywhere). This is how insurance people think. I, for one, was never in an accident as a teenager. My brother was never in an accident as a teenager.

As far as he’s concerned rampaging teenagers are out there running around crashing into things and fucking up his bonuses. But they’re such great people that they’re willing to let the first one go. That’s how Nationwide is on your side.

I don’t think I’ll be giving them any of my money.

I have a Blackberry. I know a lot of other people who have a Blackberry. I know more people with assorted phones with qwerty keyboards on them. What this means and apparently what advertising/marketing  monkeys have failed to grasp is that a lot of us aren’t looking at standard phone dials anymore.  That means that we don’t have ABC above the number 1 and it makes it hard to decipher alphabetic phone numbers. What that also means is that when somebody asks me to dial 800-CleverNumberThatSpellsTheirName I either have to go to a site like phonespell.org or, more often than not, not call them.

When I was taking marketing classes, the object of advertising was to make people want to use your product or service. This fails in the most astounding way if you make somebody want to use your product but then make it really difficult to get to.  I can’t possibly be the first person to notice this since Blackberrys  have been required equipment for every upper level management wonk for approximately the last 10 years.

I mean, seriously, I understand that numbers are tricky for people to remember but it’s nothing like trying to remember what letters appeared above what numbers on a phone dial and decoding that in your head. I could totally buy into phone “numbers” becoming alphabetic like domain names but since telephone companies have all the innovative capacity of Neanderthals I don’t see that happening any time soon. They still seem to think area code splits are a good idea. I’m hoping Google Voice (and services like it) will change this someday.

Those of you who know me know I have an abiding hatred of all things Walmart. In fact, one of my favorite lines from Boston Legal was when Denny Crane and Alan were sitting on the balcony and Denny Crane asks Alan what he would do to make the world a better place. Alan response was something along the lines of ‘destroy all businesses with mart in the name’.

I haven’t spent any money in a Walmart in at least 4 years and try not to go into them at all so you know I love this website. I hope they post lots more.

(PeopleOfWalmart via Gizmodo)

Joseph Carnevale, the traffic barrel monster creator who was arrested in June after Raleigh’s crack police force solved the case, had his day in court. The end result is 50 hours of community service and then the charges will go away. The president of Hamlett Associates plans on erecting the sculpture outside the corporate headquarters and taking Carnevale to lunch. Carnevale plans on doing his community service working with Habitat for Humanity. No word yet on what RPD plans on doing with all the time they’ve got to waste now. Hang out at Snoopy’s, perhaps?

There still hasn’t been any mention in the traditional press but it certainly seems that this whole thing came about  because of a joyless thug named K.L. Everett who wears a badge. As near as I can tell (since the traditional press won’t come right out and say it), he took it upon himself to decide a crime had been committed and set to work the huge bureaucratic machine that is Piggy Central. Hope you take a bullet and it kills you in a slow and painful way. I would say that I hope it paralyzes you but then you’d be paraded around as some sort of “hero”. If you’re dead you just go away and the earth is a slightly better place.

Here’s a link to a story in the N&O.

While I was getting my head sewed back together the other day, I couldn’t help but notice this sign in the waiting room. I’ve got to believe that there’s something left out because there’s nothing I can think of that makes this grammatically correct. What I find especially funny is that somebody put it up on the wall and didn’t seem off-put by it.

PETA, the people who euthanized over 95% of the animals placed in the care of their facility in Norfolk, VA now wants to stop the fishmonger’s a Seattle Pike Place fish market from throwing dead fish because it “is disrespectful to creatures that already have gone through a lot” according to an article in the Los Angeles Times.

So, I’m totally down with not abusing animals that are kept as pets. People who do that deserve all the ugliness life can throw at them but when you become a fanatic about things your sense of proportion goes out the window. Thus it is with PETA. Seriously. Disrespectful to dead fish? I don’t get it but maybe that’s because I’m an unrepentent omnivore. Whatever.

According to a new Harvard study, health insurers own $4.5 billion in tobacco company stock. Does that seem odd? David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study, calls it “the combined taxidermist and veterinarian approach: either way you get your dog back.” The Consumerist has a good write up on it.

One line I find particularly funny is at the end of the article: “It’s just another thing to keep in mind this summer as Congress debates whether we can continue trusting our private health insurers to look out for our best interests.” Debate? Seriously? Private health insurers have never looked out for our best interests anymore than GM or Microsoft or Kellogg’s has. They aren’t supposed to. They’re businesses and if you expect them to look out for anybody’s interests but their own you’re going to be really disappointed. What I find interesting is that they are so arrogant that they’re willing to hold them in their own name in the open.

If people (and by people I mean politicians) would stop endlessly ruminating over whether or not we should have socialized medicine and come to the realization that we already do, they could start doing something to fix the situation. Realistically, we have it already in the form of corporate syndicalist socialism (is he going to use the national socialist word, hmmmm?). Insurance companies have been making your medical decisions for at least a decade and probably more.  And that, my friends, is the essence of socialized medicine. It makes no difference at all whether the bureaucrat making the decision for your doctor gets a check that says US Treasury on the top of it or Prudential–it’s all the same thing. And healthcare in this country won’t get better until it’s fixed.

In this story at the N&O, Sarah Ovaska puts a slightly different spin on things. From her article it sounds like Hamlett Associates isn’t the bad guy. Apparently, some overzealous pig named K.L. Everett spotted the dangerous menace to society lurking on Hillsborough Street with his keen piggy eyes and had it dismantled and hauled away for investigation. OK, it probably didn’t happen that way since cops can’t do anything but write tickets on their own. He probably called his sargeant who called whatever fake military rank they use above that to indicate that this pig has a bigger dick than the other one. Then there was some kind of task force convened and so on until the swat team came down to take it apart.

Daniel Hall, the project manager for Hamlett Associates, claims he told Everett they weren’t interested in pressing charges and would like the monster back. So doesn’t that mean that RPD in the person of K.L. Everett really stole the barrels? Now, I’ll grant you that it’s possible that Hamlett Associates is spinning this story once word got out (Isn’t the internet a wonderful thing) but most of these projects are either Time and Materials or Cost Plus billing. Either way, it’s likely that Hamlett would have passed on the cost of the barrels to the State. I’m much more willing to believe that some joyless assholes overstepped their bounds in their quest for a world without sin or danger or variation from the norm.

This is what happens when you give people who grew up wanting to be bullies but didn’t have the balls guns and the authority of The State to back them up. One day we’ll be coming for you motherfuckers. And my smiling face will be one of the last things you see when we blindfold you in front of the ditch.

Through the diligent efforts of the fine boys in blue in Raleigh the creator of the Traffic Barrel Monster has been apprehended.  Joseph Carnevale, a junior at NC State was charged with misdemeanor damage to property and larceny. It seems thatthe authorities are claiming that there was $360 in damamge done to the 3 barrel that were cut up. Stop. Read that last sentence again (No, not the one that says ‘Stop’, the other last sentence). Three barrels were damaged and unless my calculator has gone batshit that workd out to $120 each. For little plastic barrels. Perhaps now we understand whyroad construction companies winning contracts in NC do such sub-standard work…. they’re spending all the contract money on orange barrels. Here’s a deal for the fuckwits at Hamlett Associates, I’ll personally supply you with all the orange barrels you care to purchase at $90 a piece.

Here’s another thing – NC has a budget shortfall of  something in excess of $1 billion. Wake County’s budget increased by 5.8% and included a 2.5 cent property tax increase part of which is to be used for increased law enforcement. I’d love to hammer on Raleigh too but they’ve taken the congressional tack and made their budget completely unreadable.  At any rate, I find it moderately offensive that this has wasted clearly non-infinite government dollars. Seriously, make him pay the $360 and move along. Or better yet have him replace the barrels by buying them from me for $270. As if the fucktards feeding at the public trough weren’t making enough money. What I want to know really is why none of these asswipes every get charged for anything when they milk government contracts?

The actual artist is uliveandyouburn (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) chronicles this and many other exploits at his blog NoPromiseOfSafety.com

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