“Miley Cyrus plays Pink Floyd?”
All in all, you’re just another shtick in the mall.
Wish you weren’t here
Category: Dollars and nonsense
Let me hear your balalaikas ringing out
of KCXL and Radio Sputnik.
I don’t remember what was playing on the radio when I was hitchhiking through Kansas City back in 1972. Number one on my personal hit parade was getting the hell out of Missouri.
Forty-eight years later, guess who wants in?
Radio Sputnik, that’s who. Actually, the Russian propaganda outlet has already landed, at three KC-area radio stations.
According to Neil MacFarquhar at The New York Times, Radio Sputnik — formerly Radio Moscow — is one cog in a state-run Russian “news” machine that focuses on “sowing doubt about Western governments and institutions rather than the old Soviet model of selling Russia as paradise lost.”
“(T)he constant backbeat,” says MacFarquhar, “is that America is damaged goods.”
Well. I guess it must be. It’s a hell of a note when we have to offshore our bitching and moaning to the Russians.
Can’t Alpine Broadcasting Corporation find some red-blooded, home-grown, U-nited States of America Americans to talk shit? I mean, I do it for free, which is about as cheap as it comes. Alpine honcho Peter Schartel has the Russkies and their stooges do it for him and he gets $27.50 an hour. What’s that work out to in rubles, or pieces of silver?
I don’t expect that KCXL plays many cuts from the early Merle Haggard catalog between swigs of milk and honey and preachin’ ’bout some other way of living. But if you slip Schartel a few dead presidents, why, I expect he might just accommodate you.
It’s a free country, but everything in it costs money.
Of artists and safety nets
Thank Cthulhu I’m not an artist like Russell Chatham. We hacks have a safety net.
Here’s mine: This past weekend, Herself signed me up to start collecting Socialist Insecurity payments beginning in March 2020. If I live that long, and assuming that Agent Orange doesn’t redirect all SS monies to his Wall or his wallet, I will receive a princely sum indeed, each and every month.
After accounting for inflation, it’s roughly equal to what I was paid as a copy boy back in 1974, when I first got into the writing racket.
I figure I can score a used Chevy Express 1500 for about 12 large. The monthly payments should take about 18 percent of my income, which sounds about right. The camping gear I’ve already got.
And parking down by the river? It’s free! Winning!
The Farce is with us
Hm. No flying saucers up there. Not right this minute, anyway.
I guess we need a “space force” anyway, though, if only to learn how to flush money down a zero-gravity toilet.
Look for a low-Earth-orbit version of the F-35, coming to a military-industrial complex near you.
“Jesus, Chet, now they want the fucker to be a spacecraft, too. They’re lucky it gets off the ground at all. Oh, well, it’s only money, amirite? Haw haw haw! Back to the ol’ drawing board. …”
Meanwhile, in the back of the bus. …
Bus we mus’? Maybe not.
The two companies ’Burque has dealt with while trying to improve its mass-transit system are facing charges that they failed to follow through on their end of wage-and-benefit deals, according to The New York Times.
BYD we’ve discussed before. Now New Flyer, the outfit the Duke City turned to after its deal with BYD wound up on blocks, faces a fraud complaint in California.
Says the Times:
In a 2012 proposal to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority for an order of up to 900 buses, New Flyer said it would create more than 50 full-time positions that paid $11 to nearly $50 an hour.
New Flyer won the contract, worth about $500 million. But the company did not pay the wages it said it would and misrepresented the value of the benefits it was providing, according to pay stubs and corporate reports recently unsealed in the fraud case.
“It was a commitment — it matters,” said Madeline Janis, the executive director of Jobs to Move America, the nonprofit group that filed the complaint against New Flyer in California state court. “This case is about holding a huge company’s feet to the fire. … They make deals with public agencies and promise whatever, and think they don’t have to follow through.”
Is it just me, or does the invisible hand of the free market seem to spend a lot of time jerking off the rubes?
Mad Blog Media 