Super Bowl Sunday: It's Not All About Beating Your Wife

Hopefully you've already been disabused of the false notion that domestic violence peaks on Super Bowl Sunday. This spectacular event is about all the great things that America has to offer: chicken wings, beer, 17 hour pre-game show, more beer, pizza, more beer, patriotic ritual and glorification of military, more beer, potato chips, more beer, kick off, more beer, (mostly not very) funny commercials, more beer, deep-fried Oreos, more beer, lame half-time show, more beer, score getting lopsided by the middle of the 3rd quarter, more beer, nachos, more beer, long visit to the bathroom, more beer, game's outcome decided by beginning of 4th quarter, more beer, tequila shots, more beer, ranch dressing flavored pretzels, more beer, tequila's gone so open another bottle of whatever you've got, more beer, game over, more beer, more booze, and finish it all off with sex with a prostitute in her early teens. If you harbor any doubt that God loves America best, then why did He bestow upon us and no one else this greatest of all events?

ARLINGTON, Texas —
As thousands of football fans descend on Texas for Sunday's Super Bowl, law enforcement agencies are keeping watch for a different kind of out-of-town visitor: pimps selling children for sex.

[...]

Pimps hawking young girls see the thousands of men who travel to the Super Bowl each year as a gold mine of potential clients. Police in and around host cities have tried for years to crack down on prostitution by conducting stings or increasing patrols during Super Bowl week. Only in recent years have underage girls come to light in increasing numbers.

"This is a very large issue. We want people to know what human trafficking looks like," said Thomas Lawrence, an assistant Dallas police chief. Last year's Super Bowl in Miami drew as many as 10,000 prostitutes, including children and human trafficking victims, police said.

[...]

Advocacy groups and the North Texas Trafficking Task Force are focused on underage victims coming to Dallas ahead of Sunday's game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers. They say pimps who engage in human trafficking place ads for escorts with out-of-town contact numbers and rent houses or buses for parties featuring underage girls.

Advocates say many Americans do not realize child sex trafficking happens in the United States, not just overseas. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimates that at least 100,000 children in the U.S. are victims of prostitution each year.

[Seattle Times]

CSI: America -- Drunk, Blind, Not Even Doctors

The good news is that if you've been murdered, it's not going to make a whole lot of difference to you if your killer gets caught.

Let’s imagine that an intruder entered your home one night and fatally poisoned you. Let’s say that during the previous weeks or months you had evinced signs of emotional volatility. Perhaps you were even depressed. Let’s go further and presume that you lived in one of the many places in America experiencing state and municipal budget crises. The police suspect suicide, but because the coroner’s office is underfinanced and understaffed — maybe there isn’t even a place to refrigerate your body until someone can get around to dissecting your corpse — no autopsy is performed to confirm or invalidate those suspicions. A murderer is free and on to the next house and victim.

“Post Mortem,” a documentary on PBS on Tuesday, compellingly demonstrates just how often a situation like this one actually occurs.

[...]

If its own DNA had any less gravitas, “Post Mortem” might have been called “CSI: Miami — What a Big Bunch of Hooey.” Apparently autopsies are performed with far more precision and rigor on fictionalized television than they are in the real world, where some medical examiners aren’t even doctors. The film introduces us to the bizarre obfuscations of Frank Minyard, who has served for more than 30 years as coroner in New Orleans, where he has been elected to the position 10 times. Before becoming the medical examiner he had been an obstetrician, and during his tenure he has overseen a team whose work has repeatedly come under question for gross inaccuracy.

Coroners elsewhere have been blind or drunk, limited to a single refrigerator held together by a belt, or forced to perform their duties without X-ray machines. As Vincent Di Maio, the forensic pathologist and the inspiration for Patricia Cornwell’s character Kay Scarpetta puts it, the work done by forensic pathologists in this country “varies from excellent to absolutely lousy.”

[NYT]

Recovery Continues - Employed are "Lucky" to Work Harder to Make Less

More good news. "More efficient," that means more work.

"Labor costs fell," means they paid you less.

"Exhaust their ability to squeeze more output out of depleted work forces." That's you - exhausted and depleted.

If you analyze this as carefully as I do, you know that this means you're working more now for less and you are...

"Lucky To Have A Job."

Our collective epitaph. So it is written, so let it be done.

The work force was more efficient last year with productivity rising at the fastest pace in eight years. Labor costs fell for a second straight year, something that hasn't happened in nearly five decades.

Productivity, the amount of output per hour of work, rose a strong 3.6 percent in 2010 after a 3.5 percent gain in 2009, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Both years represented the best showing since 2002. Labor costs dropped 1.5 percent last year after a 1.6 percent decline in 2009.

But economists say the two-year surge in productivity is coming to an end as companies exhaust their ability to squeeze more output out of depleted work forces. They look for more hiring in 2011 which will help boost incomes.

[Associated Press]

Good Time To Be a Squeezer, Bad Time To Be a Lemon

Woooo-hoooo, people, pop open the champagne! US companies are making money hand over fist and are sitting on "mountains of cash." "How is this possible in a time of massive unemployment," you ask? Easy -- it's because of massive unemployment that companies are making so much money. They figured out that they could fire lots of workers, get their remaining employees who are terrified of losing their jobs to work like slaves, and pocket the savings. Voilà, pretty neat trick, eh? Say hello to the new lean and mean corporate American machine. And say goodbye to the American dream for all but the upper crust.

The current profit-reporting season is shaping up to be one of the best ever. For non-financial firms in the S&P 500, earnings per share are now higher than they have been for at least a decade. With over half of the companies in the S&P 500 having reported, profits in 2010 were up by 17% compared with 2009. (The year-on-year increase is far greater if financial firms are included, since they plunged in 2009 and then rebounded spectacularly.)

[...]

Some fear that the productivity improvements that have driven profit growth since the financial crisis will soon tail off. “Around 90% of the productivity growth in corporate America has come from cost-cutting, and that is now reaching its limit,” says Carsten Stendevad of Citigroup’s corporate-advisory arm. Scared for their jobs during the crisis, employees toiled more for no more money; but they cannot be whipped much harder.

[...]

Others disagree. “There is a lot more juice to be squeezed out of the lemon,” insists Hal Sirkin of BCG, a consultancy. Firms brag about having introduced “lean systems”, but most have done only “10-25% of what they could do”, says Mr Sirkin.

[...]

If, for some reason, [American companies] should fail to put their cash mountains to work, investors will demand the cash back through dividends and share buybacks. Indeed, many are already demanding, and receiving, just that. In short, as American firms expand at home and abroad, profits are set to rise and cash holdings to fall. Whether this will help the more than 9% of the American workforce who are unemployed remains to be seen.

[The Economist]

"If You Want Me to Get the Devil Out, I'll Need to Touch Your Privates"

It's one thing to sexually abuse alter boys in full possession of their wits, but molesting a woman suffering from seizures brought on by "demonic possession" really sets the bar at a new level.

A priest has admitted to a sexual indiscretion with a woman under his spiritual care during an exorcism.

Father Thomas Euteneuer made the confession after a wave of online debate about his sudden departure from his post of president of an anti-abortion group.

[...]

The mystery provoked a wave of speculation on the internet about why the priest, described by some as a 'rock star' of the pro-life movement, might have stepped down.

The internet storm peaked after a January 27 medical emergency involving a woman at Human Life International's Virginia headquarters, according to an article posted on the Huffington Post.

Paramedics described the woman, who had previously been associated with Father Euteneuer, as undergoing a 'medical seizure'.

Witnesses claimed she was suffering from 'demonic possession'.

[...]

[Father Euteneuer] admitted to a sexual indiscretion while performing an exorcism.

'The circumstances that led to my departure from HLI were related exclusively to my own decisions and conduct within the ministry of exorcism that I carried out independently from my responsibilities at HLI,' he stated in a blog post on the website LifeSiteNews on February 1.

He then admitted that 'one particularly complex situation clouded my judgment and led me to imprudent decisions with harmful consequences, the worst of which was violating the boundaries of chastity with an adult female who was under my spiritual care.'

He said he took 'full responsibility' for his 'weakness and sinful conduct'.

[Daily Mail]

We Have Excellent Jobs With Low Salaries

Hey, did you know how hard it is to get a job? I did! Did you know that the job you're going to get after being out of work for a year is going to pay less than your last job? Duh-hey, yeah Archie, where's Veronica?

Ultimately what is great about this is that the employees at the Bureau of Labor Statistics are probably safe from being laid off since they have to measure how bad this is. How bad would things have to get for us to stop measuring how bad it was? That's an interesting question! "It's so bad, forget about it, we give up, no more statistics."

It's amazing how precisely they can identify a problem, and they have no ability to solve it. I can do that for FREE!

There are two problems with the jobs recovery to date. Employers haven't added enough jobs. And those they have added aren't particularly good ones.

The former has gotten a lot of attention. But the low-wage jobs that have been added are also a cause for concern.

"Growth has been concentrated in mid-wage and lower-wage industries. By contrast, higher-wage industries showed weak growth and even net losses," said Annette Bernhardt, policy co-director for the National Employment Law Project. She said that growth has been far more unbalanced than during previous job recoveries.

Bernhardt's analysis of the first seven months of 2010 found that 76% of jobs created were in low- to mid-wage industries -- those earning between $8.92 to $15 an hour, well below the national average hourly wage of $22.60.

But the Bureau of Labor Statistics has made some worrisome projections about the pay for jobs likely to be created.

The BLS's most recent job growth forecast, published back in November 2009 and projecting the job market from 2008 through 2018, identified 30 different occupations expected to experience the best growth.

The good news is that the occupation expected to add the most jobs over those 10 years -- registered nurse -- is considered "very high wage." But the six occupations with the largest gains are all classified as either "low wage" or "very low wage." Among those jobs are home health aides, retail sales people and food preparation -- including fast food workers.

[CNNmoney.com]

If I Fell

If you, dear reader, find yourself in the 99.99% of North America that's covered in treacherous ice right now, please exercise caution out there.



Several more videos to be found at the link below.

[The Awl]

Book Your Luxury Hitler Holiday Today!

Fine hotels, spectacular Bavarian scenery, delicious pretzels and sausages, and the opportunity to pay homage to Hitler in style and comfort -- this is a dream vacation opportunity that doesn't come along every day. Book your family's trip today and thank the Captain later.

UK tour leaders faced criticism over plans to take tourists on a luxury trip to visit sites associated with Adolf Hitler.

The eight-day £2000 ($3122) trip in June - titled "Face of Evil: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" - has been sanctioned by German authorities.

The itinerary includes visits to sites such as the spot where Hitler committed suicide, the lakeside villa where the Holocaust was planned and the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

[...]

"German historians have confronted the Nazi past with seriousness," said David Cesarani, a British expert on the Nazi period.

"But there is a danger of sensationalism when it is incorporated in what I'd call a holiday tour.

"If you focus on the sites most pertinent to Hitler, you are concentrating on the cult of that personality. The trip in effect becomes a perverse pilgrimage," he added.

[Daily Telegraph]

America Chases Imaginary Chinese Boogeyman

This makes my blood boil. Here we are, worried about China. Big economy, destroying the dollar, refusing to buy all of our bonds. Commies. And lots of them. Really they could just start walking around the world and if they get here they can just walk right over us and take over. A billion of them! And they're all stuffed in there now. So naturally any red blooded American would have a concern.

Turns out, there's nothing to worry about. They don't have an army or an air force, they just show everybody a clip from "Top Gun" and then they go back to doing whatever they're doing. They are a paper tiger! They get us crazy by acting all Chinese and now look. It turns out that even our ACTORS could probably take out their whole freakin' military.

You know, if we sent a great big PICTURE of Tom Cruise over to China I bet half the country would take off. A photo of Charlton Heston or Henry Fonda would be the equivalent of an atom bomb!

“Top Gun,” the famed 1980s Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer film about jet fighter pilots, was the source of news footage used by Chinese state-run CCTV recently, according to reports this weekend.

A Wall Street Journal blog posted a video that compared scenes from the Tony Scott-directed film and CCTV footage from a news feature about a Chinese air force training exercise. The jet explosions in both pieces of footage look exactly the same—down to the smoke, fire, and debris flying out from the explosion. There are other striking similarities as well.

The Jan. 23 CCTV film faux pas was first spotted by a Chinese user named “Liu Yi” on the Ministry of Tofu blog.

The user pointed out that "the jet that the [Chinese] J-10 ‘hit’ is an F-5, a U.S. fighter jet. In Top Gun, what the leading actor Tom Cruise pilots an F-14 to bring down is exactly an F-5.”

The Journal reported that CCTV has since removed the clip from their website.

A person familiar with CCTV told the BBC that this hasn’t been the first time that the state-run television broadcaster used movie footage in a news report.

"There are other cases of the deliberate use of inappropriate footage," the source, who was not named, told the British news agency. He said that it was sometimes due to laziness or lack of footage.

[Epoch Times]

Hitler's Bodyguard Too Old, Tired to Answer Fan Mail

Have you sent a letter expressing your admiration to Hitler's last living bodyguard recently? If you have and you've yet to get a response, don't despair -- Rochus Misch hasn't been reunited with his old boss just yet. It's just that at 93 years old, Misch just doesn't have the energy to respond to the mountains of fan mail he still receives regularly.

(Reuters) - More than 65 years after World War Two, Adolf Hitler's last surviving bodyguard says that he can no longer respond to the continuous deluge of fan mail he receives from around the world, because of his advanced age.

Rochus Misch is 93 and uses a walking frame to move around his apartment. He told the Berliner Kurier tabloid that, with most of the letters he receives asking for autographs, it was "no longer possible" to reply because of his age.

"They (letters) come from Korea, from Knoxville, Tennessee, from Finland and Iceland -- and not one has a bad word to say," said Misch, who is believed to be the last man alive to have seen Hitler and other top-ranking Nazis in the flesh.

[Reuters]

Booze Saves Lives

Next time you feel like sleeping nearly naked in the snow, be sure to get your blood alcohol level at least thirty times higher than the legal limit for driving.

A drunk man found lying on a frozen park bench in his underwear survived because of the amount of alcohol in his blood.

[...]

A breath test showed he had 1,024 micrograms per 100ml, nearly 30 times the legal limit for driving, which doctors say helped him live.

They believe alcohol in his blood acted like anti-freeze - on the other hand it may have played a part in him ending up on a frozen park bench in his underpants.

[Orange News]

Newsflash: Feeding Your Children "Toxic Waste" a Bad Idea

When the Captain sees candy on the shelf called "Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge," manufactured in Pakistan, his first thought is "this looks like a wholesome snack that American kids should be eating in abundance." Turns out the Captain is wrong about that. (There's a first time for everything.)

The Food and Drug Administration says Candy Dynamics of Indianapolis is recalling all flavors of its Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge Chew Bars after way too much lead turned up in some cherry-flavored bars in California.

The company, citing "an abundance of caution," is pulling all flavors of the bars ever produced. Those would be the sour apple, blue raspberry and cherry chew bars. All of them are imported from Pakistan.

The problem was discovered by the Californian Department of Public Health, found 0.24 parts per million of lead in a batch of cherry-flavored bars. The FDA doesn't allow more than 0.1 parts per million because even a little too much lead can cause health problems for little kids, infants and pregnant women.

The company says its other Toxic Waste candies, marketed on its website as "hazardously sour," are OK and are unaffected by the recall. The potentially lead-laden bars were distributed to stores nationwide and also were sold by mail.

[NPR]

America's Leading Blowhard Mimics Chinese Leaders

Rush Limbaugh, this guy is like the highest paid radio guy there is. On the one hand, who hasn't heard someone doing a Chinese accent and laughed? But on the other hand, this is usually one of your stupid friends, it's not a guy who's making millions on the radio. He should have better material, sure, but you can't really criticize the guy too much. Ching ching, chong chong cha. That can be funny. Come on!

The beef I have with this sack of beef is I want to know how Rush Limbaugh judges a guy like...Rush Limbaugh. If some guy he didn't like had a drug problem, would he be cool with it? Like if Obama had a drug problem, would Rush Limbaugh say, "hey, we've all been there man, it's alright." I would guess not. He would use it as an opportunity to slam away. And Rush Limbaugh had a drug problem! I know he got nailed for some prescription drug thing, but some guy I know told me he was running around with him in California smoking weed in these private rich guy weed smoking drug clubs.

Apparently there's a network of drug clubs that the rich guys go to, and this way when they pass out or whatever they're all taken care of. These joints are all over the world. I've never been to one, but I've heard Rush has. I wonder if Rush can do a good Mexican? I've always found British accents the hardest to goof on. I just can't get it right.

Rush Limbaugh's imitation of the Chinese language during a recent speech made by Chinese President Hu Jintao has stirred a backlash among Asian-American lawmakers in California and nationally.

California state Sen. Leland Yee, a Democrat from San Francisco, is leading a fight in demanding an apology from the radio talk show host for what he and others view as racist and derogatory remarks against the Chinese people.

"The comments that he made — the mimicking of the Chinese language — harkens back to when I was a little boy growing up in San Francisco and those were hard days, rather insensitive days," Yee said in an interview Thursday. "You think you've arrived and all of a sudden get shot back to the reality that you're a second-class citizen."

During a Jan. 19 radio program, Limbaugh said there was no translation of the Chinese president's speech during a visit to the White House.

"He was speaking and they weren't translating," Limbaugh said. "They normally translate every couple of words. Hu Jintao was just going ching chong, ching chong cha."

He then launched into a 20-second-long imitation of the Chinese leader's dialect.

The next day, Limbaugh said he "did a remarkable job" of imitating China's president for someone who doesn't know a language spoken by more than 1 billion people.

A telephone and e-mail to Limbaugh's station operator Clear Channel Communications Inc. was not returned Thursday. Clear Channel's Premiere Radio Networks Inc. is home to Limbaugh, Jim Rome, Ryan Seacrest, Glenn Beck, Bob Costas and Sean Hannity.

An e-mail to Limbaugh's show requesting comment was also not returned.

[Associated Press]

The Thoughtful Egomaniac

First off, this is a decent looking woman, so all she has to do is stand still and shut up. But that's too much for her. Admit it, if she came up to you and started talking you wouldn't listen to a word but on some level, about chest level, she'd have your full attention. It would take a while to hear what she was saying so you wouldn't immediately know how off the wall nuts she is.

She's dating some guy for six months and telling everyone that she's picked out engagement rings. Does he know he's getting engaged? Judging by her roll call of talented guys, while she likes BEING in relationships, they seem to like ENDING them. The boob power must wear off.

She then explains the engagement ring thing by putting down all women. All women are idiots and she is just one of many. "I feel women are confusing." Hard to put a brand on half the human race but there it is. Other words spring to mind.

She uses the word "plethora?" Is that made up?

Then, "she's better as a couple?" A couple of what? It's good that she can admit she's not a complete person all by herself, but still, what a ramble this is. It could be the most inspired airhead rant ever. If she becomes a "couple" and splits herself in two I would like a half that doesn't speak.

Finally, the boyfriend speaks and apparently Jennifer wrote a manual on herself, like the kind that comes with a car, so guys everywhere could read it and understand how to deal with her. This guy read it and talked to her in the code in the book and he scored. You have to admire him. She's obviously psychotic but hot from certain angles. You overlook some psychosis when they're hot, but usually you don't need to get through a whole book. They blab away and you don't listen. It's all good. And then you're outta there, bang!

Exhausting. I'm going to read her book though because I have a feeling this deal may not work out.

Hollywood actress Jennifer Love Hewitt is giving ample choice to her boyfriend Alex Beh - she has prepared three engagement rings to help him choose from when he proposes to her.

The 'Ghost Whisperer' star, who has been dating the director for past six months does not want to upset him if he chooses something she dislikes, reported Contactmusic.

"I actually have three engagement rings because I feel like I'm doing the guy a favour. I feel women are very confusing. We never know what we want and we're not very good at nailing that down for them. And I feel like I don't want to be upset if he picks a bad ring, so I feel like having three picked out and saying, 'Look! Look at this plethora of things you can choose from!'," Hewitt said.

The 31-year-old actress, who has previously dated John Mayer, Carson Daly and Ross McCall loves to be in a relationship.

"I feel like as a person, I am better as a couple," she added.

Beh, who embarked on a romance with Hewitt after her break-up with Jamie Kennedy last April, used her book 'The Day I Shot Cupid' to ask her out on a date.

"The book is very informative. I learned all I needed to know. When I first met her, I really was able to just map out all the things to do and not to do," he said.

[Press Trust of India]

Eat Me

For the person intent on doing himself in, there are a lot of options: rope, guns, pills, heights, razor blades, etc. One method that never crossed the Captain's mind before now was making oneself into bear food.

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) -- A convicted killer who escaped from an Arizona prison said after his capture that he had planned to overdose on heroin at Yellowstone National Park and let bears eat him to end the fear and panic he was experiencing while on the lam.

Tracy Province told Mohave County sheriff's Detective Larry Matthews that he had wanted to go up on a mountain, shoot up a gram of heroin and "be bear food." As he was preparing the drug, a voice told him not to go through with the plan, and he changed course in favor of trying to hitchhike to Indiana to see family.

[...]

Province told Matthews about his plan to commit suicide after he was returned to Arizona following his Aug. 9 capture in the sleepy town of Meeteetse, Wyo.

He was serving two life sentences for murder and robbery and told Matthews he fantasized about fleeing but became nervous after scaling a fence topped with barbed wire and cutting through another fence. The trio's escape went unnoticed for hours.

"He didn't know why anyone would want to escape because all you do is look over you(r) shoulder the entire time," Matthews wrote.

[...]

Province also discovered that he forgot how to drive during their time in New Mexico, telling Matthews that he almost hit other motorists. The group of fugitives ended up leaving the vehicle he was driving behind.

"Everyone drives too fast now," Matthews quoted Province as saying. "When he went to prison the speed limit was 55."

[Journal & Courier]