From the Telegraph:

Advert for ‘reliable workers’ banned as discrimination by Jobcentre Plus

The boss of a recruitment firm said she was told she could not place an advert for ”reliable workers” because it discriminated against unreliable people.

Nicole Mamo, 48, wanted to post an advert for a £5.80-an-hour domestic cleaner on her local Jobcentre Plus website.

The text of the advert ended by stating that any applicants for the post ”must be very reliable and hard-working”.

But when Ms Mamo called the Jobcentre Plus in Thetford, Norfolk, the following day she was told that her advert would not be displayed instore.

A Jobcentre Plus worker claimed that the word ”reliable” meant they could be sued for discriminating against unreliable workers.

I would say that words fail me, but this sort of thing is becoming depressingly commonplace over in England. Even though Aldous Huxley and George Orwell wrote their dystopias more than half a century ago, they clearly saw something in the roots of British culture that worried them.

Hat tip to my old friend and fellow skydiver, Matt Yuen, who posted this over at Facebook.  ..bruce w..

Eric S. Raymond, author of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar“, has a thoughtful post on his blog this morning on how the current recession is impacting his circle of friends, two in particular. Here are the key paragraphs:

When I look at these guys, though, I can’t buy the explanation most people would jump for, which is that they simply fell behind in an increasingly skill-intensive job market. Thing is, they’re not uneducated; they’re not the stranded fruit-picker or construction worker that narrative would fit. Nor does offshoring explain what’s happened to these guys, because their jobs were the relatively hard-to-export kind.

No. What I think is: These are the people who go to the wall when the cost of employing someone gets too high. We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped. Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables (alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the mildly dysfunctional.

In other words, established ‘liberal’ policies actually hurt those whom the liberals would most like to protect. Read the whole thing.

Wayne Holder, a high school friend and my boss at Oasis Systems/FTL Games nearly 30 years ago, talked once about how he was a radical liberal through college, then turned hard-core conservative once he started his own business and had to hire people. He complained about the increased costs and legal/regulatory consequences of each new person he hired — and this was back in the 1980s! I can only imagine what it’s like today.  ..bruce w..

I had to write an expert report last week, and I’m in New York on business all this week.  In the meantime, watch the music video above (that’s the artist’’s grandmother), courtesy of Gerard Van der Leun over at American Digest. And be sure to watch it all the way to the end.  ..bruce w..

…Dr. Phil Jones of the CRU made a series of (for warmists) startling admissions over the weekend. And, of course, Hitler has to weigh in. Hat tip to Gerard Van der Leun over at American Digest (one of the best blogs on the web). I know the Hitler clip is a bit overused, but this is very, very well done. Heh.

UPDATE 1830 MDT

FX is showing “The Day After Tomorrow” right now; I don’t know if that’s pure coincidence or some clever programming on someone’s part.  In either case, the movie’s wretched and nonsensical scientific gaffes, as well as the political heavy-handedness (e.g., the Dick Cheney clone), are even more painful in the light of the wholesale collapse of AGW during the past several months.  ..bfw..

Remember Chris Christie, the Republican who defeated Gov. Jon Corzine in New Jersey last year? Well, here’s his address to a joint session of the New Jersey legislature about the budget crisis there. I can’t embed the video, so you’ll have to go over and watch it. I have to agree with Hunter Baker’s assessment (hat tip to him for the link to the speech) that this speech is “one of the most astounding speeches and demonstrations of leadership I have ever seen.” It really is worth the time to watch because it represents everything that we’re not seeing out of the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress with regards to fiscal honesty and responsibility.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of the problem in New Jersey, the annual state budget is currently around $17 billion. However, New Jersey has $90 billion in unfunded pension and medical benefit costs. Gov. Christie points out that New Jersey would have to spend $7 billion every year going forward — nearly half of its annual budget — to make those unfunded pension and medical costs good.  ..bruce..

Some 20 years ago, I wrote Sandra a poem on the 2nd anniversary of our temple sealing. It still says everything I feel for and about her, so here it is:

Two Years On

Two steps towards eternity
Widdershins about the sun,
A dance of light in time and space
That leads beyond.

Threads of glory wind around
And bind us into unity,
Pulled by love’s accretion to
celestial singularlity.

Natural as gravity –
As others note with but a glance –
Our lives collide and coalesce.
But oh! the fire in the dance!

Happy Valentine’s Day, sweetheart.  ..bruce w..

One of my favorite Billy Joel songs for years has been “Miami 2017 (Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway)” because of its science-fictiony flavor. I’ve wondered at times if it was part of John Carpenter’s inspiration for “Escape from New York“, particularly since he says he wrote the first draft of the screenplay in the same year (1976) that “Miami 2017″ was released.

Anyway, the song came up on rotation on my iPhone while I was reviewing documents this morning, so I popped over to YouTube to see if there was a music video for it (original or fan-made). What I found was footage from a concert that Billy Joel gave (out in Brooklyn, I assume) post-9/11, intermixed with 9/11 footage. It hit me pretty hard, both because of the re-interpretation of the song and the footage itself. Sandra and I lived in DC from 1999 to 2005; on 9/11/01, we had just moved into a house about 5 miles due north of the Pentagon. We dealt not just with one (and almost a second) terrorist attack on DC, we dealt with the aftermath within DC for months and years. I have a son who has served in Iraq and a nephew who has served in Afghanistan. I understand the reasons why they were there, and why one or both may end up going back. I’m afraid a lot of folks don’t or have forgotten.  ..bruce w..

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The International Olympics Committee continues to refuse to let women ski jump in the Winter Olympics, apparently for “medical reasons”. Or is it because women can actually beat men at this sport? Hat tip to ASIP reader Katy Jo. ..bruce w..

So, how many of these scenes do you recognized? Hat tip to John August. ..bruce w..

This was my favorite ad from the Superbowl yesterday, though probably not for the reasons Audi wanted.  ..bruce w..