jobs now offline

The grand American experiment in shifting to the Internet the system for finding, evaluating, and hiring employees seems to have failed. According to an ABC news report, 80% of all available jobs in America are to be had only for that special person-in-the-know, not merely to the first schlub with an Internet connection. This author is not the least bit surprised to hear that companies have stopped hiring off the Web; each job at which I have worked in the last decade I got through a personal contact, a temporary-employment agency, a physical visit, or a similarly old-fashioned method, and only a few of the hundreds of resumes and job-specific cover letters I have ever emailed, posted, or uploaded garnered even a brief response.

Thousands of templates exist on dozens of sites that job-seekers can use to craft for themselves slick-looking resumes, and the World-Wide-Web abounds with page upon page of detailed instructions on how to puff up or expand one's job-history, on how to use bullet-points to the greatest effect, on what the placement of those bullet-points says about the applicant's character, on the varying importance of a snail-mailed thank-you note, and on just the right thing to say in the subject line in order to catch a downtrodden recruiter's eye; I can only imagine the difficulty of doing the job of a human-resources officer sifting through mountains of documents that all look the same, that all sound the same, that all employ the same tricks. The Online resume, it seems, has faded into oblivion almost as quickly as it hurtled to the forefront of our commonly-shared dream of finally doing something satisfying or worthwhile with our lives. (Whether or not we are misguided fools for seeking fulfillment and reward outside of ourselves – in stilted and stifling job-environments – rather than within the crowded recesses of our own souls, is not in question here, although it probably should be.)

Some of us still have a bit of spunk left in our gullets, however, such as the young man who posted a fake hiring-bulletin on craigslist.com in order to spy on his competition for personal-assistant jobs, receiving over four hundred responses before the end of the first day. (He now has the names and addresses of hundreds of different people, data he can sell – to advertisers, political campaigns, or Kenyan scammers – for good money.) One idea is to get all of the people looking for jobs to come together at a physical location where they can network and figure out which businesses to start with each other, or get paid to assemble widgets, thingamajigs, or whatnots – for a few hours a day while getting paid the federal minimum wage. (With just a sliver of the hundreds of billions of dollars that the United States of America spends waging war on foreign peoples, we could employ every single job-seeking man, woman, and teenager in this country for a whole decade, in the spirit of the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps.) Another idea is to pay these unemployed masses to stand out in the streets to watch the watchers, to keep an eye on corruption-prone and law-breaking police officers. Our ultimate purpose as a nation, however, is to create methods by which our citizens can discover their true passions and abilities, so that they might Pursue their Happiness independent of outside pressure, outside influence, and outside coercion rather than sitting around all day staring at television screens and computer monitors and eating junk food; but, with our state and federal governments filled with persons who have sold their souls to corporate scumbags from agribusiness (Monsanto) and to banks awash with debt-payments (BofA, TD Ameritrade, etc.), we, the American people, will keep on suffering, all the good jobs having been shifted to South-East Asia. But, hey, someone has to restock these t-shirts, and man the deep-fryers. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on poison, pests, & how we choose to live

Persons watching television for long enough will be familiar with advertisements playing up the dangers of termites and other such small animals that are considered by many people to be pests. Computer-animated sequences containing high drama, witty comedy, and compelling action play during these commercials while a gravely-voiced narrator speaks repeatedly of poisoning, rooting out, exterminating, and eliminating such beings as are blamed with threatening not just the home's structural integrity but also the very health and safety of the people living within it; it is as if these pests were not just eating the foundations of the home but that they posed a risk to the entirety of human existence.

It is not the fault of the termite that he likes to eat the wooden beams that home-builders line up in such nicely even rows in such nicely dark and poorly-ventilated places; nor are termites or their burrowing buddies to blame for their tendency to eat fibrous materials and to aid in the rapid decomposition thereof: Nature in all her finery has equipped these our little brothers and sisters with such tools as that speed up the process of breaking down dead material into smaller and smaller bits until it is once again indistinguishable from dirt. No, the termite is not to blame; it is the human who is to blame for using the one material that termites love to eat and for building his house in such a way as to all but beg for something to eat at it. And then, when the human (living in America) discovers that something is munching on his pricey abode, instead of celebrating this completely natural cycle of decay and rebirth and obviating the issue by changing the materials he uses to build his domicile (such as by switching to stone), he gropes around blindly for the first available, seemingly most simple option, and fills his home – and the home of the termites – with powerful and deadly poisons.

No, there is no excuse for the various extermination companies that here ply their trade; they offer short-term, chemical solutions to a long-term issue that, at its root, requires a complete redesign of everything we humans thought we knew about How To Build Structures That Last. Perhaps with a little fiddling, a bit of foresight, and a healthy dollop of hubris, we can keep termites and other burrowing beasts where they belong: in the woods.

場黑麥 menterefecterem fecit

encylopediamericanifesto: panem et circenses

  Beyond its propensity for outright hostility against citizens loyal to the rightfully elected government of the United States, the military-industrial complex and its cohorts in the rapacious plutocracy has done injustice to the fed and to the American people alike in that instead of clever or devious tactics it prefers as the tool to craft for the ages a new order an ancient Roman method called panem et circenses.

  A ruling body exercises panem et circenses, or bread and circuses, by attempting to control the rage of an urban population using compelling, addictive entertainment and delicious, cheap food. The typical city dweller in ancient Rome resembled the modern homeless person in appearance and in morals both – by all accounts, he was as likely to be sexually promiscuous as he was to binge drink, and if he could drink and fuck while watching gladiators fight to the death, he was contented. But the modern urbanite is rich, and so he pays good money to watch the circuses on TV at his home, where he will eat from paper bags a meal of fast food suffused with fat and sugar that was prepared for him by silently desperate wage-slaves. The urbanite does these things because he is a good boy, and because good boys follow the rules – he watches the commercials and he buys all the useless and superfluous crap, and he does not mind that his conspicuous and incessant consumption (and that of his semi-affluent cohorts) makes only 0.05% of the US population wealthy beyond imagining. The richest of the rich, this group is comprised of those individuals who own television companies and fast food chains: it stacks chips like a boss while the remainder of the population, the 99.5%, descends into orca-fat obesity and chronic laziness.

  But it is not enough for the Point Oh Five to control the messages you hear and see or to dictate which foods you eat – these Rapacious Plutocrats have wrested the shaping of a new order for the ages from the federal government of the United States of America (which is the agent selected by Destiny to be the perpetrator of the whole Shaping a New Order for the Ages business). The people who own the TV stations and the fast food shacks become rich beyond reckoning upon the backs of the wretched citizens who fork over their meager wages to keep themselves sated of food and to spend their time staring at images dancing on a magic box.

  While the fed has at times acted foolishly, I place more of my trust in it than in a cadre of individuals whose minds are so twisted with the pulsing whorish thrust of money that their balance-sheets matter more than the vitality and diversity of the American people.

  Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp