Oh, The Humanity! However Will We Survive With the 9% Cut to the Budget of a Non-Existing Programme???

Oh, the humanity!

It is with the heaviest of hearts, my dear readers, that I bring news of a most calamitous calamity.  The rich, white men of the GOP - cemented in their intransigence and myopic in their obstruction - are about to kill men, women, and children.  "Why?" "How?" You ask.  Oh, my dear luvs, bear with me, it is so bloody difficult to type with masacratears running down one's face and gasping for air while my heart is exploding with the force of 2,000 Hiroshimas.

Hankie, please.

OK - sob - here are the gory details:

The National Drug Intelligence Centre, which saves more lives than the Berlin Airlift-Live Aid-Farm Aid-the liberation of concentration camps and gulags-etc, is going to face an 8.5% cut in its annual budget!  According to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) ~~sob, sob~~ roughly 8.2% of the centre's overall budget will be cut.  However will life continue on the planet?  Does anyone have some extra hemlock laying around?

I learned of this travesty of galactic proportions very recently.  You see, pursuant to The Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012, the good little boys and girls at OMB delivered a bloody corpse, er, I meant, a report projecting the effects of the Sequester's automatic spending cuts.

 As you will know, I am not one to shy away from thousands of pages of data, but if I want to read over-the-top projections of doom, gloom, and Armageddon, I'll read the founding literature of the Hojjatieh Mahdatieh Society and the works of Ahmadinejad's spiritual adviser, Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, and his fave Ayatollah Messbah Yazd....and, IF I STILL CAN'T SLEEP, then there's the one and only Ayatollah Khomeini's Resaleh Towzih al-Masael.  Sheep, you should get a load of what he has to say in that!  Guaranteed to turn you into a vegetarian anytime that you are in the Middle East.*  (If you are more of the scientific lover endeavouring to save the world from climate apocalypse, then, dude, do I have the book for you and the author is a Nobel Peace Prize winnah!**) 

Anyhoo, getting back to the OMB's report.  I read a lot of it and, unsurprisingly, most of the strawmen that Obama and his minions are whipping like ginger-headed step-children are EXEMPT!   But, the use of the NDIC really takes the cake!

From the OMB Report:

The first line of the OMB's September 2012 report on page 121 says that the National Drug Intelligence Centre would lose $2 million out of its $20 million budget, which would equate to a 8.2% sequester cut percentage.  [I got a 9% percentage decrease, but who's quibbling?]

And, maybe, if we were a flush country:

*   Without $16,610,557,777,904.98 in national debt;

* Without $222 trillion in unfunded Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid liabilities;

*  Without states with $390 billion in unfunded teacher pension liabilities;

* Without states and local governments that have between $730 billion and $4.4 trillion in unfunded liabilities

* Without 47 million people on food stamps (that's more people than the ENTIRE population of Spain);

*  Without one-in-19 Americans being on SSDI;

*  Without a U-3 of 8.3% (the real U-3 rate is 11.8%***) and a U-6 of 15.40%;

*  Without the lowest Labour Force Participation Rate (63.6% - it was 65.5% when Obama took office), since before 1979 (63.7%);

*  Without 8.5 million fewer Americans working today than when Obama took office;

*  Without one in 4 children living in poverty;

*  Without a middle class that has lost more than $5,000 in wages and benefits since 2009;

* Without a "recovery" where the top 1% pocketed 93% of the gains in 2010, 37% of the gains went to the top one-tenth of 1% and no one below the richest 10% saw any gain at all, according to an analysis of tax returns by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty - and frequently cited by Robert Reich...so no member of the VRWC there.

* Without a country where the President and CEO, Ben Jealous, of the NAACP didn't say, “The country’s back to pretty much where it was when this president started.  White people in this country are doing a bit better. Black people are doing a full point worse. [to the host of "Meet the Presss," David Gregory]."

And, if everyone were happy with butterflies, lollipops, teddybears, and state-funded vacays on the USS Good Ship Obama, I might really die of a broken heart because of the tragedy that has befallen the National Drug Intelligence Centre, but everyone isn't happy, we aren't flush, and the damn thing is a defunct agency. 

Fortunately, I've been given a reprieve because - even though Obama & Co have been citing the Armageddon that will awash the world with drugs because we will lack the critical, life-saving intelligence this agency provides, it seems that the National Drug Intelligence Centre unplugged the phones, turned off the lights, and shuttered it doors on the 15 of June 2012.  Pssst:  Three whole months before the OMB issued its report.  

I think, perhaps, I might have to sue the OMB for emotional distress, pain and suffering, a spa treatment to reduce my puffy eyes, acupuncture treatment to relieve my stress, along with a Grey Goose cosmo and a Valium chaser, a facial to unclog my pores clogged by masacratears, and a replacement tube of Le Volume De Chanel en noir.

 How did our $3.7 trillion government NOT send out engraved notices?  Très gauche!

Here’s the OMB report:  “But there’s a small problem with the report: One of the cuts it warns against would affect an agency that no longer exists–and didn’t exist when the OMB sent its report to congress."

Let's see if any other departments or agencies have noticed any mistakes:

And, here’s the DOJ website:  ???

And, here's the DHS website:  ???

And, here's the EPA website:  ???

And, here's the HHS website:  ???

And, here's the DOT website:  ???

And, here's the DofLab's website:  ???

And, here's State's website:  ???

And, here's the DoD's website:  ???

And, here's the Commerce's website:  ???

And, here's the BATFE's website:  ???

This raises the obvious questions: 

What other errors – if any — are hiding in the OMB report?

What other ginger-head strawmen beaten to a pulp by Obama & Co will be completely untouched by the Sequester?

Fortunately, for you, my dear reader, I've found some of them:

Exempted From Sequester:  Obama's Salary & Most Of His Strawmen!

* NOT. KIDDING.

#2631. It is loathsome to eat the meat of horse and mule and donkey and if somebody makes coitus with them, that is an intercourse, they become unlawful and they must be taken out of the city and sold elsewhere. 

#2632. If they have intercourse with a cow and sheep and camel their urine and dung becomes unclean and drinking their milk will also be unlawful and they must be killed and burned without delay, and the person who had intercourse with them must pay money to the owner. Further, if he had intercourse with any beast its milk becomes unlawful.

If you bonk your mule, you’ve gotta take him out the city and sell him.

If you shag your neighbour’s sheep, you’ve gotta write him a cheque.

That’s not me, that's not some compiler of some discredited anthology, that’s the Grand Poopah himself!  The One!  The Only!  The Ayatollah Khomeini!

**  Return to Almora

As the UN's climate change chief, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, who co-won the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Jazeera Gore, has spent his career writing only the driest of academic articles. But the latest offering from the chairman of the UN’s climate change panel is an altogether racier tome.

Some might even suggest Dr Pachauri’s first novel is frankly smutty.

Return to Almora, published in Dr Pachauri’s native India earlier this month, tells the story of Sanjay Nath, an academic in his 60s reminiscing on his "spiritual journey" through India, Peru and the US.

On the way he encounters, among others, Shirley MacLaine, the actress, who appears as a character in the book. While relations between Sanjay and MacLaine remain platonic, he enjoys sex – A Lot Of Sex – WITH A LOT OF WOMEN.

In breathless prose that risks making Dr Pachauri, who will be 70 this year, a laughing stock among the serious, high-minded scientists and world leaders with whom he mixes, he details sexual encounter after sexual encounter. 

The book, which makes reference to the Kama Sutra, starts promisingly enough as it tells the story of a climate expert with a lament for the denuded mountain slopes of Nainital, in northern India, where deforestation by the timber mafia and politicians has "endangered the fragile ecosystem".

But talk of "denuding" is a clue of what is to come. 

By page 16, Sanjay is ready for his first liaison with May in a hotel room in Nainital.

"She then led him into the bedroom," writes Dr Pachauri.

"She removed her gown, slipped off her nightie and slid under the quilt on his bed... Sanjay put his arms around her and kissed her, first with quick caresses and then the kisses becoming longer and more passionate.

"May slipped his clothes off one by one, removing her lips from his for no more than a second or two.

"Afterwards she held him close. ‘Sandy, I’ve learned something for the first time today. You are absolutely superb after meditation. Why don’t we make love every time immediately after you have meditated?’."

More follows, including Sanjay and friends queuing to have sexual encounters with Sajni, an impoverished but willing local: 

"Sanjay saw a shapely dark-skinned girl lying on Vinay’s bed. He was overcome by a lust that he had never known before ... He removed his clothes and began to feel Sajni’s body, caressing her voluptuous breasts." 

Dr Pachauri writes:

"[Sadly for Sanjay] the excitement got the better of him, before he could even get started."

 

While teaching meditation to women in the US, Sanjay can once more barely contain his ardour. Again, breasts – usually heaving or else voluptuous – are thrust to the fore.

"He enjoyed the sensation of gently pushing Susan’s shoulders back a few inches, an action that served to lift her breasts even higher," writes Dr Pachauri. "He was excited by the sight of her heaving breasts, as she breathed in and out deeply."

A friend of Susan is taken to a motel by Sanjay but only after he has fondled her breasts – "which he just could not let go of" – inadvertently sounding the car horn at the same time.

Other passages in the novel involve group sex and more risqué sexual practices.

The novel was launched amid much fanfare with Bollywood stars and wealthy industrialists in attendance, a reflection of Dr Pachauri’s esteemed status in the country.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In the acknowledgement of his novel, Dr Pachauri admits to writing the book while flying around the world between meetings as IPCC chairman or else in his capacity as head of a research institute in Delhi.

But with calls for him to resign over academic blunders in the reports he presides over, some critics will question whether he should have devoted more time to scrutinising the science behind the reports.

Some will also wonder whether just a little bit of Dr Pachauri is reflected in Sanjay, although there is no suggestion Dr Pachauri has ever lusted after women quite so readily.

Both men are in their 60s, grew up in Nainital and obtained doctorates in the US. There are, of course, plenty of differences too.

Although the novel, is unlikely to win awards other than the Bad Sex in Fiction prize, it is at least to the lay reader more enjoyable than most of his other books.

Previous titles include the 1976 tome Dynamics of Electrical Energy Supply and Demand: An Economic Analysis (Praeger special studies in US economic, social and political issues.

*** The Reported U-3 v The Real U-3

		Employment Status & The Real Unemployment Rate
		Civilian Noninstitutional Population
		Civilian Labour Force	244,463	244,463
		Participation Rate	154,645	160,266
		Employed	63.50%	65.80%
		Population-ratio	143,322
		Unemployed	58.30%	58.30%
		CLF adj for growth	12,544	18,165
		Not in labour force		5,621
		U-3 Rate	88,921	94,542
		U-3 Reported Rate	8.11%
		Real U-3 Rate Adj For Pop Growth		11.80%
					PHUP

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