Monthly Archives: April 2013

Get A Job You F@#$ Slop Is All He Replied

There has been much gnashing of teeth over the recent NPR stories about disability insurance.  It is well worth the read.  This is an issue that I’m both glad people are starting to pay attention to and scared because people are starting to pay attention to it.

Here is how it goes for those of you just tuning in.  The economy of the United States has been progressively changing for 30 years now.  Manufacturing jobs are leaving and only partially being replaced by lower paying service jobs.  There are no jobs for these people.  They are poorly educated and, often, too old to get trained for a new economy job.  They got their unemployment checks for as long as they could and then went on welfare.

All of this was happening at a time when Republicans decided that people on welfare were a pox on the society that their wealthy masters helped create.  So, with the help of Bill Clinton, they passed a massive welfare reform law that was incredibly successful at reducing the number of people on welfare.  It’s main driver was forcing the states to carry a larger burden of the welfare pot.  Before, the federal government would pick up most of the tab.  Now, not so much.  The only problem is it didn’t reduce the welfare roles the way everyone thinks it did.  It was supposed to be a “back to work” bill, but many of the people on welfare were completely unemployable in the new economy.

States had an easy choice to make.  They could either continue to pay money for welfare or they could funnel as many people as possible onto disability insurance.  Disability insurance is 100% covered by the federal government.  Can you guess which one they chose?  Congratulations, you have basic reasoning skills.

So, millions of Americans lost their jobs, couldn’t find new ones, went on unemployment, went on welfare, and are now on permanent disability.  Many of these people have disabilities that most of us would laugh at.  The most common being chronic back pain.  Millions of other Americans work every day of their life with back pain, why don’t they get disability too?  Well, mostly because they can find a job that allows them to sit down.  There’s not much call for an employee with little education who needs to sit behind a desk all day.  There’s not much an employee with little education can do sitting behind a desk all day.  So onto disability they go.

Welcome to the new Invisible America.

As you can imagine, this system has all sorts of perverse outcomes.  Families now depend on that disability income in order to survive and it pays about minimum wage.  If you were given the choice between working a full time minimum wage job where you were constantly in pain or collecting disability, which would you choose?  It turns out that millions of Americans were more than willing to work through a good deal of pain working at a job that put them well into the middle class, but not so much when doing so puts you into the lower class.  Can you blame them?

Of course the $260,000,000,000 (that’s how much disability costs the government each year now) question is what to do with these people.  And this is where my trepidation begins.  I fear that calling attention to this issue will make it more likely to be welfare reform all over again.  Only this time, there will be no fallback.  The result being millions of unemployable people with no lifeline relegated to the streets.

At the same time, though, keeping so many people on disability is untenable.  The disability pot is currently scheduled to run out of money in 2016, right when Obama is leaving office.  Obviously, something needs to be done well before that.  But what?

I wish I had answers.  I don’t know enough about the needs of these Americans to comment intelligently.  That, of course, won’t stop me from commenting anyway.

This sounds like a great opportunity to start a massive retraining effort.  Instead of sending these people back to vocational training, though, we should really just send them back to regular school and pay them what they’re getting right now to go.  As long as they put in the effort to go to school, they get the money.  They could do this for the rest of their lives if they so choose.  Hopefully, though, they would progress to such a point that they could then get jobs that pay more than they are being given by the government.

Yes, this is very pie-in-the-sky.  But it’s something.  If we had come up with something along the lines of this instead of “welfare reform”, we’d likely be in a much better position than we find ourselves now.

This Is What Happens When You Put Your Faith In One Man

Dan Piraro, author of the comic Bizarro, wrote a mildly amusing comic of two birds, one of them a cardinal wearing the Pope’s mitre and the other bird exclaiming to the cardinal, “You wish!”

Like I said, mildly amusing.  But he also writes a blog to go along with the comic.  And it is devastating in its succinctness.  Money quote:

Millions of people all over the world are so dedicated to the belief that this one man, elected by other men, is divinely ordained by GOD that they will do anything he says, no matter how foolish or dangerous. The most conspicuous of these dangerous edicts is the condemnation of birth control and condoms. If but one man in a very fancy dress said it was okay to use birth control, millions of babies each year would not be born into poverty and subsequently die of malnutrition and disease. If he encouraged the use of condoms, untold numbers of people would be protected from AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, thus avoiding the suffering and death of millions more. These facts are undeniable and serve to illustrate in gory detail how dangerous the human inclination toward superstition can be.

Ouch.  Dan’s not the first to express such a sentiment, but he does so better than most.  Of course, people like Dan aren’t going to change the Pope’s mind.  I doubt anything would.  Religion’s control of an individual’s sexual identity is its main weapon in controlling the individual.  If you’re told that your natural thoughts are impure, you’ll inevitably believe that you’re impure.  If you believe you’re impure, you’ll believe you need the church.  If you believe you need the church, you’ll give them your money.  If you give them your money, they’ll spread their control to others.  And the vicious circle continues.

Movie Review: G.I. Joe: Retaliation

Ratings for reviews will appear above the fold, while the review itself will appear below the fold to avoid spoilers for anyone that wants to go into it with a blank slate.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 2/5 stars

Good action.  Bad plot.  Ugly dialogue.

Continue reading →

Ken Cuccinelli Is A Very Bad Man

For those of you who don’t know who Ken Cuccinelli is, he is the current Attorney General of the state of Virginia.  He is also currently running for Governor of said state.  You will not find a more laughably socially retrograde individual running for a major state office that actually has a chance of winning.

How socially retrograde is Ken Cuccinelli?  He is fighting to keep Virginia’s anti-sodomy laws on the books.  Anti-sodomy laws were ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003’s Lawrence v. Texas ruling.  Despite that, Ken “lick a penis, go to jail” Cuccinelli fights on.

Anti-sodomy laws are notoriously just anti-gay laws or anti-prostitution laws.  Sure, in theory, they apply to both sexes, but in practice, they have rarely been used to prosecute married couples.  Because almost every married couple would be in jail otherwise.  Except, I’m sure, Ken Cuccinelli.  (Who, by the way, and I am totally not making this up goes by the nickname the Cooch.  Thought I’m sure he’d spell it different.)

Ken “only one God sanctioned hole for that to go” Cuccinelli’s anti-sodomy stance is just the tip of the crazy iceberg, though.  He’s also gone on a crusade against climate scientist Michael Mann and many others at the University of Virginia, demanding all of their e-mails in an obvious attempt to dig up dirt on the scientists.  All this despite the fact that Michael Mann’s data and conclusions had already been proven multiple times to have been honestly come by.

On top of that, he’s pretty boilerplate far Right Republican.  Life begins at conception.  Abstinence-only sex education.  Immigrants bad.  Homosexuality bad.  Taxes bad.  Guns good.  He even flirted with birtherism for a while.  And, proving that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, he’s very anti-eminent domain when government takes property and then gives it over to private businesses.

The beautiful (or horrible, depending on how things turn out) thing about Ken Cuccinelli’s run for governor is that it’s going to be the only real race that anyone’s going to be watching in this off year election.  That means all the Cuccinelli crazy will be front and center for the whole country to see.  He will be the man that Republicans put front and center at a time when they’re desperately trying to change their image.  Good luck with that.

RIP Roger Ebert

NPR is reporting that Roger Ebert has died.  He just recently announced that he was diagnosed with cancer again.  I don’t know how I missed him, but he most certainly deserved to be on my ‘people who I would want in my neighborhood‘ list.  He has been added posthumously.  He was a great writer and by all accounts a wonderful soul.  His writing certainly has inspired mine.  He will be missed.

Quit Sneezing, You Pervert

So, it turns out that there is a small section of the population that will sneeze when aroused.  Also, the sinuses contain erectile tissue.  I’m pretty sure that this means that people with sinus problems are just sexually repressed and instead of saying “bless you” or “gesundheit”, we should actually be saying “pervert!”

Fanatical Religious Nutjob Of The Day

The lunatics are in control of the asylum over in North Carolina.  Two Republican lawmakers are pushing a resolution declaring that the state/county/city has the authority to establish an official religion and write religious laws.  Clearly, these two are crypto-islamo-fascist Muslims hoping to stealthily bring Sharia Law to North Carolina.  They must be stopped!

Their laughable claim is that the U.S. Constitution only prevents the establishment of a national religion.  Smaller municipalities are free to do as they please in this regard.  I guess that means states can restrict speech as much as they want as well.  And your county can restrict who you choose to associate with.  And your city can prevent you from petitioning the government.

This whole affair stems from a lawsuit filed against a county that starts their commissioners meeting with a prayer.  They filed the resolution to show their solidarity with the commissioners.  There are many of these lawsuits being filed across the country.  The basic argument is that saying a Christian prayer at the beginning of a governmental meeting is establishing a religion and goes against the First Amendment.  Most of the lawsuits are fought against vigorously by the local governmental body being sued.

Thanks to these two bumbling lawmakers, though, this is the first one that has hit the national spotlight.  And it really gets to the heart of why the prayers are illegal and that fighting the lawsuits is a colossal waste of taxpayer money.  They are all but admitting that the prayer is similar to establishing a religion.  And there is plenty of precedent showing that the establishment of a religion is illegal no matter how far down the governmental ladder you go.  Way to shoot yourselves in the foot, North Carolina.

All Hurricane Names Should Begin With The Letter ‘J’

Almost every decision we make is determined, in part, by our cognitive biases.  The smart person makes sure that, to the best of their ability, those biases are consciously and honestly analyzed whenever making a decision.  It is a shame that we do not learn about known cognitive biases in school at a young age.

That’s all well and good, but how do you defend against biases that are almost impossible to recognize?  Take charitable giving, for example.  It turns out that people are much more likely to donate money to disaster relief efforts for hurricanes when the first letter of the hurricane name matches our own.  Mind blown.

The beautiful thing about cognitive biases, though, is that we all have them and, thus, can manipulate people using them. (Oh, wait, no, that’s the horrible thing about them.)  This is why I am proposing that all hurricanes start with the letter ‘J’.  ‘J’ is the most common first letter for names in America.  This should allow for the maximum of charitable giving to occur.  At least until everyone whose name begins with ‘J’ ends up bankrupt because of all of their charitable giving.  Then we can move on the hurricanes that begin with ‘M’.

When technology progresses to a point when information from the interwebs is directly fed into our brains, I propose that hurricane names be tailored to the individual.  Any news we consume about the hurricane will automatically fill in our name for the hurricane name.  Donations will pour in faster than water from the broken levees caused by hurricane <insert your name here>!

How Effed Up Is Healthcare In The United States?

It is absolutely appalling how much we spend for healthcare in the United States.  What’s even more appalling is that we have absolutely no idea how much we’re going to spend for even basic health services.  It can vary wildly from place to place.  Quick, how much do you think an angiogram will cost you?  If you answered anywhere between $173 and $2,740, you’d be right!  But why the huge disparity and why do we pay so much more for healthcare than other countries.  Well, the disparity has to do with how health insurance pays for healthcare.  Each individual health group bargains with each individual health insurance company to get the best rate.  Two people sleeping in the same hospital room for the same procedure are likely not paying the same price.  As for the reason why we pay so much more than other countries, that’s easy.  Other countries restrict costs and we don’t.

You might want to argue that the United States pays vastly more because we have better health outcomes.  The only problem with that is we don’t.  We don’t even come close to the best health outcomes in almost every category you can imagine.