Author Archives: Jean-Paul

Why Are These Criminals Not In Jail?

Most of you have probably forgotten about the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 oil workers.  If you haven’t forgotten about it, you likely think that it’s a thing of the past.  The oil was cleaned up.  People were paid for their hardship.  The ecosystem has recovered.  Wipe off your hands, pat yourself on the back, get back to business.

Yeah, not so much.

Would it surprise you to know that BP executives lied to Congress about how much oil was spilled from the disaster?  Would it surprise you to know that BP plead guilty to lying to Congress?  Would it surprise you to learn that BP was warned that the dispersants used to hide the oil spill from the public was known to cause serious health issues in humans and BP ignored and hid those warnings?  Would it surprise you to learn that hundreds, if not thousands, of humans who helped in the clean up now suffer major health complications likely caused by the use of the dispersants?

Would it surprise you to learn that no one has gone to jail for these crimes?  Me either.

Movie Review: 42

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: 3/5 stars

A mediocre movie about a monumental man.

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Mysteries Of Manhood

Why do men spit in the urinal before, during, or after urinating in said urinal?  I’d say the incidence of occurrence is close to 50%.  There has to be some psychological reason for this.  I am at a loss to explain it, though.  Any insights?  Is there a female equivalent?  These are the burning questions that need to be answered.

Mama Mia, Antonin Scalia!

Justice Antonin Scalia is allowed out in public.  I would say this is a good thing if the words he used in public were able to be used against him to get him kicked off the Supreme Court.  Alas, they are not.

This time, Justice Scalia is praising the virtues of the very long history of women being excluded from jobs like CEO and such.  Always looking for a silver lining in a bad situation, Justice Scalia exclaimed:

Every cloud has a silver lining, and one of the benefits of the exclusion of women from most professions was that we had wonderful teachers, especially the women who today would probably be CEOs.

Tune in next week when we’ll hear Justice Scalia say:

  • One of the benefits of slavery was the blacks were able to learn a really good work ethic.
  • One of the benefits of smallpox blankets was the indians were able to develop an immunity to the virus.
  • One of the benefits of lynchings was the blacks moved to better paying jobs in the north.
  • One of the benefits of rape is the woman learns what bad sex feels like.
  • One of the benefits of me opening my mouth is that everybody can see what a dick I am.

 

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.

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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.