Author Archives: Jean-Paul

Urge to Kill…Rising

It’s time to play everyone’s favorite game, “What’s pissing me off now?”  It’s the game in which I tell you what’s pissing me off now.  Hours of fun for the entire family!

I am years too late to this tragedy, but it’s worth bringing it to your attention since it was brought to mine.  The book that I’m reading, “Reamde” by Neal Stephenson, had a sentence in it mentioning the killing of American soldiers by electrocution when taking a shower.  I had never heard of such a thing and it stuck with me so to the Interwebs I went.

It turns out that faulty equipment has caused the deaths of eighteen soldiers.  Eighteen!  Who do we have to thank for this completely unnecessary tragedy?  Why, KBR of course!  Don’t remember KBR?  They are a Halliburton spin-off company that is the largest support contractor in Iraq.  You remember Halliburton, right?  That company that was run by vice president Dick Cheney?  It is really amazing that all roads of governmental evil seem to lead back to that man.

And as if KBR killing eighteen soldiers wasn’t enough, they’re also trying to weasel out of paying compensation to the families.  Even in horrible tragedies, you expect a certain amount of deniability from a company even if they are obviously to blame for the tragedy.  KBR, though, takes it to an entirely new level of evil, though.  They are trying to claim that Iraq law should be used to determine the outcome because the killing happened in an Iraqi government building.  Even though the building was under U.S. control at the time.  Why?  Because Iraq law doesn’t allow for punitive damages.  Yes, that’s right, they want to make sure that they pay the grieving families as little as possible for their mistake.

It gets better.  What does our government do to a company whose negligence resulted in the death of eighteen of our soldiers?  Why, give them an $83 million bonus, of course!

Let’s sum up, shall we?  Dick Cheney starts an unnecessary war.  Dick Cheney’s company gets more contractor work than any other company for said unnecessary war.  Dick Cheney’s company does really crappy work and this results in the electrocution deaths of eighteen of our soldiers.  Dick Cheney’s company denies responsibility but is found guilty of negligent homicide.  Dick Cheney’s company tries to have Iraqi law applied to verdict to keep payments to families to a minimum.  Dick Cheney’s company is awarded $83 million in bonuses for said shoddy work that killed people.

Yes, it might be a stretch to call KBR Dick Cheney’s company.  But it is certain that he is a shareholder and the people who run it are his friends and that he has profited massively from the war that he created.

And that’s “What’s pissing me off now?”  Thank you for playing.

Rock You Like a Hurricane

If you think Earth’s storms are getting bigger and more damaging, you may want to avoid Saturn.  It’s north pole sports a 2,000 kilometer vortex.  This is all compliments of NASA and the Cassini spacecraft.  The pictures will blow you away.

What’s weird is how the fluid dynamics of the storm end up forming a hexagon.  What’s even weirder is that this storm has existed for at least 25 years when Voyager first discovered it.  Still, it’s probably better living there than in Ohio during a Presidential election.

Does the Universe Have a Purpose?

What do you get when you cross Minute Physics and my man-crush, Neil deGrasse Tyson?  More reason than you can shake a stick at!

 

Department of Stopped Clocks

File this one under a stopped clock being right twice a day.  Pat Robertson is defending science!  In this case, agreeing that the Earth is actually billions and billions of years old.

 

While this is certainly encouraging, it doesn’t explain why his company still sells young earth educational materials.  Oh, yeah, that’s because Pat Robertson is still a massive hypocrite.  The world is as I remember it.

More Fun With Tax Policy

Ok, listen up, you masses that worship the job creators.  You know how you think that raising the tax rate on the richest people will doom our economy to another recession?  Would you be surprised if I told you that this is complete toro caca?

Well it is.

How do I know this?  Economic history.  Tax rates on top earners have varied anywhere from 25% to 93%.  There is absolutely zero correlation between low tax rates for top earners and good economic performance.  Zero.  Guess when income and capital gains taxes for the top earners were at their lowest?  Just before the Great Depression!  Guess when they were at their highest?  Between 1940 and 1965, some of the best economic times our country has ever had.

I don’t mean to imply that higher taxes on top earners leads to economic growth in the prior paragraph.  What I mean to imply is that the tax rate on those who make well in excess of what they are required to live has absolutely no bearing on how the economy performs.  We could raise taxes on top earners back to 90% and the economy could either thrive or shrink and it would have nothing to do with the fact that the taxes were raised.

We are still fighting at least one war and will be fighting many shadow wars for years to come.  The social safety net could use some mending.  The country’s infrastructure needs huge improvements.  All these things are known to be true to just about every American.  So why are we even arguing about raising the top rate a few measly percentage points?  That’s a rhetorical question, I know the answer.

Voter ID = Voter Suppression

Ever since voter ID laws became the latest craze with Republican voters, there has been a steady trickle of prominent Republican politicians who have let slip the real (and obvious) reason for voter ID laws: To allow Republicans to win seats that they normally wouldn’t be able to win.

First it was Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai claiming that voter ID laws will provide a path to victory in the state for Mitt Romney.  Now it’s two Florida Republicans.  Former Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer says that it’s state voter ID law was specifically meant to suppress Black and Latino turnout and former governor Charlie Crist echoed that voter ID only suppresses voter turnout though he doesn’t specify that it is targeted mainly at minorities.

We’ll leave aside the implicit racism of voter ID laws for now because all you get from that is a chorus of “I’m not racist!  Some of my best friends are of an oppressed minority!”  I will say this, though: If you consistently favor laws that happen to disproportionately disfavor minorities, you need to do some deep introspection because you both walk like a duck and talk like a duck so you shouldn’t get upset if people mistake you for a duck.

On the almost certain chance that you don’t think you’re racist and that in-person voter fraud is totally a thing and that it decides elections, I say learn statistics.  It is statistically impossible to win an election by in-person voter fraud.  Please note that “statistically impossible” doesn’t mean impossible, it just means that an improbable series of events would have to occur in order for in-person voter fraud to decide the election.

First, the election would have to be close.  Unless you are off-the-wall crazy and believe that organized in-person voter fraud is capable of producing more than a handful of votes here and a handful of votes there, you have to conclude that, right off the bat, 95-99% of all election decisions in any given year simply cannot be decided by in-person voter fraud.

Second, if the election is close, there is a far greater chance that the election will be decided by a counting error.  Neither machines nor people can count ballots with 100% accuracy.  Statistical models show that final tallies normally have a margin of error of between 1.8% and 2.0%.  That’s right, a close election that, by law, calls for a recount would be much better served by a flip of the coin than by a recount and would also save tax payers tons of money.

Third, “but what about the smaller local elections”, you ask?  Yes, the smaller the election, the greater the chance of fraud, but that fraud isn’t going to come from in-person fraud, it’s going to come from collusion.  You see, the smaller the election, the harder it would be to commit in-person voter fraud because it becomes much more likely you are going to be identified by poll workers as a stranger in a town where everyone knows each other.  So the only way to safely get away with it is to collude with the poll workers and voter ID laws aren’t going to stop that.

Voter ID laws are and always have been about voter suppression.  At best, they solve a non-existent problem.  At worst, they’re reminiscent of the Jim Crow era poll taxes. Please stop supporting them.

Your Privilege Is Showing

It often surprises me how out of touch most people are with the plight of the poor.  One “journalist” who stopped surprising me long ago is Megan McArdle.  She is ostensibly a business and economics reporter, but she quite often has issues with basic economic theory and even basic math sometimes.  She is at her best (read worst) when she shows just how clueless she is about the people she is covering, though.

In a recent article about the recent Black Friday Wal-Mart strike, Megan says the following:

Recessions are also a time when employers don’t necessarily have a lot of profits to give up.  Walmart’s $446 billion of revenue last year was eye-popping, but its profit margins are far from fat–between 3% to 3.5%.  If they cut that down by a percentage point–about what retailers like Costco and Macy’s have been bringing in–that would give each Walmart employee about $2850 a year, which is substantial but far from life-changing.  Further wage improvements would have to come out of the pockets of Walmart’s extremely price conscious shoppers.  Which might be difficult, given how many product categories Amazon is pushing into.

Yeah, Megan, you’re right, for you, an extra $2,850 a year is far from life-changing.  You waste more than that in a year.  For a person making $20,000 a year, though, it is huge!  You would suddenly have 14% more money than you did previously.  Who wouldn’t be thrilled with a 14% raise?  Megan McArdle, apparently.  You would have $200 extra each month.  You can pay for groceries with that.  You can not get kicked out of your apartment with that.  You can maybe start planning for a future with that instead of having to constantly worry about the present.

But, no, Megan, you continue to live in your fantasy world.  Continue believing that $2,850 wouldn’t be life altering for almost 15% of the U.S. population.  Your persistent writing with blinders on gives us bloggers plenty of fodder.  I mean, it’s not like we can all just pick on David Brooks.

Legal Question of the Day

Say that I am standing on the Illinois side of the border.  There is another man standing a little way away from me, but on the Wisconsin side of the border.  I shoot that man dead.  Who has jurisdiction?

A murder definitely occurred, but on which side of the border did the actual physical crime occur?  Is the act of firing the gun with the crime or is the result of the act the crime?  Can you separate the two?    Or is this one of those jurisdictional nightmare situations where you have two district attorneys fighting for the prestige of getting a conviction for an unusual crime and all the press that goes with it?  I certainly couldn’t be tried for murder in both states because that would violate double jeopardy.

Never a lawyer when you need one.

Being poor

My friend Eric commented in my “The poor think differently than you” post about an old post by John Scalzi titled “Being Poor“.  It’s worth reading in its entirety.  It’s hard to wrap your head around, but choice is a privilege.