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: 5/5 stars
Oh, the indignities we inflict on our fellow man. Oh, the indignities we can endure.
I really need to learn more about Dwight D. Eisenhower. By all accounts, he was a remarkable man. Army General. Supreme Allied Commander. President of the United States.
Somehow, though, his words and warnings are lost on the present batch of politicians at a time when they should be most listened to. For example:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. … We pay for a single fighter plane with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
Beautiful in its simplicity. That’s from Eisenhower’s “Chance for Peace” speech. The numbers in the title of this post are the adjusted for 2013 numbers. It is amazing what this country could do for the advancement of freedom if we just sacrificed a modicum of our security.
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
Hello, I’m Ira Glass. Today on This American Life, we look into the relationships that fathers have, or don’t have, with their sons in three acts. Act one: “The Place Beyond the Pines”. Stay Tuned.
Nothing gets to the heart of the huge double standard in U.S. society between labor and business like the events of the past few weeks. First we had the Boston Marathon bombings where three people were killed and over one hundred were injured. This is obviously an act of terrorism. Then we had the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion that killed at least 15 and also injured over one hundred and also leveled a town. Was this an act of terrorism? Turns out yes it was.
As Eric Loomis points out, anyone that is stockpiling more than 400 lbs of ammonium nitrate must report the stockpile to the federal government. To not do so violates federal anti-terrorism laws. How much was West Fertilizer stockpiling at their plant? 604,000 lbs! West Fertilizer either willfully or ignorantly violated anti-terrorism laws. Shouldn’t the owners of the company be charged with acts of terrorism? They willfully stockpiled an incredibly dangerous component often used in bomb making in the middle of a small town. They did so without notifying the federal government as required by law. The ammonium nitrate blew up. More people were killed and injured than the Boston Marathon bombing. And nothing.
I guarantee you that if a farmer had 401 lbs of ammonium nitrate stockpiled in a barn for fertilizer and it accidentally blew up causing his cows to be killed, the farmer would be treated like a terrorist. And if that farmer happened to look non-white, there would be calls by Republican lawmakers to ship him to Guantanamo. Our society allows businesses to commit grave harm to society and simply pay a fine for the harm caused. That fine is often less than the profits gained from causing said harm. This has to stop.
Another lesson we should learn from this disaster is that the federal regulatory process is in complete disarray and needs to be fixed. The West Fertilizer plant was last inspected in 1985. In that inspection, many serious violations were found at the plant. The fine for these violations? $30 and no followup inspections. Remember West, Texas the next time you complain about the federal government’s “strict” regulations against business. Yes, there are regulations that seem ridiculous, but most are there to protect the people of West, Texas from companies like the West Fertilizer Company.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.