Deafening Silence

Quote of the Week

I don't always agree with David Frum, but this time he knocks it out of the park:

For most Americans, the dominant economic fact of the past 15 years has been the deteriorating market for their labor. They must work longer and harder for less pay and fewer benefits. And since the financial crisis of 2008, many have found it difficult to get work at all. Unemployment still exceeds 7 percent even as we approach the fifth anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy; nearly half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed.

Yet from the point of view of some Americans, labor remains too costly. American wages—although no longer anything like the highest in the world—remain considerably higher than elsewhere on the planet, even after adjusting for productivity differentials. People earn more than they otherwise might, just by the accident of being American.

The great unspoken question in the immigration debate is whether this “living in America” wage premium is a benefit to be cherished or a problem to be overcome. To a startling extent, political leaders agree: the wage premium is a problem—and immigration is the answer.

That point of view is seldom phrased quite so bluntly. Instead we hear concern about “labor shortages,” “skills mismatches,” and “jobs Americans won’t do.” In a market economy, however, there are no shortages. There is always a price at which supply will rise to meet demand. Sometimes that price takes the form of higher pay. Sometimes it takes the form of capital investments to reduce a job’s difficulty or danger.

What employers mean when they refer to labor shortages is “shortage at the wage we prefer to pay.” Here’s how this preference operates in the labor market. Back in the mid-1970s, meatpacking was an industry overwhelmingly characterized by native-born labor. Meatpackers earned an average of $17.41 an hour, only slightly less than the average wage in all manufacturing. (All the dollar figures I’m about to use are inflation-adjusted to 2006 purchasing power.) Over the next three decades, native-born labor in the meatpacking industry was displaced by immigrant labor, much of it illegal. Wages correspondingly collapsed. By 2006, meatpackers averaged $11.47 an hour, more than $5 less than the average manufacturing wage—which had itself declined nearly $1.25 over the same period.

What’s happened to meatpacking has happened to other occupations, both unskilled (notably janitorial) and highly skilled (software engineering).

 

I have been watching with dismay and disgust as both political parties insist on attacking American employment by either legalizing illegal labor or pumping out more and more H1B visas.  Whether you are highly-skilled or unskilled labor, you're being shafted by a political structure that caters only to the oligarchy.

It's refreshing to hear someone with a megaphone start saying what I've been thinking for years now.  It's also depressing- because it's so true, and because everyone either denies it or doesn't give a damn.

 

America The Juvenile

(Image Credit:Hollywood Reporter)

From Yesterday's Hollywood Reporter:

Marvel Studios and Disney's Iron Man 3 has blasted into the stratosphere overseas, opening to $195.3 million from 42 markets to beat last year's global blockbuster The Avengers, which debuted to $185.1 million internationally.

 Am I the only American who finds this embarrassing?

 I think back to the 1988 Tom Hanks movie Big, in which a 12-year-old makes a wish at a fairground to be turned into a adult.  If Big were made today, it would be called Small and center on a grown man wishing to be a 12-year-old.

Adult culture in this country is dying.  In it's place we've been given fairy tales with dirty words and bunny suits in super-grande sizes.

Increasingly, we aspire to nothing.

I first noticed the decay in 1990.  That was the year that compulsory school figures were officially dropped from international figure skating competitions. 

Does anyone remember school figures?  They gave the sport its name.  For generations, figure skaters were required to trace intricate figure-of-eight patterns on the ice as the ultimate test of technique and concentration. Specators were hushed.  Music was not played. Faces did not smile.

Then figure skating hit TV bigtime. First the Olympics, then other international competitions were broadcast.  Female figure skaters competed to become America's Sweetheart, jumping and twirling in dazzling, (figure-free) "long programs" accompanied by dramatic music.

Compulsory school figures did not broadcast well.  They were quiet.  Technical.  They required a deeper understanding of the sport. 

The viewing audience turned up its nose.  School figures were boooring.  They were irrelevant.  Bring on the big jumps!  Show us some pretty costumes!

And school figures were dropped.  The "short program" was developed to take their place- another opportunity to watch twirling and leaping and listen to lush music. Yay!

1990 also saw the rise of the graphic novel.  Here's the Merriam-Webster.com definition of "graphic novel":

"a fictional story that is presented in comic-strip format and presented as a book."

That's right: comic books for grownups.  Why bother trying to understand an author's metaphors and create an image in your head when you can just stare at brightly colored cartoons that explain it all for you?

Fans defend graphic novels by pointing out that they often cover dark, adult subjects.  But graphic novels do that by reducing the subject to a series of simple line drawings accompanied by short, punchy text.  Once a subject has been that simiplified, you have left adult territory.

By 2009 the New York Times had announced a new series of Graphic Books Best Seller Lists to appear alongside their venerable fiction and nonfiction Best Seller Lists.

Well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I guess.

Of course, if you would rather enjoy your graphic novel adventures without slogging through any boooring, irrelevant words, you could try another previously kids-only activity: video games.

According to a recent Christian Science Monitor article, 25% of all video gamers are over 50.  And in the United States:

The average American gamer is about 37 and has played for 12 years...This isn't something kids outgrow.

 According the article, many gamers spend up to 40 hours per week playing.  When Skyrim director Todd Howard addressed a Los Vegas convention last year, he asked the crowd:

"What can games give you that nothing else can?"

He answered the question himself:

"Pride in something you did."

 Have we really come to a place where a 37-year-old man's chief accomplishment is slaying digital dragons for 40 hours a week?  Call me an old fogey but I remember when men that age aspired to start families, build a business or take over the family farm.

Not FarmVille.  A real farm.

Have all our goals become virtual?  Maybe we should stop chiseling "rest in peace" on our gravestones in favor of something more appropriate.

How about "game over"?

Graphic novels and video games pretend to expand the imagination but in reality they stunt it.  Gamers have the illusion of choice, but they are really choosing from options pre-determined by the game designer.  Likewise, graphic novels do not "free" the imagination from having to construct of world from an author's words; they chain it to a single, pre-determined image.

It's like the old saying about giving a man a fish versus teaching him to fish.  Rely on someone else's imagination for too long and you may discover you no longer have one of your own.

 Hollywood is another enthusiastic promoter of endless adolescence.  From The Day the Movies Died, a 2011 GQ article by Mark Harris:

... the degree to which children's genres have colonized the entire movie industry goes beyond overkill. More often than not, these collectively infantilizing movies are breeding an audience—not to mention a generation of future filmmakers and studio executives—who will grow up believing that movies aimed at adults should be considered a peculiar and antique art. Like books. Or plays.

 Harris lists some of the movies in development in 2011:     

 With that in mind, let's look ahead to what's on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children's book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon.

We are training ourselves to live in a perpetually juvenile mindset: a candy-colored world populated by heroes and villains, where superpowers are required to vanquish evil.

That is no way to approach actual problems.  It's just an escape from them.

But then, actual problems are booooring.  They're irrelevant.  Bring on the dragons and skating girls!

 

If you didn't understand what I've been getting at, let Craig Ferguson explain it all for you:

 

This Fact is Not a Fact

I keep hearing some version of this sentence on all forms of national media:

After all, the last man to attack strangers with an IED in the United States was Eric Rudolph, who planted a bomb at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

This is absolutely not true.  The last known IED exploded on U.S. soil for the purpose of terrorizing/wounding random people was planted by Bruce and Joshua Turnidge in Woodburn, Oregon on December 12, 2008.

The device killed two men and maimed a third.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Other Explosion

"It don’t take nothin’ but a spark," said West, Texas resident Gary Horton.

 

With all due respect to Mr. Horton, he was wrong.  It took more than a spark to create the explosion that killed 14 and wounded close to 200 (at last count).  It took a decades-long pattern of careless community planning and lax regulatory oversight.

From a recent Reuters report:

The explosion at the privately owned West Fertilizer Co retail facility gutted a 50-unit apartment complex, demolished about 50 houses and battered a nursing home and several schools. Dozens more homes were reported damaged.

A reporter allowed into the evacuated blast zone on Sunday said the roof was torn off the apartment complex. Large chunks of concrete hurled from the plant littered the complex grounds hundreds of yards (meters) away, and a basketball court was unrecognizable except for the toppled goals, according to a pool report.

"This is like a war zone," said Brian Hoback, a national response team investigator for U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, among more than 60 federal and state personnel working at the scene.

For decades the little town of West had been allowed to build far too close to the plant, and longtime residents knew it:

Many locals like McGruder are left wondering why the plant was located in such close proximity to homes, apartments, a nursing home, and at least two schools in the first place. “It was too close,” says McGruder, 45, whose two children attend the local high school that was damaged after the blast. “Why build schools there? They knew that school shouldn’t have been there. There is so much pain in this town.”

When the plant was built in 1962, it was mostly surrounded by fields and a few small homes. But that began to change as the town grew up around it. The nursing home and the 25-unit apartment complex were constructed in the ’60s and late ’70s and were located within 150 yards of the plant. Subdivisions and homes began being built in the 1980s. The plant’s current owner, Donald Adair, bought it in 2004.

 That area now looks like this:

    

(Image Credit: Reuters)

As investigation into the cause of the explosion begins, we are now told that the West Fertilizer Co. had persistent safety violations:

The fertilizer plant that exploded on Wednesday, obliterating part of a small Texas town and killing at least 14 people, had last year been storing 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Yet a person familiar with DHS operations said the company that owns the plant, West Fertilizer, did not tell the agency about the potentially explosive fertilizer as it is required to do, leaving one of the principal regulators of ammonium nitrate - which can also be used in bomb making - unaware of any danger there.

Ammonium nitrate is the same chemical used by Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Murrah Federal Building.

"It seems this manufacturer was willfully off the grid," Rep. Bennie Thompson, (D-MS), ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement. "This facility was known to have chemicals well above the threshold amount to be regulated under the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Act (CFATS), yet we understand that DHS did not even know the plant existed until it blew up."

Reuters asked an industry safety specialist to examine the plant's records:

In response to a request from Reuters, Haywood, who has been a safety engineer for 17 years,reviewed West Fertilizer's Tier II sheets from the last six years. He said he found several items that should have triggered the attention of local emergency planning authorities - most notably the sudden appearance of a large amount of ammonium nitrate in 2012.

"As a former HAZMAT coordinator, that would have been a red flag for me," said Haywood, referring to hazardous materials.

Across America, many rural economies depend on a primary industry- fertilizer production, chemical manufacturing, or some other heavy industry.  That in itself is not bad. But when a primary employer's grip on a community is not balanced by proper safety oversight, it becomes bad.

The West, Texas explosion should not have been so deadly.  Poor municipal planning and lax regulatory oversight made it deadly.

(Image Credit: Reuters)

 

The Best Link for Boston Coverage Right Now...

...is definitely this, hands down.

If you're trying to follow events in Boston, WCVB.com'c Live Wire is the place to be.  Grounded, non-hysterical coverage by local reporters who know the area.  I've been watching them since the explosions were first announced and in comparison to other sources they're just tearing it up.

Meanwhile, the suspect's uncle Reslan is demanding that he turn himself in ("Our family grieves with all of Boston," he told reporters):

 

This is a good time to remind everyone that the actions of a few Chechens do not make all Chechens evil.  This man, and the suspect's other uncle are proud Americans and deeply ashamed of the actions of these two men.

For Boston

Oh Beautiful for heroes proved

(Image Credit)

 In liberating strife

 

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Who more than self their country loved

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And mercy more than life!

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If you want to help but don't live in Boston, please consider a donation to  the One Fund, created by Governor Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Tom Menino to help the victims.

 

 

 

If you have photos or video from the 117th Boston Marathon Yesterday...

...please contact boston@ic.fbi.gov immediately.

The FBI has set-up 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324), prompt #3, for anyone who has information, visual images, and/or details regarding the explosions along the Boston Marathon route and elsewhere. No piece of information or detail is too small.

Any images, however trivial at first glance, could help the investigation.  This includes footage of the area in the day or so before the race. 

That goofy pic you took of your cousin could have an important clue hiding in the background.

 

And to Boston:

When the rest of this country was still a wilderness, the people of Boston stood up to one of the greatest empires the world had ever known.

You got this, Boston.  And the rest of us have your back.

Your Oligarchy at Work: Breeding and Preserving the Master Race

When Susan Patton originally published this essay in the Daily Princetonian, everyone assumed she was sending an anti-feminist message.  They thought she was telling Ivy League girls to nail that MRS degree first thing, or else face spinsterhood.

Feminists everywhere howled in protest.

I experienced the screeching as background noise.  I'm a married woman decades past college and decades past dating, trying to scrounge money for a new axle boot and some medical bills. 

"Not my reality," I thought.

 This morning, while waiting for a repairman to show up and (hopefully) fix our washing machine, I found Ms. Patton's essay and read it.

I was wrong.  This essay is part of my reality- and everyone else's.  Ms. Patton might have thought she was offering dating advice to the young ladies of Princeton, but in the process she accidentally hiked up the skirts of the Oligarchy and gave the rest of us quite an eyeful.

For example:

I am the mother of two sons who are both Princetonians.

She actually says this with a straight face.  Apparently mankind has evolved beyond mere homo sapiens to a new and superior genus: Homo Princetonius. 

The superiority of this new genus is an awful burden to its females:

Smart women can’t (shouldn’t) marry men who aren’t at least their intellectual equal. As Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market. Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are. And I say again — you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you.

Of course, once you graduate, you will meet men who are your intellectual equal — just not that many of them. And, you could choose to marry a man who has other things to recommend him besides a soaring intellect. But ultimately, it will frustrate you to be with a man who just isn’t as smart as you.

I can almost hear David Attenborough's voice, can't you?  Ah, the perils of life in the jungles beyond the Princeton Preserve!  So dangerous for the breeding female.

Susan Patton assumes that there are no intellectually "worthy" people outside the Ivy League.  Women who don't choose mates there are, in her eyes, diluting the species.

But don't take my word for it.  Read Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist and Harvard graduate:

Her betrayal consists of being gauche enough to acknowledge publicly a truth that everyone who’s come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively — that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.

....................

Thus the importance, in the modern meritocratic culture, of the unacknowledged mechanisms that preserve privilege, reward the inside game, and ensure that the advantages enjoyed in one generation can be passed safely onward to the next.

..........

This article  hints at the mechanisms used to keep Ivy League campuses populated with the "right" people:

 Over the last thirty years, America’s test-prep companies have grown from almost nothing into a $5 billion annual industry, allowing the affluent to provide an admissions edge to their less able children. 

......................

 Others cut corners in a more direct fashion, as revealed in the huge SAT cheating rings recently uncovered in affluent New York suburbs, in which students were paid thousands of dollars to take SAT exams for their wealthier but dimmer classmates.⁷

Oligarchies serve their countries poorly because they function by blocking true ability in favor of promoting the "right" people.  The result, after a brief while, is an entrenced, all-powerful elite equipped with mediocre abilities at best. 

As one NYT commenter put it:

What grinds my gears is when they assume that their life of privilege qualifies them for public office.  They often think that they've worked hard to get where they are, and I'm sure many did.  But many others are blissfully unaware that doors don't swing open automatically for just anyone.  These are the people who don't understand the difference between being broke and being poor.  Ann Romney's remark that raising five boys qualified as a difficult job was a case in point.  Try doing it while working part time at Wal-Mart.

In the end, Oligarchies can't solve problems because they are too busing serving themselves.

 

 

Run. Hide. Fight.

Excellent advice from Ready Houston if you're ever caught in a mass shooting:

 

Happy Grilled Cheese Day!

It's actually National Grilled Cheese day!  I kid you not.

If you want to celebrate, I can think of no better way than to make a batch of Creamy Tomato Soup with Grilled Cheese Croutons (recipe courtesy of the Crepes of Wrath):

 

This terrific recipe calls for making grilled cheese sandwiches (they use crusty French bread and fancy cheese, but classic grilled cheese also works), then cutting the sandwiches into croutons and using them to garnish tomato soup.

And what a soup!  Make from oven-roasted fresh tomatoes and garlic and garnished fresh basil and just a hint of sage, it's very best tomato soup I've ever eaten in my life (and the only tomato soup I've ever liked.)  The addition of the grilled cheese croutons is the perfect finish.

It sounds complicated, but it's surprisingly easy to make.  Check out the recipe and go hit the market for the best fresh tomatoes and cheese!