We’re really a disgraceful group of people:
Ramen noodles are overtaking tobacco as the most popular currency in US prisons, according a new study released on Monday.
A new report by Michael Gibson-Light, a doctoral candidate in the University of Arizona’s school of sociology, found the decline in quality and quantity of food available in prisons due to cost-cutting has made ramen noodles
“[Ramen] is easy to get and it’s high in calories,” Gibson-Light said. “A lot of them, they spend their days working and exercising and they don’t have enough energy to do these things. From there it became more a story, why ramen in particular.”
Gibson-Light interviewed close to 60 inmates over the course of a year at one state prison as part of a wider study on prison labor. He did not identify the prison to protect the confidentiality of the inmates.
He found that the instant soup has surpassed tobacco as the most prized currency at the prison. He also analyzed other nationwide investigations that he says found a trend towards using ramen noodles in exchanges.
“One way or another, everything in prison is about money,” one soft-spoken prisoner named Rogers said in the report. “Soup is money in here. It’s sad but true.”
Ramen noodles have long been known to be a popular dish in prisons. Gustavo “Goose” Alvarez, who spent more than a decade incarcerated on a weapons charge, wrote a book on its popularity, Prison Ramen: Recipes and Stories From Behind Bars.
He was inspired to write the book after a race riot in 2009 led to a standoff between a group of Hispanic and African American inmates. An older inmate quelled the dispute and the two groups resolved the tensions by cooking a feast together, largely with ramen noodles.
The book, released last year, includes several recipes such as Ramen Tamale, using Doritos, canned pork and beans, and ramen. It recommends mixing strawberry jelly with soy sauce to make teriyaki, to go with Cheesy Meat Tacos. The book also includes the favorite ramen recipes of celebrities such as Shia LeBeouf and Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash.
The study paints a bleak picture of the state of food available at the prison. Gibson-Light found that black-market food became more valuable after control over food preparation switched from one private firm to another in the early 2000s.
“That change was part of a cost-cutting measure,” Gibson-Light said. “With that change that resulted in a reduction in the quantity of the food the inmates were receiving.”
Inmates at the prison Gibson-Light studied went from receiving three hot meals a day to two hot meals and one cold lunch during the week, and only two meals for the whole day on the weekend.
The phenomenon is described by Gibson-Light as “punitive frugality”. Spending on corrections has not kept pace with the number of inmates in prisons since 1982, the report found.
The reasons for this are twofold:
1.) Instead of creating good jobs in cafeterias in prison for both civilians and give the prisoners an opportunity to learn a skill, we’re happier to heap profits on the investor class who have found prisons can be a gold mine with little oversight.
2.) Because most people, when told this, will shrug and basically say “fuck them, they’re prisoners.” These same people will then bitch about repeat offenders who, after being treated like an animal for ten years are released and commit another crime, because we didn’t spend any time or money educating them, dealing with their mental illnesses, teach them a trade, and generally just shit on them for a decade. So now they are worse than what they were when they went in.
I actually talked about this several years ago with someone, and they straight up said “Hell, they eat better than my kids do at school,” and all I could think was “Wow, if you’re ok with that you’re a pretty shitty parent.” That person is no longer in my life.
But that’s who we are as a country. Greatest country in the world, amirite?
Rosalita
It can’t happen quickly enough, but at least Justice is getting away from for-profit prisons.
Kryptik
I hope someone pointed out the fact that there’s a difference between that kind of food handling once a day, 5 days a week is a bit different from that kind of food handling 2-3 times a day, 7 days a week. Not to mention that school lunches are optional, compared to prisoners who essentially have no recourse unless they want an involuntary hunger strike.
rikyrah
Tell the truth, Cole.
I shook my head reading about this in the Morning Open Thread
Shell
Better food=Better behavior. Not so farfetched?
jamesjhare
If enough Republican legislators had family members in prison this would get fixed lickety-split.
schrodinger's cat
You can thank Reagan and his team for putting the interests of investors (rentiers, not people with retirement accounts) above all other stakeholders (workers, consumers, the common good etc.) Milton Friedman is purring like a basement cat somewhere.
Kryptik
@Shell:
Unfortunately, most people don’t want better behavior to come out of prisons. They just want to grind a boot down on ‘criminals’. Forget the self-fulfilling cycle of recidivism that kind of mindset helps create, it’s all about punishing those who ‘deserve’ punishment.
Mnemosyne
I don’t think any of the front-pagers have addressed this yet, but the DOJ announced last week that they will be phasing out the use of private prisons, which is yet another reason to work for Hillary’s election in November.
We have kind of a weird situation in California where we use prisoners to help fight our wildfires. IMO, it’s kind of a gray area because they’re all volunteers who actually learn some job skills (something that is VERY lacking in all of our prison systems), but it’s disturbing to know that I as a taxpayer am paying these guys $2 a day to risk their lives on my behalf. That doesn’t sit well even if they are volunteers.
? Martin
We have a remarkable capacity to dehumanize our fellow citizens.
Raven Onthill
And don’t forget the yuge incarceration rates of the USA. That is probably the biggest factor, right there. If the USA wasn’t so quick to incarcerate so many, it would be far easier to run a humane prison system, if this is possible at all.
lamh36
On the same subject…
Private prisons are shrouded in secrecy. I took a job as a guard to get inside—then things got crazy via @MotherJones
Roger Moore
And the answer is to make prisoners eat worse, not to spend the money to let the kids eat better. “Conservative” thinking in a nutshell.
Marmot
This is one of those times when I can’t imagine you as a Repub, John. Out of curiosity, what would you have said?
I would probably have said “fuck them,” but it’s been so long that I really don’t know how I would have reacted.
Roger Moore
@jamesjhare:
Better solution.
zanamu
It is the same argument we have against investing in education, highways, power grids – 1. we don’t reward legislators for vision. They only get elected for cutting taxes, not building useful stuff that we need. 2. We want to monetize everything, because Neoliberalism! and 3. If you are in prison, you are undeserving of ever being granted humanity ever again, which is why we don’t train/treat inmates, and why they lose their citizenship privileges forever in many states. Even once their sentences are served, they can’t vote, or even get jobs because they are bad. bad. very bad. So we punish them forever, even those whose only crimes were against themselves. So, yeah, we are awful people.
? Martin
@Roger Moore: Conservatism is a politics of loss and revenge.
Trump is just the distilled version of it.
gvg
I agree with all the points about the prison system and want to point out that various programs here in Florida send some kids home with weekend backpacks of food disguised so fellow students don’t know. In the summer, the elementary schools feed any kid under 16 who shows up. I think it’s privately funded but I am not sure however we don’t treat our kids well either. In some cases the schools think the parents actually could pay but evidently aren’t so teachers do something…that is a problem with paperwork to apply and thats why they try to make it no application.
Back to how do we change peoples attitude about prisoners. Citizens mostly don’t care. IMO everyone has been taught to be afraid, it’s more pervasive than racism without an effective advocacy. people haven’t even thought that it might be wrong to be that afraid, to assume they are all hopeless bad people.
Mike in NC
“Orange is the New Black” has covered for-profit prison issues, ranging from shitty food to lack of training opportunities.
eric
@jamesjhare: give them time…….
schrodinger's cat
I have read that the deportee prisons are much worse. Egregious considering visa violations are not a criminal offense.
pamelabrown53
@Mike in NC: #18
Mike, I was just about to bring up that “Orange…” storyline. Prior to the prison’s privatization different prison groups vied for supremacy in the prison kitchen. What they had in common was pride in cooking good meals (while doling out favors to their own group). What the show emphasized was, after privatization, the food became horrendous slop.
Glad you brought it up.
Mike J
Both sides do it.
pamelabrown53
@schrodinger’s cat: #20
Do you have any links that could direct us to one of your favorite articles?
Thanks, shrodinger’s!
catclub
@Shell:
I think the theory is fewer calories, less energy to raise hell. [Also cheaper.] Not sure if it even works. Maybe they should see if Dr Mengele had any papers on the subject.
Droppy
You can measure whether a civilization is good or bad by the way it treats 1) its children; 2) its elderly; 3) its poor; 4) its mentally- and physically-challenged; and 5) its prisoners. I’m not sure if there is a particularly good civilization (I’d bet somewhere in Scandinavia) but ours doesn’t make the cut.
pseudonymous in nc
@Kryptik:
It’s the welfare system that white Americans are willing to pay for — especially if it provides government jobs in small depressed white cities, which is where you’ll find a lot of state prisons — as long as it’s shitty and destroys black and brown lives.
…though I will add that NC’s state prisons actually run educational outreach with local community colleges to train up kitchen workers, because the restaurant industry tends not to discriminate against people who have a record. So I’m sure a lot of law’n’order conservatives are getting their expensive (and expensed) lunches made by people who’ve served their time.
schrodinger's cat
Children against Federal lawyers in immigration courts
The Pale Scot
WOW
catclub
@? Martin: Yes. Clinton as the candidate of optimism about the future. WaMonthly article on the optimism gap.
All of the very old and extremely rich investors have noted that long term bets against the US economy getting better have never paid off.
There was a time when the long term pessimists were liberals worrying about overpopulation. I still worry about it but might as well be optimistic.
schrodinger's cat
Private companies still run immigration detention centers.
Chris
@Kryptik:
This.
I remember having to research MS-13 in Central America in undergrad. Apparently, the gang grew internationally with a lot of help from “mano dura” laws passed, in part, on the insistence of the local cops’ FBI partners. Basically, American gang members that can be extradited are sent back to their home countries; their home countries hit hard and lock them up; while they’re there, they recruit a whole lot of new members of the gang; when they finally get out, they have no marketable skills and just go right back to the gang life, with that many more members.
At the time, the only nation that had made meaningful progress was Nicaragua. Not incidentally, it was also the only nation that 1) had invested seriously in rehabilitation programs and 2) didn’t have the FBI for partners.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
I think the real theory is that prison isn’t punitive enough. If we make it even more miserable and inhumane than it already is, the prisoners will learn that crime doesn’t pay and want to keep straight when they get out.
schrodinger's cat
@pamelabrown53: See #29 and # 26.
Mary G
I can hear a wingnut somewhere saying that this is good because less smoking equals lower medical costs so win/win.
EBT
All private prisons should be immediately nationalized as a national security issue and the executive boards of all of them launched in to the sun.
Chris
@? Martin:
A big part of the conservative mentality consists in finding people that you can rationalize as deserving to be treated as subhumans, so that they can work all their sociopathic tendencies out on them with a clear conscience, telling themselves that it’s not sociopathy, it’s tough love and justice.
Prisoners. “Moochers.” Yada yada.
dedc79
@The Pale Scot:
Phrasing!
CONGRATULATIONS!
Reap what you sow. Someone who’s been in an institution and dealt with treatment like this will never, could never, adjust to being able to function in society. We’ve created a “criminal justice system” where every sentence is a life sentence.
Of course, I cannot rule out that such a system was designed to produce that result.
@Rosalita: Nice gesture, means almost nothing. The vast majority of “correctional facilities” in this great nation of ours are state, not federal. Those facilities are welcome to continue business as usual.
gratuitous
I had a relative go to jail for a short stretch. Tales of meal times were about the worst. Getting special needs met (vegetarian, gluten free, no nuts, etc.) was well-nigh impossible. The relative’s theory was that the diet was meant specifically to render people soporific and more docile: Lots of processed food, high in carbohydrates, no fresh fruit or vegetables at all. Meals were handed out on a rotating lazy-susan style table, when your seat reached the point where you got on, you had to vacate finished or not, and the next wave of inmates sat down. Meals were hurriedly gulped down, so any complaints simply shortened your designated meal time. You learned quickly not to do anything but bolt down your food. If the authorities didn’t deal with you for holding things up, the other inmates would.
El Caganer
@The Pale Scot: Forget Clinton. I’ve found my candidate.
Comrade Scrutinizer
Scope out confinement loaf (Nutraloaf is the nice name).
EBT
And fuck every single share holder with a switchblade too.
Chris
@? Martin:
First response got lost in FYWP:
A big part of the conservative mentality consists of finding anybody that they can rationalize as deserving to be treated as subhuman, so that they can work out their sociopathic tendencies on these people with a clear conscience and think of it as tough love, justice, wev.
Hence, prisoners (they must be punished harshly for what they’ve done), people on welfare (they must be given motivation to stop being lazy and get a job), “moral transgressors” like pregnant women who want to have an abortion (they have to live with the consequences of their actions so they’ll stop being sluts).
Peale
@Kryptik: Well, we don’t actually get better behavior in our prisons. The point of our prisons I think is to create race based gangs which can be exported via a deportation to central America so that we can then castigate immigrants from those countries when their populations have enough US gang infiltration and ship their children north for safety.
shomi
With all the other shit, worrying about the food in prisons is pretty far down the priority list.
Didn’t the fed gov’t just announce they will no longer use private prisons? Is this related to that? It’s not clear to me if this is a private prison problem or non-private prisons contracting out the cafeteria to private suppliers. Are those private suppliers the same companies that run private prisons?
Bobby_D
It’s amazing how spot-on the series “Orange is the new Black” is WRT prison issues. They’ve hit on this issue, problems with privatization of prisons, and many others. The writers are clearly doing their research and not just knocking up scripts like is was any random drama series.
EDIT: Looks like many above said the same. Time limted on my lunch hour, can’t always read before posting.
gene108
Nope
The U.S. is the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth.
Sean Hannity, June 6, 2008
We are the pinnacle, the apex, the acme – if you will – of human civilization and what civilization has to offer.
All other countries and methods and systems and ideas are therefore inferior and can be ignored.
Roger Moore
@gratuitous:
That meal choice could just as easily be a result of trying to get the food as cheap as possible (including preparation costs) rather than any more detailed planning. Of course they could bring the preparation and ingredient costs down by having the inmates cook meals from scratch.
Bobby_D
@Mnemosyne: I’ve actually used some of those CA prisoners when they were not fighting fires. They occasionally do other things like brush clearance (I worked for a DoD installation where they cleared our stormwater channles). And they worked with our base’s fire dept on mutual aid calls to fight wildfires. Saw them build a basketball court for a redevelopment agency once too, from clearing the bare ground to laying the rebar, finishing the concrete, planting landscaping. They were hard workers and loved being outdoors instead of in the box.
Aleta
They say this is a “christian nation” ? The ‘religious right’ says there’s a war against ‘religious values’ in this country; I say they are hypocrites from hell who should be locked up in their churches.
Roger Moore
@Chris:
I don’t think that’s quite right. Conservative mentality is about dividing the world into Us and Them, and then doing everything possible to help Us, even/especially if it comes at the expense of Them. This is why Conservatives are so willing to bend over backward to justify the behavior of people they classify as Us, even when they would denounce the same behavior when coming from Them. It also explains why Conservatives can show compassion that breaks with orthodoxy if/when it affects somebody they know and care about.
Mnemosyne
@Bobby_D:
Yeah, that’s why I have mixed feelings about it — by all accounts, those prisoners really like the work and get a lot of satisfaction from it. But I still feel weird as a taxpayer knowing that they’re basically slave labor. Maybe pay them at least a minimum wage but put it into escrow pending their release?
Felonius Monk
Sounds like the real crooks aren’t in prison.
MattF
So, the next time some idiot tells a woman to ‘smile more’, tell him to read this.
Tom D
Also, you know, you can’t smoke in many jails & prisons now, thus lowering the value of tobacco as currency.
Schlemazel
Here is a different problem for the prison-industrial complex.
Prisoners making helmets for a USMC contract and they are all garbage that had to be destroyed.
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/08/18/pentagon-prison-inmates-produced-thousands-of-defective-helmets.html
sukabi
@Rosalita: on the federal level, the for profits will focus their attention on getting state, county contracts…juvenile detention centers are a thriving private market.
Tee
@Aleta: The Catholic church has a ministry devoted to prison population programs. My family has been involved since the sixties(grandparents, parents, myself). According to my Dad it has gotten worse since “outsourcing/privitising” has overtaken the system. Our youth group regularly gathers pop bottles to get refunds and donates proceeds to the ministry so they can put money in prisoners accounts who haven’t any family for food, toiletries etc. You don’t have to be Catholic to volunteer all dioceses have programs. They cover local and county jails as well.
jl
I know some people who do health care, social and educational work in prisons. They tell me that that they don’t like to admit to it, since they get all kinds of outrage about doing anything at all in the prisons from many of the good right-minded decent folk out and about in the general population. Outrage over their tax dollars being use to coddle criminals, criminals, miserable criminals, who deserve to rot.
Disappointing that so many people have such a stupid and vicious attitude.
raven
Not all works of history have something to say so directly to the present, but Heather Ann Thompson’s “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy,” which deals with racial conflict, mass incarceration, police brutality and dissembling politicians, reads like it was special-ordered for the sweltering summer of 2016.
raven
More
LeonS
@gene108: Sometimes I wonder if our prosperity from the 50s-60s, not to mention the ridiculous TV version thereof, didn’t spoil us beyond redemption. Too many of us seem like a spoiled brat who’s out back torturing frogs because they didn’t get the extra scoop of ice cream they wanted,
Bill
We live in a society where many regard rape as an appropriate punishment for whatever crime lands someone in prison. When viewed through that lens a little starvation seems just fine.
Ruviana
@shomi: Don’t know about the OP article but the private prison article Lamh36 cited cut meals to save money. The meals were meager at best and after awhile, if memory serves, they cut it down to two meals. It’s one tiny piece in an enormous problem, but healthier, better-fed prisoners could learn better, do better work, be in better health–oh wait, they cut all the training programs, eliminated the classes and closed the exercise yard. Never mind…
Johannes
@dedc79: So that’s a thing again?
cain
@Kryptik:
You can thank the gentle evangelical attitudes for that. They are all about punishment.
rikyrah
@EBT:
yep
yep
Ruviana
To further harsh your mellow, a really good article on private prisoner transport. The Marshall Project is really good on prison coverage.
wvblueguy
I have a member of my immediate family who just got out of a private prison in Georgia on Parole. I can attest to the fact that the minimum allowances on food per day is incredibly low like 1100-1200 calories per day for 3 meals. Virtually no protein and if they want breakfast the hours for same are incredibly early. To supplement prisoners can buy food items from the store once per week. The money for this account comes from deposits made by friends and family that are charged a percentage by the company that handles the deposit. The items they can buy and the inflated prices are absurd. Ramen Noodles per package can be 4 to 10 times higher in price than those in even the most expensive grocery stores. (No wonder they are used like money). Weekends and holidays are a problem because they only serve 2 meals on those days. Quarterly you can send your loved one a gift package of food that is limited by weight and price. When a prisoner is lucky enough to have a loved one or friend visit (limited to those on a very specific list submitted by the prisoner and approved by the Warden) junk food can be purchased from vending machines at severely inflated prices. Hamburgers, Philly Cheesesteaks,Wings, Chips, Rolls and Candy Bars. My family member survived with no issues and thankfully he is now out on parole. The store money is also used to pay for visits to the Dr and/or a nurse. Everybody is making a big buck somewhere. Phone calls have just come down in price because the FCC told the contractors that provide them they had to cut prices. Even then in my case I paid $2.95 for a 15 minute call and there is a handling charge on those when the time for the call is purchased. Imagine what it is like for prisoners that have no family members or friends to help support them. I rank the Prison Industrial Complex right along with the Military Industrial Complex as a bunch of really sorry bastards. As for those that say these are criminals and don’t deserve better “FUCK YOU” and pray that someone close to you doesn’t end up in this hidden God forsaken prison world we have in our nation.
gvg
I think past prison reform movements have to build up lots of aware population with lots of stories, over and over for years to hit a critical mass of voters who will elect based on it, so…..I guess that means we need to hear this alot for years. Man that’s going to be depressing.
If the base population smokes less, it may be that the prison population does too. Plus much of the anti smoking laws are taxes that make it a lot more costly.
FlyingToaster
@Aleta:
And then set the churches on fire, a la the Duc de Guise at Vassy.
Note: This is NOT aimed at the mainstream Xtian charities (as @Tee mentioned, Catholics have a prison ministry that actually tries to minister), but at the fundamentalists whose entire ministry is to help jailed white guys “find Jesus” so as to whitewash their reputations.
sunny raines
America = profits over people. Pretty damn disgusting.
Ruviana
@efgoldman: Again from the Bauer article, if I’m remembering, populations are declining in prisons generally, along with the dropping crime rate so there is space opening up in publicly operated prisons. Some prisoners will be moved there. This doesn’t solve the problems of the detention centers run by ICE and this mostly only affects Federal prisoners, but it is something of a start. Not enough by any means.
Gelfling 545
@Raven Onthill: “it would be far easier to run a humane prison system, if this is possible at all.”
The Scandinavian countries -of course- seem to do a better job & have far lower rates of recidivism.
Mary G
@FlyingToaster: We had a thrift shop in town (disclosure: I volunteer at another one) whose building’s owner raised its rent 650%, which made the charity operating it have to close, because you can’t make any money for anyone but the landlord at that rent. The owner then opened his own thrift store with labor provided by his charity. This is a “ministry” alleging to be helping people who’ve just gotten out of prison transition back to society. They bus in 20 guys to a store with work enough for six or seven, and pay them prison wages to mostly sit around for 8 hours. There is no management, much less anyone who knows about thrift shops, so the place is a mess.
Seanly
Well said, John. I have to ask – with attitudes like yours, how were you ever a Republican?
As far as the article, the prison must not be in SC because I think they get baloney sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
jl
@Gelfling 545: And Germany. I mean, the Germans run more humane prisons that produce less recidivism? The Germans?
There is some old joke that hell is where the British are the cooks, the Germans are the jail guards, the Italians are the politicians… something like that… I guess it is out of date now.
J R in WV
@Raven Onthill:
Saw a news piece on prisons in Germany – past humane to nice places that actually rehabilitate prisoners, apparently. More like a school dorm than a cell, classes every day, dorm rooms lock from the inside…
In what world is nothing healthy to eat not cruel and unusual punishment? I’m going to blame the judges as well as the crooked legislators. They could stop that shit, they have the power.
WaterGirl
@J R in WV:
Totally agree. Also, in what world is living with the constant threat of rape and violence also not cruel and unusual?
Tee
@J R in WV: There was a judge in PA who got caught getting kick backs from private jail for sending juveniles to the prison instead of probation or diversion program.
Roger Moore
@jl:
The one I heard was that the EU was supposed to get German efficiency, English charm, and French cuisine. Instead, they wound up with French efficiency, German charm, and English cuisine.
RaflW
It seems that any notion of rehabilitating people in the system is long since gone. Which is insane, except that as a society we’ve decided that prisons are a toxic mix of cost centers and profit opportunities. Minimize the former, maximize the latter, and spin the door.
An acquaintance did some hard time for a stupid deed, and recently told me he started the prison’s only AA meeting, which was once a week and that was it for any sort of dealing with addiction. He had had a long run of sobriety before he made his bad choices, so he knew he needed and wanted AA and was smart (and white and educated) and could get it past the warden.
This is just no f*king way to deal with a huge societal problem. I wonder in the age of Trump (and, no I don’t think he will win but his ability to get the nom and get this far speaks volumes) if we can even have a chance to start talking about prison reform. We’re killing ourselves as a society in so many ways, have such deep needs for real policy responses to real problems, and yet we have this insane clown show.
And the larger GOP is no better. Not at all. They’ve been against any sort of policy based, performance-measured results from government for decades. This is the decrepit end-state of their cancerous hatred of the government they seek to “lead.”
Just beating Trump will not be nearly enough. There is so damn much work to do!
J R in WV
@Tee:
Hell, that judge was convicting people who were clearly not guilty of anything. You had no way to avoid prison because the judge was getting paid piecework to convict kids and send them to the for-profit private facility jail.
Pretty sure several guys are doing/did time for that racket. I’m trying to live well and be free of hate, but greedy Republicans (or Dems!) really make that hard!
Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap
And a nation of morons:
Roger Moore
@J R in WV:
It’s harder than you think. California has been fighting judges over providing prisoners with adequate health care for years. The judges can make all the rulings they want about what’s supposed to happen, but until they actually start throwing legislators in jail for contempt, the results are going to be slow and iffy.
Gelfling 545
@Bobby_D: when I think about my former students who ended up in prison, none of them were disinclined to work hard. Some were mentally ill, a number were learning disabled so education was not going to be their ticket out of poverty – at least not the way it’s done presently. It’s just that there were really few alternatives for a kid who maybe couldn’t get a high school diploma and the money the drug & petty theft gangs were offering looked better than busting their butts for minimum wage. They would have worked, though, happily, in a number of jobs except training was not available. By the time I retired they had to practically be honor students with no disciplinary record to get into the auto mechanics program or construction program because there was so much demand & so few places available.
r€nato
@jl: pretty close. There’s variations on it, but the one I am familiar with is:
“In Heaven the police are British, the cooks are Italians, the lovers are French, the mechanics are German and it’s all run by the Swiss.
“In Hell the police are German, the cooks are British, the lovers are Swiss, the mechanics are French, and it’s all run by the Italians.”
The DPRK version of it is: “In Heaven the police are North Korean, the cooks are North Korean, the lovers are North Korean, the mechanics are North Korean, and it’s all run by Dear Leader who created everything.”
SiubhanDuinne
@lamh36:
Way O/T, but what news from your sister? Do you have another niece yet?
lamh36
@SiubhanDuinne: hey…still waiting for baby Layla…she won’t be leaving the hospital…they said in the next 24 hours baby LayLay will be here
jl
@r€nato: Been a long time, but that is close to what I heard last time the joke came my way, years ago.
Just heard on the news that The Trump cancelled his big speech on immigration. Guess that part of the ‘pivot’ to the center is not going too well.
Becoming clearer that even Trump knows his plan is crazy and unworkable, besides being immoral, and perhaps an indictable international human rights crime (edit: though whether Trump understands or cares about the latter part is debatable). He just told his fanatics who are slobbering for a couple of indictable international human rights crimes, and maybe the main reason they like Trump that he would never lie to them. But from news reports, has become clear from what Trump says in private meetings, that is just what he has been doing to them: lying about bad stuff he will do to get their votes, but has no intention of following through on (just like the big bad corrupt GOP establishment).
Trump is a walking poltical disaster from every angle.
Eric U.
@efgoldman: I worked with a faculty member that said we should encourage smoking so that social security would be better funded. Of course, it costs us much more in medicare/medicaid, so that’s just stupid as well as evil. He was a wingnut before I even recognized that such a thing existed. I’m sure he’s a real mess nowadays, he retired very young.
Roger Moore
@Gelfling 545:
Another potential advantage of having the minimum wage be a living wage.
Major Major Major Major
@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: Those words make very little sense. Wow.
Major Major Major Major
@efgoldman: In their defense, it would save boatloads on entitlements.
shomi
I see the right wing echo chamber is trying to make something out of Obama’s response to Lousiana by comparing it to Dubya’s Katrina response. Showing pictures of Obama riding a golf cart and whatever….lol. Just goes to show how badly G Dubya the Texas sized dummy screwed up that they are still trying to defend him after all these years
SiubhanDuinne
@lamh36:
YayYay for LayLay!! I’ll bet Zoë is excited about getting a new cousin :-)
Major Major Major Major
@shomi: With all the other shit, worrying about the predictable right-wing ‘Obama sux’ outrage of the day is pretty far down the priority list.
Eric U.
@Major Major Major Major: no, it really takes a lot of smokers a long time to die, and cancer is very expensive. I’m pretty sure that smoking, obesity, and guns all hold significant hidden costs for us taxpayers even though they might lower life expectancy.
@Tee: when they finally got rid of the judge that was selling kids, they had a big backlog, so they took one of our judges from Centre county to help. Not that I have much experience, but he was the only judge that I have had personal dealings with that I thought was a moron, so it was a win-win as far as I was concerned.
Trollhattan
That Mother Jones article is riveting. All the adventure you ever wanted and nine bucks an hour to boot. Winning!
Major Major Major Major
@Eric U.: Dying from smoking-related complications is a hell of a lot cheaper than living long enough to catch one of the really expensive diseases. Everybody dies of something. Smokers in general die sooner and from things that have been researched to (ha ha) death so the treatments we DO attempt are relatively cheap.
I think most smoking-related death is heart failure anyway, which is quite cheap since you just sort of tip over.
sad
That ain’t me goddammit.
Properly identify your fuckken target.
Asshole.
jl
@Major Major Major Major: smoking related cancer, COPD, heart attack and stroke in mid 50s through 60s, when you are strong enough to withstand expensive and horrible treatments is pretty expensive, and live to see expensive follow-ups like heart failure, is pretty damn expensive.
singfoom
Hmm, another industry where privatizing the profits and socializing the losses has predictable results. Is there nothing that financialization can’t ruin?
Major Major Major Major
@jl: That’s not what the studies I’ve encountered say, but ok.
Roger Moore
@jl:
And another appearance the next day. Internet speculation is that he lacks the stamina to keep up.
Berto
Yet another reason to prosecute banker and Wall Street fraud, which crashed the world’s economy.
Once you start imprisoning the rich, prisons will quickly become safer and more humane.
jl
@Major Major Major Major: Would like a reference to some of the studies you’ve read. It the most comprehensive estimate of lifetime expenditures in US due to smoking is still (though I admit it is a bit dated by now)
Cigarette smoking and lifetime medical expenditures.
Hodgson TA.
Milbank Q. 1992;70(1):81-125.
More recent study that confirms most of Hodgson’s conclusions is
Difference in lifetime medical expenditures between male smokers and non-smokers.
Health Policy. 2010 Jan;94(1):84-9
Hayashida K, Imanaka Y, Murakami G, Takahashi Y, Nagai M, Kuriyama S, Tsuji.
But is for Japan.
Villago Delenda Est
Here’s an obvious solution: take the members of the “investor class” and house them in their own prisons for a week. A small percentage of them will take the hint. The rest, leave them there to rot, forever.
J R in WV
@Berto:
But don’t you lose the ability to lobby from prison?
Roger Moore
@Berto:
Conditions will get cushier in Club Fed, but not in the typical state maximum security prison. One more way justice is not blind.
Ian
You forgot to mention this wonderful addition- we often pay farmers to not grow food. We pay people not to grow food when schools, prisons, and poor people cannot get enough nutrition to feed themselves.
Betsy
@jl: in heaven, the French do the cooking, the Italians do the the loving, the British run the police force, and the Germans do the organization.
In hell, the British do the cooking, the Germans do the loving, the French run the police force, and the Italians do the organization.
… “Canada could have enjoyed English government, French culture, and American know-how. Instead it ended up with: English know-how, got French government, and American culture.”
John Colombo …
Weaselone
@Ian: Umm. That’s actually a fairly minimal practice now. We pay farmers to grow massive excesses of food, particularly commodity crops like corn and soybeans. That’s why they constantly come up with creative new ways to use all that corn. Like replacing cane and beet sugar with corn syrup, or using it as an industrial feedstock, or using it to power our automobiles, or all those fantastic processed foods. Even so, it’s not like we have a shortage of fresh, nutritious foods at reasonable prices. We have so much, that we could essentially feed another country our size on the waste. It’s just the healthy nutritious food is not finding it’s into the hands of the people who need it, nor do these individuals necessarily have the time, skills, equipment or energy to cook from scratch, or even know what they should be eating.
Original Lee
We toured the Eastern State Penitentiary last summer. What a depressing place, and what a depressing concept for dealing with people convicted of crimes. I think at least one of the serious issues with our prison system is the lingering vestiges of the Pennsylvania and Auburn penal systems, which both assumed that criminals would reform their ways if they were made to feel really sorry for what they had done, and were limited in their contacts with other criminals. Please note that after this system became popular in Europe, many in the U.S. opposed its continued use on the ground that it was too expensive.
Tim Wayne
“and all I could think was “Wow, if you’re ok with that you’re a pretty shitty parent.” That person is no longer in my life.”
Was this said out loud? I sure hope that was said out-loud.