Robyn – Hang with me
It must be about time for an Open Thread….Post + Comments (88)
by Sarah, Proud and Tall| 88 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Robyn – Hang with me
It must be about time for an Open Thread….Post + Comments (88)
This post is in: Open Threads
Just curious how many of you are watching them. Game of Thrones is turning out to be great, and Camelot is campy and fun, but the one that surprised me is the Borgias. I wasn’t sure I was going to like it, because I find so many of the characters lacking. I don’t like either of the sons, either the Cardinal who really should stop trying to grow facial hair or the younger commander of the Papal guard. What has made the show for me, though is Lucrezia and King Charles. The fellow playing the King, Michel Muller, is just great. For some reason, I think he steals every scene.
by Kay| 51 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
We looked at this report briefly last week (pdf). I’ve had a chance since to read it. If you’re up for it, and want to know what happened, it’s a solid piece of work.
The narrative section is framed around the testimony of friends and family of one of the miners who didn’t get out in time. That’s important because one of the questions is who knew what, when, in terms of unusually dangerous working conditions (within a mine environment, so taking into account that this work has the potential to be dangerous, always).
But, that section (first 20 or so pages) is also very personal to that (named) miner and should be read in context to do the miner and his friends and family who were willing to talk to investigators justice, so I won’t pull out quotes.
What jumped out at me, as someone who knows nothing about mining, is how often the witnesses use the word “air”. “Air”, here, has specific technical meanings in mining. They move it from place to place, they measure it, they know how it changes when traveling over or displaced by water, so it’s unremarkable that they would use the word all the time. This is what they do for a living. But they also use the ordinary meaning that’s familiar to all of us. The fact that they need “enough air” and are constantly aware of that comes through very powerfully, and that’s what makes the narrative of the events difficult and sad to read.
The events are presented from the view of the people in the mine. That sole persepective wasn’t the preference of the investigators, or the state of West Virginia. Management and others were subpoenaed, and chose not to speak:
The Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from requiring a person to be a witness against himself involuntarily or to furnish evidence against himself. The following individuals, when they were subpoenaed by the State of West Virginia, through their attorneys invoked their Fifth Amendment rights and declined to be interviewed by investigators
I pulled the following section out because it goes to the specific disincentives to safety the company put in place that contributed, over time, to increasing the risk of a disaster.
Intimidation of workers. There is ample evidence through testimony that miners were discouraged from stopping production for safety reasons. Workers said that those who questioned safety conditions were told to get on with production.
In another instance, Tailgate 22 foreman Brian “Hammer” Collins described what happened when he stopped his crew from running coal because he found inadequate ventilation when he did his pre-shift exam. Collins didn’t allow any work to start on his section until the ventilation problems were resolved – a process that took about an hour. When he came to work the next day, he said Performance Coal Vice President Jason Whitehead suspended him for three days for “poor work performance.” Collins stood his ground. “I am hard-headed…I said, ‘No, if I ain’t got the air in my last open break I cannot load coal”.
Enhanced Employment Agreements. The company also used “enhanced employment agreements” to discourage workers from complaining about safety concerns or working conditions. Under terms of the agreements, the company offered pay increases, bonuses and guaranteed employment in exchange for employees’ agreeing to work for a three-year period. However, by accepting the company’s terms, the miners became “at will” workers. If they left voluntarily or if their employment was terminated “for lack of performance as determined by management, unacceptable conduct … or a serious safety infraction,” the miners had to return the “enhanced pay” and all of the bonuses received under the contract. They also could not work at any competitor’s coal mine within a 90-mile radius of the mine where they had worked.
The enhanced pay is subject to statutory deductions and withholdings, including state and federal income taxes, and Social Security and Medicare. Even if an employee banked 100 percent of the enhanced pay, he would not have enough to buy out his contract because the net take-home pay from the bonus would always be less than the gross amount of the enhanced pay he is obligated to pay back. The miner would have to delve into personal savings to make up the difference or face being sued and having to pay a financial penalty. In effect, the enhanced employment agreement effectively handcuffs the employee.
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Dog Blogging, Open Threads, Pet Rescue
From commentor Ron L, mid-December 2010:
I share my home with the Shepherd sisters, Troi and Crusher. They are pushing 14. I also have Pearl, our diabetic, geriatric cat. Our youngest dog is Felony, the pit-bull, who is a spry 10 year old. In June, Felony was diagnosed with lymphoma. She is doing very well but her future is uncertain. She wasn’t able to tolerate chemo and we almost lost her in August. Every day since then has been a blessing and a pleasure. My goal for Felony is that she never has another bad day and I think that I can manage that. We have her on doggy hospice care.
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My days revolve around the needs of my aging pets. Medications, seperate walks for every dog, twice daily injections of insulin for Pearl. Crusher, the larger shepherd girl, no longer climbs stairs so if we linger too long in the morning we are treated to the “I’m lonely” barks. Frequently, we are awakened by barks to go in or out. She also barks if she’s silly enough to fall asleep on the hardwood floor instead of the multiple dog beds and carpet runners provided for her. She has trouble rising up from the hardwood and we have to go downstairs and grab her butt and help her up. She sometimes looks a little apologetic about this but mostly she just looks entitled.
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Troi and Crusher were acquired from the Lewis and Clark Humane society when they were about 4 months old. Pearl was the sickliest kitten in a litter found in a trailer park. Felony, the pit-bull, was a gift. When the dogs were younger, we did foster work for pit-bull rescue. We fostered seven puppies. All of whom went to good homes. There has always been a certain randomness to the acquisition of these pets. We did not plan on getting two puppies when we went to the shelter. I did not intend to bring home a pit-bull. Pearl was incredibly sickly and I didn’t want my son to choose her because I thought she was a heartbreak waiting to happen. She’s 17 or so now.
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Some days I feel like I’m living on the geriatric/oncology ward so I’ve decided to take on another specialty, pediatrics. I’m already up during the night. I have a petsitter who sits with the dogs while they await their walks. I have a dog centric life, I may as well bring in a new beginning to a house full of endings. Our puppy is two weeks old today and will come home at the end of January.
Monday Morning Open Thread: Old Dogs & NewPost + Comments (27)
This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights, Open Threads, Daydream Believers
Because sometimes you have to either laugh or scream, and laughing is easier on the vocal cords. Live long and prosper, Commander Sulu!
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Late Night Open Thread: “It’s Okay to Be Takei”Post + Comments (35)
This post is in: Open Threads
Lots of stuff I want to write about, but it is sunny outside, so some quick links instead:
1.) Good piece by Jacob Weisberg on the fantasies modern Republicans must believe.
2.) Excellent piece on Ailes and Fox and the predicament they are in.
3.) A proud moment for Obama, while Herman Cain continues to be a clown. Is Godfather’s Pizza any good? I’ve never even seen a store.
4.) Color pics from the great depression.
In other news, last night was another debacle at the Cole household. Rosie shot out of the door while I was moving a plant and ran off. I couldn’t find her, so went and got in thecar and drove around looking for her. Apparently when doing that, I left the basement door to the garage open, and when I got back I saw Tunch running off in the back yard. Down to one of three pets, I put the car away, and saw mom and my brother walking Boghan, Ellie, Ginny, Guesly, and Rosie, who apparently had gone to my parent’s house to visit. Got Rosie inside, and went after Tunch, to no avail. I left the basement garage door open, and woke up every hour on the hour to find him and let him in, but he never showed. When I was making tea this morning, I heard him chirping up a storm in the basement stairwell. He was filthy and had cobwebs and other crap all over him, but happy as hell. Guess he just needed a night on the town.
Currently we are 3/3 with pets, and I hope it stays that way.
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Daydream Believers
Not exactly hot off the pixel-press, but if you’re a fan — or an anti-fan — of K-Thug, Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ NYMag cover article on “Paul Krugman’s Lonely Crusade” is a good read:
… For the first two years of the Obama administration, Krugman has been building, in his columns and on his blog, not just a critique of this presidency but something grander and more expansively detailed, something closer to an alternate architecture for what Obamaism might be. The project has remade Krugman’s public image, as if he had spent years becoming a chemically isolate form of himself—first a moderate, then an anti-Bush partisan, and now the leading exponent of a kind of liberal purism against which the compromises of the White House might be judged. Krugman’s counterfactual Obama would have provided far more stimulus money and would have nationalized Citigroup and Bank of America. He would have written off Republicans and worked only with Democrats to fashion a health-care reform bill that included a so-called public option. The president of Krugman’s dreams would have made his singular long-term goal the preservation of the welfare state and the middle-class society it was designed to create. […] __
A few years ago, Krugman, having decided that he was going to be writing about politics and so he should know more about it, did a very Krugman thing. He didn’t talk to people who worked in Washington. Instead, he started to read the political-science literature. Krugman had never understood the press coverage of politics, which seemed to emphasize its most irrelevant aspects. Why dwell on a presidential candidate’s psychology when the trends in unemployment would tell you who would win an election? But viewed through the prism of political science, politics began to seem much more familiar to him. There was a mathematics to it—you could assemble data, draw correlations, understand what was essential and what was noise. The underlying shape of politics came sweeping into view: If you arranged members of Congress from left to right based on how they voted on welfare-state issues—Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance—it turned out that this left-to-right axis could predict every other vote: On Iraq expenditures, on abortion, whatever. “When you realize the fundamental divide in U.S. politics is just this one-dimensional thing, and that is how you feel about the welfare state,” Krugman says, “that changes things.”
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You could see something else in the data, too. From 1979 to 2004, the income of the richest one percent of Americans grew by 176 percent, that of the richest one fifth of the country by 69 percent, and that of everyone else by less than 25 percent. Working through the numbers, Krugman came to believe that “only a fraction” of the change was compelled by global forces, which had been the standard explanation. The rest, he concluded, was political.
Krugman’s detractors, foremost among them Larry Summers, are given plenty of space to explain his shortcomings. Of course, if you are like me, and consider Larry Summers the IQ-enhanced version of William Kristol, this is only going to reinforce a certain prejudice about judging an individual by the quality of his enemies…
Sunday Reading: “What’s Left of the Left”Post + Comments (102)