Board Rooms and Coal Miners

The Wyoming Star Tribune reports some surprising fun facts:

Kevin Crutchfiled, CEO alpha: Getting His

1. Coal miners make about $82,000 a year, on average. Not bad for guys who didn't finish high school.
2. When the executives and Board of Directors of Alpha Natural Resources saw net losses or no profits every year from 2011 through 2016, their response was to file for bankruptcy, to petition the court to allow them to cut paying health insurance benefits for their miners while paying themselves multi million dollar bonuses. The price of failure was paid not by the millionaire executives, who were sure to take care of themselves, but by the working stiffs in the coal mines.
From the Casper Star tribune:

But based on the average annual coal miner’s wage of $82,000, the layoffs would save the pair around $37 million in annual wages, or 84 percent of the $44 million Peabody and Arch paid their executives teams in 2014.

Alpha is seeking to cut retiree benefits for some 4,580 nonunion miners and their spouses. That move is expected to save $3 million annually, or about 14 percent of the $20.8 million Alpha paid its management in 2014.

When Bernie Sanders talks about a rigged system, the coal miners don't need an explanation of what that means. What a rigged system means is the board of directors can, legally, rape their own companies, drain away cash from the companies' accounts and into their own personal bank accounts while reneging on the promises they made to their employees, for health insurance and pensions. Oh, your security for health and retirement is gone? Never mind, we are doing just fine in the executive suite.

So when Donald Dotard talks about those swarthy Mexican illegals stealing across the border to rape white women, he is talking about small time rapists. The rare Mexican rapist is small time compared the CEO's who rape thousands of employees as they hollow out their own companies--all perfectly legally.

November 8 Explained

Success has a thousand fathers, John F. Kennedy noted, but failure is an orphan.

Actually, in the case of Hillary Clinton's defeat a thousand reasons have been put forward by pundits and humble citizens alike.

Doesn't take many to herd

Yes, the Russians brain washing Americans with fake news, and Hillary's failure to eat enough pork in Blue Wall states, gerrymandering, the electoral college, Citizens United and on and on, yada, yada.

But the fact is, if Blacks had voted in the numbers they turned out to vote for Obama, President Hillary.

Which is not to put the whole thing on Blacks, just to say, for understandable reasons, they voted with their feet by not turning out for the white lady.

Trump asked Blacks how much worse he would be for them than Hillary and they answered silently.

Maybe some regret it now. Maybe not.

Sheep to the slaughter

But democracy's Achilles heel is the fact that a willful, united, orchestrated minority can defeat and rule a majority, simply by acting in a concerted way, while the millions scatter before them. This is the basis of all military forces--a few hundred thousand men following commands from a single leader toward a single purpose can defeat a population of millions. Numbers do not matter in conflict; organization matters.

People believe in trolls, and read them , too

For Democrats to win they need to pull Blacks, Hispanics, gays, liberals, all sorts of cats which resist herding together. All Republicans need is that vaunted base--the white supremacists, quiet racists who pull their oars at the same time.

In this country there are always a core constituency of lunatics who believe whites are facing genocide, Obama was born on Mars, the New World Order will be arriving in black helicopters to strip citizens of their guns and the global Jewish world conspiracy in cahoots with radical Islam is out to gut the Christian world. They will reliably vote Republican.

We get what we deserve.

DIGGING UP DEMONS DEMOCRATS NEED

You know who Donald Trump rode to the White House on.


So where are the Democrats when it comes to vilification?


It's not like there aren't any good candidates out there.


John Oliver gave us the CEO of Alpha Coal, who nearly broke down sobbing, talking about the prospect of laying off coal miners in response to a question about a photo on his wall of a coal miner's. But, as Oliver pointed out, he had asked the bankruptcy court to cut the health insurance for 1200 miners while his board voted him and themselves 12 million dollar bonuses.

The coal industry is just too sweet a gift for Democrats, if they were only smart enough to use the gift they've been given.

And big pharma--who could have dreamed up an icon like Martin Shkreli if they'd tried?  Raises the price a drug upon which lives depend by 1000%, "Because I could. There's nothing illegal about it."

Or Robert Murray of Murray Energy who is the latest incarnation of those old tobacco industry executives who testified before Congress that smoking is good for your health and nobody should believe those scientists who said it caused lung cancer because they were all in the pockets of the liberal establishment and were like pinko Commies. Mr. Murray says we shouldn't believe the scientists who say burning fossil fuels (like the coal he just happens to own) contributes to climate change but we should trust his "four thousand scientists" who say just the opposite.  And all he cares about is his coal miners, well, except for that mining disaster which the government said was his fault but he claims was just a natural disaster an earthquake only he knows occurred.

The problem with the CEO's and the board members and the billionaires is most of them avoid fame like the plague. They are happy enough to just be super rich.

The Koch brothers occasionally make public appearances when they are being honored at Lincoln Center for giving money to the opera or ballet. But they keep a low profile and other than books like "Dark Money" they are not much examined, and who reads books anyway?

The shame is that no CEO went to jail for the 2008 financial collapse which, as anyone who saw "The Big Short" movie knows, had many fathers, but some at least were working at the agencies which sold stock and bond AAA ratings to the very companies whose stocks they were rating. 

These Wall Street, Wichita, Kansas,  Bentonville, Arkansas mogols pull the strings which control the lives of coal miners, factory workers, servers all over the country but they are never the bad guys. The bad guys are the imaginary Mexican rapists storming across our Southern Border. 

We need somebody to give us new villains.

Bernie Sanders took a few steps in the direction of stirring up embers of resentment. If only a few younger whippersnappers could follow his lead.

Robert Murray, Coal Miners' Dotard

Another stimulating PBS News Hour in which a right wing fanatic was able to bend truth to his own purposes with nary a peep of objection from Judy Woodruff or John Yang. 

Robert Murray, of Murray Energy, claimed:
1/ Global warming is a hoax meant to enrich liberal elites
2/ CO2 is not a pollutant, as President Obama claimed
3/ The Earth has actually cooled, not warmed over the past 19 years
4/ The Antarctic ice shelf is at an all time high, proving global warming is a hoax
5/ 4,000 scientists say so.

Consulting Professor Google, which apparently neither  Ms. Woodruff nor Mr. Yang had time to do, it turns out:

1/ The Antarctic ice shelf is at a high level, but that is beside the point--the Arctic is where the action is--and it is melting in prodigious fashion. The Antarctic is an ocean of ice but the Arctic is where the polar melting is occurring, where the polar bears are drowning and where the evidence of global warming is most evident.
Apparently, Mr. Murray does not understand the Antarctic is the South Pole with those cute, stoic penguins and the North Pole is polar bears, Santa Claus and melting glaciers.

2/ The Earth has not cooled over the past 19 years, but there have been measurements at various places in Greenland which have shown cooling;  none of those measurements, which were misunderstood by the Daily Mail which picked up the chant, mean the earth is cooling. Some parts of Greenland are still cold.
3/ CO2 is a greenhouse gas not a "pollutant" in the sense of lead or mercury. Mr. Obama never characterized CO2 as a pollutant--it is after all the gas we all exhale. Mr. Obama did not say we are all polluting the atmosphere every time we breathe, much as Mr. Murray would like us to believe. This is the "distraction" technique and Donald Trump is better at it.
4/ The Alt Right can round up 4,000 graduates of Liberty College to say the Earth was made in 7 days just a few thousand years ago. Scientists one and all.
5/ Yes, as coal goes the way of the dodo, windmills and solar will likely make a lot of people money who are not coal mine owners, but the coal miners might get better jobs in clean energy than the coal miners every gave them.

Really, if ever there was a naked example of that old observation:  It is difficult to bring a man to understanding if his salary depends on not understanding, than Robert Murray, I'd like to hear about it.

But nobody said anything about this on the News Hour. They had bigger stories, like the Harvey Weinstein affair.

For a more trenchant analysis of the argument for coal, look at John Oliver, below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw6RsUhw1Q8&t=235s


Here's Oliver on Mr. Murray:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwoAu_UiZvs

Reading the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page

Remember Peggy Noonan?  She wrote that famous speech Ronald Reagan gave after the Challenger space shuttle blew, up seconds after leaving the launch pad.

Reagan was, until President Dotard, our most recent "Teflon President."  Almost anything could go wrong under his watch and everyone, beginning with the President, would shrug it off:  Hundreds of American Marines blown up in a compound in Lebanon, having been put there for no discernible reason, apart perhaps from literally showing the flag? Well, nobody plans everything out, not even when you build a house--who finishes the basement? Yeah, well, we didn't plan for a truck bomb. You know. Things happen.
And when warnings from underlings about those O rings were ignored, Reagan went on national TV with the speech Ms. Noonan wrote and he said, among other things, in Peggy's purple prose: 
"We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of Earth' to 'touch the face of God."

So she helped everyone rise from the dismal reality to keep their eyes planted firmly on the Heavens and dreams of glory. Or, put another way, she parlayed a steal from John Gilespee Magee into a gig on the WSJ. (For my money, if you want to read a woman who knows a thing or two about slipping the surly bonds of Earth, open up Beryl Markham's "West With The Night." There is a woman who could write.)

Well, that woman who used to be Peggy Noonan has now managed to pin the blame for the mass shooter of Las Vegas on, guess who?  
The Democrats. 
Not just the Democrats but the "elites."  It's the fault of all those people who disagree with her, who she doesn't like. 
Liberals are what gave us mass shooters. Liberals drove them to it. 
And in response to the mass shooters, everyone else is quite justified in accumulating arsenals.
Now, that's even better than a guy who can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote. Shooting has never been a problem for Republicans, but mass shooter maniacs, they have not yet figured out how to market that. 
"I think a lot of Americans have guns because they're fearful--and for good reason. They fear a coming chaos...They think it's all collapsing--our society, our culture, the baseline competence of our leadership class."

Oh, we've got a leadership class now. Well, what a relief to hear that. 
But wait:

"Americans have so many guns because drug gangs roam the streets, because they have less trust in their neighbors, because they read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road."

Well, now that is reassuring. Those gun toting, gun hoarding NASCAR fans are readers! And they read Cormac McCarthy, no less.

"Because our country's real overlords are in Silicon Valley and appear to be moral Martians who operate on some new postmodern ethical wave-length. And they'll be the ones programming the robots, that'll soon take all the jobs! Maybe the robots will all look like Mark Zuckerberg."

Ah, here we are getting to it. This is sort of a cross between that South Park episode where outer space beings from the future come back through a time warp to take the jobs of all the present day earthlings, because in the future everyone loses his jobs to robots, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  I don't know about Cormac McCarthy novels, but I do watch South Park

And, by the by, did you notice the introduction of the manipulative Jew into the plot line?  The guy who is not guided by good American values but by Martian morals? (And remember Mars is where Barack Obama was born.)  Zuckerberg drinks the blood of Christian children, don't you know? He's into blood sacrifice, but first he circumcises them without anesthesia.

"Our leaders don't even think about technological revolution."

Well, nobody's ever accused Zuckerberg about that before. Peggy's on a roll. 

"They're too busy with transgender rights."

Well, there she's got me on board. Entirely too many Zuckerbergs thinking about transgender rights. And you know once they get to thinking about transgender rights, it just sucks all the air out of the room and their brains go all to mush.

Try not to think too much about this.

Personally, I'm no fan of Chelsea Manning or Bruce Jenner who is now somebody else, a woman on the cover of a magazine.  Unlike homosexuality, transgender people appear, from superficial evidence alone, to harbor a certain level of pathology.

Oh, are we disturbed yet?

But I digress--only to say I'm with Peggy about spending too much time thinking about transgenders, but I'm astonished to learn this leads directly to the guy in Las Vegas who mows down innocents with a bump stock converted automatic rifle.

Where's my gun?

"Those who create our culture feel free to lecture normal Americans."

Culture creator

And here I thought normal Americans created their own culture, for better or for worse. Silly me. It is a relief to hear there are extant, Normal Americans. I've been looking for them and just about given up hope.

"They sail on, oblivious to the legitimate anxieties of their countrymen who live near the edge."

Well, now I understand. With the coming apocalypse, we will all need guns and a home ammo depot and a bomb shelter, from which we can blast away at our neighbors--good guns make good neighbors--when the legions of transgender armies unleash their awful attack on our homes like those Orks in "Lord of the Rings" or the White Walkers in "Game of Thrones." 

Peggy is nothing else, if not literary. Did you catch the whiff of F. Scott Fitzgerald there? I'm sure it was intentional: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." And that is where Peggy lives--in some imagined past that never was.

Do you think Peggy Noonan has dinner with Rupert Murdoch every week?
If we invited them and the Dotard and maybe Mike Pence and Rush Limbaugh to Hampton for a cocktail party--or a beer fest--do you think it would be a good time?

Really, how about a bash at Smutty Nose?  I'm buying.

Do Drug Rehab Programs Work?

Our journal club, where we read the month's New England Journal of Medicine among a group of doctors from various specialties, now starts every article by examining not the names of the authors, or an examination of the universities from which they generated their studies, but a look at who sponsored the study--many if not most "investigators" are now funded by drug companies to assess the efficacy of the drug the company is trying to market. So if the drug is made by Merck, then Merck sponsors a group at Harvard to run a study to see if it works. 

As Upton Sinclair said, "It is hard to bring a man to understanding if his salary depends on not understanding."

One Squirrely Slide--coming from the NIH!

I now feel the same way when I read papers on the question of whether or not our approach, or our various approaches, to treating drug addiction are effective.

Even the web site of the National Institute of Health's National Institute of Drug Abuse reads like something between a marketing plan and  a legal brief more than an dispassionate examination of data.

Money spent on drug rehab programs, the site tells us, is far less than it would cost to incarcerate drug addicts.  We are also shown a bar graph which shows that during the time an addict is in the program, he stops  using drugs, but he relapses almost as soon as he quits.  The NIDA tells us, this is acceptable, if you think of drug abuse like hypertension; it never disappears. You have to continue treatment for life.

But the problem is: What is your goal?
If your goal is to get the drug fiend, as addicts call themselves, to stop using drugs forever, then what the NIDA is saying is, forget that. It's like alcoholism: You will always crave that fix.

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But if your goal is to reduce the illnesses associated with drug abuse: HIV/AIDS, hepatitis and subacute bacterial endocarditis, then treatment programs, most particularly clean needles, do that effectively.

click on image

Whether drug rehab programs reduce drug overdose deaths is tough to say. 
If you are running a program, and one of your clients overdoses and dies, do you say, well, we failed? Let's record that as a failure, and make your statistics look like you are a worthless organization running a failing program, or do you say, well, that guy dropped out of our program a week ago--his death is not on us.

The question is: What do we do? Just give up? 

I would say we should do what Portugal did: Legalize drugs and treat addicts as a public health problem.

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Of course, that's not easy in a for profit, commercial health care system like ours.
You really need a government health care program for that, because drug addicts are going to make every bottom line in every ledger look bad, from ER visits, to hospitalizations to deaths.

Getting Real About Guns

If I had my way, there would be no privately held guns in the United States.
But, if I had my way we would have no drug addiction and I would be twenty pounds lighter when I wake up tomorrow morning. Oh, and I'd have a full head of hair and be twenty years younger.

Sadly, none of the above will ever happen.


Now about guns:  My father in law was a lifetime member of the NRA. He got his first rifle age 12 and hunted in the fields around his home in Utah. He kept several locked lockers full of guns in his basement. He kept notebooks on each gun, with targets shot with holes by each and careful notes about the gun's characteristics: At 150 feet this gun pulls to the left 1 inch, etc. 


He was appalled by the idea a gun is any good at defending you in your house because the home invader has a weapon more powerful than any gun: surprise. He thought the most likely outcome of a bedside gun was some family member would someday be shot with it. Guns at home were kept locked.


He raised his three sons and his daughter (my wife) to be good shots. In fact, he was pleased that for a few years, his daughter was rated higher than any of his sons at the skeet shooting range and she was listed in some rifle magazine as some sort of hot shot.

But he spent his life in the military, where, he noted no solider was every allowed back from the shooting range without the same number of spent cartridges as he was issued before he went shooting targets. The military tightly controlled bullets lest one of the recruits had it in for his drill instructor, as in "Full Metal Jacket."


If we restricted gun ownership and home possession, we would likely cut down on deaths among children shooting themselves or others at home and we might cut down on suicides by gun, although it's an open question whether we'd cut down on suicides by other means.

We may not prevent mass shootings by lunatics.  The reasons for this are obvious: A guy who plans out his mass shooting by booking a room plus an adjoining suite, rigging up hallway surveillance cameras, fits out his guns with bump stocks,  is not likely to have much trouble collecting guns of mass destruction.  As anyone who has read "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" knows, the trade in illegal guns is not much more inhibited by law than the sales of illegal drugs.


Beyond the sportsman and gun aficionado who was my father in law, I've met plenty of men who love talking about their guns in New Hampshire. Most of these guys are small or very obese or simply physically unimpressive men for whom a gun is their ticket to instant respectability: I may look like a loser, like a nobody, but put a gun in my hand or on my hip and you've got to respect me, because I might just kill you.

Big gun is the surrogate for big penis. 


Those are the guys you have to pry their gun from their cold, dead fingers, because they need that gun so.


For some of these guys, its a thin line from an inferiority complex and fragile ego to a shooting rampage, but they may go their whole lives without crossing it.
They are the guys who worry us, however. Ordinarily, they get through the day, but all it might take is that one very bad, no good, terrible day, when their car is rear ended, their boss fires them for being late to work and they go home to find their wife in bed with the mailman.

We do not need bump stocks and we do not need legislators packing heat in the State House to show what tough guys they are and we do not need guys at political rallies carrying assault rifles. All that can be legislated away, just as soon as we assure our gun loving fellow citizens, they can keep their security blankets.