Government Shutdown 2018

Well here we go again.
WASHINGTON — Much of the federal government officially shut down early Saturday morning after Senate Democrats, showing remarkable solidarity in the face of a clear political danger, blocked consideration of a stopgap spending measure to keep the government operating. The shutdown, coming one year to the day after President Trump took office, set off a new round of partisan recriminations and posed risks for both parties. It came after a fruitless last-minute negotiating session at the White House between Mr. Trump and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader. With just 50 senators voting in favor, Senate Republican leaders fell well short of the 60 votes necessary to proceed on the spending measure, which had passed the House on Thursday. 

Five conservative state Democrats voted for the spending measure. Five Republicans voted against it, although one of those, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, did so for procedural reasons. As the clock ticked toward midnight, when funding for the government was set to expire, senators huddled on the floor of the crowded Senate chamber, searching for some way forward. Then, in the early morning hours, Mr. McConnell proposed a measure that would keep the government open for another three weeks, not four as the House measure would have done, and said the Senate would come back to into session at noon Saturday.

Book Reviews: The Troop

The Troop
by Nick Cutter

Stephen King wrote that this book was old school horror that scared the hell out of him. Based on that blurb and other people's ravings about the book I decided to give it a read. Although this is not a new book it is still the best book I've read this year. It's the best book I've read in a while actually. After I finished it I looked up some more information about the writer. I was pleased to confirm my suspicion that Cutter (the name is a pseudonym) is a David Cronenberg fan.While reading this book I couldn't help but think back to Cronenberg films such as They Came From Within or The Fly. The Troop is body horror at its finest. I'm interested in reading other works by the author now. 

It stinks to be sick. For most ailments your body's immune system can marshal some pretty effective defenses to isolate and/or kill anything in your body that is not you. Your body is even smart enough to recognize what it kills and develop immunity to new versions of what it killed and ejected. Occasionally however you run across some creatures, bacteria or viruses that aren't so easily dismissed. Some of these things might even become permanent residents of your particular universe. No power on earth can get rid of them. You have no choice but to deal with them.

Canadian Scoutmaster Tim Riggs and his five teen Boy Scouts are on a wilderness camping trip to a small deserted island, one that will allow Riggs' charges a chance to put their outdoors skills to the test and of course gain more scouting patches. Some of the boys are more enthusiastic about this trip than others. All of them are right around the age where girls will become more interesting than running around the woods tying knots or identifying edible types of fungus. They are also around the age where they're starting to test how far they can challenge adult authority. 

Movie Reviews: American Made, The Change-Up

American Made
directed by Doug Liman

When investigative journalists talk about the American government turning a blind eye to or even assisting in criminal activity for reasons of "national security" or pure greed, the public often ignores those people in real time. Mainstream media mouthpieces or military-industrial complex muppets mock such people as loons and conspiracy buffs. It's only after the evidence has become impossible to ignore or many of the major players have passed on that the entertainment industry feels comfortable depicting some of the events.  American Made is a fictionalized retelling of the life and times of Barry Seal (Tom Cruise), who morphed from a shady and bored airlines pilot to a CIA intelligence asset and supplier of the Nicaraguan contras (Iran-Contra affair) to a drug and gun smuggler for the Medellin Cartel to a DEA informant and military asset. There wasn't always a clear delineation among these roles. Seal made a lot of money; he had multiple bosses in different organizations. Unfortunately for Seal he wound up in a position where he had betrayed the cartel , but wasn't considered important enough for the U.S. government to protect. 

So as the saying goes, live fast, die young and leave a good looking corpse. That last is important for this film as the slender and seemingly ageless Cruise (his only concession to advancing years appears to be some deepening lines around eyes and mouth) looks absolutely nothing like Barry Seal, who was a porcine good old boy from Louisiana. 

Patient Dumping in Baltimore

"This place is cruel; no where could be much colder /If we don't change the world will soon be over"
Stevie Wonder "Living For The City"

There are things you are allowed to do and things you are not allowed to do. When no one is looking, for many people it's tempting to do the things they aren't allowed to do, particularly if it saves them money. For an auto company engineer this could mean ignoring a defective transmission part and letting a poor design go to market. Why should she jeopardize her bonus and next promotion for something that may not even be discovered for another decade? She can reason that those drivers could have had fatal accidents anyway. Maybe a banker sells a young couple a horrible mortgage with sub-prime interest rates and balloon payments, reasoning that as long as they sign on the dotted line it's not his responsibility to save them from themselves. A restaurant owner might choose to use the moldy jalapenos in the rear of the freezer or fry up the wormy meat that fell on the floor. Margins are tight and state investigators will never know. 

Or maybe a hospital, already dealing with lower reimbursements and higher costs than it can handle, decides to eject the patients who either lack insurance or lack more remunerative private insurance. This is called patient dumping. A psychotherapist good Samaritan named Imamu Baraka, apparently by happenstance, witnessed a woman being dumped outside near the bus stop on a cold winter night. The woman was incoherent. She only had a gown on. 

BALTIMORE (AP) — The man who said he came to the aid of a woman discharged from a Baltimore hospital wearing only a gown and socks on a cold winter's night, says he was left outraged and stunned at how she was treated.

Imamu Baraka, identified in local reports as the person who sought to help the woman, told The Associated Press he was so angry he decided to record Tuesday night's events on cellphone video, fearing no one would believe him if he reported a woman being left at a bus stop like that.

Frozen Alligators

https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/24a81d0c-1417-3586-abfd-be332f1864f6/ss_alligators-use-bizarre-%E2%80%93-and.html

Book Reviews: Killers

Killers
by Howie Carr

If I had realized just who the author was before I picked this book up on a 2 for 1 sale at the local bookstore I probably wouldn't have purchased it. It's always tricky to figure out how much of a book's or fictional characters' worldviews are things that are created by the author separate from his or her own views. Fiction and reality don't necessarily have anything to do with one another. But there are authors with very strong political or personal views that not only bleed into their creative works, they inspire the creativity in the first place. The view points are the reason for the creative work. They give the author a way to purge himself.

Howie Carr is a Boston area conservative racist radio host and Boston Herald columnist who has played footsie with birtherism, claimed that President Obama was given everything because of his race, and mocked Senator Elizabeth Warren with "Indian" war whoops. Boston has always had a certain reputation for xenophobia and bigotry. Although Carr is not a Boston native, he seems to fit well within that framework. Carr is also an expert on New England area organized crime. Famously he attracted the negative attention of Winter Hill gang boss Whitey Bulger, who publicly regretted not murdering Carr when he had the chance.

Now depiction is not endorsement as any creative artist would tell you. But I think that most readers are smart enough to tell the difference between someone who creates racist characters because he's a keen observer of human nature and someone who creates racist characters because he sympathizes with that view point. As a reader there are only so many sentences decrying "a fat female Obama voter yakking on her Obamaphone" or snide asides about jungle areas in Boston (Roxbury) that I can tolerate. Killers was right at my limit.

Prison Abolition: Good Idea??

I can't remember the cartoonist's name but somewhere in my home I have an old newspaper comic cut out that shows a smirking sheriff about to hang a depressed looking criminal. The comic's caption is a quote from the sheriff. It reads something like "Of course I realize that society is partially to blame for your crimes. Unfortunately I only have enough rope for you!"

If you talk to most people about their ideas on individual responsibility, punishment, crime, rehabilitation and the like you will find that many people tend towards one of two differing schools of thought. Many (not all) conservatives will be clustered around the idea of "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime!". Some will (knowingly or not) have a pretty healthy dollop of bigotry mixed in as well. They think the individual is responsible for committing the crime, and must pay the cost. Punishment is important. These folks usually aren't that concerned with rehabilitation or repayment. They are interested in punishment. They are often indifferent to why someone committed a crime. If one group of people commits more crimes or has more run-ins with law enforcement than perhaps those people have some personal problems to fix. People who think like this can be still be persuaded to look beyond punishment as the key purpose of the criminal justice system but only if other important (to them) points are raised like cost. Saying that prison is too harsh usually won't evince too much sympathy from these citizens. They will retort that the criminal should have realized that before they committed a crime. There is an axiom that a liberal is a conservative who just got arrested. With the opioid epidemic in full swing some conservatives have suddenly become open to non-prison alternatives for those who look like them.