Selected tales of outrage

Couple articles have stuck in my head of late. First a few tales of corporate responsibility. Good and bad.

A guy buys a company, an emerald company, and decides that he is going to do things the right way. People are going to be paid and paid fairly. Gives them health insurance. And guess what, the natives are pissed, because he is no longer allowing them to steal and they demand the customary and age old opportunity to "wet their beak."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/2015/08/09/the-dangerous-search-for-emeralds-in-colombia/

Volkswagen puts a little secret device in their diesel motors that detects and obviates smog checking emissions testing and allows its cars to spew forty times the allowed rates of nitrogen oxide. Hey, like Bellichek says, "you ain't cheating, you ain't trying." This one is going to get expensive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/19/business/volkswagen-is-ordered-to-recall-nearly-500000-vehicles-over-emissions-software.html

Johnson and Johnson cooked the numbers and results on its testing of the drug Risperdal. Crime obviously pays. They make 30 billion and pay a two billion dollar fine. Interesting expose by Steven Brill, here's today's chapter:

nice rack of manboobs...

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/miracleindustry/americas-most-admired-lawbreaker/

"The cases of boys 10 and over with gynecomastia had been eliminated from the numerator—the group in the table that counted those suffering from gynecomastia. However, all the children, no matter their age, were still counted in the denominator. In other words, five boys under 10 years old had been shown to have developed breasts, but all 592 children—over and under 10—were included in the total to tabulate the percentage: five is 0.8 percent of 592. However, only 358 of the children were under ten. Thus, the supposed 0.8 percent represented 0.8 percent of all 592 children, but the real number—the real denominator—should have been 358, which is the number of children under 10. That would have yielded a percentage of 1.4 percent, not 0.8 percent, because five is 1.4 percent of 358. In fact the real percentage should have been derived from the percentage of the number of boys, not boys and girls, under 10 with breasts, or 255. And five is 2.0 percent of 255, a number that likely would have gotten the attention of Benita Pledger and her doctor.
And, again, that assumes that retroactively removing the boys 10 and over was justifiable, which those who had originally designed the study had not assumed. Had those boys not been removed, the percentage of all boys with gynecomastia would have been 4.5 percent: 22 cases out of 489 boys. A J&J witness in a case brought by a boy who had developed male breasts later attempted to offer a rationale for including the original denominator, but even one of the doctors involved in the study would later concede that the denominator should have been changed."

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I am of mixed opinion on the story of the muslim kid who brings his clock to school in Irving, Texas. You bring something ticking with wires on it into a classroom, I want to take a second look. I don't care what color and creed you are. Of course Sarah Palin is still convinced it was a bomb.

But why was he arrested when the cops admit that they knew it wasn't a bomb and why was the kid suspended for three days?  For what?

Then again he got off easy compared to this poor guy in Stockton. Note to self, Never jaywalk in Stockton. Especially if you have dark skin. Nine cops to apprehend a crying sixteen year old.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/california-cops-scrutiny-teens-jaywalking-arrest-caught-video/story?id=33861780

Of course after the massive black hole collision all of this will be moot. No more kardashians, no more middle east problems, no more inflation, just neutrinos and protons flying around a lonely deserted space trying to stay warm.

I fail to see how Donald Trump has any obligation or responsibility to correct the record on Barack Obama's religion and birthplace.

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Just when the Republicans look like they can increase their market share they have to go off on Planned Parenthood again. These social conservatives shoot themselves in the foot every time.

With 40% of democrats now considering Israel a negative force, thanks to the nifty triangulation strategy of the current administration among other things, and Netanyahu being such an asshole, it would be nice to have another option but I don't. You give the social conservatives an inch and they start putting the apostates in stocks again.

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Interesting article on Kissinger at WSJ.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/kissinger-the-freedom-fighter-1442570401

In his time as national security adviser, he played a key role in negotiating the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union. It was Kissinger who, with Zhou Enlai, opened diplomatic communications between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China. It was Kissinger who extricated the U.S. from the Vietnam War. And it was Kissinger who pressed for the end of white rule in Rhodesia.

In an essay that he wrote for the Brookings Institution in 1968, he could hardly overlook “the contemporary unrest” that was sweeping American campuses. But he struggled to make sense of a “younger generation [who] consider the management of power irrelevant, perhaps even immoral” and whose “new ethic of freedom is not ‘civic’; it is indifferent or even hostile to systems and notions of order.”
As Kissinger observed, there was something unforgivable about the way the “protest movements [had] made heroes of leaders in repressive new countries,” oblivious to “the absurdity of founding a claim for freedom on protagonists of the totalitarian state—such as Guevara or Ho or Mao.” The student radicals failed to see that they were living through a fundamental transformation of the postwar international order. “The age of the superpowers,” Kissinger announced, “is drawing to an end.”

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President Obama has appointed a gay man, Eric Fanning, as Army Secretary. He sounds very competent and I am sure he will do a very good job, irrespective of something as silly as sexual orientation.

My hope is that it was a decision based on merit rather than the social engineering this administration is obviously so fond of. But was there no gay muslim woman available for the position?