SeniorJunior

Give predicting a shot Why not? Badda boom. The horrifying news that there is a massive spike in the most serious form of black lung disease in coal mining country couldn't come at a more ironic time. The great NPR investigative work has put a reality light on how the coal companies work. THIS IS A HUMAN LUNG, NOT A LUMP OF COAL If you thought the worker performance pressures were bad at Wells Fargo - leading to false accounts and phony billing - how about "work 16 hours a day and outperform the guy on the other side of the mountain or lose your job" therefore expose your lungs to silicon dust at a guaranteed fatal level. SO I PREDICT that the truth will come out that not only are the miners having to drill through a lot of silicate rock (because all that's left are narrow seams of coal), but that the new generation drilling machines make A NANO SIZED DUST. This partially explains how the respirators fail and the miners get killer silicosis complicati...

Things Are Looking Up When National Public Radio launched its re-make of Edward R. Morrow’s “ This I Believe ,” I was almost motivated to take a shot at making an entry. I say almost because I just never got around to doing it. I thought about it a bunch. Even my subject and position were clear in my head. Never happened. Darn. Not to let a well formed idea go totally unpublished, here ‘tis. It’s simple. Things are getting better. Generally speaking and on a long time scale, that is. Of course some things are getting worse; they always are, but most of the downers are on shorter time scales. And any such judgment on the better/worse balance has to reflect a cosmic perspective, no small task in our quarter-to-quarter, Wall Streetish culture. I have to admit, attaining cosmicity hasn’t been my strong suit. If you riffle through all the posts on this blog, you can’t help but note that I’ve been much more vocal on worsenings than betterings. Drought, wars, political chicanery,...