Books That Changed Me

PlaidStallion (1): So that’s the reason why I’m a breast man!

PlaidStallion (2): This is my choice, assuming I even thinking about it at all.

PlaidStallion (3): There are only 24 hours in a day. Workers spend many of them in wage labour, trying to support themselves and their families. They spend several more caring for themselves – in essence, getting ready to go back to work the next day. And if they're lucky, they'll have a couple of hours left for relaxation and recreation.

So time is scarce and valuable. And businesses understand this. They try to reduce how much of your time they have to “pay for” – whether you are a worker, a customer, or an innocent bystander. In so doing, profit-seeking businesses “steal your time” ... and thus steal part of your life.

In the workplace, for example, employers minimize any non-productive time they must pay for. So workers are usually required to travel to, prepare for, and clean up after work on their own time, not the boss's time. While they are on the payroll, every possible paid minute is monitored and dedicated to production. Outside of the workplace, businesses regularly waste the unpaid time of customers or potential customers: putting customers on hold for long periods of time, forcing customers to wait in line, selling products that require many hours to assemble, interrupting homelife with unsolicited phone calls. All this wasted time may be “free” from the perspective of a company, but it’s invaluable to busy families. What would happen to capitalism if companies actually had to pay people for all the time they currently “steal” without payment?… (más)

PlaidStallion (4): While the hopes of those who had long dreamed of a world without nuclear weapons were crushed by Obama’s reversals, pronuclear forces were ecstatic. In 2015, Alabama congressman Mike Rogers addressed a weapons conference sponsored by Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics “I think we can safely say the President’s Prague vision is dead,” he gloated, “And I’ll leave it to the Nobel committee to ask for its prize back.”

In May 2016, Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow, who delivered one of the two Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speeches in 2017 in recognition of her lifelong efforts to abolish nuclear weapons, expressed her disappointment with Obama’s lack of meaningful action, “The world waited and waited and waited but so far our problem continues and actually it’s worse. So we are, and I am, very disappointed . . . it’s a huge, huge disappointment for the world.”

Administration insiders were often as disappointed with Obama’s capitulation to the hardliners as were his outside critics. Former undersecretary of state for arms control Ellen Tauscher reported “a universal sense of frustration” and disillusionment among those who entered the administration expecting to limit nuclear weaponry.

In May 2016, with Obama en route to Hiroshima, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) reported that he had actually reduced the nuclear arsenal at a slower pace than had either of the Bushes or Bill Clinton, his three post-Cold War predecessors. At that point, with a few more months of his presidency still to go, the U.S. had dismantled 702 warheads or 13.3 percent of the arsenal. Clinton, by comparison, had reduced the arsenal by approximately 23 percent, George H. W. Bush by 41 percent, and George W. Bush by 50 percent. Hans Kristensen, the FAS analyst, noted that the fault was not entirely Obama’s given the fierce opposition in Congress and a Russian government that had resisted additional reductions while New START was being implemented. Kristensen did, however, note that during the time of the Obama presidency, Russia had reduced its stockpile by more than a thousand warheads.… (más)

PlaidStallion (5): Apart from logical cogency, there is to me something a little odd about the ethical valuations of those who think that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent Deity, after preparing the ground by many millions of years of lifeless nebulae, would consider Himself adequately rewarded by the final emergence of Hitler and Stalin and the H-bomb.… (más)