A Friday Visit To "Some Assembly Required"

It's a good day to go to "Some Assembly Required"  --  as usual, here are a few tidbits from yesterday and today.  Have fun!
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Reprint: “Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.” Kurt Vonnegut

A Giant Step For Stupidity: Jerome Corsi's new book, “The Great Oil Conspiracy: How the U.S. Government Hid the Nazi Discovery of Abiotic Oil from the American People”claims that all that oil was created abioticly - how, he asks, did those dinosaurs get buried tens of thousands of feet below the surface? Never mind that oil was formed from algae in the shallow seas of the Cretaceous and Jurassic, not from dinosaurs and that the process is well understood. That's science. We want bread and circuses.

The Gift That Keeps On Giving: Nearly all of the 10,893 spent fuel assemblies stored at the Fukushima complex sit in pools - many 100 feet above ground and now open to the atmosphere - that are vulnerable to future earthquakes, tusnami, loss of water, or simple bad luck. They hold about 85 times the long-lived radioactive material than was released at Chernobyl.

Warm-up Question: Why hasn't the closing of 40 predominantly black public schools in Philadelphia made the national news? Beyond the obvious racial explanation, there's also a story here about bribery, politics and charter schools. The fix has been in for a long time, and not just in Philadelphia. (Go ahead, Google charter schools + Bush + Florida...)

 Guarding The Guards, Part II: In a case of dereliction of duty far worse than getting laid in their off-duty time, TSA guardians have been charged with taking bribes to allow drug smugglers through airport screening. As TSA and Homeland Security continue to insert themselves in our everyday activities, expect more such stories.
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Please go there   --   a lot more to ponder.