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Babies — Pulp

This Guy Narrates People’s Lives Randomly In Public And It’s Hilarious [source]

It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby.

Kurt Vonnegut -- Slaughterhouse Five

Sometimes cartoons get way too real

Paying for College: Then and Now

So baby boomers were born between 1946 and 1964

This means that they entered college between 1964 and 1982

The total average cost to go to Public College including tuition room and board ranged from $950 in 1964 to $2945 in 1982

While they were on college they could count on making at least $1.25 an hour in 1964 to $3.35 an hour in 1982

This means that spending the 18 weeks during summer working full time at minimum wage they would make $900 dollar in 1964 and $2412 in 1982

That means someone going to school 1964 would only have to work 40 hours during the school year to completely pay for all of their expenses.

Someone going to school in 1982 had it a little worse, they had to work for less than 160 hours during the school year to completely cover their expenses.

To put this in perspective in 2006 (the most recent year that the Dept of Edu reports) a public college education cost $11,034

The minimum wage was $5.15 in 2006

That means to pay for school in 2006 at minimum wage you would have to work just over 2142 1/2 hours to pay for school.

Working full time year around, without any time off, is only 2080 hours

I have one job, and its a pretty simple job: I come in in the morning, and we look at the news, and I write jokes about it.  And then I make a couple of faces, and like a noise, and then it’s just ch-ching, and I’’m out the door. But I didn’t do my job today, so I apologize. I got nothing for you in terms of jokes and sounds, because of what happened in South Carolina.  And maybe if I wasn’t nearing the end of the run, or this wasn’t such a common occurrence, maybe I could’ve pulled out of the spiral, but I didn’t.   And so I honestly have nothing.  Other than just sadness, once again, that we have to peer into the abyss that we do to each other, and the nexus of a gaping racial wound that will not heal, and that we pretend doesn’t exist. I’m confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is… we still won’t do jack shit. Yeah.  That’s us. And that’s the part that blows my mind.  I don’t wanna get into the political argument of guns, and things – what blows my mind is the disparity of response between when we think people who are foreign are going to kill us, and us killing ourselves. If this had been what we thought was Islamic terrorism, it would have fit into our – we invaded two countries!  And spent trillions of dollars, and thousands of American lives, and now fly unmanned death machines over like five or six different countries.  All to ‘keep Americans safe’!  'We gotta do whatever we can!  We’ll torture people!  We gotta do whatever we can to keep Americans safe!’ Nine people.  Shot in a church.  What about that?  'Hey, what can we do?  Craziness is craziness, right?’ That’s the part that I cannot, for the life of me, wrap my head around.  And you know it.  You know that it’s going to go down the same path.  'This is a terrible tragedy.’  They’re already using the nuanced language of lack of effort for this. This is a terrorist attack.  This is a violent attack on the Emanuel Church in South Carolina, which is a symbol for the black community.  It has stood in that part of Charleston for a hundred and some years, and has been attacked viciously many times, as many black churches have. And to pretend that, I heard someone on the news say ‘tragedy has visited this church.’  This wasn’t a tornado.  This was a racist.  This was a guy with a Rhodesia badge on his sweater. I hate to even use this pun, but this one was black and white.  There’s no nuance here.  And we’re going to keep pretending like, ‘I don’t get it!  What happened?  This one guy lost his mind!’  But we are steeped in that culture in this country, and we refuse to recognize it, and I can’t believe how hard people are working to discount it. In South Carolina, the roads that black people drive on are named for Confederate generals who fought to keep black people from being to drive freely on that road. That’s insanity.  That’s racial wallpaper.  You can’t allow that.  Nine people were shot in a black church by a white guy who hated them, who wanted to start some kind of civil war. The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina. And the roads are named for Confederate generals. And the white guy is the one who feels like his country is being taken over. We’re bringing it on ourselves. And that’s the thing: al Qaeda?  ISIS?  They’re not shit compared to the damage that we can apparently do to ourselves on a regular basis.

JON STEWART, The Daily Show (via inothernews)

Look at the difference: In 1977 I bought a small house in Portland Oregon for $24,000. At the time I was earning $5 per hour working at a large auto parts store. I owned a 4 year old Chevy Nova that cost $1,500. Now, 36 years later that same job pays $8 an hour, that same house costs $185,000 and a 4 year old Chevy costs $10,000. Wages haven’t kept up with expenses at all. And, I should point out that that $5 an hour job in 1977 was union and included heath benefits.

an anonymous online commenter on the current economy. (via han-nara)