Author Archives: RF_Alum

The Predictable Surprise

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book cvr_ predictable surpriseThe subtitle of this book by Sylvester J. Schieber is “The Unraveling of the U.S. Retirement System.” The book is neither a fun nor easy book to read (unless you are a compulsive accountant). However, you should consider the book if you want to know about the history and current status of Social Security and other retirement plans. Sadly, I must say the book does not have easy answers for how we can get our politicians to address some daunting problems. The dust cover explains, “Social Security is projected to deplete its funds in the 2030s. Pensions from previous generations have either disappeared or been completely reengineered…Americans are faced with the conundrum of how to pay for a growing retired population with dwindling financial resources.” The author believes privatizing part of Social Security would be a good first step, but has given up on that idea because politicians have made it a toxic idea.

I consider the most important part of the book to be a series of quotes made by Barack Obama at a roundtable discussion with the editorial board of the Washington Post four days before his first inauguration. “As soon as the economic recovery takes place, then we’ve got to bend the curve and figure out how we get federal spending on a more sustainable path…We are going also to have a discussion about entitlements and how we get a grasp on those…As bad as these deficits that have already been run up have been, the real problem is with our long-term deficits, actually, have to do with our entitlement obligations…So we’re going to have to shape a bargain. This, by the way is where…some very difficult issues of sacrifice, responsibility, and duty are going to come in because what we have done is kick this can down the road and we are now at the end of that road. We are not in a position to kick it any further…I have told my folks, to some consternation on their part, that we have to signal seriousness in this by making sure that some hard decisions are made under my watch and not under somebody else’s because the usual game is to say, ‘well, here’s what is going to happen but, by the way, it just happens to start in the ninth year from now.’ What we have to signal is that we are willing to make hard decisions now.”  (This passage is on pages 373-374 of the hard cover book I read. I’m providing a link to the full recorded statement.) Continue reading →

Ukraine’s Nuclear Weapons and Russia

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The recent aggression of the Russians against Ukraine made me wonder whether the Ukranians regretted sending their nuclear weapons back to Russia after declaring their independence from the Soviet Union. I realized I needed a history review to better understand the situation. According to the Office of the Historian of the U.S. Department of State, the collapse of the Soviet Union arguably could be traced to Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to “…loosen the yoke of Soviet control over Eastern Europe.” That led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the overthrow of Communist rule throughout Eastern Europe. The Soviet destabilization continued until the attempted coup by hard-line Communists against Gorbachev in August 1991. That failed coup led Ukraine and Belarus to declare their independence.  Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan had nuclear weapons at that time.

The Ukrainian Week states, “Ukraine had to give up its nuclear weapons to become a sovereign state and have its independence recognized by the entire world.” The people of Ukraine were dominantly anti-nuclear as a result of the Chernobyl disaster.  Also, the nuclear weapons had been produced by the Soviet Union, and retaining them would have tied Ukraine to the Soviet (later Russian) military industrial complex.  Ukraine also judged that the criteria announced by the U.S. required that they disarm themselves of nuclear weapons to gain recognition. They remembered the sad experience of the 1920s when the West did not recognize Ukraine and it became a target of Bolshevik aggression. Recent events do not bode well for them trying a different approach to assuring their national sovereignty. Continue reading →

The Amazing Life of Moe Berg, Catcher, Scholar, Spy

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book cvr_moe bergI was intrigued about this man’s story, and this book was the one available at the local library under “young adult biographies.” The book was short, easy to read, and welcome compared to the complex and lengthy books I’ve recently reviewed. It is a well-written book describing the life of a fascinating person. The inside flap begins, “Espionage agent. Wartime hero who refused the Medal of Freedom. Major league catcher who practiced law in the off-season. Eccentric, intellectual, athletic Moe Berg…” Berg’s father was an industrious Jewish immigrant from Kippinya Ukraine who is described as neither practicing his religion nor trying to hide it. Morris, immediately nicknamed Moe, was the third child of Bernard and Rose Berg. Moe became passionate about baseball very young. He achieved his first baseball headline while playing on a Methodist team under the name “Runt Wolfe.”

Moe’s father disapproved of baseball as a waste of time and never changed his opinion even as Moe played baseball for Princeton and then began making a living at it in the major leagues. Moe signed with the Brooklyn Robins (later Dodgers) in 1923. He was given a three month contract that paid him $5,000 to play shortstop. He was described by one scout as “Good field, no hit.” He attracted the attention because he was an avid reader and enjoyed learning new languages. He was teased that he “…could speak many languages but couldn’t hit in any of them.” Fellow White Sox catcher Frank “Buck” Crouse told him, “I don’t care how many of them degrees you got. They ain’t learned you to hit a curve ball no better than me.” He had a career hitting average of .243 and was also described as a very slow runner (something that struck me as odd for a shortstop.) Continue reading →

Ducks on the Pond

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This expression was a favorite of Dizzy Dean, and during my teenage years I was a regular viewer of the baseball “Game of the Week” with Mr. Dean as the color announcer. I wasn’t much of a baseball player but became a fan of the game because of his colorful descriptions. He used this expression to describe that there were runners on base and ready to score if the batter could get a hit or make a “productive out.” It was originally used by Arch McDonald, a broadcaster for the Washington Senators from 1934 to 1956. It did not refer to a hunter seeing ducks sitting on a pond and thinking of them as easy targets.

GMOs, Food Safety, and Golden Rice

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We have written about the positives and negatives of Genetically Modified Foods (GMOs), and the debate continues. An article titled “Eating Dangerously” by Jennifer Brown and Michael Booth in the March 12, 2014 Denver Post describes “…how 50 million Americans will get food poisoning this year…More than 100,000 will go to the hospital; 3,000 will die.” Federal authorities do not ban the sale of chicken contaminated with bacteria such as salmonella. They instead rely on consumers to cook the chicken to at least 165 degrees, which would kill the bacteria. However, there was a “Foster Farms chicken scare (in) 2013” that involved chicken contaminated with an antibiotic-resistant strain of salmonella that wasn’t killed by cooking to 165 degrees. Dozens of consumers were hospitalized.

The article focuses on the Colorado case of salmonella-contaminated cantaloupes that killed 33 people in 2011. Federal inspectors had never visited the farm that was the source of the cantaloupes prior to the outbreak. Continue reading →