Chuggita Chuggata

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Floating objects we call “chugs” wash up from time to time on the beaches here in the Keys. Cuban boatbuilders work with materials scavenged from junked cars, crates, roofs, packing.

Google Cuban Chug ImagesThese almost-boats are small enough to build in the sheds and garages of Cuba where craftsmen keep ’53 Chevvies running and can make a Vermont farmer cry with their ingenuity to recycle and repurpose and reuse 60-year old iron.

Then 20 or 30 desperate people crowd aboard for a journey of days or weeks across open ocean, dodging Cuban and American patrol boats, huge, blind cargo ships, go-fast drug boats, and other sharks.

The salvaged engines have only one direction: north. The engines run at a chuggita chuggata low speed slowly propelling people who hope for the best when they leave everything behind.

In spite of our political malfugalties, those 20 or 30 people are desperate to get one foot on American soil.

Many chugs look like boats for obvious reasons. Humans arrived on Borneo by “boat” at least 120,000 years ago. Egyptians knew how to sew wooden planks into a ship hull as early as 3000 BC. Boats have evolved since then but most still have a pointy end to go through the water first and a hull shape that is easy to push. Most chugs are like that.

A different chug arrived on Coco Plum last Fall. It is unique in construction with a welded rebar space frame, metal roof panels hammered into shape, and styrofoam blocks as flotation and deck combined.


Cuban Chug Collage

The boatbuilder impressed me for inventiveness and resourcefulness. Many of these unseaworthy boats sink; the Styrofoam blocks might have been awash under the load, but they would support it. The lightweight roofing protected the flotation from abrasion. The rebar frame kept the people aboard and kept the boat together.

I’ve wandered over to Coco Plum to photograph the chug several times, including yesterday, and ended up with a pleasingly good batch of images. I had pre-planned, so I knew what I wanted to compose. And I checked that the tide would be out at the time the light was right. The vessel was a little higher on the beach than I remembered so the background was within the Depth of Field zone but I stood in the water and shot with the 100mm lens. The detail is so fine that you can count the threads on the rod used to secure the hull to the top frame.

I like these images; this album will continue to grow.

I’m thinking we want anybody that resourceful to live and grow here, too.

The “wet foot, dry foot policy” is the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 that permits that anyone who flees Cuba and makes it onto United States shores can to pursue U.S. residency a year later. Any Cuban caught on the waters of the Florida Straits (hence the “wet feet”) are sent home or to a third country. Any Cuban who makes it to shore (“dry feet”) can stay. The law provides for expedited legal permanent resident status and, eventually, citizenship.

News:
A Key Largo man tired of “illegal immigrants” was jailed for threatening a man with a knife after asking a group of people for “their papers.” (The 50-year-old construction worker he pulled the knife on is from Miami and was born in the United States.)

At least 18 Haitian migrants died on Christmas day as their boat carrying 50 people capsized off the Turks and Caicos islands. Eleven Haitians died in 2012 when a boat carrying 28 people from the Bahamas to Florida sank.

Forty residents of Perico, a town about 100 miles southeast of Havana, drowned at sea on a failed attempt to cross the Straits in 2007. The group included between nine and 12 children and expected to make landfall in the Keys.

We have an interesting way of enforcing national immigration policy here in South Puffin. The Key Largo man was arrested for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, burglary, battery, and criminal mischief. His bond was set at $114,000 but we give the few illegal immigrants we catch free room and board before sending them back.

Over on another border, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio offered to detain illegal immigrants his Tent City because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials announced they would release a number of illegal immigrants held in immigration jails. See, the Feds needed to cut costs.

Can you spell Immigration Reform?

The muttonheads we sent to Washington to fix laws like this are too stupid to fix the problem but men and women and children from every country in the world will risk their lives to get here anyway. Just think how much we could accomplish if people like this chug builder could build real boats here.

On the other hand, I don’t have much use for pictures of cruise ships but I’ll have plenty to photograph as long as people are willing to come here on boats like these.

 

Preventive Testing

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Blue Cross sent me my new Obamacare card and “Outline of Coverage” on Saturday, more than a month after I finally got signed up and 18 days after the new policy period started. I’m glad I didn’t get sick.

The accompanying letter advised, “Please carefully review the enclosed outline of coverage…”

I did. After the shock of seeing my deductible, I went online to view the more detailed explanation. That’s where I found this:

Women have unique health care needs that change over the course of their lifetime. The Affordable Care Act has expanded women’s preventive services to be covered with no member cost share for plans with ACA-defined preventive benefits beginning August 1, 2012 and upon renewal.

I understand why ACA would mandate free Rh(D) Incompatibility and other Screenings for Pregnant Females.

I understand why ACA would mandate free Cervical Cancer Screening for females only just as I understand why ACA would mandate free Prostate Cancer Screening for males only.

I simply do not understand why ACA would limit breast cancer screening, chlamydia screening, glucose screening, Hepatitis B virus infection screening, HPV DNA testing, to females only.

It’s not as if the government doesn’t know men develop breast cancer. NIH reports that, although breast cancer is much more common in women, men can get it too. It happens most often to men between the ages of 60 and 70. But there is no preventive male Breast Cancer Screening in the ACA list.

NIH reports that Chlamydial urethritis affects men. But there is no preventive male Chlamydia Screening in the ACA list.

An NIH report recommends the glucose challenge test screening for prediabetes and undiagnosed diabetes because diabetes prevention and care are limited by lack of screening. But there is no preventive male Glucose Screening in the ACA list.

CDC reports that gay and bisexual men are at increased risk for Hepatitis A, B and C. But there is no preventive male Hepatitis B virus infection screening in the ACA list.

CDC reports that most men who get HPV (of any type) never develop any symptoms or health problems but they can still transmit it to their partners. But there is no preventive male HPV DNA testing in the ACA list.

“If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance.”

I did like my health insurance. It did offer free breast cancer screening, chlamydia screening, glucose screening, Hepatitis B virus infection screening, and HPV testing. To everyone covered. It covered my cataract surgery with no waiting period for the cataracts to “mature.” And so on.

Now I have sticker shock: The new policies cover less and cost more.

I'm from the Government

Once upon a time, that wasn’t a joke.

 

Figures Don’t Lie

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Right? Right?

Except Carroll Wright’s entire quote is “Figures do not lie but liars figure.” Carroll D. Wright was United States Commissioner of Labor, addressing Congress at the time; he probably drew on earlier but unattributed versions of the saying.

In the story, Stagnant Wages Imperil Financial Security, the PBS Newshour and Bloomberg News collaborate to paint a deliberate picture of pernicious inflation eating away at our income (true) and that we need to increase the minimum wage to combat it (not true). See, there may be plenty of reasons to increase wages as well as plenty of reasons not to. This story doesn’t tell any of them.

“I would go to neither outlet for facts,” Rufus said when he sent me the original link, “but this is all the way over the top propaganda (or monumentally stupid.)”

PBS Graphic of CPI v. Adjusted WagesAt the core of the story is this animated graphic that they say shows wages aren’t keeping up with prices.

Figures don’t lie but liars do figure.

I had trusted Bloomberg News. Co-founded by former-NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Matthew Winkler, it delivers what we thought was accurate financial news to subscribers. Mr. Winkler was a writer for the Wall Street Journal. Pretty good creds for a finance reporter. They wanted to undercut the competing Dow Jones News Services.

That’s why it disturbs me that Bloomberg’s Roben Farzad would use data he has to know he manipulated to illustrate the PBS story. See, the problem with Mr. Farzad’s chart is that he adjusted the wages data for inflation and then compared the result to inflation. Apples versus oranges. Lies versus truth.

PBS corrected itself. Sort of. “A few of you who visited the NewsHour website last night commented on a graphic we created for yesterday’s show. It was meant to explain the relationship between stagnating wages and inflation. What we should have said is that one reason wages adjusted for inflation have been so flat for so long is that rising consumer prices are eating up a good deal of the gains.” They even offered a chance to view a “selection” of those responses and a corrected graphic but there was no link to the corrected graphic and the main body of the story still uses the wrong one.

Figures don’t lie but liars do figure.

Here’s the chart they should have used:

Published Figures of Minimum Wage Income v. Federal Poverty Level

Huh. Here we can see that published figures of minimum wage income for one person and the annual federal poverty levels for a family or household of one tell the opposite story. Minimum wage income has grown slightly above the alleged market prices in the Federal Poverty Level. The unadjusted data from each year doesn’t lie.

Unfortunately, the real data doesn’t tell the story PBS and Mr. Farzad wanted to tell, does it?

We’re left with two conclusions. Either (a) PBS and Mr. Farzad are too stupid or too uneducated to do simple arithmetic or (b) PBS and Mr. Farzad lied to us to push an agenda. This is very, very bad. The first indicts our schools since every editor and reporter has been graduated from somewhere. The latter indicts the media.

Bottom line? Rufus was right.