Dishonesty, Race and What Have You?

In a recent show, Bill Maher led a failed discussion on the maddening fact that our government can’t seem to get anything done. Unfortunately, the discussion barely touched on the reasons why this is true or the fact that Joe Manchin opposed Build Back Better but never really explained why.

Dishonesty seems to be the great American flaw.

In NYC we build subways at about two billion dollars a mile while in France, they build them for about 6% of that price. Are the French that much more functional and efficient than we are? With their unions? Not a chance.  What they may be is a hell of a lot more honest.

The best example of construction dishonesty and greed is the Henry Hudson Bridge. It crosses from the Bronx to Riverdale. It has been under construction and reconstruction since 1933 and it’s still not completed. Who’s doing the stealing? Easy to pinpoint, but hard to prove! It looks like everyone from the grunt labor grabbing tons of unnecessary overtime, to contractors creative scheduling, which drags out each part of the operation, sometimes for years, to the politicians who always get their piece. Every aspect of every construction job screams for one thing: oversight. The most important element necessary to almost every bill passed by congress is transparency and oversight, yet it is rarely in any of them. The fact is; it took NYC more than twice as long to build a few blocks of the 2^nd Avenue subway than it did to build the George Washington Bridge. The GWB, which opened in 1931, took only four years to build, but the 2^nd Avenue Subway took almost two decades even though we have better tools with which to work and a whole system of computing that should shrink all planning to a fraction of what it took to do it ninety years ago. It would surely take over thirty years today.

So what’s the reason for the increase of schedules and costs? Simple, people are stealing with both hands and no one is in charge of closing the barn door. No municipal construction job should ever be started until someone is hired to be accountable for every financial aspect for the entire job because giving the contractor that responsibility is like begging to have your pocket picked. His goal, after all, is to make money for himself. That is in direct conflict with the goal of any job, which is to make the best product at the most reasonable cost, in the least amount of time.

I am fortunate to live a five-minute walk from the 79^th Street Boat Basin, which is about to be demolished and replaced by a newer and supposedly more functional version. There is currently a small, dilapidated, wooden boat house that will be torn down and replaced by a…what? Well, they released the sketches of the proposed boat house this week and it looks like something they reclaimed from an army base in Guam. Aluminum siding and glass are fine in Texas and Arkansas, but we usually expect a little more in the way of design in NY, especially when the whole park, of which the boat basin is an integral part, is built of wood and stone.

So how did this happen? It’s the way everything happens in modern iifrastructure. The guy in charge of letting out the bids went to his buddy down the hall who normally designs the trash containers for the park and told him to put in a bid on the boathouse. Incredibly he won! Now he and the guy in charge are banking the profits as the cost of the job, currently estimated at 90 million, heads for the stratosphere.

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Let’s talk about discrimination. President Biden says he is going to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court and all kinds of people get bent out of shape. Bizarrely there would be much less controversy about him actually making such an appointment than about his talking about one.

Reporter Jane Coaston, one of the most intelligent, sharpest reporters currently on the scene, has come out with a story about ex-Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores being interviewed by the NY Giants for their open head coach job. According to Flores, he was interviewed after the Giants had already chosen Joe Daboll as their new coach so he is suing the Giants. Why? The Giants were just doing what the NFL demanded they do. They set up an interview with Flores after the one they had with Daboll but during the one with Daboll they decided they wanted him.  They were never going to hire Flores anyhow. He is a good technical coach but he has real interpersonal problems and fought with everyone in Miami. Coaston, who is a very smart lady, seems to have picked the wrong horse in this race but she continues to fight the bad fight. The rule was instituted by the NFL seemingly to help minority coaches make their case about landing a head coaching job. There is currently a dearth of black head coaches among the thirty something teams in the league, even though a majority of the players are black. The NFL tried to balance this uneven situation by making a rule that a team looking for a head coach had to interview at least one minority candidate. Looks like a good idea, didn’t turn out so well. The rule says they have to “interview;” not they have to hire. Forcing a team to interview a minority candidate, even if they already know whom they want to hire, is a dumb idea, even if it seems certifiably woke. So the result of this rule hasn’t been to get more black head coaches hired. It’s been to get more black coaches pissed off, especially when they go all the way across country for an interview at which they don’t have a shot at getting hired. Does that seem like a good idea to you?

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I’ve been a big fan of Bill Maher for a long time. Sure, he’s often full of shit but aren’t we all and his intentions are usually in the right place. But this week he had a particular ax to grind. He had originally started bitching about COVID restrictions the nano-second they appeared, not that they were a violation of his rights but because they interfered with his broadcast and concert schedules, which cut into his bank account.

This week he went on a rant about science and the Covid mess. It seems Bill is outraged that the messages about the virus and how to deal with it had changed several times over the past two years. So he has decided that the government and the scientific community are lying to him. Lie may be harsh but not in Bill’s world.  So this week he went off again, this time reaching back to HIV-Aids and mixing up the changes caused by new scientific discovery with those brought about by the gay prejudices of the ‘80s.

For those who have been paying any attention, the information about COVID has changed on an almost daily basis since the disease hit us. This kind of informational shifting is usually brought about by one of two causes. The first is that someone is making a lot of money by the confusion and the second is that new facts are emerging that constantly alter the picture.

Normally when big Pharma is involved in anything that has a monetary aspect, we don’t have to look any further than them, but in this case Big Pharma was going to make so much money no matter what happened that it really didn’t have to screw the public. No, in this case it’s all about information and the fact that it came in so fast and sometimes so inaccurately, that the picture changed 100% every day. That’s why one day Fauci might be telling us not to wear masks and the next day he might be saying the opposite.

One of the reasons I’m a big fan of Maher is that he never learned his lesson even when it cost him his job. His show is the epitome of free speech.