canning jars and missiles

When I was in the insurance industry, part of my territory was the state of Indiana. As a result, I wound up providing insurance for Ball Manufacturing Company, which all of us are familiar with, even if your mother didn’t use their jars for her canning.

The company started business in Buffalo, New York, when the Ball brothers purchased a company called the Wooden Jacket Can Company. In 1884, the brothers started to manufacture glass canning jars, and a few years late, moved their operations to Muncie, Indiana.

The company expanded into other product lines during the Great Depression, but took their greatest departure from their roots in 1956, when the management team started an aerospace division. Its first product was a pointing control for missiles.

Since defense weapons have a higher profit margin than glass charges, the company sold its canning business to a subsidiary in 1993. The company moved its headquarters to Broomfield, Colorado in 1998, Although the company continues to sell products to the aerospace industry, it also makes a variety of plastic and metal food storage products.

Although Ike warned us about the “military-industrial” complex in the 1950’s, the defense industry is still a HUGE industry. According to the Stockholm International Peace Institute, worldwide weapons sales in 2013 were $402 billion. The top 10 companies (Ball is not one of them) had sales of over $200 billion, or slightly more than half. 6 of the 10 largest companies are located in the United States of America. The top 2 companies, Boeing and Lockheed, sell a combined total of $75 billion a year.

We all know people who seem to think that having more guns in our society somehow makes us all safer, which is the reason that the Texas legislature recently passed a law to all students to carry weapons on campus. In response, numerous students decided to open carry dildos to demonstrate how silly the new law is.

Since Joe McCarthy scared the bejeezus out of all us in the 1950’s, we all know that the Doomsday Clock is. It is now the closest it’s been to midnight at any point in the last 30 years. Fittingly, climate change is now one of the factors that affext the setting, and we just finished the hottest year on record, which proves that global warming IS real.

We’d all like to see an increase in the manufacture of canning jars, and a decrease in the production of weapons, but I don’t think that that’s going to happen anytime in our lifetime.