Quote for the day

I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.

-- Jim Carrey

Gas prices, catering to the rich, and Obama's place in the political spectrum

Ezra Klein looks at concerns about price gouging in the gasoline market and comes up empty. The real explanation is increasing world demand and Saudia Arabia's unwillingness (or inability) to increase production to compensate.

In another post he also writes about polling data that indicates the rich are less concerned about the state of the economy than other people. One effect of this, due to the fact that decision makers are not only wealthier than average themselves but also more attuned to the needs of the wealthy, is a considerable bias in Washington against taking action to improve the economy.

Nate Silver has a great post that not only looks at where Obama falls in the conservative-liberal spectrum relative to previous Democratic presidents but also at how the two parties and the Congress as a whole has simultaneously shifted to the right and become more polarized since the 1970s.

Song for the day

"The Man's Too Strong," from one of my favorite albums of all time, Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms.

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TGIF

It was an up and down week, but all in all, I have to say it wasn't too shabby. I feel a little shift, and for the first time in a long time, I'm present to the idea that all is well...

I watched one of my favorite movies last night--Living Out Loud--and that didn't hurt. I realized yet another way that I identify with Holly Hunter's character, Judith. (This video has nothing to do with it :-)

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Understanding healthcare

Specifically, an explanation of why patients aren't consumers in the usual sense. Worth a read.

Awesome photographs

Here are some great photographs from Chris Hondros, one of the photographers killed in Libya this week.

Song of the day

Coldplay's "Warning Sign"

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Whoa! I just watched the video, which I hadn't seen before. And it reminded me that when I was in high school, I had a dream about a girl I had dated being hit by a car during the final week of our senior year. A little unnerving to re-experience that three decades later...

All Summer In A Day

Leave it to Mom, she remembered the name of the story I referred to in my recent "My Life On Venus" post: Ray Bradbury's "All Summer In A Day." Apparently there was even a TV version (on YouTube parts 1, 2, and 3).

I watched the first few minutes, and it reminded me too much of the last month in Portland. And given that this week has been sunny, I think I'll wait to watch the whole thing. :-)

Can't people do anything right???

So we've been hearing a lot how natural gas is a clean alternative to coal, and that America has so much of it that we could greatly reduce our imports of foreign oil if we switched to using natural gas to fuel our cars and trucks.

And that in the last couple of decades companies have developed new technology that lets them extract natural gas from shale deposits, expanding our reserves even more. We're told that the oil companies inject water under high pressure to break up rocks deep underground, releasing the gas in the process.

But we've also heard some concerns that this "fracking" may be polluting groundwater.

Now comes this report: companies have apparently been knowingly injecting not just water but also toxic solutions containing carcinogens like benzene, and those chemicals are turning up in drinking water.

This kind of thing makes me feel like it's about impossible to have any faith in people. I'm sick of listening to conservatives argue endlessly about how we have too much regulation, and we should just let business police itself.

Sorry, but I just have zero confidence in the ability of American companies to do the right thing on their own.

It's tax time

And because taxes tend to get people all crazy, it's always good to inject a little reality into the conversation.

First, Paul Krugman has a recent post which compares the tax burden in the United States to a number of other countries. He also charts the dramatic drop in tax rates for the wealthiest Americans.

And the White House has released an interactive "tax receipt" application. You enter the amount of income tax you paid for 2010, and it itemizes exactly where your tax dollars went. The next time you're talking to someone who thinks that foreign aid or NPR or education spending is what's behind America's deficits, you'll know exactly where to send them.

Here's a sample "receipt" for a married couple with $80,000 in income and two children (click on it for a larger image):

Priceless

Okay, this B.C. strip is spot on (especially considering my "Venus" post yesterday :-)

Poem for the day

I watched The Shipping News tonight, and the ending brought to mind this poem, "The Untold Want":

The untold want by life and land ne'er granted,
Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.

-- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

P!nk for the day

"Who Knew"

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My life on Venus

When I was in elementary school we had to read a story about a bunch of kids living in a colony on a terraformed Venus. The process of altering the climate still had a long way to go, and the weather was nonstop, driving rain. Once every few years the scientists would adjust the conditions so that the rain would dry up for a day.

All but one of the children in the story had been born on Venus; the one exception was a girl who had arrived from Earth and who had experienced the warmth of sunshine on her face.

For some reason that I've long since forgotten, the native Venusians locked the Earth girl in a closet on the day when the rain stopped. They ventured out and enjoyed an afternoon in the open more than they could possibly have imagined. But when the sun set and the rain began again, they remembered the girl and, of course, felt guilty for their actions.

I didn't think about this story much until I moved to Portland. Now I sympathize with that Earth girl a lot. Especially when driving in the rain.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, I did run across one thing that gave me a moment of delight today. A scientist has applied techniques developed for genetic analysis to identify patterns in human languages, and he made this fascinating claim:

Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, ... has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: a language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.

Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has 45 phonemes.

This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Language is at least 50,000 years old, the date that modern humans dispersed from Africa, and some experts say it is at least 100,000 years old. Dr. Atkinson, if his work is correct, is picking up a distant echo from this far back in time.

The President's approach to addressing the nation's budget deficits

In today's speech, President Obama laid out his framework for reducing the country's budget deficits and ensuring that our long-term debts remain manageable. He contrasted his approach with that of the GOP (i.e. Congressman Paul Ryan's plan), which he described this way:

There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don't think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill. That's not a vision of the America I know.

The President spends some time filling in the picture of how we got into our current situation and reminds us how we've dealt with similar problems in the past. And he forcefully states that he will neither allow Medicare to be dismantled on his watch nor sign off on continuing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent of Americans beyond 2012 when they're set to expire.

It was good to hear the President so firmly differentiate his vision for America from that of the Republicans. Now let's just make sure that we actually speak up and let him know that we're not okay with another "robber baron" era (Roger Ebert had a good column on that topic last week (thanks, Sally!)).

The full transcript is here; the speech is about 40 minutes long but worth your time. And here is the New York Times' coverage.

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Quote for this sesquicentennial of the War of the Rebellion

Future years will never know the seething hell, the black infernal background of the countless minor scenes and interiors … of the Secession War, and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books.

-- Walt Whitman on the Civil War, which began 150 years ago today

Max Fischer lives

Wow, I just watched Rushmore. Not sure how I missed it all these years, but I was totally charmed.

Quote for the day

Indecision is the key to flexibility.

-- Unknown

Quote of the day

Destiny has two ways of crushing us -- by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.

-- Henri Frederic Amiel

Poem for the day: Be Drunken

One of my Western Culture professors had us watch Long Day's Journey Into Night in class one day. I watched it again the other night; this poem (spoken by a dreamy Dean Stockwell) has always stuck with me:

Be Drunken, Always. That is the point; nothing else matters. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weigh you down and crush you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please. But be drunken.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, or on the green grass in a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and find the drunkenness half or entirely gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the clock, of all that flies, of all that speaks, ask what hour it is; and wind, wave, star, bird, or clock will answer you: "It is the hour to be drunken! Be Drunken, if you would not be the martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please."

-- Charles Baudelaire

Quote for the day

There is a period of life when we swallow knowledge of ourselves and it becomes either good or sour inside.

-- Pearl Bailey

Quote for another day

I'm sure I've posted this before, but recent events have reminded me that...

One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are.

-- Gail Godwin

Cello for the day

"The Eternal Vow" by Tan Dun, from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

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The unbearable weight of being

It's been a heavy week, both on the home front and in the world. And since I don't really want to get into my personal woes, I'll focus on the news.

After reading about the U.N. workers who were killed in response to a Florida Koran burning, I felt such an urge to succumb to isolationism: bring all the troops home, forget globalization, and erect a 30' wall at the U.S. border.

But, alas, things aren't so great in North America either. Earlier in the week I wrote this email to a couple of friends:

In my sociology class in Las Vegas, we discussed how ridiculously low the official poverty line is in America. A single person is considered to be living below the poverty line if they are making less than roughly $10,000/year.

This [New York Times] article looks at how much people really need to make in order to have a minimum level of economic survey (their figure is closer to $30,000/year for a single person).

Now consider the fact that the most recent statistics show that about 14% of Americans live below the "official" poverty line. Meanwhile, the top one percent hold forty percent of the country's wealth.

And I don't know how President Obama can justify it when General Electric pays no taxes, but I find it scandalous that GE's CEO Jeff Immelt heads Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

(On the other hand, look at the Oval Office alternatives. What has our nation come to when the likes of Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachmann get air time as potential GOP presidential candidates?)

I HAD BEGUN TO THINK that we weren't really capable of dealing with climate change, but maybe we could at least lessen the problem with better nuclear technology. But watching the Fukushima mess in Japan is a reminder that we humans are mostly incapable of escaping the blinders we wear. We just have a really hard time dealing with the unknown unknowns as Andrew Revkin discusses here.

AND FINALLY: on the way to work earlier this week, I tuned in to Morning Edition midway through an interview about the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Listening to the guest speak, I made the assumption that he fit into a particular pigeon hole, namely the "liberal commentator." I took what he was saying with a hefty grain of salt until I learned that he was actually Neil Barofsky, the Inspector General for TARP.

So while news this week that the government actually made money on its TARP loans to the banks is good, we can't forget all of the other ways that the program failed to meet its objectives (for example, the utter failure to reduce the scale of the foreclosure debacle).

You can read Mr. Barofsky's op-ed piece in the Times here or listen to his NPR interview here.

It all circles back around... in a time of financial crisis, we took the best care of the people who needed the least assistance. Instead of simply stabilizing the banking system, we sent the perpetrators home with 100 cents on the dollar and big bonuses. The Republicans want to cut-cut-cut the spending that affects most folks but keep the huge tax breaks for GE and the rich.

And the world is so small now that when an idiot in Florida burns a book, people on the other side of the globe die for it. Go figure.