I've long been skeptical of the theory that global warming is man-made. More accurately, I've long been skeptical of the evidence. The theory itself seems reasonable. We live in what is essentially a very, very big greenhouse. The temperature of the air we breathe is determined in part by the mix of gasses present in our atmosphere. Water vapor traps a lot of heat, as does methane, and, to a much smaller degree, carbon dioxide. We live in an era when modern life is changing the ratio of all of these gasses. We are liberating carbon that has long been trapped beneath the surface. Our modern agriculture has specialized in producing animals that produce a lot of methane. And even water vapor has new outlets into the atmosphere thanks to human activity, as anyone who has ever driven past a factory belching steam must surely have noticed. A lot of that water is taken from ancient aquifers far below ground, with molecules that haven't had a shot at the sky for millions of years,
But, of course, nothing is simple. Sure, our livestock farts out a lot of methane, but so did bisons and passenger pigeons, and we turned off those spigots. We may pull a lot of carbon out of the ground as coal and oil, but we take a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere by cutting down forests to build houses and print books. The new forests that grow in the wake of our activities pull a lot of carbon out of the air. As for water vapor, there is so much water in the atmosphere that human actions can barely be measured.
As for whether the world is getting warmer, I think that's pretty well established. There's a long set of non-biased data that point to a fairly consistent warming trend, at least in the northern hemisphere, dating back to the 1850s. But, of course, this follows a centuries long cooling trend known as the "Little Ice Age." The problem with figuring out if human actions lead to climate change is that there is no such thing as climate stability. Our present warming trend could just be part of the background variation inherent in our climate.
But, perhaps because some global warming proponents are seizing on our current heat wave as evidence of man made climate change, I've noticed some skeptics adopting some of the same religious ferver they denounce in their opponents. The other day, I read an article talking about how all the various climate models on computers had been debunked. If the computers got it wrong, there's no man-made climate change! None! But, that argument is a false one if you give it even half a moments thought. The reality of changing climate has nothing at all to do with the existence of good computer models. The mastodons didn't look once at a chart showing the ice age might be coming to an end, but it ended anyway. Just because we can't model the effects of human activity upon the atmosphere isn't evidence that there aren't any such effects.
I think skepticism is healthy. Being skeptical of your own skepticism isn't a bad thing either. It's easy to argue against man-made global warming just for the satisfaction of poking holes in the near religious certainty of the proponents. The sky-is-falling doomsday predictions are fun to shoot down. But, don't lose sight of a simple truth: Natural variation might explain all the climate change we've experienced in recent centuries. But, it's also just as valid to argue that natural variation might mask genuine long term harm we're inflicting upon the earth by tweaking the atmosphere a little more each year. Cool-headed, reasoned certainty that man isn't causing long term climate change seems to me to be just as foolish a position as feverish certainty that we are.
If I may use a few analogies, climate change alarmists may be Chicken-Littles, panicking over a random string of hot days. But climate change skeptics might be the proverbial frog in the pot of water, never taking action to save themselves as the temp climbs slowly to boiling.
Wednesday, July 04, 2012
Sunday, July 01, 2012
Thoughts on the Health Care ruling
It looks like I let June be my first month since starting this blog without a post. Sorry. I have a deadline of July 31 to turn in my next book, Witchbreaker, but due to buying a house, renovating it, and moving in, I basically wrote almost nothing on the project between mid-March and mid-May. Fortunately, when panic finally sets in, I can crank out some words, and I just finished the second draft yesterday. So, I'm taking a few days before jumping into the third draft to catch up on some of the stuff I've let fall by the wayside during my writing frenzy.
I used to write about politics frequently on this blog, but my enthusiasm for politics has waned in recent years. I used to have this vague, half-formed hope that as our countries problems worsened, we'd finally have some leaders step up to pull us back to a path of sanity. I took some amusement from the cowardice, hypocrisy, and stupidy of elected officials because it reinforced my libertarian prejudices that government just messes everything up.
But all joy sort of seeped away during the unending Republican primaries. Amusement changed to terror as I realized our next president might be the oops guy, the pizza guy, the crazy lady, the religious nut, the wife-leaver, or the spineless rich guy. Sweet merciful jesus, has a political party ever fielded a worse slate of candidates? Ron Paul was okay, but he was doomed by crazy talk, i.e., explaining his true beliefs clearly and plainly without shaping them to make them more palatable to his audience. Romney makes his opinions palatable by seeming not to have any. He doesn't like Obama's temporary immigration fix, and says he wants a permanent solution... without saying what that will be. He wants to repeal and replace Obamacare... but replace with what? He claims he understands the economy, but if he has any ideas beyond cutting taxes I haven't heard them.
Meanwhile, Obamacare. I have to admit, I didn't expect the individual mandate to be upheld, and I certainly didn't expect that it would be Roberts that pushed it over the top. But, I do think there's a fundamental honesty in calling the "penalty" a tax. And, if even once in the bill it had been called a tax, there's no question it would have been constitutional. I'm deeply offended, even outraged, that elected representatives might vote to tax me for things I might not do (like having health insurance), but I can't deny that the constitution grants congress the power to levy taxes.
And, I did appreciate what I thought was the most important sentence in Robert's ruling: It's not the court's job to protect the public from the consequences of their political choices. Robert was basically slapping the American public in the face and shouting, "If you don't like this law, vote for people who will overturn it. Don't come crying to us!"
So, should we vote for people to overturn the law? My immediate impulse is yes, completely, 100%. The law is too complex, and way too expensive. I have little doubt that it's a drag on the economy that's making companies reluctant to hire people. And, because of the individual mandate, unemployed people no longer have the option of trying to start their own business. As someone self-employed as a writer, I can tell you that my income is marginal and unpredictable enough that it would be extremely difficult for me to pay a monthly health care premium. I do have a day job, and get my health care coverage through this. But, like most writers, I dream about quitting my day job. It's possible that, if I did so, I might be taking a gamble on having a few years uninsured. Lots of people do this, and, if you're in good health, and young enough, it's often a gamble that pays off. You go without insurance while you're starting your small business and ten years later, when your hard work is finally paying off, you get insurance.
Now, with the individual mandate, you can't have those just-scraping-by years to launch your own business because you either need to earn enough to buy insurance, or you get charged a hefty tax. This is going to be a burden discouraging millions of people from trying to be their own boss. The law tilts the employment playing field in favor of large corporations, who get the best insurance rates. But, of course, now the large corporations don't want to hire as many people, because the law also removes things like payment caps, meaning any given employee can be a time bomb just waiting to explode into multi-million dollar health care price tags.
On the other hand, if Obamacare truly does cause more people to have insurance, maybe this will keep down the costs. If we add more healthy young people, it subsidizes sicker old people. I think the costs of the plan outweight the benefits, but at this point I'm open to the argument that we need to try something. If Romney wants to repeal and replace, let me hear about the replace.
My libertarian instincts are that the best path available to lower health care costs would be tort reform and insurance deregulation. But, I also think there may be room for some federal action, though, perversely, it's probably action that's the opposite of what they would do. My wife works for a hospital, and as near as I can tell, 10% of her job is directly involved with providing drugs to customers, and 90% of her job involves filling out paperwork. Two weeks ago, I injured my hand at work, a fairly deep cut from a box cutter that was over an inch long. The treatment of the cut was pretty simple. They basically glued it shut and sent me on my way. But, I had to talk to my help line at work before I went, which involved 20 minutes of talking on the phone to a nurse who asked me a ton of information, then going to the urgent care center where I had to fill out paperwork asking almost exactly the same questions. Meanwhile, my boss had his own paperwork to fill out. Couldn't there be an infrastructure created that removed all this redundancy? And why is their paperwork at all? Anything I fill in on a sheet of paper is presumably being transfered to a computer by someone. Instead of handing me a clipboard, why not hand me a tablet computer that already has 90% of my data already filled in after my insurance card has been scanned, leaving me only to answer questions about my immediate problem?
Improved technology has cut down my costs for communication and acquiring information in almost every aspect of my life. Only in healthcare does the increasing technology seem to be driving costs up instead of down. Why?
Maybe over regulation and overlitigation has created most of these problems. Or, maybe complexity just makes change more difficult. I don't think Obamacare improves the complexity, and may actually increase it. But, does repeal lead to improvement? Or just a return to an already horrible status quo?
I used to write about politics frequently on this blog, but my enthusiasm for politics has waned in recent years. I used to have this vague, half-formed hope that as our countries problems worsened, we'd finally have some leaders step up to pull us back to a path of sanity. I took some amusement from the cowardice, hypocrisy, and stupidy of elected officials because it reinforced my libertarian prejudices that government just messes everything up.
But all joy sort of seeped away during the unending Republican primaries. Amusement changed to terror as I realized our next president might be the oops guy, the pizza guy, the crazy lady, the religious nut, the wife-leaver, or the spineless rich guy. Sweet merciful jesus, has a political party ever fielded a worse slate of candidates? Ron Paul was okay, but he was doomed by crazy talk, i.e., explaining his true beliefs clearly and plainly without shaping them to make them more palatable to his audience. Romney makes his opinions palatable by seeming not to have any. He doesn't like Obama's temporary immigration fix, and says he wants a permanent solution... without saying what that will be. He wants to repeal and replace Obamacare... but replace with what? He claims he understands the economy, but if he has any ideas beyond cutting taxes I haven't heard them.
Meanwhile, Obamacare. I have to admit, I didn't expect the individual mandate to be upheld, and I certainly didn't expect that it would be Roberts that pushed it over the top. But, I do think there's a fundamental honesty in calling the "penalty" a tax. And, if even once in the bill it had been called a tax, there's no question it would have been constitutional. I'm deeply offended, even outraged, that elected representatives might vote to tax me for things I might not do (like having health insurance), but I can't deny that the constitution grants congress the power to levy taxes.
And, I did appreciate what I thought was the most important sentence in Robert's ruling: It's not the court's job to protect the public from the consequences of their political choices. Robert was basically slapping the American public in the face and shouting, "If you don't like this law, vote for people who will overturn it. Don't come crying to us!"
So, should we vote for people to overturn the law? My immediate impulse is yes, completely, 100%. The law is too complex, and way too expensive. I have little doubt that it's a drag on the economy that's making companies reluctant to hire people. And, because of the individual mandate, unemployed people no longer have the option of trying to start their own business. As someone self-employed as a writer, I can tell you that my income is marginal and unpredictable enough that it would be extremely difficult for me to pay a monthly health care premium. I do have a day job, and get my health care coverage through this. But, like most writers, I dream about quitting my day job. It's possible that, if I did so, I might be taking a gamble on having a few years uninsured. Lots of people do this, and, if you're in good health, and young enough, it's often a gamble that pays off. You go without insurance while you're starting your small business and ten years later, when your hard work is finally paying off, you get insurance.
Now, with the individual mandate, you can't have those just-scraping-by years to launch your own business because you either need to earn enough to buy insurance, or you get charged a hefty tax. This is going to be a burden discouraging millions of people from trying to be their own boss. The law tilts the employment playing field in favor of large corporations, who get the best insurance rates. But, of course, now the large corporations don't want to hire as many people, because the law also removes things like payment caps, meaning any given employee can be a time bomb just waiting to explode into multi-million dollar health care price tags.
On the other hand, if Obamacare truly does cause more people to have insurance, maybe this will keep down the costs. If we add more healthy young people, it subsidizes sicker old people. I think the costs of the plan outweight the benefits, but at this point I'm open to the argument that we need to try something. If Romney wants to repeal and replace, let me hear about the replace.
My libertarian instincts are that the best path available to lower health care costs would be tort reform and insurance deregulation. But, I also think there may be room for some federal action, though, perversely, it's probably action that's the opposite of what they would do. My wife works for a hospital, and as near as I can tell, 10% of her job is directly involved with providing drugs to customers, and 90% of her job involves filling out paperwork. Two weeks ago, I injured my hand at work, a fairly deep cut from a box cutter that was over an inch long. The treatment of the cut was pretty simple. They basically glued it shut and sent me on my way. But, I had to talk to my help line at work before I went, which involved 20 minutes of talking on the phone to a nurse who asked me a ton of information, then going to the urgent care center where I had to fill out paperwork asking almost exactly the same questions. Meanwhile, my boss had his own paperwork to fill out. Couldn't there be an infrastructure created that removed all this redundancy? And why is their paperwork at all? Anything I fill in on a sheet of paper is presumably being transfered to a computer by someone. Instead of handing me a clipboard, why not hand me a tablet computer that already has 90% of my data already filled in after my insurance card has been scanned, leaving me only to answer questions about my immediate problem?
Improved technology has cut down my costs for communication and acquiring information in almost every aspect of my life. Only in healthcare does the increasing technology seem to be driving costs up instead of down. Why?
Maybe over regulation and overlitigation has created most of these problems. Or, maybe complexity just makes change more difficult. I don't think Obamacare improves the complexity, and may actually increase it. But, does repeal lead to improvement? Or just a return to an already horrible status quo?
Sunday, May 20, 2012
New house photos!
We've finally reached a point in our move where we've carted off the 5000 card board boxes that formed a maze in our living area and are able to take some photos:
Our living room. Big skylights make the room feel bright and open. Pay no attention to the photos sitting on the floor instead of hanging on the wall.
We picked the rug based on the colors of our cats...
We have a dining room! We can eat like civilized people instead of on the couch!
The deck as seen from the dining room window. The deck's bigger than our old living room.
Our kitchen. When we bought it, there were no appliances and half the cabinet doors were missing.
We plan to fill the long hallway with art and photos. Also, cats.
The guest bathroom doubles as an art gallery.
The guest bedroom. Oscar, the black and white cat, is stalking me as I take photos.
My office. And Oscar. He's ubiquitous.
Look! Up on the wall!
The master bathroom, or parts of it, at least.
The master bedroom. You can see the new bamboo floor we had installed. The ceiling fan is also new. Also, the white cat on the bed is kind of new. She was an outdoor cat at our old house who's very quickly figured out how to use furniture now that we've brought her inside.
Wednesday, May 09, 2012
Yesterday's Progress Toward Legalizing Gay Marriage
So, gay marriage advocates had a bad day in North Carolina yesterday. Or did they? Roughly 40% of voters came out and voted against an amendment to ban same-sex unions. 40% acceptance is a pretty amazing figure considering that 30 years ago, if there had been google, and if you'd googled the phrase "same sex marriage" you would have gotten probably zero hits. The idea was not only not being debated thirty years ago, it wasn't even a thing people knew would be a debate.
As much as same sex marriage advocates promote the idea as a fundamental human right, the reality is we are asking for a radical change in human thinking. We are asking society to officially sanction a relationship model that has never been accepted before recent decades. We honestly don't know what changes will come to society by adopting this new idea. I'm optimistic that most changes will be positive, but I'm also certain there are unknown unknowns.
For instance, gay marriage could have the perverse effect of eliminating homosexuality. Assuming that homosexuality is a genetic trait, it's being passed down from generation to generation. Until recent decades, societal pressures have forced majorities of homosexuals to hide their true natures. Countless homosexuals get married to opposite sex partners and have children. This keeps the genes for homosexuality in the genetic pool.
But, if homosexuals no longer enter into show marriages with opposite sex partners, economic forces will reduce the number of children they have, since reproducing will require surrogate mothers, sperm donors, etc. If gays aren't passing on their genes because they now marry same sex partners, we could see a decline in homosexuality over generations.
I obviously don't know that this will happen. It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, if I may borrow a phrase. I'm just saying that it's not irrational for society to be slow to enthusiastically embrace a change of this magnitude.
But, one prediction I will make is that the future looks good for gay marriage. I just googled some stats. In 1988, the first year there were reliable polls on this issue, opposition to same sex unions was at 75%, and only about 15% were in favor. Today, nationally, the issue is very close to 50/50. North Carolina is part of the Bible Belt, so it's not surprising that it's 40/60 here, unless the surprise is that 40% of the citizens seem ready to say yes to the idea after so few years of the topic being in the public debate.
Assuming that 5% of the population warms to the idea each decade, even NC is only 20 years away from a tipping point. Anything that can be made illegal by a vote can be made legal by a vote. I recognize that, if you are gay, you have good reason to be disgusted and angered by the thought of having to wait another 20 years for legally sanctioned marriages in North Carolina. I would encourage you to turn this anger into a positive energy. Think about all the "vote against" signs you saw in people's yards over the last month. Momentum is building for your goals.
Are there bigots out there standing in your way? Yes. But you don't need to change the opinions of bigots. You need to change the opinions of ten to twenty percent of people who oppose same sex marriage out of simple momentum. You need to appeal to their hearts and minds, make your case that what you want is a positive change not just for you, but for everyone. Advocates have made astonishing progress in only a few decades. Keep moving forward. We've evidence that minds can change. Our greatest weapons in this war are reason and time.
As much as same sex marriage advocates promote the idea as a fundamental human right, the reality is we are asking for a radical change in human thinking. We are asking society to officially sanction a relationship model that has never been accepted before recent decades. We honestly don't know what changes will come to society by adopting this new idea. I'm optimistic that most changes will be positive, but I'm also certain there are unknown unknowns.
For instance, gay marriage could have the perverse effect of eliminating homosexuality. Assuming that homosexuality is a genetic trait, it's being passed down from generation to generation. Until recent decades, societal pressures have forced majorities of homosexuals to hide their true natures. Countless homosexuals get married to opposite sex partners and have children. This keeps the genes for homosexuality in the genetic pool.
But, if homosexuals no longer enter into show marriages with opposite sex partners, economic forces will reduce the number of children they have, since reproducing will require surrogate mothers, sperm donors, etc. If gays aren't passing on their genes because they now marry same sex partners, we could see a decline in homosexuality over generations.
I obviously don't know that this will happen. It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, if I may borrow a phrase. I'm just saying that it's not irrational for society to be slow to enthusiastically embrace a change of this magnitude.
But, one prediction I will make is that the future looks good for gay marriage. I just googled some stats. In 1988, the first year there were reliable polls on this issue, opposition to same sex unions was at 75%, and only about 15% were in favor. Today, nationally, the issue is very close to 50/50. North Carolina is part of the Bible Belt, so it's not surprising that it's 40/60 here, unless the surprise is that 40% of the citizens seem ready to say yes to the idea after so few years of the topic being in the public debate.
Assuming that 5% of the population warms to the idea each decade, even NC is only 20 years away from a tipping point. Anything that can be made illegal by a vote can be made legal by a vote. I recognize that, if you are gay, you have good reason to be disgusted and angered by the thought of having to wait another 20 years for legally sanctioned marriages in North Carolina. I would encourage you to turn this anger into a positive energy. Think about all the "vote against" signs you saw in people's yards over the last month. Momentum is building for your goals.
Are there bigots out there standing in your way? Yes. But you don't need to change the opinions of bigots. You need to change the opinions of ten to twenty percent of people who oppose same sex marriage out of simple momentum. You need to appeal to their hearts and minds, make your case that what you want is a positive change not just for you, but for everyone. Advocates have made astonishing progress in only a few decades. Keep moving forward. We've evidence that minds can change. Our greatest weapons in this war are reason and time.
Monday, May 07, 2012
Why Gay Marriage is Good for Straight People
Tomorrow in North Carolina, we go to the polls to vote on an anti-gay marriage amendment that would prevent the state or any business within the state from recognizing same sex marriage or even civil unions. Gay marriage is already illegal by statute. The amendment, say defenders, is to keep activist judges from imposing gay marriage on the state against the will of the people.
I'm going to be voting against the amendment. For me, it's mainly an issue of fundamental fairness. Marriage isn't just about procreation, it's also an important societal creation for helping people deal with finances as well as illness and death. I've personally experienced the turmoil of losing a beloved partner who I wasn't legally married to. Laura became ill with cancer when we were dating, and after that we were so focused on fighting the cancer that we never really stopped to make plans for the future. Her family was wonderful in giving me a say on most of the end of life decisions and the funeral arrangements, but there were still a few issues left dangling due to the fact that we were never legally married. I at least had the option, however unrealistic, of marrying Laura. Imagine being in a similar situation of losing a loved one and being told that the state was going to prevent you from forming a legal union. It just seems needlessly harmful, even spiteful, to withhold this legal sanction from someone simply because you find their partner to be of the wrong sex.
However, I find it unsatisfying to simply appeal to emotion to make a case for a matter of law. It's not that emotion has no role to play in law, but I'd prefer most laws be grounded in reason. So, here are some non-emotional arguments for how allowing gay marriage can benefit straight marriage.
1. As capitalism and evolution teach us, competition is good. Gay couples might have an incentive to build storybook marriages that other people envy. Just as people turn out in former dictatorships to vote at amazing rates, gay people long denied marriage might approach their unions with a special enthusiasm and dedication. This could provide an example for straight couples, who, let's face it, often seem a bit jaded with marriage. Maybe trying to live up to a gay standard could help lower the overall divorce rate of straight couples. This could keep more children in two parent households, which is a major force for fighting poverty.
2. As long as we're talking about economics, as someone who has been wedded in the last 12 months, I can testify that weddings and honeymoons are excellent economic stimulus. If we legalized gay marriage tomorrow, I bet the revenues generated from all the pent up demand for legal marriages could drive economic growth up a point or two. Wedded couples are also likely to go out and buy a house together. They save money together, have health insurance together, and are generally statistically less of a burden on society than single people. Gay marriage, in both the long and short term, would be good for straight people's wallets.
3. It would increase morality. Perhaps you disapprove of homosexuality. If so, do you also disapprove of sex before marriage for straight people? Do you think that sex should be between monogamous couples with the sanction of church and law? If you allow gay marriage, you are helping take a step away from the counter culture, anything-goes sexual morality that took hold in the sixties and seventies and is so ubiquitous today that no one bats an eye if two unmarried opposite sex people live together. Suddenly, you have homosexuals singing the praises of life-long, covenant monogamy. Since homosexuals are frequently drivers of popular cultural trends, marriage could suddenly be the cool, rebellious lifestyle that all young people aspire to. Again, straights win!
So, if you're thinking about voting for the amendment tomorrow, please take a few moments to reconsider. You might be standing in the way of better marriages for everyone.
I'm going to be voting against the amendment. For me, it's mainly an issue of fundamental fairness. Marriage isn't just about procreation, it's also an important societal creation for helping people deal with finances as well as illness and death. I've personally experienced the turmoil of losing a beloved partner who I wasn't legally married to. Laura became ill with cancer when we were dating, and after that we were so focused on fighting the cancer that we never really stopped to make plans for the future. Her family was wonderful in giving me a say on most of the end of life decisions and the funeral arrangements, but there were still a few issues left dangling due to the fact that we were never legally married. I at least had the option, however unrealistic, of marrying Laura. Imagine being in a similar situation of losing a loved one and being told that the state was going to prevent you from forming a legal union. It just seems needlessly harmful, even spiteful, to withhold this legal sanction from someone simply because you find their partner to be of the wrong sex.
However, I find it unsatisfying to simply appeal to emotion to make a case for a matter of law. It's not that emotion has no role to play in law, but I'd prefer most laws be grounded in reason. So, here are some non-emotional arguments for how allowing gay marriage can benefit straight marriage.
1. As capitalism and evolution teach us, competition is good. Gay couples might have an incentive to build storybook marriages that other people envy. Just as people turn out in former dictatorships to vote at amazing rates, gay people long denied marriage might approach their unions with a special enthusiasm and dedication. This could provide an example for straight couples, who, let's face it, often seem a bit jaded with marriage. Maybe trying to live up to a gay standard could help lower the overall divorce rate of straight couples. This could keep more children in two parent households, which is a major force for fighting poverty.
2. As long as we're talking about economics, as someone who has been wedded in the last 12 months, I can testify that weddings and honeymoons are excellent economic stimulus. If we legalized gay marriage tomorrow, I bet the revenues generated from all the pent up demand for legal marriages could drive economic growth up a point or two. Wedded couples are also likely to go out and buy a house together. They save money together, have health insurance together, and are generally statistically less of a burden on society than single people. Gay marriage, in both the long and short term, would be good for straight people's wallets.
3. It would increase morality. Perhaps you disapprove of homosexuality. If so, do you also disapprove of sex before marriage for straight people? Do you think that sex should be between monogamous couples with the sanction of church and law? If you allow gay marriage, you are helping take a step away from the counter culture, anything-goes sexual morality that took hold in the sixties and seventies and is so ubiquitous today that no one bats an eye if two unmarried opposite sex people live together. Suddenly, you have homosexuals singing the praises of life-long, covenant monogamy. Since homosexuals are frequently drivers of popular cultural trends, marriage could suddenly be the cool, rebellious lifestyle that all young people aspire to. Again, straights win!
So, if you're thinking about voting for the amendment tomorrow, please take a few moments to reconsider. You might be standing in the way of better marriages for everyone.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
A good day to buy stock at Home Depot
Cheryl and I have decided it's time to rescue the US economy. We've just helped clear the glut of houses on the market by purchasing a new home. Even better, we purchased a new home with many thousands of dollars of repairs needed. Woo!Seriously, the list of repairs was daunting. The place needs a new furnace, a new water heater, new floors in three rooms, new doors, new appliances, new gutters, new light fixtures, and a new wood stove. (That last item seems optional, but the living room has a stovepipe in the ceiling and a big brick foundation for a stove taking up space in the floor. It would probably cost more to remove these things and repair the ceiling and floor than just to buy a new stove.) Anyway, today might be a good day to buy stock in Lowe's or Home Depot, as we convert all the money in our savings account into profits for thier shareholders. (Actually, most of the money will probably be going to private small businesses who are providing all the labor, but none of these are listed on the NYSE.)
One might wonder why we've purchased a house in such need of repairs. The house was seriously underpriced for its neighborhood. Even adding the cost of the repairs, we think the house is a bargain. If the house had been priced higher, we still would have made and offer because it's really a terrific home. The lot is big, but not too demanding. It's landscaped with a lot of flowering bushes and trees instead of being mostly lawn. The place is huge in comparison to our present home, but not a stupidly oversized McMansion. It has seven closets and an attic; our current houses has no attic and three small closets, and one of these has the water heater in it. The closet in the master bedroom alone has more storage space than all three of our closets combined.
The location is excellent, right on the edge of town. Take a right from the driveway and it's less than a mile to grocery stores and restaurants, take a left and you're half a mile away from beautiful farmland.
There is, as pictured, a fantastic deck. There's a covered front porch running the length of the house. Inside, three huge skylights fill the living room, kitchen, and dining room with sunlight. The dining room has a giant window overlooking the backyard. If the house has any drawback, it's that the kitchen doesn't have a lot of counterspace. We'll bear this burden as best we can.
Now, we just have to sell our existing house. Spread the word if you know someone in the market who doesn't require a lot of closet space.
Monday, April 02, 2012
Name Calling as Political Debate
I have a story in the latest Intergalactic Medicine Show anthology. If you follow the link, you will find in the customer reviews a one star review titled, "Buy this book to show your support of homophobic bigotry." In the review itself, Card is called vile and hateful, and the review ends with the suggestions that readers might also enjoy "The Adolf Hitler Anthology of Aryan Adventure."
A comment thread then opened beneath this review, where other people call Card and "epic jerk" and "scum," though of course his defenders jump in as well.
Orson Scott Card has become a lightning rod due to articles he's written opposing gay marriage. I've been a fan of Card's political essays for years, and have read most of his arguments against gay marriage. I find that I disagree with nearly all of them.
But, so what? Gay marriage isn't illegal due to Orson Scott Card. It's not even illegal due to George W. Bush or the pope or Clarence Thomas. Homosexual marriage wasn't even a blip on the radar screen of possibilities until about two decades ago. People who oppose gay marriage are standing firmly atop the status quo concept of marriage that has prevailed through most of human history. While I can think of a few cultures where homosexuality wasn't a horrible stigma, I can't think of a single culture where men were openly allowed to marry other men.
I think that there are very good arguments to be made as to why same sex couples should marry. I think society as a whole benefits if we have the legal framework in place to protect homosexual life partners, who work together to purchase property, raise families, and care for one another through sickness, into death. Homosexual couples also seem to have an above average desire to adopt children, and, while I know only a few such couples, those I do know seem to be raising fairly normal children, to the degree that any child can be said to be normal. Finally, the age when gay people would pretend to be straight to protect their families and hide their true identities from thier friends is drawing to a close. The more gay people you discover you're related to, or work with, or friends with, the more you will discover just how ordinary they are, and deserving of a fair shot at the the same happiness straight couples are allowed to pursue.
But, I'm perfectly aware that, in advocating for homosexual marriage, I'm asking the world to accept something new and different. Do I want to redefine marriage? Well, duh, of course. I'm seeking to expand from the long established norm of civilization. Are there risks involved? Quite possibly. One risk is that homosexual couples, so long denied the chance of marriage, will prove exceptionally committed to making their marriages work so as not to give satisfaction to people who say that gay marriage can't work. They could wind up with a divorce rate of, like, 10% while heteros keep rolling along at close to 50%, and embarrass us straight people.
It's a risk I'm willing to take.
So, I'm pro-gay marriage. But, for the life of me, I don't see how calling people bigots, homophobes, and scum advances the same sex cause. Once you start comparing your opponents to Hitler, you've pretty much admitted that you don't understand history, morality, or analogies, and are thus unable to participate in a genuine debate.
The irony is, for all the people pissed off at Orson Scott Card, he's probably done more to advance the concept of homosexual marriage than a million people shouting, "Bigot!" The fact is, in his essays, he spells out his reasoning. He presents his evidence. One might argue that he's dishonest, and searching for a bandaid of logic to slap over his gut-level bias. Who knows? Who cares? The fact is, twenty years ago, nobody was talking about gay marriage. Now, you have prominent conservatives who take the possibility of legally recognized homosexual partnerships seriously, and are thus compelled to take an intellectual stand against it. But, in by the very act of making their arguments, opponents provide a framework that proponents can work with. Anyone who takes the time to write out a long, thoughtful essay on gay marriage is showing a willingness to think about it. Answering their objections, even if you don't change their minds, helps bring clarity to your own arguments, and makes you better prepared to discuss the topic thoughtfully the next time it comes up.
I'll close by saying that, yeah, I know this column singles out people I'll presume to be liberals who are resorting to name calling instead of actual debate. Before anyone brings up Micheal Savage or Rush Limbaugh, yes, yes, yes, I know that the right has plenty of people who engage in name calling. It's a failure across the whole political spectrum, and across a lot of media platforms.
Luckily, I know if you're reading my blog, you're intellectually vibrant enough to avoid such shenanagins. Good job, readers!
A comment thread then opened beneath this review, where other people call Card and "epic jerk" and "scum," though of course his defenders jump in as well.
Orson Scott Card has become a lightning rod due to articles he's written opposing gay marriage. I've been a fan of Card's political essays for years, and have read most of his arguments against gay marriage. I find that I disagree with nearly all of them.
But, so what? Gay marriage isn't illegal due to Orson Scott Card. It's not even illegal due to George W. Bush or the pope or Clarence Thomas. Homosexual marriage wasn't even a blip on the radar screen of possibilities until about two decades ago. People who oppose gay marriage are standing firmly atop the status quo concept of marriage that has prevailed through most of human history. While I can think of a few cultures where homosexuality wasn't a horrible stigma, I can't think of a single culture where men were openly allowed to marry other men.
I think that there are very good arguments to be made as to why same sex couples should marry. I think society as a whole benefits if we have the legal framework in place to protect homosexual life partners, who work together to purchase property, raise families, and care for one another through sickness, into death. Homosexual couples also seem to have an above average desire to adopt children, and, while I know only a few such couples, those I do know seem to be raising fairly normal children, to the degree that any child can be said to be normal. Finally, the age when gay people would pretend to be straight to protect their families and hide their true identities from thier friends is drawing to a close. The more gay people you discover you're related to, or work with, or friends with, the more you will discover just how ordinary they are, and deserving of a fair shot at the the same happiness straight couples are allowed to pursue.
But, I'm perfectly aware that, in advocating for homosexual marriage, I'm asking the world to accept something new and different. Do I want to redefine marriage? Well, duh, of course. I'm seeking to expand from the long established norm of civilization. Are there risks involved? Quite possibly. One risk is that homosexual couples, so long denied the chance of marriage, will prove exceptionally committed to making their marriages work so as not to give satisfaction to people who say that gay marriage can't work. They could wind up with a divorce rate of, like, 10% while heteros keep rolling along at close to 50%, and embarrass us straight people.
It's a risk I'm willing to take.
So, I'm pro-gay marriage. But, for the life of me, I don't see how calling people bigots, homophobes, and scum advances the same sex cause. Once you start comparing your opponents to Hitler, you've pretty much admitted that you don't understand history, morality, or analogies, and are thus unable to participate in a genuine debate.
The irony is, for all the people pissed off at Orson Scott Card, he's probably done more to advance the concept of homosexual marriage than a million people shouting, "Bigot!" The fact is, in his essays, he spells out his reasoning. He presents his evidence. One might argue that he's dishonest, and searching for a bandaid of logic to slap over his gut-level bias. Who knows? Who cares? The fact is, twenty years ago, nobody was talking about gay marriage. Now, you have prominent conservatives who take the possibility of legally recognized homosexual partnerships seriously, and are thus compelled to take an intellectual stand against it. But, in by the very act of making their arguments, opponents provide a framework that proponents can work with. Anyone who takes the time to write out a long, thoughtful essay on gay marriage is showing a willingness to think about it. Answering their objections, even if you don't change their minds, helps bring clarity to your own arguments, and makes you better prepared to discuss the topic thoughtfully the next time it comes up.
I'll close by saying that, yeah, I know this column singles out people I'll presume to be liberals who are resorting to name calling instead of actual debate. Before anyone brings up Micheal Savage or Rush Limbaugh, yes, yes, yes, I know that the right has plenty of people who engage in name calling. It's a failure across the whole political spectrum, and across a lot of media platforms.
Luckily, I know if you're reading my blog, you're intellectually vibrant enough to avoid such shenanagins. Good job, readers!
Saturday, March 17, 2012
The Oil Debate Continues
Since I wrote my essay on why politicians should resist manipulating the price of gasoline, pretty much every op-ed article of the last week has focused on the topic. I'm glad I have such influence on the national debate.The most amusing claim I've heard this week is that President Obama has intentionally decieved the public as to how much oil the US has, creating a "myth of scarcity." The chart above has often accompanied these arguments.
I am especially amused by the claim that we have 2,303 billion barrels in "undiscovered resources." Wow! Curiously, I woke up this morning and realized I must be a millionaire, since I have 999,999 dollars in undiscovered cash. I plan to alert my banker at once.
I have no doubt, by the way, that we do have a good deal of undiscovered oil, but I'm amused by the specificity of the number provided. It's not just 2,000 billion barrels, or 2,300 billion, it's 2,303 billion.
What the people who make arguments from this chart don't make note of is that, if oil prices fell, most of the oil shown above wouldn't be recovered. We've drilled most of the easy oil that just bubbled up from the ground when we punched a hole, and the oil that remains requires more elaborate technology to extract, and is only viable if the price of oil remains where it's at today.
One irony that environmentalists don't appreciate is that, as the price of oil rises, it will lead to more production, not less. If oil hit 200 dollars a barrel, all of of that "technically recoverable" oil will suddenly be genuine black gold, and will be extracted. Even at the higher prices, demand is only going to keep rising as the rest of the world chases a western standard of living.
So, here's my prediction: If Obama is reelected, gas prices will rise. If the next president is Ron Paul, gas prices will rise. There may be short term down swings, but, in the long run, we should all start planning for much higher prices.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
A few random political thoughts
Random opinion #1
Has there ever been a lamer attempt at creating a scandal than the attempt at outrage by some right-wingers over a 1991 video showing a young Obama praising Harvard professor Derrick Bell, even going so far as to hug him? The standard line of argument is that this proves how truly radical Obama is, and is evidence of his secret agenda to tear down America.
The scandal so far appears to be a dud. First, maybe .0001 percent of the US population could have told you who Bell was before this video appeared. From a practical matter, he's just not famous enough to be fuel for scandal. Second, who cares if Bell held the most radical views you can imagine? Suppose he advocated mandatory abortions and 100% taxation. He's a professor. Outrageous philosophical and political beliefs are pretty standard issue among their ilk. The trade off for letting them think whatever the heck they want to think is that everyone else in the world gets to ignore their ideas. But, their students can still like them. I loved arguing with my professors in college, who often had very different ideas about how the world truly worked than I did. How much they genuinely believed thier opinions, and how much they adopted extreme ideas as a way of challenging me to think I can't say. But, if I were to introduce one at a ralley, I'd certainly be generous with praise. My best friend ever identitified himself as a communist. I call myself a libertarian. We agreed on nothing. But I would gladly tell the world he was an intelligent, thoughtful person who should be listened to, and he would have done the same for me. If you only are friends with people who agree with you on everything, you have my sincere pity.
Finally, while I dislike labeling all attacks against Obama as being rooted in racism, I get the icky feeling from this scandal that the right wingers are trying to prove that Obama is a scary black man who hates white people. I've seen the term "racialist" in about half the essays I've read on this subject. Bell apparently argued that the US constitution was an inherently racist document, and thought that the entire system of government would have to be overthrown if blacks were to get a fair shake in this world. I don't agree with this opinion, but its certainly not difficult to understand how a black person born and raised in the era of Jim Crow might have come to such opinions. If such opinions seem frightening to you, you need to get out more often.
Random Opinion #2:
Iran has been in the news a lot. Most of the Republican presidential candidates except Ron Paul have been advocating a willingness to go to war to stop Iran from having nuclear weapons.
I can't understand how anyone who looks at our experience in Iraq or Afghanistan thinks that launching another war is going to be a good option for us. Assuming that our intelligence on Iraq wasn't purposefully fraudulent, we know that a great deal of the things we thought we knew about the facts on the ground in that country turned out to be wrong. The places we thought were manufacting chemical weapons weren't. There were no stock piles of yellow cake uranium. Every claim of a weapon of mass distruction turned out to be false.
I will presume that we weren't trumping up or inventing this intelligence as an excuse to go to war. This just shows how exceptionally difficult it is for us to know what's really going on in a country. I will assume that the Iranians do have a nuclear program, since they openly say they do. But, can we really be certain we know which sites to bomb? How do we know we've got all the sites? If I were an Iranian general wanting to manufacture a bomb, and knew my enemy could look down on my country from space, I would think it would be a no brainer to build dummy facilities that looked menacing but were actually building nothing of significance, while hosting the genuine nuke facilities in the basement of an oil company.
Also, while making a nuclear bomb involves a lot of equipment, the reality is that the big obstacle isn't the equipment, it's the know how. As the engineers perfect each bit of equipment, don't you think the plans are backed up and secured to a ridiculous degree? We could destroy every bit of equipment they have, and a year from now it would all be rebuilt. Bombing wouldn't even destroy the nuclear fuel. It might scatter it and contaminate it, but you don't destroy elements with bombs. With a little clever engineering, most of the fuel could probably be recovered in the aftermath of an airstrike.
So, that leaves us two options. First, we don't rely on airstrikes alone. We invade the country and hunt down every last flash drive that might contain nuclear secrets, and vacuum up every last bit of soil that might contain nuclear fuel. This would be a massive invasion, at least as large as our war with Iraq. But, when we went to war with Iraq, our nation was in much better shape financially. Part of our multi-trillion dollar debt can be blamed on our unfunded wars. Can we really afford to throw on another two or three trillion? At what point would our economy collapse? Second, we rely only on airstrikes, but we don't target only nuclear sites. We cripple Iran's entire infrastructure and keep it down for decades. We bomb every elecrical grid, every water treatment plant, every bridge. Bring Iranian civilization to a halt, so that they can't build even a microwave oven, let alone a nuke. The downside here, aside from the fact that we would be mass murderers of millions of innocent men, women, and children, is that we would again be committing economic suicide. If we destroyed Iranian infrastructure, we would destroy their oil production. As refugees flowed into Iraq right next door, we'd probably send that country back into war, and the flow of oil there would dry up. Overnight, the price of gas could double. I know in my last essay, I said that politicians shouldn't be concerned with trying to control the price of gas, but resisting taking actions that would double the price of gasoline overnight is an area where I might make an exception.
Random Thought #3: Republicans are kind of doomed.
One argument against Obama was that he was inexperienced and had never accomplished anything during his few years in the senate. Sadly, I think that Republicans are now turning this into a requirement for all future nominees. The reality is, if you've been a governor or a senator or held any level of political office higher than Mayor of Wasilla, you've made votes and judgment calls that will outrage the conservative activists that decide the nominations. Before Rick Perry revealed himself as being too inarticulate to lead a Boy Scout troop, he was already losing support because he'd made anti-conservative choices on childhood vaccinations and tuition for illegal immigrants. Rick Santorum is being attacked for voting to raise the debt ceiling and for supporting pork projects in his home state. Romney is attacked because he passed a mandate that all citizens of Massachusetts were required to purchase health insurance--a position at the time regarded a very conservative, but that is now regarded as extremely liberal.
Ronald Reagan couldn't be nominated today. He'd raised taxes when governor, and before he got into politics he was head of a union! Socialist alert!
I understand the roots of Republican mistrust of compromise. But, governors have to make real world choices on how best to educate children, protect the environment, and balance budgets. Senators have to make votes that bring money back home to their states or they don't remain senators. If no elected official is going to be pure enough to earn the support of conservative activists, I hope that in the next round of elections we can just cut to the chase. The people with actual experience can stay home, and the base can nominate a talk show host. It almost happened this time with Herman Caine. Give it another four years.
Has there ever been a lamer attempt at creating a scandal than the attempt at outrage by some right-wingers over a 1991 video showing a young Obama praising Harvard professor Derrick Bell, even going so far as to hug him? The standard line of argument is that this proves how truly radical Obama is, and is evidence of his secret agenda to tear down America.
The scandal so far appears to be a dud. First, maybe .0001 percent of the US population could have told you who Bell was before this video appeared. From a practical matter, he's just not famous enough to be fuel for scandal. Second, who cares if Bell held the most radical views you can imagine? Suppose he advocated mandatory abortions and 100% taxation. He's a professor. Outrageous philosophical and political beliefs are pretty standard issue among their ilk. The trade off for letting them think whatever the heck they want to think is that everyone else in the world gets to ignore their ideas. But, their students can still like them. I loved arguing with my professors in college, who often had very different ideas about how the world truly worked than I did. How much they genuinely believed thier opinions, and how much they adopted extreme ideas as a way of challenging me to think I can't say. But, if I were to introduce one at a ralley, I'd certainly be generous with praise. My best friend ever identitified himself as a communist. I call myself a libertarian. We agreed on nothing. But I would gladly tell the world he was an intelligent, thoughtful person who should be listened to, and he would have done the same for me. If you only are friends with people who agree with you on everything, you have my sincere pity.
Finally, while I dislike labeling all attacks against Obama as being rooted in racism, I get the icky feeling from this scandal that the right wingers are trying to prove that Obama is a scary black man who hates white people. I've seen the term "racialist" in about half the essays I've read on this subject. Bell apparently argued that the US constitution was an inherently racist document, and thought that the entire system of government would have to be overthrown if blacks were to get a fair shake in this world. I don't agree with this opinion, but its certainly not difficult to understand how a black person born and raised in the era of Jim Crow might have come to such opinions. If such opinions seem frightening to you, you need to get out more often.
Random Opinion #2:
Iran has been in the news a lot. Most of the Republican presidential candidates except Ron Paul have been advocating a willingness to go to war to stop Iran from having nuclear weapons.
I can't understand how anyone who looks at our experience in Iraq or Afghanistan thinks that launching another war is going to be a good option for us. Assuming that our intelligence on Iraq wasn't purposefully fraudulent, we know that a great deal of the things we thought we knew about the facts on the ground in that country turned out to be wrong. The places we thought were manufacting chemical weapons weren't. There were no stock piles of yellow cake uranium. Every claim of a weapon of mass distruction turned out to be false.
I will presume that we weren't trumping up or inventing this intelligence as an excuse to go to war. This just shows how exceptionally difficult it is for us to know what's really going on in a country. I will assume that the Iranians do have a nuclear program, since they openly say they do. But, can we really be certain we know which sites to bomb? How do we know we've got all the sites? If I were an Iranian general wanting to manufacture a bomb, and knew my enemy could look down on my country from space, I would think it would be a no brainer to build dummy facilities that looked menacing but were actually building nothing of significance, while hosting the genuine nuke facilities in the basement of an oil company.
Also, while making a nuclear bomb involves a lot of equipment, the reality is that the big obstacle isn't the equipment, it's the know how. As the engineers perfect each bit of equipment, don't you think the plans are backed up and secured to a ridiculous degree? We could destroy every bit of equipment they have, and a year from now it would all be rebuilt. Bombing wouldn't even destroy the nuclear fuel. It might scatter it and contaminate it, but you don't destroy elements with bombs. With a little clever engineering, most of the fuel could probably be recovered in the aftermath of an airstrike.
So, that leaves us two options. First, we don't rely on airstrikes alone. We invade the country and hunt down every last flash drive that might contain nuclear secrets, and vacuum up every last bit of soil that might contain nuclear fuel. This would be a massive invasion, at least as large as our war with Iraq. But, when we went to war with Iraq, our nation was in much better shape financially. Part of our multi-trillion dollar debt can be blamed on our unfunded wars. Can we really afford to throw on another two or three trillion? At what point would our economy collapse? Second, we rely only on airstrikes, but we don't target only nuclear sites. We cripple Iran's entire infrastructure and keep it down for decades. We bomb every elecrical grid, every water treatment plant, every bridge. Bring Iranian civilization to a halt, so that they can't build even a microwave oven, let alone a nuke. The downside here, aside from the fact that we would be mass murderers of millions of innocent men, women, and children, is that we would again be committing economic suicide. If we destroyed Iranian infrastructure, we would destroy their oil production. As refugees flowed into Iraq right next door, we'd probably send that country back into war, and the flow of oil there would dry up. Overnight, the price of gas could double. I know in my last essay, I said that politicians shouldn't be concerned with trying to control the price of gas, but resisting taking actions that would double the price of gasoline overnight is an area where I might make an exception.
Random Thought #3: Republicans are kind of doomed.
One argument against Obama was that he was inexperienced and had never accomplished anything during his few years in the senate. Sadly, I think that Republicans are now turning this into a requirement for all future nominees. The reality is, if you've been a governor or a senator or held any level of political office higher than Mayor of Wasilla, you've made votes and judgment calls that will outrage the conservative activists that decide the nominations. Before Rick Perry revealed himself as being too inarticulate to lead a Boy Scout troop, he was already losing support because he'd made anti-conservative choices on childhood vaccinations and tuition for illegal immigrants. Rick Santorum is being attacked for voting to raise the debt ceiling and for supporting pork projects in his home state. Romney is attacked because he passed a mandate that all citizens of Massachusetts were required to purchase health insurance--a position at the time regarded a very conservative, but that is now regarded as extremely liberal.
Ronald Reagan couldn't be nominated today. He'd raised taxes when governor, and before he got into politics he was head of a union! Socialist alert!
I understand the roots of Republican mistrust of compromise. But, governors have to make real world choices on how best to educate children, protect the environment, and balance budgets. Senators have to make votes that bring money back home to their states or they don't remain senators. If no elected official is going to be pure enough to earn the support of conservative activists, I hope that in the next round of elections we can just cut to the chase. The people with actual experience can stay home, and the base can nominate a talk show host. It almost happened this time with Herman Caine. Give it another four years.
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
It's not the government's job to determine the price of gas
My last post ridiculed Newt Gingrich's vision of making the moon the 51st state. Now, I'm going to ridicule him for recently saying that, if he were president, he'd make sure gasoline cost $2.50 a gallon.
But, I'm not really targeting Gingrich here. It's a fairly common charge in politics that expensive gasoline is the fault of the current president. Bush got blamed for high gas prices during his entire administration. He was in the "pockets of the oil companies." Obama is now being blamed, because his administration is "choking the oil industry with regulations."
It bugs me that republican's, who are supposed to be champions of the free market, feel like the federal government should be concerned with the market price of gasoline. It bothers me that democrats, who have been on the record proposing carbon taxes that would increase the price of gasoline, start proposing to tap the strategic oil reserves in hopes of driving prices down.
The reality is, while gas prices can be manipulated in hundreds of different ways in the short term, in the long term prices are determined by the balance of how much it costs to produce weighed against how much we are willing to pay for it.
We aren't unwilling slaves to the oil companies. We pay willingly for their product because we judge the benefits to outweigh the costs. If the costs go up, we do have plenty of tricks up our sleeves to reduce our spending on this or any other product. A coworker of mine has spend years commuting to work in an SUV. Recently, she's swapped this for a compact car. Higher prices can drive us to more fuel efficient vehicles and altered driving habits.
The energy shocks of the seventies produced cars that were radically more fuel efficient on average, and houses that were better insulated. Our appliances today are fine tuned to make the most efficient use of electricity, and the average cost is posted right on the front of each appliance when you buy it. Higher gas prices will produce similar change over time.
We as consumers have power over our purchases. That's the beauty of the free market.
When republicans hear democrats talk about setting prices for, say, health care, they cry "socialism!" If it's true for the cost of a doctor's visit, it's true for the cost of gasoline. Sorry, Newt.
But, I'm not really targeting Gingrich here. It's a fairly common charge in politics that expensive gasoline is the fault of the current president. Bush got blamed for high gas prices during his entire administration. He was in the "pockets of the oil companies." Obama is now being blamed, because his administration is "choking the oil industry with regulations."
It bugs me that republican's, who are supposed to be champions of the free market, feel like the federal government should be concerned with the market price of gasoline. It bothers me that democrats, who have been on the record proposing carbon taxes that would increase the price of gasoline, start proposing to tap the strategic oil reserves in hopes of driving prices down.
The reality is, while gas prices can be manipulated in hundreds of different ways in the short term, in the long term prices are determined by the balance of how much it costs to produce weighed against how much we are willing to pay for it.
We aren't unwilling slaves to the oil companies. We pay willingly for their product because we judge the benefits to outweigh the costs. If the costs go up, we do have plenty of tricks up our sleeves to reduce our spending on this or any other product. A coworker of mine has spend years commuting to work in an SUV. Recently, she's swapped this for a compact car. Higher prices can drive us to more fuel efficient vehicles and altered driving habits.
The energy shocks of the seventies produced cars that were radically more fuel efficient on average, and houses that were better insulated. Our appliances today are fine tuned to make the most efficient use of electricity, and the average cost is posted right on the front of each appliance when you buy it. Higher gas prices will produce similar change over time.
We as consumers have power over our purchases. That's the beauty of the free market.
When republicans hear democrats talk about setting prices for, say, health care, they cry "socialism!" If it's true for the cost of a doctor's visit, it's true for the cost of gasoline. Sorry, Newt.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Why the moon won't be the 51st state, and why the stars aren't our destination
Newt Gingrich was the subject of much mockery this week when he proposed a permanent lunar colony by the end of his second term. Perhaps he was joking when he said one day it could be the 51st state. But, there are plenty of people who, while they may be dubious of Newt Gingrich's ability to lead us into space, take it as an article of faith that mankind will some day leave the Earth and colonize the moon, then other planets, then move on beyond our solar system to explore and exploit other solar systems.
I, alas, am dubious, though with caveats. First, "some day" is a vague time frame. I'm ill prepared to speculate what mankind might accomplish in, say, 5000 years, let alone 50,000 years, or 5 million years. But, a lot of science fiction envisions our civilization spreading off the earth in this century. Indeed, a lot of science fiction imagined it taking place in the LAST century. Plenty of science fiction imagined us having moon bases and Mars colonies by 1999. By 2012, we were going to be shuttling back and forth to Saturn. I talk to a lot of people at science fiction conventions who feel like, if only politicians would get their priorities straight, we could be setting up shop on Mars by the end of the decade. For now, I'll just say that it's difficult for me to imagine any permanent base of any significance by the end of this century.
Caveat two: "Of any significance." Obviously, we HAVE a space station. We had a space shuttle. We made it to the moon. I don't doubt that China or India or even the US might go back to the moon for a visit as a matter of national pride. Maybe we'll get our act together enough to pay a visit to a nearby asteroid. But the kind of "city of wonders in the sky" space station of science fiction is difficult to foresee within the next 100 years. "Cramped RVs parked somewhere between here and the moon," maybe.
Caveat three: I'm only talking about human space flight. Obviously, we've done amazing stuff with rovers, probes, and telescopes. I anticipate the trend will continue. We might be stuck on the planet, but our tools can really travel.
That third caveat, by the way, is the real reason I don't think humans will be heading for another planet anytime in the coming century. The weak point in "manned space flight" is the "manned" part. We simply aren't engineered well for traveling to another planet. Humans have absolutely horrific fuel consumption, we generate a tremendous amount of waste, we are overly complicated and prone to breakdowns. Our sensory arrays are a mess. Our one tiny advantage over machinery is our ability to behave erratically. Mars rovers aren't likely to head for a funny-looking rock on a whim, kick it over, and by chance find some kind of martian worm. But, while our ability to behave randomly and benefit from lucky outcomes may have a huge evolutionary advantage here on earth, outside the bubble of our own biosphere, it's more likely to get us killed.
Consider interstellar travel. When science fiction authors contemplate it, they have to resort to magic to move humans through the void at speeds not just faster than light, but faster than boredom. If it takes the Enterprise five years to get from star to star, Kirk doesn't get to sleep with too many alien babes before he becomes to fat and bald to be a player. Some science fiction writers do tackle this issue by introducing generations ships which are basically self contained worlds. But, trying to move a human biosphere across the void requires a stunning amount of resources compared to moving a robot the size of my cell phone from here to another planet.
Any argument I've ever heard for us leaving the earth seems either self-negating or better tackled by leaving humans out of the equation.
Popular arguments are:
1. We have to leave because a collision is inevitable. We need only look at our moon to see that massive collisions do occur in our neck of the woods. But, unless the object is truly massive, I don't see how evacuating the planet is a superior approach to using robots to intercept the threatening object and steer it away.
2. We will find some resource out there that not here.
Suppose the thing we desire is information. Machines can go wherever we need them to and gather the data we need. If a machine can't go there, we can't go there. Suppose the thing we need is some exotic mineral. The main problem here is that we understand the periodic table pretty well, and any exotic mineral we need is either here already, or else so unstable that it's going to vanish from wherever else it might be found. If we understand chemistry at all, then the same building blocks of nature are going to be found all over the universe. They don't have anything in the Andromeda galaxy we can't put our hands on here. Of course, some matter is more interesting than other. Suppose we get lucky enough to discover life on another world, either Mars or Europa. Yay! The impulse to go and study would be strong.
And that impulse would absolutely have to be resisted. Because if we do find another ecosystem, I can think of nothing more irresponsible than to place a human in the middle of it. Suppose we flew a spaceship filled with humans to Europa. It's a well built machine, with an artificial ecosystem capable of supporting us. Since we can't pack enough food for the journey, we probably have some sort of algae and brine shrimp farming going on, possibly in combination in recycling our waste. Now imagine this ship gets whacked by a rock the size of softball a mile above the surface, and we suddenly spray brine shrimp and algae and human excrement over a hundred mile swath of ice. Then the ship smashes into the surface, and the liquefied remains of the crew seep into the cracks we've opened in the ice. We would have forever contaminated the very thing we went there to examine, an ecosystem untouched by man.
3. We have to leave our planet because we'll outgrow it. You don't have to be blind to see that we are placing severe ecological stress on our planet. We are altering the atmosphere, acidifying the oceans, and creating entire islands of waste plastic. We suck nutrients from the soil by growing crops in places they were never designed to grow. And, we're starting to get really packed in. It's tempting to look at Mars, and dream of a little elbow room. But, honestly, is the fact that we've screwed up our current ecosystem a good argument for leaving it behind, the way Newt Gingrich might abandon a sick wife? Or, couldn't the money and energy spent on a hypothetical mission to Mars be used instead to clean up some of the crap we've dumped in our seas?
The fact is, our current technology is capable of building a space probe and sending it to another solar system. Perhaps the journey would take fifty thousand years. Obviously, we aren't going to spend money on a project that requires so long for a payoff. But, the weak link here is the human need to see results of a project in our own lifetime. On the scale of the universe, fifty thousand years is just a blip.
Perhaps one day we'll beat death, and a race of immortal humans will be able to plan projects that span thousands of years. If not us, then the better designed beings that follow us.
For now, we're stuck with this world, and we're stuck with our fellow men. I advise we take care of both.
I, alas, am dubious, though with caveats. First, "some day" is a vague time frame. I'm ill prepared to speculate what mankind might accomplish in, say, 5000 years, let alone 50,000 years, or 5 million years. But, a lot of science fiction envisions our civilization spreading off the earth in this century. Indeed, a lot of science fiction imagined it taking place in the LAST century. Plenty of science fiction imagined us having moon bases and Mars colonies by 1999. By 2012, we were going to be shuttling back and forth to Saturn. I talk to a lot of people at science fiction conventions who feel like, if only politicians would get their priorities straight, we could be setting up shop on Mars by the end of the decade. For now, I'll just say that it's difficult for me to imagine any permanent base of any significance by the end of this century.
Caveat two: "Of any significance." Obviously, we HAVE a space station. We had a space shuttle. We made it to the moon. I don't doubt that China or India or even the US might go back to the moon for a visit as a matter of national pride. Maybe we'll get our act together enough to pay a visit to a nearby asteroid. But the kind of "city of wonders in the sky" space station of science fiction is difficult to foresee within the next 100 years. "Cramped RVs parked somewhere between here and the moon," maybe.
Caveat three: I'm only talking about human space flight. Obviously, we've done amazing stuff with rovers, probes, and telescopes. I anticipate the trend will continue. We might be stuck on the planet, but our tools can really travel.
That third caveat, by the way, is the real reason I don't think humans will be heading for another planet anytime in the coming century. The weak point in "manned space flight" is the "manned" part. We simply aren't engineered well for traveling to another planet. Humans have absolutely horrific fuel consumption, we generate a tremendous amount of waste, we are overly complicated and prone to breakdowns. Our sensory arrays are a mess. Our one tiny advantage over machinery is our ability to behave erratically. Mars rovers aren't likely to head for a funny-looking rock on a whim, kick it over, and by chance find some kind of martian worm. But, while our ability to behave randomly and benefit from lucky outcomes may have a huge evolutionary advantage here on earth, outside the bubble of our own biosphere, it's more likely to get us killed.
Consider interstellar travel. When science fiction authors contemplate it, they have to resort to magic to move humans through the void at speeds not just faster than light, but faster than boredom. If it takes the Enterprise five years to get from star to star, Kirk doesn't get to sleep with too many alien babes before he becomes to fat and bald to be a player. Some science fiction writers do tackle this issue by introducing generations ships which are basically self contained worlds. But, trying to move a human biosphere across the void requires a stunning amount of resources compared to moving a robot the size of my cell phone from here to another planet.
Any argument I've ever heard for us leaving the earth seems either self-negating or better tackled by leaving humans out of the equation.
Popular arguments are:
1. We have to leave because a collision is inevitable. We need only look at our moon to see that massive collisions do occur in our neck of the woods. But, unless the object is truly massive, I don't see how evacuating the planet is a superior approach to using robots to intercept the threatening object and steer it away.
2. We will find some resource out there that not here.
Suppose the thing we desire is information. Machines can go wherever we need them to and gather the data we need. If a machine can't go there, we can't go there. Suppose the thing we need is some exotic mineral. The main problem here is that we understand the periodic table pretty well, and any exotic mineral we need is either here already, or else so unstable that it's going to vanish from wherever else it might be found. If we understand chemistry at all, then the same building blocks of nature are going to be found all over the universe. They don't have anything in the Andromeda galaxy we can't put our hands on here. Of course, some matter is more interesting than other. Suppose we get lucky enough to discover life on another world, either Mars or Europa. Yay! The impulse to go and study would be strong.
And that impulse would absolutely have to be resisted. Because if we do find another ecosystem, I can think of nothing more irresponsible than to place a human in the middle of it. Suppose we flew a spaceship filled with humans to Europa. It's a well built machine, with an artificial ecosystem capable of supporting us. Since we can't pack enough food for the journey, we probably have some sort of algae and brine shrimp farming going on, possibly in combination in recycling our waste. Now imagine this ship gets whacked by a rock the size of softball a mile above the surface, and we suddenly spray brine shrimp and algae and human excrement over a hundred mile swath of ice. Then the ship smashes into the surface, and the liquefied remains of the crew seep into the cracks we've opened in the ice. We would have forever contaminated the very thing we went there to examine, an ecosystem untouched by man.
3. We have to leave our planet because we'll outgrow it. You don't have to be blind to see that we are placing severe ecological stress on our planet. We are altering the atmosphere, acidifying the oceans, and creating entire islands of waste plastic. We suck nutrients from the soil by growing crops in places they were never designed to grow. And, we're starting to get really packed in. It's tempting to look at Mars, and dream of a little elbow room. But, honestly, is the fact that we've screwed up our current ecosystem a good argument for leaving it behind, the way Newt Gingrich might abandon a sick wife? Or, couldn't the money and energy spent on a hypothetical mission to Mars be used instead to clean up some of the crap we've dumped in our seas?
The fact is, our current technology is capable of building a space probe and sending it to another solar system. Perhaps the journey would take fifty thousand years. Obviously, we aren't going to spend money on a project that requires so long for a payoff. But, the weak link here is the human need to see results of a project in our own lifetime. On the scale of the universe, fifty thousand years is just a blip.
Perhaps one day we'll beat death, and a race of immortal humans will be able to plan projects that span thousands of years. If not us, then the better designed beings that follow us.
For now, we're stuck with this world, and we're stuck with our fellow men. I advise we take care of both.
Friday, January 06, 2012
Answering the Polygamy Equivalency
Yesterday in New Hampshire, Santorum explained his opposition to same-sex marriage by equating it to polygamy:
Santorum retorted, “Are we saying that everyone should have the right to marry?”
When the audience member told him yes, he shot back, “So anyone can marry can marry anybody else, so, if that’s the case, then everyone can marry several people.”
I hear this a lot, and I always find it a bit perplexing. It seems to be arguing that, if we allow monogomous gay marriage (which is growing in societal acceptance), it opens the door to polygamy (which is opposed by a much wider margin).
But, it doesn't seem to me that gay marriage is the real slippery slope to polygamy. Instead, the slippery slope would be "everyone can marry several people," which is certainly legal and widely practiced by some heterosexuals. Newt Gingrich has married three women, John McCain, two, and Rush Limbaugh, the paragon of all values conservative, is on wife #4. Admittedly, they obey the legal nicety of abandoning their old wives before remarrying, but still, if a heterosexual person wants two, four, or ten spouses, our laws allow it, as long as it's sequential. Isn't the social acceptance of multiple sequential spouses far more likely to lead to polygamy than monogamous homosexual marriage?
Again, I think that people who worry that homosexuals might destroy the meaning of marriage are ignoring the reality that heterosexuals have already devalued it substantially on their own. Homosexual enthusiasm for the institution might be society's best hope of making it mean something again. I suspect that the first generation of legally wed gays will fight extra hard to make their marriages work, since they won't want to give gay marriage opponents the satisfaction of saying, "See, I told you this wouldn't work."
Santorum retorted, “Are we saying that everyone should have the right to marry?”
When the audience member told him yes, he shot back, “So anyone can marry can marry anybody else, so, if that’s the case, then everyone can marry several people.”
I hear this a lot, and I always find it a bit perplexing. It seems to be arguing that, if we allow monogomous gay marriage (which is growing in societal acceptance), it opens the door to polygamy (which is opposed by a much wider margin).
But, it doesn't seem to me that gay marriage is the real slippery slope to polygamy. Instead, the slippery slope would be "everyone can marry several people," which is certainly legal and widely practiced by some heterosexuals. Newt Gingrich has married three women, John McCain, two, and Rush Limbaugh, the paragon of all values conservative, is on wife #4. Admittedly, they obey the legal nicety of abandoning their old wives before remarrying, but still, if a heterosexual person wants two, four, or ten spouses, our laws allow it, as long as it's sequential. Isn't the social acceptance of multiple sequential spouses far more likely to lead to polygamy than monogamous homosexual marriage?
Again, I think that people who worry that homosexuals might destroy the meaning of marriage are ignoring the reality that heterosexuals have already devalued it substantially on their own. Homosexual enthusiasm for the institution might be society's best hope of making it mean something again. I suspect that the first generation of legally wed gays will fight extra hard to make their marriages work, since they won't want to give gay marriage opponents the satisfaction of saying, "See, I told you this wouldn't work."
Monday, January 02, 2012
The Hazards of Love, Explained
I've been obsessing over the Decemberist's album the Hazard's of Love. It's a fantastic fairy tale love story told as a rock opera. Most of the story is relatively easy to follow, but there are some gaps that are left open to interpretation. I thought I'd take my stab at interpretting things. If you haven't heard the album, you can probably stop reading right here. I'm addressing this post to people familiar with the work who may be puzzled by certain plot points.
The grand arc of the story is easy. A maiden named Margaret rides into the forest and finds a wounded fawn. She attempts to help the fawn and before her eyes it changes shape into a man, William. Margaret and William share a night of passion. When she returns home, she longs for him, and soon discovers she's pregnant. She returns to the forest and reunites with William, who is deeply in love with her. But, William is the adopted son of the Queen of the Forest, and the Queen is jealous that her child's heart now belongs to someone else. A villianous rake who has murdered his own children passes through the woods, discovers Margaret, and kidnaps her. The Queen is eager to remove Margaret from the forest, so she helps the Rake escape by crossing a raging river. William chases after them, but his horse is afraid to enter the river. Having no time to build a boat, and with the waters too wild to swim, William begs the river to calm down and not drown him, and, in exchange, when he returns, the river can have his life then. The river accepts the bargain; William kills the Rake and when the villain enters hell he's greeted by the ghosts of his dead children who will torment him for all eternity. Alas, all does not end happily ever after, for William still has his bargain with the river, which floods the fortress where he and Margaret have reuinited. As the waters rise, William and Margaret accept thier fate and exchange wedding vows, so they will be united in marriage even in death.
The album contains these major mysteries:
1. At the end of the second track, "The Hazards of Love Part One," a woman can be heard shouting. What she shouts is tough to say, but I believe it is the Queen shouting "You'll feel my wrath, yes!" It's definitely a pissed off shout, and it's deep female voice, which matches that of the Queen. Musically, I think it's a tip of the hat to Pink Floyd's The Wall, where a shout leads into "Another Brick in the Wall"
2. Based on lyrics in the same track, there's some debate as to whether Margaret is a prostitute. I think, given the setting of a "bower," that she is instead a Lady in Waiting, who does entertain men, but chastely. I also think that the "sister" who comes to visit her in the next track is actually the Queen of the forest in disguise. The evidence is that when the "sister" speaks, the Queen's musical theme is playing. When she asks Margaret who the father of her unborn child is, she's searching for confirmation that William has betrayed her trust by falling in love with a human woman. My biggest argument that Margaret isn't a prostitute is that her pregnancy is a scandal to forces her to flee the bower. If the bower is a brothel, as some people argue, then an unwanted pregnancy was probably a pretty run of the mill work hazard, hardly worthy of fleeing into the wilderness to hide.
3. The most controversial claim I'll make is that one of the tracks on the album is out of sequence. Track 8 is The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid. In it, William asks for the freedom to enjoy the night as a man. The Queen agrees, but tells him she'll take his life come morning. However, William certainly seems alive on the rest of the album, so did she not keep her word? Also, William's pleas that he wants to enjoy the night come after he's knocked up Margaret, so he's already been having plenty of fun with his evenings, unless this scene is treated as a flashback or a memory. (In the song immediately before, William and Margaret sleep together beneath a sky full of stars, so perhaps William is dreaming.) In this light, his curse makes sense. The Queen has granted him the freedom to be a man during the night, but during daylight he changes into a white fawn. The Queen did this to ruin his chances of ever finding permanent love with a human woman, but didn't count on Margaret being kinky enough to be turned on by the whole half man/half fawn thing.
4. Another mystery is whether William is the Rake's son. The Rake boasts of murdering his son, burning the body, and burying the ashes in an urn. The Queen tells William that she rescued him from a "cradle of clay." The Queen tells William:
"How I made you
I wrought you
I pulled you
From ore I labored you
From cancer I cradled you
And now: this is how I am repaid?"
"From ore I labored you" could certainly be interpretted that he was nothing but minerals when she found him, which would certainly be the case if he was ash. The beauty of this interpretation is that it makes revenge against the Rake a double revenge. But, despite the poetic justice if it were true, I don't think this interpretation is correct. My main argument would be that the dead boy is singing right along side his sisters during the revenge song. William is one of the distinctive voices on the album, and this boy ain't him. Unless Colin Maloy, the songwriter, says otherwise, I think that William and the burnt son are different people.
5: In the last song, a lot of people seem to feel that William and Margaret are taking a boat back across the river and their ship is sinking, probably because the word "sinking" is actually used.
"Margaret, array the rocks around the hole before we’re sinking
A million stones, a million bones, a million holes within the chinking"
My objection to the boat theory is that William would have to be an idiot to go back to the river, and even more of an idiot to try to take Margeret back to his mother's kingdom. Also, what kind of boat is carrying a million stones? Instead, William has probably been clever enough to think he's not going to go back to the river. But, alas, the river comes to him, flooding the castle where he's rescued Margaret. He has no time to get her to safety. They've retreated to a chamber where they are trying to plug up all the holes so the rising water can't reach them, but the water is gushing through more tiny holes than they can fill. He knows he's brought this fate on her, but tells her that, if they must die, they will die as man and wife.
"But with this long, last rush of air let’s speak our vows in starry whisper
And when the waves came crashing down, he closed his eyes
and softly kissed her."
Thus, death may bring an end to life, but not to love.
Obviously, there's no definitive way of knowing if these interpretations are correct, but I think it's a pretty good mesh with the lyrics. The only remaining point I'm undecided on is whether Margaret is still pregnant when she dies, or if she had the child earlier. In the seventh track, she sings:
"And isn’t it a lovely way
We got in from our play
Isn’t it babe? A sweet little baby"
Is she still pregnant as she's singing this? "A lovely way we got in" could mean that she's pregnant. But, the way she coos "sweet littly baby" makes it easy to imagine she's cradling the child as she sings. If so, what is the fate of the child? It seems odd that it would just vanish from the lyrics. But, I can't see anything that makes a case either way. It's probably the most unsatisfying mystery of the album, since there are no real clues to work with.
The grand arc of the story is easy. A maiden named Margaret rides into the forest and finds a wounded fawn. She attempts to help the fawn and before her eyes it changes shape into a man, William. Margaret and William share a night of passion. When she returns home, she longs for him, and soon discovers she's pregnant. She returns to the forest and reunites with William, who is deeply in love with her. But, William is the adopted son of the Queen of the Forest, and the Queen is jealous that her child's heart now belongs to someone else. A villianous rake who has murdered his own children passes through the woods, discovers Margaret, and kidnaps her. The Queen is eager to remove Margaret from the forest, so she helps the Rake escape by crossing a raging river. William chases after them, but his horse is afraid to enter the river. Having no time to build a boat, and with the waters too wild to swim, William begs the river to calm down and not drown him, and, in exchange, when he returns, the river can have his life then. The river accepts the bargain; William kills the Rake and when the villain enters hell he's greeted by the ghosts of his dead children who will torment him for all eternity. Alas, all does not end happily ever after, for William still has his bargain with the river, which floods the fortress where he and Margaret have reuinited. As the waters rise, William and Margaret accept thier fate and exchange wedding vows, so they will be united in marriage even in death.
The album contains these major mysteries:
1. At the end of the second track, "The Hazards of Love Part One," a woman can be heard shouting. What she shouts is tough to say, but I believe it is the Queen shouting "You'll feel my wrath, yes!" It's definitely a pissed off shout, and it's deep female voice, which matches that of the Queen. Musically, I think it's a tip of the hat to Pink Floyd's The Wall, where a shout leads into "Another Brick in the Wall"
2. Based on lyrics in the same track, there's some debate as to whether Margaret is a prostitute. I think, given the setting of a "bower," that she is instead a Lady in Waiting, who does entertain men, but chastely. I also think that the "sister" who comes to visit her in the next track is actually the Queen of the forest in disguise. The evidence is that when the "sister" speaks, the Queen's musical theme is playing. When she asks Margaret who the father of her unborn child is, she's searching for confirmation that William has betrayed her trust by falling in love with a human woman. My biggest argument that Margaret isn't a prostitute is that her pregnancy is a scandal to forces her to flee the bower. If the bower is a brothel, as some people argue, then an unwanted pregnancy was probably a pretty run of the mill work hazard, hardly worthy of fleeing into the wilderness to hide.
3. The most controversial claim I'll make is that one of the tracks on the album is out of sequence. Track 8 is The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid. In it, William asks for the freedom to enjoy the night as a man. The Queen agrees, but tells him she'll take his life come morning. However, William certainly seems alive on the rest of the album, so did she not keep her word? Also, William's pleas that he wants to enjoy the night come after he's knocked up Margaret, so he's already been having plenty of fun with his evenings, unless this scene is treated as a flashback or a memory. (In the song immediately before, William and Margaret sleep together beneath a sky full of stars, so perhaps William is dreaming.) In this light, his curse makes sense. The Queen has granted him the freedom to be a man during the night, but during daylight he changes into a white fawn. The Queen did this to ruin his chances of ever finding permanent love with a human woman, but didn't count on Margaret being kinky enough to be turned on by the whole half man/half fawn thing.
4. Another mystery is whether William is the Rake's son. The Rake boasts of murdering his son, burning the body, and burying the ashes in an urn. The Queen tells William that she rescued him from a "cradle of clay." The Queen tells William:
"How I made you
I wrought you
I pulled you
From ore I labored you
From cancer I cradled you
And now: this is how I am repaid?"
"From ore I labored you" could certainly be interpretted that he was nothing but minerals when she found him, which would certainly be the case if he was ash. The beauty of this interpretation is that it makes revenge against the Rake a double revenge. But, despite the poetic justice if it were true, I don't think this interpretation is correct. My main argument would be that the dead boy is singing right along side his sisters during the revenge song. William is one of the distinctive voices on the album, and this boy ain't him. Unless Colin Maloy, the songwriter, says otherwise, I think that William and the burnt son are different people.
5: In the last song, a lot of people seem to feel that William and Margaret are taking a boat back across the river and their ship is sinking, probably because the word "sinking" is actually used.
"Margaret, array the rocks around the hole before we’re sinking
A million stones, a million bones, a million holes within the chinking"
My objection to the boat theory is that William would have to be an idiot to go back to the river, and even more of an idiot to try to take Margeret back to his mother's kingdom. Also, what kind of boat is carrying a million stones? Instead, William has probably been clever enough to think he's not going to go back to the river. But, alas, the river comes to him, flooding the castle where he's rescued Margaret. He has no time to get her to safety. They've retreated to a chamber where they are trying to plug up all the holes so the rising water can't reach them, but the water is gushing through more tiny holes than they can fill. He knows he's brought this fate on her, but tells her that, if they must die, they will die as man and wife.
"But with this long, last rush of air let’s speak our vows in starry whisper
And when the waves came crashing down, he closed his eyes
and softly kissed her."
Thus, death may bring an end to life, but not to love.
Obviously, there's no definitive way of knowing if these interpretations are correct, but I think it's a pretty good mesh with the lyrics. The only remaining point I'm undecided on is whether Margaret is still pregnant when she dies, or if she had the child earlier. In the seventh track, she sings:
"And isn’t it a lovely way
We got in from our play
Isn’t it babe? A sweet little baby"
Is she still pregnant as she's singing this? "A lovely way we got in" could mean that she's pregnant. But, the way she coos "sweet littly baby" makes it easy to imagine she's cradling the child as she sings. If so, what is the fate of the child? It seems odd that it would just vanish from the lyrics. But, I can't see anything that makes a case either way. It's probably the most unsatisfying mystery of the album, since there are no real clues to work with.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Favorite Albums I Discovered in 2011
I've been seeing a lot of "Best of" lists in recent days, and been thinking about my own favorite music discoveries of the year. This isn't a "best of 2011" list, since most of the albums and artists I've been listening to recorded their work years ago. But, it was all new to me.
This year marked a significant shift in my music listening habits. Save for a few rare instances, I'm buying 100% of my music online now. As a result, I'm spending a lot more time mixing my own playlists, and I buy a lot of single tracks to fill these in. Gone are the days when I'd have to shell out money for a CD to get one good song. So, this means that if I find an album that holds my attention, it's a really good album.
Probably my favorite album discovery was How We Quit the Forest by Rasputina. Rasputina is progressive cello rock with hints of steampunk and goth. Her literary and historical interests are very strong, and half of the pleasure of listening to Rasputina is researching the obscure historical trivia she's referencing, or else having her sing a song about something that you knew about, but had never known was songworthy until now. Alas, Rasputina is so far ranging in her topics and musical approaches, most of her albums are a mess of stuff that doesn't really fit together. She has an annoying fondness for gimicky, jokey songs that really stop being interesting the second time you hear them. But, her instincts also drive her to write songs with haunting lyrics and beautiful melodies, and can produce songs so perfect they give me songasms.
How We Quit the Forest has only a few joke songs (Onward Christian Soldiers, Diamond Mind, and Dwarf Star). And, as her joke songs go, these are pretty good ones. But, she really goes all out on more serious topics, singing about relationships in The Olde Headboard, senility in Rose K, human cruelty in Herb Girls of Birkenau, and standing by a troubled/sick friend in Sign of the Zodiac. And, if there has ever been a better song, wierder, more perfect song about alienation and love than The New Zero, I can't think of it. Seriously, my friend Mike Edmonston told me about this band last spring, and I've been hooked since the first you-tube video I sampled, a cello driven cover of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here.
In contrast to my online discoveries, I happened to run across Radiohead's albums Amnesiac and Kid A while I was in a thrift store. The CDs were only 99 cent, so picking them up wasn't a huge gamble. I've like Radiohead in small doses, but never really fell in love with their albums before. But both Amnesiac and Kid A are works of art that need to be listened to in thier entirity. They are atmospheric, moody, and haunting, with most of the voice work digitally altered until it's nearly impossible to understand. But, rather than being annoying, the warped voices add to the overall emotion of the albums, and seem to be a statement in themselves about how difficult it is to communicate honestly. I don't use drugs, but these albums give me a feeling of altered consciousness, of sinking into a surreal landscape where the familiar becomes unrecognizable.
While I'd been lukewarm to Radiohead, I've loved the Decemberists since I first heard them, and have nearly all their albums. One I didn't have until recently was The Hazards of Love. It's a concept album, where all the songs blend together to tell the story of a shapeshifting son of the forest who seduces a mortal woman. When I heard about it, it was a bit too fairy-tale for my tastes. Also, I had the bad luck of listening to The Rake's Song out of context, and was just put off by it. It's sung by a man who boasts of murdering his three children after his wife dies so he can return to the life of a wanton bachelor. The Decemberists have a flair for dark humor, but, out of context, this song was too dark even for my tastes.
Now, I've heard it in context and, wow, The Hazards of Love is easily the Decemberist's best album. Ironically, it manages to do this without having any of thier best songs. There's nothing from this album I'm going to pull out and put onto my Decemberist playlist. The songs really only make sense in the context of the other songs. The Rake's Song doesn't work unless it's matched by the revenge song that comes near the end of the album where the spirits of the dead children rise from the water to greet thier murderous father. Many of the catchiest songs echo and thread throughout the work, like the refrain of the title, "The Hazards of Love," or the chorus from the song "The Wanting Comes in Waves." Most of the characters in the musical play are matched with musical themes, and the music will shift from theme to theme as the characters interact. I find myself looking forward to driving places that take more than an hour to get to, so I'll have the chance to listen to the whole album at once, which is really the only way to approach this. Otherwise, it would be like trying to watch a movie in three and four minute snippets.
One last note: My year got off to a good start with Jonah Knight released an EP of songs based on my novel Nobody Gets the Girl. While it seems like that should be on my list of favorite albums, I confess that Jonah really knocked the Nobody soundtrack out of my year end thoughts by putting out an even better album, The Age of Steam: Strange Machines. Steampunk is a growing trend in a lot of media, and some artists embrace of it seems more opportunistic than inspired. But, The Age of Steam is a perfect blend of geeky and creepy and just sounds sincere. You can tell Jonah loves the subjects of time machines, airships, haunted guitars and the restless dead. Also, he does a cover of "Bad Moon Rising" that will make you forget the original version, which had a pop, upbeat melody. Jonah's slow, haunting take really highlights the menace woven through the lyrics. This version really makes going out at night when a bad moon is on the rise sound like a very poor choice.
I feel like I need to note an absense on this list: For the first year in almost a decade, I didn't find any new Mountain Goat albums to obsess over. This is a combination of having filled out nearly all of his back catalog, and being somewhat let down by his new album this year, All Eternal's Deck. AED had one song that produced one of the aforementioned "songasms," High Hawk Season. Damn These Vampires and Prowl Great Cain are also very strong songs. But, past that, the album just never caught my imagination. I felt like John Darnielle pulled back on this album and didn't do many songs that were really personal or daring. I know it has to be emotionally draining to produce albums like The Sunset Tree or The Coroner's Gambit, but there was something clinical and clean about All Eternal's Deck that robbed it of emotion. But, I'm not losing faith, and await the next album he produces so it can wipe away my rather feeble memories of this one.
This year marked a significant shift in my music listening habits. Save for a few rare instances, I'm buying 100% of my music online now. As a result, I'm spending a lot more time mixing my own playlists, and I buy a lot of single tracks to fill these in. Gone are the days when I'd have to shell out money for a CD to get one good song. So, this means that if I find an album that holds my attention, it's a really good album.
Probably my favorite album discovery was How We Quit the Forest by Rasputina. Rasputina is progressive cello rock with hints of steampunk and goth. Her literary and historical interests are very strong, and half of the pleasure of listening to Rasputina is researching the obscure historical trivia she's referencing, or else having her sing a song about something that you knew about, but had never known was songworthy until now. Alas, Rasputina is so far ranging in her topics and musical approaches, most of her albums are a mess of stuff that doesn't really fit together. She has an annoying fondness for gimicky, jokey songs that really stop being interesting the second time you hear them. But, her instincts also drive her to write songs with haunting lyrics and beautiful melodies, and can produce songs so perfect they give me songasms.
How We Quit the Forest has only a few joke songs (Onward Christian Soldiers, Diamond Mind, and Dwarf Star). And, as her joke songs go, these are pretty good ones. But, she really goes all out on more serious topics, singing about relationships in The Olde Headboard, senility in Rose K, human cruelty in Herb Girls of Birkenau, and standing by a troubled/sick friend in Sign of the Zodiac. And, if there has ever been a better song, wierder, more perfect song about alienation and love than The New Zero, I can't think of it. Seriously, my friend Mike Edmonston told me about this band last spring, and I've been hooked since the first you-tube video I sampled, a cello driven cover of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here.
In contrast to my online discoveries, I happened to run across Radiohead's albums Amnesiac and Kid A while I was in a thrift store. The CDs were only 99 cent, so picking them up wasn't a huge gamble. I've like Radiohead in small doses, but never really fell in love with their albums before. But both Amnesiac and Kid A are works of art that need to be listened to in thier entirity. They are atmospheric, moody, and haunting, with most of the voice work digitally altered until it's nearly impossible to understand. But, rather than being annoying, the warped voices add to the overall emotion of the albums, and seem to be a statement in themselves about how difficult it is to communicate honestly. I don't use drugs, but these albums give me a feeling of altered consciousness, of sinking into a surreal landscape where the familiar becomes unrecognizable.
While I'd been lukewarm to Radiohead, I've loved the Decemberists since I first heard them, and have nearly all their albums. One I didn't have until recently was The Hazards of Love. It's a concept album, where all the songs blend together to tell the story of a shapeshifting son of the forest who seduces a mortal woman. When I heard about it, it was a bit too fairy-tale for my tastes. Also, I had the bad luck of listening to The Rake's Song out of context, and was just put off by it. It's sung by a man who boasts of murdering his three children after his wife dies so he can return to the life of a wanton bachelor. The Decemberists have a flair for dark humor, but, out of context, this song was too dark even for my tastes.
Now, I've heard it in context and, wow, The Hazards of Love is easily the Decemberist's best album. Ironically, it manages to do this without having any of thier best songs. There's nothing from this album I'm going to pull out and put onto my Decemberist playlist. The songs really only make sense in the context of the other songs. The Rake's Song doesn't work unless it's matched by the revenge song that comes near the end of the album where the spirits of the dead children rise from the water to greet thier murderous father. Many of the catchiest songs echo and thread throughout the work, like the refrain of the title, "The Hazards of Love," or the chorus from the song "The Wanting Comes in Waves." Most of the characters in the musical play are matched with musical themes, and the music will shift from theme to theme as the characters interact. I find myself looking forward to driving places that take more than an hour to get to, so I'll have the chance to listen to the whole album at once, which is really the only way to approach this. Otherwise, it would be like trying to watch a movie in three and four minute snippets.
One last note: My year got off to a good start with Jonah Knight released an EP of songs based on my novel Nobody Gets the Girl. While it seems like that should be on my list of favorite albums, I confess that Jonah really knocked the Nobody soundtrack out of my year end thoughts by putting out an even better album, The Age of Steam: Strange Machines. Steampunk is a growing trend in a lot of media, and some artists embrace of it seems more opportunistic than inspired. But, The Age of Steam is a perfect blend of geeky and creepy and just sounds sincere. You can tell Jonah loves the subjects of time machines, airships, haunted guitars and the restless dead. Also, he does a cover of "Bad Moon Rising" that will make you forget the original version, which had a pop, upbeat melody. Jonah's slow, haunting take really highlights the menace woven through the lyrics. This version really makes going out at night when a bad moon is on the rise sound like a very poor choice.
I feel like I need to note an absense on this list: For the first year in almost a decade, I didn't find any new Mountain Goat albums to obsess over. This is a combination of having filled out nearly all of his back catalog, and being somewhat let down by his new album this year, All Eternal's Deck. AED had one song that produced one of the aforementioned "songasms," High Hawk Season. Damn These Vampires and Prowl Great Cain are also very strong songs. But, past that, the album just never caught my imagination. I felt like John Darnielle pulled back on this album and didn't do many songs that were really personal or daring. I know it has to be emotionally draining to produce albums like The Sunset Tree or The Coroner's Gambit, but there was something clinical and clean about All Eternal's Deck that robbed it of emotion. But, I'm not losing faith, and await the next album he produces so it can wipe away my rather feeble memories of this one.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
The War on Christmas
First, as an atheist, I'd like to apologize for the behavior of some of my brethren this season. Specifically, I'm talking about the atheists who flooded the lottery system for a town in California in order to claim 15 of 18 spaces reserved in a public park for a holiday display. Ordinarily, these spaces were used by local churches to stage nativity scenes. This year, however, only three churches could put up displays due to the atheists having snatched up the other spaces. Adding insult to injury, the atheists only put up three rather boring winter solstice displays, then left the remaining dozen spaces empty.
Some people will argue that a public park shouldn't be used for religious displays, period. I find this a little confusing. It seems to me that public parks as shared space should be available for use of all the public, and, last I checked, Christians composed at least some small portion of the population. I would think that as long as the local government is neutral on content, allowing religions other than Christianity to put up displays if they wish, there's no violation of anyone's rights unfolding by letting churches stage their nativity scenes in a park. If you can stage a Shakesperian play in a park, why not the nativity? A nativity scene is just a very boring play. Some teenagers in robes stand around with sheep and a donkey, staring adoringly at a baby doll in a straw-filled wooden box for hours on end. The highlight of the evening is if the donkey poops. How does this harm anyone?
I firmly support the right for atheist groups to put up a display promoting their point of view. But to leave the majority of spaces empty just shows they weren't interested in spreading a message, they were interested in silencing Christians. I can think of no motivation beyond spite.
It is, bluntly, the work of jerks. The fact that these jerks happen to be atheists embarrasses me. No one should gain pleasure by stopping their fellow man from partaking in an activity that he enjoys if no one is harmed. It's just petty.
That said, I find it tiresome that some right wing commentators use this time of year to trot out the predictable phrase, the War on Christmas.
If Christmas is in any existential danger, it's not from atheists. Instead, it's in danger from the corporate Christmas machine. Christmas has become a brand, a rather naked excuse to drive American's into a shopping frenzy that results in shoppers breaking down mall doors, pepper spraying fellow shoppers, and brawling over sneakers. I know that there's a reporting bias here; no one is going to report a story of shoppers entering a Walmart, quietly finding the items they want, then checking out with a polite cashier. It's only the extremes of naughty that make the Drudge Report.
Still, I can't help but feel that Christmas has been warped by our collective affluence. I find an analogy with our obesity epidemic. American's used to do a lot of manual labor and eat less processed foods, and were, on the whole, much thinner. But, we got smart, started working desk jobs and making more money, and began eating out all the time. We ballooned up. Christmas faced a similar problem. There was a time when gift giving meant more, because people didn't have as much free money as they do today. (Arguably, the free money is actually cheap credit, but that's another column.) A girl who got a doll on Christmas morning was thrilled, because she didn't have that many toys. Today, kids have more toys than they can ever play with. I've watched kids opening gifts and been struck at just how jaded and ungrateful they seem now. It doesn't get much better with adults. Because we're affluent relative to the Victorian era where many of our traditions began, most of us already have all the stuff we need to live a comfortable life. So, Christmas gifts almost by definition are becoming stuff that we don't need. I was struck by a gift center in a department store the other week, where the items being sold were obvious intended for no other purpose than giving away, since they were in decorative holiday boxes already. The gifts were little doo-dads and trinkets. A hammer with a flashlight in the handle. Binoculars with a compass built in. Clock radios for showers. Golf balls with little christmas trees on them. Bars of soap shaped like snowflakes.
No one would ever buy these items for themselves. But, because we absolutely must give gifts, these useless, pointless items are purchased, given, then promptly go into drawers, or storage buildings, or landfills.
Just as our affluence has led us to devour too many empty calories, we now clog the arteries of our holiday traditions with valueless gifts. And, just as our wastelines have expanded beyond the bounds of health and attractiveness, Christmas has expanded, swelling across the calendar to all but swallow Thanksgiving and Halloween, which are now events concurrent with the Christmas season, rather than events that preceed it.
I admit, I'm saying this as an outsider who walked away from Christmas many years ago. It may be that those of you who still celebrate the holiday like walking into malls at Labor Day and looking at the Christmas displays going up. But, I still can't help but think that, if Christmas doesn't mean as much as it used to, it's not the fault of atheists.
Some people will argue that a public park shouldn't be used for religious displays, period. I find this a little confusing. It seems to me that public parks as shared space should be available for use of all the public, and, last I checked, Christians composed at least some small portion of the population. I would think that as long as the local government is neutral on content, allowing religions other than Christianity to put up displays if they wish, there's no violation of anyone's rights unfolding by letting churches stage their nativity scenes in a park. If you can stage a Shakesperian play in a park, why not the nativity? A nativity scene is just a very boring play. Some teenagers in robes stand around with sheep and a donkey, staring adoringly at a baby doll in a straw-filled wooden box for hours on end. The highlight of the evening is if the donkey poops. How does this harm anyone?
I firmly support the right for atheist groups to put up a display promoting their point of view. But to leave the majority of spaces empty just shows they weren't interested in spreading a message, they were interested in silencing Christians. I can think of no motivation beyond spite.
It is, bluntly, the work of jerks. The fact that these jerks happen to be atheists embarrasses me. No one should gain pleasure by stopping their fellow man from partaking in an activity that he enjoys if no one is harmed. It's just petty.
That said, I find it tiresome that some right wing commentators use this time of year to trot out the predictable phrase, the War on Christmas.
If Christmas is in any existential danger, it's not from atheists. Instead, it's in danger from the corporate Christmas machine. Christmas has become a brand, a rather naked excuse to drive American's into a shopping frenzy that results in shoppers breaking down mall doors, pepper spraying fellow shoppers, and brawling over sneakers. I know that there's a reporting bias here; no one is going to report a story of shoppers entering a Walmart, quietly finding the items they want, then checking out with a polite cashier. It's only the extremes of naughty that make the Drudge Report.
Still, I can't help but feel that Christmas has been warped by our collective affluence. I find an analogy with our obesity epidemic. American's used to do a lot of manual labor and eat less processed foods, and were, on the whole, much thinner. But, we got smart, started working desk jobs and making more money, and began eating out all the time. We ballooned up. Christmas faced a similar problem. There was a time when gift giving meant more, because people didn't have as much free money as they do today. (Arguably, the free money is actually cheap credit, but that's another column.) A girl who got a doll on Christmas morning was thrilled, because she didn't have that many toys. Today, kids have more toys than they can ever play with. I've watched kids opening gifts and been struck at just how jaded and ungrateful they seem now. It doesn't get much better with adults. Because we're affluent relative to the Victorian era where many of our traditions began, most of us already have all the stuff we need to live a comfortable life. So, Christmas gifts almost by definition are becoming stuff that we don't need. I was struck by a gift center in a department store the other week, where the items being sold were obvious intended for no other purpose than giving away, since they were in decorative holiday boxes already. The gifts were little doo-dads and trinkets. A hammer with a flashlight in the handle. Binoculars with a compass built in. Clock radios for showers. Golf balls with little christmas trees on them. Bars of soap shaped like snowflakes.
No one would ever buy these items for themselves. But, because we absolutely must give gifts, these useless, pointless items are purchased, given, then promptly go into drawers, or storage buildings, or landfills.
Just as our affluence has led us to devour too many empty calories, we now clog the arteries of our holiday traditions with valueless gifts. And, just as our wastelines have expanded beyond the bounds of health and attractiveness, Christmas has expanded, swelling across the calendar to all but swallow Thanksgiving and Halloween, which are now events concurrent with the Christmas season, rather than events that preceed it.
I admit, I'm saying this as an outsider who walked away from Christmas many years ago. It may be that those of you who still celebrate the holiday like walking into malls at Labor Day and looking at the Christmas displays going up. But, I still can't help but think that, if Christmas doesn't mean as much as it used to, it's not the fault of atheists.
Saturday, December 03, 2011
Through the Looking Glass
This week produced one of those moments in politics where I felt, once more, that I lived in a Looking Glass universe. The heart of the weirdness started when Newt Gingrich said something right on the borderline of common sense, always a dangerous place for any politician to wander. Gingrich said, if I may paraphrase, that our child labor laws hurt poor children who would enjoy long term benefits in life if they were allowed to work at an earlier age. He went on to say that the poorest of poor children grow up in households and neighborhoods where no adult works, so they never witness good work habits. Finally, his proposed remedy was to hire the children as janitors in their public schools.
There are three basic arguments here. First, poor children would benefit if child labor laws were changed. My libertarian sensibilities lead me to believe this statement is true for all children, not just poor ones. I'm not saying children should be put to work in sweat shops, nor that they should be allowed to work schedules that would take away time from their education. But, in my personal experience, people who started working early in life (often outside the legal employment grid, working as baby sitters and mowing lawns) tend to be more mature by the time they reach college age than the kids who've managed to avoid any real labor. Of course, the real issue today may be, if we did remove the working age barrier, and let individuals employ whoever they wished no matter what their age, would there be any jobs available for young workers? Still, on this point, I think Gingrich was taking a common sense position, but many commentators acted as if he was advocating child abuse. The Nation ran an article titled "The Nastiness of Newt Gingrich" and the New York Times had an editorial titled "Newt Gingrich's War on Poor Children."
The latter essay, by Charles Blow, directly attacked the second premise of Gingrich's argument, that poor children don't see adults working. I'll concede that Gingrich didn't throw out any percentages, so his claim is a bit overly broad. By the census statistics Charles Blow sites, fifty percent of all households in poverty have at least one parent working full time, and another twenty-five percent have a parent working part time. That still leaves one in four children fitting Gingrich's assertion. But, Charles Blow goes on to look at the "poorest of the poor," since that is who Gingrich singled out, and seems to feel like he's delivering a devestating rebuttal when he declares that 1/3 of these households have at least one working parent. Meaning two out of three of these households don't have an employed adult providing a role model for their kids. Either Charles Blow is really bad at math, or he thinks his readers are, to trot out a statistic supporting Gingrich's argument and wave it around as evidence that Gingrich is wrong.
But it wasn't this editorial that most pushed me into Looking Glass land. It's was Gingrich's solution to the problem of childhood unemployment. By arguing that they should work at their schools, Gingrich is suggesting that the government hire them. Isn't this... I dunno... a stimulus plan? Instead of removing barriers to kids finding work in the private sector (for instance, by having a lower minimum wage for teenagers), he's proposing that government do the hiring directly. Isn't this something that, if President Obama proposed it, Newt Gingrich would denounce as socialist manipulation of the free market?
For all the Tea Party types who are starting to support Gingrich (who is, I admit, a towering intellectual genius when placed against Perry, Bachmann, and Cain, and a portrait of political courage when stood up next to spineless Romney), pay close attention to what Gingrich is revealing about his political instincts in this off the cuff remark. He may talk up small goverment and free enterprise, but Gingrich is a political creature to his deepest core. He's a font of ideas, but many of these ideas are about how government can improve people's lives. If he winds up as president, there is no way he'll govern as a hand's off, libertarian type. The problems of the world are nails sticking up that he doesn't want people to trip on, and government is his hammer. That people who claim to want small government can choose a man like him over someone like Ron Paul is mystifying to me. At least, it's mystifying until I remember, oh, right, I'm through the Looking Glass.
There are three basic arguments here. First, poor children would benefit if child labor laws were changed. My libertarian sensibilities lead me to believe this statement is true for all children, not just poor ones. I'm not saying children should be put to work in sweat shops, nor that they should be allowed to work schedules that would take away time from their education. But, in my personal experience, people who started working early in life (often outside the legal employment grid, working as baby sitters and mowing lawns) tend to be more mature by the time they reach college age than the kids who've managed to avoid any real labor. Of course, the real issue today may be, if we did remove the working age barrier, and let individuals employ whoever they wished no matter what their age, would there be any jobs available for young workers? Still, on this point, I think Gingrich was taking a common sense position, but many commentators acted as if he was advocating child abuse. The Nation ran an article titled "The Nastiness of Newt Gingrich" and the New York Times had an editorial titled "Newt Gingrich's War on Poor Children."
The latter essay, by Charles Blow, directly attacked the second premise of Gingrich's argument, that poor children don't see adults working. I'll concede that Gingrich didn't throw out any percentages, so his claim is a bit overly broad. By the census statistics Charles Blow sites, fifty percent of all households in poverty have at least one parent working full time, and another twenty-five percent have a parent working part time. That still leaves one in four children fitting Gingrich's assertion. But, Charles Blow goes on to look at the "poorest of the poor," since that is who Gingrich singled out, and seems to feel like he's delivering a devestating rebuttal when he declares that 1/3 of these households have at least one working parent. Meaning two out of three of these households don't have an employed adult providing a role model for their kids. Either Charles Blow is really bad at math, or he thinks his readers are, to trot out a statistic supporting Gingrich's argument and wave it around as evidence that Gingrich is wrong.
But it wasn't this editorial that most pushed me into Looking Glass land. It's was Gingrich's solution to the problem of childhood unemployment. By arguing that they should work at their schools, Gingrich is suggesting that the government hire them. Isn't this... I dunno... a stimulus plan? Instead of removing barriers to kids finding work in the private sector (for instance, by having a lower minimum wage for teenagers), he's proposing that government do the hiring directly. Isn't this something that, if President Obama proposed it, Newt Gingrich would denounce as socialist manipulation of the free market?
For all the Tea Party types who are starting to support Gingrich (who is, I admit, a towering intellectual genius when placed against Perry, Bachmann, and Cain, and a portrait of political courage when stood up next to spineless Romney), pay close attention to what Gingrich is revealing about his political instincts in this off the cuff remark. He may talk up small goverment and free enterprise, but Gingrich is a political creature to his deepest core. He's a font of ideas, but many of these ideas are about how government can improve people's lives. If he winds up as president, there is no way he'll govern as a hand's off, libertarian type. The problems of the world are nails sticking up that he doesn't want people to trip on, and government is his hammer. That people who claim to want small government can choose a man like him over someone like Ron Paul is mystifying to me. At least, it's mystifying until I remember, oh, right, I'm through the Looking Glass.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
Harvest Marriage
Harvest MarriageLights danced below as the Ferris wheel
lifted us above the county fair
toward a crescent October moon.
In the calm above the crowds we kissed
and said for the first time, “I love you.”
Ours was to be a harvest marriage
growing from seeds planted long ago.
Our love didn’t burst up and blossom
following the first raindrops of spring
like some eager radish full of heat
that wilts only days after it’s picked.
The seedling we planted took its time
weathering out the ticking seasons.
The tree of us has grown strong enough
to stand against this life’s hurricanes
with branches green and thick and sturdy
to support the heaviest of fruit
which we pluck and take into our teeth
when the ripe bite is at its sweetest.
_____
Poem to commemorate the wedding of James Maxey and Cheryl Morgan
11-11-11
____
Poem is copyright James Maxey 2011
May be used freely for non-commercial purposes
as long as authorship is attributed to James Maxey.
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
Doing our best to stimulate the economy
So, anyway, I'm getting married this Friday. 11-11-11.
If the economic picture of the US has improved recently, I suspect economists will be able to trace it to the number of wedding gifts that have been shipped to Cheryl and me these last couple of weeks. Today when I got home from work there was a large box from Khol's sitting on the deck. I went inside and forgot about it. Cheryl came home, passed by the box, and only an hour later did we think, oh, right, there's a present sitting outside. I had no idea it was possible to reach a state of gift numbness, but we might be getting there. It's been like Christmas every day for a month. If stock in Bed, Bath, and Beyond is going up, our gift registry is the cause.
Not that we haven't been shelling out money of our own. Weddings these days have lots of little expenses that never entered my mind when I proposed marriage. I mean, I knew we'd be spending money on a cake, some fancy clothes, flowers, etc., but I hadn't anticipated that we would require personalized M&M brand candies with our faces printed on them, or 200 tiny plastic bags to sort them into, or the mile and a half of ribbon needed to tie up all the bags. We've also got a LOT of wine stockpiled. Cases of wine every where you look, including at the foot of our bed. Since we're trying to sell our house, I can only imagine that anyone who has looked at the property must have gazed into our bedroom and assumed we were alcoholics.
None of this is a complaint, by the way. I'm happy to report that we're not going into debt for this wedding. We've done things responsibly, and Cheryl has been a Jedi master of bargain shopping. In the end, it's going to be one heck of a celebration, for an event worthy of such celebration. I've been smiling all year when I think about it. See how happy we look on the candy?
Friday, October 28, 2011
1% is amazing if you stop to think about it
I saw a magazine cover reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protests with the words, "We are the 99%." These words have been kicking around in my head for a few days, but probably not for the reason the protesters would like.
Is it really possible that 1% of Americans are wealthy? According to census data, the top 1% of earners make more than $390,000 a year. I would certainly consider that wealthy. I've also done a little googling and found a statistic that's likely out of date that says that 4% of all US households have assets greater that $1,000,000. This could be properties, businesses, etc. For instance, a farmer with a lot of land could easily have $1,000,000 in property, but be nowhere near that in annual income. Still, it ain't chump change.
If you stop and think about it, these numbers are pretty amazing. Has there ever been a society in human history were 1 person out of every 100 was wealthy? 100 people isn't a very large crowd. Can wealth really be that widespread?
If we do have a system that can allow 1 person in 100 to attain this level of wealth, I would argue that we should be very careful about messing it up. 1 in 100 are really pretty swell odds. A hell of a lot better than a lottery ticket.
What a great country!
Is it really possible that 1% of Americans are wealthy? According to census data, the top 1% of earners make more than $390,000 a year. I would certainly consider that wealthy. I've also done a little googling and found a statistic that's likely out of date that says that 4% of all US households have assets greater that $1,000,000. This could be properties, businesses, etc. For instance, a farmer with a lot of land could easily have $1,000,000 in property, but be nowhere near that in annual income. Still, it ain't chump change.
If you stop and think about it, these numbers are pretty amazing. Has there ever been a society in human history were 1 person out of every 100 was wealthy? 100 people isn't a very large crowd. Can wealth really be that widespread?
If we do have a system that can allow 1 person in 100 to attain this level of wealth, I would argue that we should be very careful about messing it up. 1 in 100 are really pretty swell odds. A hell of a lot better than a lottery ticket.
What a great country!
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