compromise

It is worth noting that House Speaker Boehner did not use the word "compromise" once in his debt-ceiling speech last night.

the GOP Taliban

The Taliban wing of the GOP is hell-bent on ruination over the debt-ceiling impasse, wearing financial suicide vests, sure of their purity, confident of their paradise of possession.

Albatross of Possession

Just finished "House of Sand and Fog," by Andre Dubus III.

Though it came out more than 10 years ago, ahead of its time on the burdens of having and acquiring.

The American Dream turned tragically upside down and inside out.

Have yet to see the movie.

media feeding frenzy

question 1:

What are we to make of a society whose media (so-called news [entertainment] organizations) make more fuss (show more investigative zeal and curiosity) over Charlie Sheen and his mental illness than they did concerning preparations and rationale (irrationale) for war (see Iraq, 2003)?

question 2:

Also, do you remember what the New York City tabloids were obsessed with just before 9/11? Shark attacks.

Yep.

You can look it up -- for both questions.

crosshairs

Sarah Palin's mouthpiece is now saying those crosshairs targeting Democrats were never, of course, never intended to call up images of gunsights, not at all, what would ever make you think of that, you incendiary liberals, you media-controlled by libs?

They could have been, ahem, surveyor's sights.

Yeah.

Right.

Sure.

Except, why did Mama Grizzly herself use the term RELOAD?

Surveyors like to reload, ur, data. Yeah. Reload data, that's it.

Fight arguments with data, not bullets.

Does the Second Amendment allow that?

the heritage of violence

When H. Rap Brown in 1967 famously declared: "I say violence is necessary. It's as American as cherry pie," it stirred controversy and contempt, although our history is replete with violence, from the words of The Star-Spangled Banner to the assassinations or would-be assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, JFK, MLK, Medgar Evans, Malcolm X, RFK, Harvey Milk, George Moscone, Ronald Reagan, John Lennon, and too many others, now including Judge John Roll and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords yesterday in Tucson.

You can't deny one thread: guns.

They weren't attacked by knives or bows and arrows or slingshots.

Speaking of which, according to the Census Bureau, as reported in yesterday's Times,

"In 2007, airport screeners confiscated 1.1 million knives, 11,908 boxcutters and 1,416 guns."

And those are the ones who got caught!

Stunning.

Sad.

Violence.

Part of our culture (and, yes, part of other cultures, too; some, more so.)

But still sad.

And worth reflecting on.

Jevons, food for thought

Ponder the Jevons Paradox. As David Owen (if you like smart contrarians, always look for him in The New Yorker) put it in "The Efficiency Dilemma," in the December 20, 2010, issue of The New Yorker magazine:

In 1865, a twenty-nine-year-old Englishman named William Stanley Jevons published a book, “The Coal Question,” in which he argued that the bonanza couldn’t last. Britain’s affluence and global hegemony, he wrote, depended on its endowment of coal, which the country was rapidly depleting. He added that such an outcome could not be delayed through increased “economy” in the use of coal—what we refer to today as energy efficiency. He concluded, in italics, “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”

Some, if not most, economists and environmentalists assert that the Jevons Paradox has little effect in the modern world. But, as Owen notes, no one has ever really studied all the variables that go into a macro-study. And it would be impossible to calculate. Owen says the Jevons effect is essentially the history of civilization. It happens all the time, in many ways.

It's only common sense, isn't it? Cheap gas? Hummers galore. Expensive gas? Less driving, smaller cars.

Eh?