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July 2nd, 2008 Here and There Posted in bio-tech, business, civil liberties, constitution, courts, disaster, economics, education, energy, environment, foreign policy, health, history, immigration, international relations, labor, law, medicine, politics, presidents, religion, ridiculous, science, supreme court, war No Comments »
June 13th, 2008 Here and There Posted in economics, education, energy, environment, international relations, labor, medicine, serious, war No Comments »
Just got done taking a Zogby poll. Setting aside questions of the pollster’s reliability, I like taking these surveys from time to time.
Something I had been thinking about as I was wandering the streets near my work the other day came up on this poll. It comes up frequently on Zogby’s, as I’m sure it does on others. It’s where the poll asks you to name what issues are most important to you (choose only two), and there’s a list of things like Taxes, Education, Economy, Space Exploration.
It seems more than a meaningless exercise to me. Because no one can solve all problems, and it’s best to have your priorities at the ready, I thought I’d share what I told the pollsters.
If I were allowed to choose five issues important to this country, they would be, in this order: Environment, Economy, Diplomacy, Education, and yes, Defense (thanks to the mess we’ve inherited).
Environment gets top billing because we’ve simply got to start, really start, making an effort now. Environmental damage is the farthest reaching and most potentially intractable. The economy trends up and down over time. Left alone, our climate is headed toward a condition in which no of us could live here anymore.
Economy because, frankly, it sucks. It sucks bad. Taxes are too low on the top earners, and too high and complex for the rest of us. It’s been seven years of skew, and it’s time to recognize that the experiment failed and get back to something more fair and sensible. A subsection to this issue is jobs, which can be created in areas concerning the environment, from cleanup to renewable energy, etc. Health care is tied in here, too. It should get its own topic, but there’s no lack of good healthcare in this country. There is, on the other hand, a telling lack of affordable healthcare.
Which kinda sorta leads to diplomacy. We’ve simply got to get our good standing back. Not launching unilateral wars for falsified reasons is a good start, but we’ve got to go so much farther. Helping struggling peoples where we can, but staying out of sovereign nation’s affairs is a safe bet, too.
Education is fourth, sadly. It should be first. But the world is fucked right now, so those others get 1-3. We’ve simply got to clamp down on education, from pre-school to college. Quality education needs to be made available at all levels. And affordable college, with reasonable loans in place, needs to be there, too. It will take a dramatic shift of emphasis, because at the current rate of school and student failure, this country is headed down the drain.
Defense because there are people who want to fuck shit up. We should be ready to stop them, but a true effort in these other areas might also reduce the threat. It’s all so wonderfully intertwined.
March 18th, 2008 Here and There Posted in art, education, energy, environment, medicine, serious No Comments »
It’s amazing. Seattle artist Chris Jordan makes art of truly mesmerizing detail, and every bit, zoomed at every level, offers commentary on who we are and how we live.
I’m speechless.
August 14th, 2007 Here and There Posted in architecture, economics, environment, food, grammar, words + copy, medicine, mepedia, neuroscience, politics, serious 3 Comments »
This is the first installment of a new feature on Here and There, tentatively titled “mepedia.” I hope you enjoy.
These are some of the things I learned yesterday, Monday, August 13, 2007:
* Karl Rove will resign from the Bush administration at the end of August. Reactions are expected and generic, but my insight is that the “family” excuse is to politics what the “busy” excuse is to the rest of us. Sort of. At least in its transparency.
* Brooke Astor dies. Okay, “news” of a 105-year-old woman dying isn’t exactly, well, news. But I’d like to give my boss props for calling this one the night before (Sunday) on, as far as I can tell, absolutely no evidence. He also mentioned some friends of his at The New York Times who had Astor and Pavarotti on their death watch. Luciano lives another day.
* Finished an article in the August 13, 2007 issue of The New Yorker about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a rare, fucked-up disorder found only in males in which the sufferer is compelled to destroy himself. It manifests most readily in the eating of the fingers and lips. Article mentions a spectrum of self-mutiliating behavior that encompasses a bad habit of mine: eating cuticles till they bleed. Help! Danger!
* After going over a story on transit-oriented development somewhere in the Peninsula (in the city of San Mateo, I believe), a coworker told me about the idea of arcology, or massive structures of huddled humans living in a sustainable, ecologically sound way.
* From visiting the wikipedia page on arcology, I found the concept of the count noun, such as “cattle” or, formerly, “fish.” Never knew that term, but it’s handy for making people think I’m some kind of grammarian.
* Toward the end of the shift last night, a coworker informed me of Van Halen’s reunion tour, which former bassist Michael Anthony will unfortunately not be taking part in thanks to his sacking by Eddie van Halen earlier this year. The younger van Halen brother replaced the band’s longtime bassist (and proud purveyor of the Jack Daniels bass guitar) with none other than his own son, 16-year-old Wolfgang van Halen. Natch.
* Read somewhere that the new Minneapolis bridge(s) will have five lanes each way. Well, the smaller bridge didn’t work, so what else to do but build bigger??
* Another New Yorker tidbit: From James Surowiecki’s Financial Page, learned the term rent-seeker, describing “a company [that] seeks to manipulate economic conditions rather than actually create value.” Sounds vaguely familiar.
* Finally, began an article in the same New Yorker about elaborate, highly lucrative European olive oil scams. Learned a little about the process of making olive oil, which the author describes as similar to juice extraction. Also learned that olives are closely related to cherries and plums (and mangoes, which the author omitted), all of which are known as drupes. Nice word.
March 16th, 2007 Here and There Posted in health, law, medicine, richardson, serious 1 Comment »
Bill Richardson has guts. I’m liking him more and more.
The New Mexico governor has said he will sign legislation making his the 12th state to legalize marijuana to be used as medicine. Nice.
January 30th, 2007 Here and There Posted in journalism, medicine, science, slightly ridiculous, technology No Comments »
When I saw “eye gunk” on the NY Times home page, I thought for sure they meant eye gunk, i.e., eye boogers.
But no, they’ve co-opted the term to mean “floaters,” or, bits of dislodged membrane on the eye.
Damn them for getting that click out of me (though in my advancing years, I should probably heed such medical information).
December 6th, 2006 Here and There Posted in animals, archeology, architecture, astronomy, economics, education, energy, entertainment, environment, history, internet/multimedia, journalism, medicine, politics, serious, technology 1 Comment »
The other day, I began a work-in-progress (what, I ask, is not a work-in-progress?), compiling a list of things I like about the country I live in. I got up to 25.
Today, I’m adding to it, beginning with number 26. (Remember, there is no reason for the order of my list. It only denotes the chronology at which things come to me).
October 9th, 2006 Here and There Posted in bio-tech, medicine, serious, technology 2 Comments »
Had a thought last night that the majority of what people do today, their industry, falls into one of three categories, all of which are loosely connected:
Medicine, technology, and bio-tech.
It took me a few minutes to think of professions and/or products that didn’t fall neatly into one of these three categories. Of course, labor and natural resources are still huge, but they’ve been eclipsed by the so-called “service economy” of the “global” network. And when you think of it, labor is basically a service.
I don’t foresee an end to academia, nor to basic resource-extraction or labor. I just see the vast majority of enterprise headed in these directions.