The Witch Head Nebula

Happy Halloween! The image of the nebula is courtesy of those lovable nerds over at http://www.nasa.gov.

You're Being Lied To

Just thought you should know.

What the Rest of the World Thinks

I found this graph today. It speaks volumes about what the Bush presidency has meant for U.S. standing in the world.

Who Gives A Damn About The Stock Market?

There is strong element of sarcasm in the headline, but there is also an earnestness. Who really suffers from these volatile financial markets? And for that matter, who benefits from them? In the past week, the DJIA took triple digit losses for something like six days in a row. Then yesterday, there was a nearly-quadruple-digit rally. It makes me wonder, who are the people buying and selling that number of shares? They aren't anyone I know.

Like the winners and losers on American Idol, who represent a tiny fraction of musicians and artists, it seems that in spite of how large the stock market looms in our collective consciousness, we are actually thinking about a relatively small number of people who control it. Ordinary folks just have to sit anxiously by and hope their favorite mutual fund doesn't face Simon Cowell's virulent tongue. The only difference is that the stakes are retirement, health care, and municipal works, rather than merely bearing witness to someone else's fifteen minutes of lame.

Fiddling While Rome Burns

I love my Google home page. It distills a lot of information I want from the web at a glance each morning, and indeed throughout the day. And sometimes it even provides me with great ironic content as well. Take this collection of news stories:
Six headlines. Four of them grimly confirm the economic crisis that has the world by the throat, one of them illustrates the dangers of unchecked government spying. And then there's this: "McCain Joins Attacks on Obama Over Radical." 5600 related stories! There is a global financial crisis, war and genocide and terrorism are rampant, domestic spying is on the rise, civil liberties are being systematically eroded, and the best McCain can do is to perform a "guilt-by-association" hatchet job on Obama.

Maybe Nero wasn't so bad after all.

Grampa Jim

My grandpa died today.

One of the many difficult things that comes with dealing with a death in the family is an awareness that there have been words left unsaid and deeds left undone. My relationship with him feels somehow unfinished, and now it must remain so. I suppose one cannot truly "finish" a relationship. But it hurts to feel the loss of someone so dear and so lively in heart and mind. There were many things I would have yet liked to have learned from him, and I long to hear more tales from his life in his own words.

I am grateful to have known him and I am very proud to be counted among his grandchildren.

Right About The Right, Again

Sometime late in the morning four years ago, the day after the disastrous 2004 presidential election, a friend sent me an email which decried the gulf of difference between ourselves and the average voter.

There is a large sector of the American public (51%, I guess) that is uninterested in facts. I'm not saying they're necessarily dumb, but they simply are not interested in weighing evidence or critical thinking. They believe what they believe, and for them, it all turns on social issues... [in that context,] the only way to win would be to sacrifice the social issues... In the meantime, we have no choice but to keep fighting for reason, science, and decency, or else just move to Canada. Obama 2008.

Obama in 2008? What a dreamer. And yet here we are! He gets full credit for calling that one.

I bring up his sagacity because we exchanged some email today about some quotes in the New York Times. In an article about the election, one church-going Catholic seriously asked, "are they going to make it the Black House?" And another: "She said she’s never voted, and was a teenage mom "like Bristol." She likes Sarah [Palin] because she’s "down home" but said Obama "gives me the creeps. Nothing to do with the fact that he’s black. He just seems snotty, and he looks weaselly." This is who we might be going to the polls with in November?

My friend wrote of these shameful (shameless?) pronouncements:

...if we [Democrats] don't [win the 2008 election], it won't be because we don't have a good candidate, or that he didn't run a good campaign. It's just that there are more of *them* than there are of us. And worse, they're outbreeding us by a fairly wide margin.

Goddammit, I suspect he's right again. It sounds a lot like Idiocracy, doesn't it?