Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Egads, what a silly title, I wince just typing that one in. But as the quotation marks suggest, I lifted it from someplace else, specifically this Nicholas Kristof piece.
In upper-middle-class suburbs on the East Coast, the newest must-have isn’t a $7,500 Sub-Zero refrigerator. It’s a standby generator that automatically flips on backup power to an entire house when the electrical grid goes out.
In part, that’s a legacy of Hurricane Sandy. Such a system can cost well over $10,000, but many families are fed up with losing power again and again.
(A month ago, I would have written more snarkily about residential generators. But then we lost power for 12 days after Sandy – and that was our third extended power outage in four years. Now I’m feeling less snarky than jealous!)
More broadly, the lust for generators is a reflection of our antiquated electrical grid and failure to address climate change. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave our grid, prone to bottlenecks and blackouts, a grade of D+ in 2009.
It would seem this “less snarky than jealous” business in the parentheses might have been inserted after initial publication. In any case, the honesty is refreshing. Not that you have long to wait before Kristof gets to the heart of the matter of what he wants to discuss…
That’s how things often work in America. Half-a-century of tax cuts focused on the wealthiest Americans leave us with third-rate public services, leading the wealthy to develop inefficient private workarounds.
It’s manifestly silly (and highly polluting) for every fine home to have a generator. It would make more sense to invest those resources in the electrical grid so that it wouldn’t fail in the first place.
But our political system is dysfunctional: in addressing income inequality, in confronting climate change and in maintaining national infrastructure.
The article isn’t very long and you should go read it from top to bottom.
It is a fascinating study in how otherwise-intelligent, and no doubt well-intentioned, people get from “I wish to be seen participating in a political process to provide safety nets for those who need them” to the mind-boggling “there is something wrong when the lowly individual is able to take extra steps to protect himself.” Turns out that chasm is not so wide & yawning. Or, if it is, the mental gymnastics of Kristof find a way to shrink it down and make the leap.
But Dr. Jacobson (hat tip to Dyspepsia Generation) has a few words to offer by way of rebuttal…
[W]here is the link between marginal tax rates and (a) the percentage of total taxes actually paid by top income earners, which has risen in the last 50 years, and (b) the electric grid. Assuming the false arguendo that higher marginal rates would have resulted in more tax revenue, where is the evidence it would have been spent on the national electric grid, rather than pork projects and giveaways for political constituencies?
There are those who believe, in the wake of this last election, that we are now heading for a “fiscal cliff” that entails such a damning fall, with such a great head of momentum built up, and we’re so close to the brink, that we as a nation are now doomed. If that is the case then it is to our national shame that things have progressed to this point, and we still don’t have a name for this mental feebleness which apparently has determined our lack-of-future. Words like “envy” and “jealousy” do not adequately describe it.
The calamity arrives; your neighbor prepared against it and you didn’t; somehow, your neighbor with the spare tire & the jack, or the jumper cables, or the swiss army knife, or the polyurethane or the canned goods or the bottled water in his basement must have screwed it up for everybody else. Or maybe the connection goes the other way? Looking out for each other depends, in some way that’s never quite stated or defined, on being unprepared for extraordinary discomforts, and thereby burdening your fellow citizens with your entirely avoidable lack of preparedness.
We don’t do right by each other unless we’re constantly diving from the stage into a mosh pit. Or something.
Month by month and year by year, I continue to be amazed that things that should not be called mental deficiencies, somehow are, and things that should be categorized that way, somehow are not. I do not know if oblivion is avoidable or not at this point. But one way or another, we’d better get cracking and start fixing this. We need to start categorizing these mental illnesses before we can address the spending issues, that’s the take-away from this. Or, could it be that the New York Times has branched out into the satire business and I shouldn’t worry? I hope that is the case. But I have to doubt it, and my concerns are there.
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My favorite comment from the rebuttal article:
Hurricanes. Is there anything they can’t do?
They threaten GOP conventions.
They provide great photo ops for incompetent presidents.
They provide a great excuse to push disastrous policies regarding supposed anthropogenic global warming.
They provide another great tenuous excuse to engage in class warfare over marginal tax rates.
They provide opportunities to play the race card.
Hurricanes. Is there anything they can’t do?
- cylarz | 11/25/2012 @ 19:02The greatest unasked question of our time – “Why aren’t automobiles equipped with AC outlets?”
- TRKOF | 11/25/2012 @ 20:41Now, it’s been asked,
Hold on… so, “tax cuts” for the “wealthiest Americans” are bad… but they make it easier to afford those private generator systems so “must-have” for the upper-middle class suburbs! What’s a Right-Thinking Columnist™ to do?
Why, write up a mea culpa in the New York Times blaming everyone else for his problems!
Or, in other words, do what you always do, right Kristof? What a pinhead.
PS – it’s ENVY, not JEALOUSY. Envy is wanting to take what others have, jealousy is hoarding what you already have so others can’t get any. If they’ve got the generator, you’re envious and they’re jealous. I’m fairly sure this should be in your company’s stylebook somewhere.
- nightfly | 11/26/2012 @ 09:20