Post 200 — Draft

This is the 200th post on A Little Tour in Yellow and I am heading north for the rest of the weekend.  I think I will leave the computer home, but I will think about what to do next with this blog.  Perhaps I’ll go back to the simple and original idea of posting about my daily experiences as a salesman.  But that depresses me somehow.

I can’t say it depresses me more than the goings on in this state and nation, however.

What a lot of disgrace!

At a very fundamental level this country has lost its way.  In Minnesota, for example, our legislature is openly debating an amendment restricting marriage rights to straight couples.  It is an idea from the conservative right, obviously, a group that is growing increasingly influential and increasingly backward.

Right wing panders to poorly informed and deliberately misguided Americans.  That is a disgrace.  Much of this pandering promotes ignorance and paranoia.  Hardly admirable qualities.  It is depressing.

Opinions trump facts like never before in my memory.  Whether they are opinions about history, economics, science, or the founding principles of our country, opinions are replacing facts.  The GOP has become a real threat to the American way of life that has given us so much.  Generations of progress are being squandered and lost in favor of regressive ideology, often seeped in religion and bigotry.  (One can hope that the bigots are right about Hell,.)

Anyroad…just a brief and kind of melancholy musing on my part before heading north for a break.  Plenty to think about, but not a lot of time for details now.  I am late!  Need to get out of town.

(WordPress problems this morning!  No images, keep losing my draft.  Just publishing this.)

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Let’s Take a Quick Quiz…

What is this?

In my attempt to curb my political rants just a smidge, I am going to complain a little about drivers in my neighborhood and do so by inviting you, dear reader (all two of you), to take a little quiz.  Please look at the photo to the right.  (Click on the photo if you need a bigger image, U No Hu.)

Now, tell me, what does the top sign mean, the red one?

Bonus points if you can tell me what the sign below the red sign means.  And if you can stretch your effort a little, take a peek at the sign on the far left of this picture.  Compose a meaningful essay explaining how the sign below the red sign and the sign on the left relate to each other.  Is there anything about these signs that might tell you something about the corner we’re looking at here?  Post your answers in the comment section below.  The scroll down and read something better on this blog and tell your friends and family to do the same.

I am convinced that the worst drivers in America live in my Minnesota.  And the worst of the worst live in my neighborhood.  Seriously, I don’t recognize my state anymore!  Minnesota had been a dependably sane place to live once upon a time.  No really…I kid you not.   Now we have Pawlenty, Bachmann, Zellers, Michel, and so on…and bad drivers to boot.  Even our schools are starting to suck!

Whoops, sorry…wandered a little political there…

Let’s talk about the drivers.

In my neighborhood, no one — other than myself — stops at stop signs.  They don’t even slow down.  In fact I think drivers speed up probably with the logic that if they get through the intersection faster they reduce the chance of being hit by another driver not stopping at stop signs.

So I do the passive aggressive thing and roll up to stop signs slowly when I see a car coming from the left or right on an intersecting road at a four-way stop, and you should see the reaction!

People don’t know what to do.  They look entirely out of sorts…Is he stopping?  What’s he doing?  Do I go, do I wait?

When they realize that I am stopping and waiting for them to do the same, they get all whacked out.  I think one poor old guy had a heart attack tonight at the corner I a sharing with you on this post.

Honest to William and Mary, why don’t people stop at frigging stop signs?  Did I miss a memo somewhere?

Oh, and by the way, save your country.  Don’t vote Republican.

Related Articles

• Because I live in Minnesota… (alittletourinyellow.wordpress.com)
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A Walk in the Park

Marking an Engagement.

I took a short walk along the west shore of Lake Harriet and then back through the Roberts Bird Sanctuary, a little wooded marshland between the lake’s north shore and Lakewood Cemetery.  Generally this is a peaceful little walk, but today people out for Easter walks crowded the path a little.

So I went off the beaten path a little and found this plaque hanging on a rather unimpressive tree.  The plaque marks an engagement.  It is dated 8/24/05 and reads “Here with this tree as witness we were engaged.”

The plaque doesn’t face any active paths and I’m sure few people have seen it.  Does anyone know the story?  Nice plaque.  I enjoy finding little surprises like that.  It adds something nice to the city.

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Made In England

Believe it or not…but I don’t know how to tweet photos and files so I’ll post an announcement of a friend’s event in downtown Minneapolis tonight here and tweet this!  I might not be tech savvy, but still somewhat clever.  No?

Brit’s Pub Presents…Made in England, an evening of Art and Music to celebrate St. George’s Day!  Featuring new paintings by Louisa Greenstock beginning at 7:00 and The Teddy Holidays will perform beginning at 9:00 p.m.

No cover and drink specials will be available.

Brits Pub is located at 1110 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis, MN  55403.  612-332-3908

www.britspub.com

I Can’t Get Enough of This Picture

Arrrr! I Got Me a Maiden to Ransom!

I’m sorry…I can’t help myself.  And enjoying this photo is a much more valuable use of my time than debating meters and millennia with Roger…

Isn’t this one of the best pictures you’ve seen recently?  Honestly.  I break out laughing thinking about it. 

Imagine you’re sailing the Seven Seas when — oh no! — pirates!  And this little guy jumps onto your deck! 

Have you ever seen a more proud and self-assured pirate? 

Oh, god…I love it.

Now scroll down and read one of my other posts.  And tell your friends to do the same.  Thank you.

Stanley Ann Dunham: The Young Mother Abroad

Barak Obama and His Mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. Great picture!

Just a quick post to plug an interesting story appearing in this week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine about Barak Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. 

The story is written by Janny Scott, a reporter at the New York Times and is adapted from her book, A Singular Woman:  The Untold Story of Barak Obama’s Mother (2008), a book that I have so far missed, but will add to my list soon.

All I want to do in this brief post is encourage people to check out the story.  If we could get some Obama bashers and birthers — that particularly paranoid and irrational set — to read the article, they might learn something about the substance and quality of character that creates good and responsible people. 

Barak Obama is blessed by a background rich with experience, but in particular he had the benefit of good people around him when he was a young boy; people of depth and dimension. 

It is hard for me not to draw mean-spirited comparisons between the smart and worldly character of Barak’s mother and the narrow and ignorant character of the people who attack President Obama on baseless spite.  I will resist.  I won’t do it.

What counts as patriotic in this country today?

A Debate I’ll Call “Roger and Me”…Catchy.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

I am going to bring Roger from New Zealand into a fresh post.  It is fair to present both sides in a debate and why conduct a debate in the comments section?

Roger is calling me out on my post that offers a way to explain global warming to people who deny it is happening based on fluctuations observed in daily weather.  Roger cites information from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to support his argument which seems to be that climate change isn’t such a big deal. 

In particular, in the last comment shared with me, Roger suggests that we need to understand the facts better because a IPCC report suggests that the sea level rises caused by the deterioration of the Greenland Ice Sheet will not reach 7 meters for at least a thousand years or more. 

I’m not sure a 7 meter sea level rise is the point when we start to have problems.  It has been argued by scientists that even a rise of a few inches can start to cause problems, surely a few feet would be catastrophic for some coastal areas, islands, rivers, etc.   Seven meters — more than 20 feet for us metric-challenged Americans — is quite a devastating accomplishment.  Bye bye Manhattan.

Queenstown, New Zealand.

I am happy Roger shared this information.  There is a lot more at the IPCC to read and study.  The site is a treasure of reports and links to studies and data.  The IPCC also is a Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2007.

I would encourage people to look beyond one or two examples that appear to be outrageous or set far into the future.  The IPCC produces an annual report on Impacts, Adaptations, and Vulnerability of climate change that can be read online or downloaded.  There is a lot of information about threats other than sea level rise.  Drought, floods, deforestation, disease, etc.  They even have a section dedicated to New Zealand!

But I have to wonder why someone — anyone — wouldn’t see climate change as an opportunity for broader changes and advancement in the way we live.  The world is getting more and more crowded with more and more people living a higher standard of living mostly on unsustainable energy sources.  That seems like a disaster waiting to happen whether the climate changes or not. 

Moreover we are at an economic crossroads.  Familiar capitalist economies that have largely depended on regional trade advantages at the global level are quickly ceasing to exist.  The United States is doomed to lose in the global labor market, for example.  New economies equal new opportunities and vice versa.

I will put my faith behind the scientists and researchers who have committed their professional lives to studying and understanding our climate and how human activity impacts it.  Perhaps if I saw global warming scientists growing fabulously rich and powerful perpetuating a minority opinion about global warming threats I might be skeptical, but I see nothing like that.  Do you?

I do, however, see a minority of big business, especially fossil fuel execs, growing fabulously rich holding a minority opinion. 

If you were a betting man, where would you put your money?

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Tim Pawlenty is a Knob

South St. Paul Union Stockyards

I don’t know why I do it…but I went back and watched Tim’s melodramatic and misleading video presenting his presidential exploratory committee.  Facts don’t get in the way of Tim’s ambitions.

He makes an issue of the meat packing plants closing in South St. Paul in the 1970s and 1980s.  He says he therefore knows what hardship is all about.  (Then, as I point out in an earlier post, he insults his home town.)  But does he really?

There isn’t much depth to conservative thought or what passes for reasoning on the right.

The conditions that caused the meat packing plants in South St. Paul to close were very different from the economic collapse causing businesses to close in recent years.  Drawing any parallel is a mistake.  What caused the meat packing businesses that Tim thinks he knew was consolidation taking advantage of profitable economies of scale.

Conservatives don’t understand macroeconomics.

Where once there were hundreds of meat packing plants across the country, there are now today only a couple dozen.  Good thing?  Bad thing?  That’s another debate.

If anything, the pro-business (so-called) and anti-regulation platform of Republican politics had more to do with closing the meat packing plants in South St. Paul than any bad economic policy position.  So here again is an example of something that conservative politics would support being turned into something that has a bad side that conservatives can exploit.

In this case, Tim is trying to build his credentials with an irrelevant issue — which is typical – and if it is relevant it is so in a way where he is on the wrong side of the issue, not the right.   Not the right stuff, indeed.

Save your country.   Don’t vote Republican.

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A Way to Discuss Global Warming

Image via Wikipedia

Last night I nearly choked on my Brunello when I had to listen (again) to self-described intelligent people carry on (and on and on) about the Great Global Warming Hoax.  The group discussing the idea work in investments for the most part and thus they can claim to be smart…

Ok, hold on.  I can’t help myself.  (I need an editor.)  I have to make a side comment about wealth in America.  I’m sure there are many good people with average to above average intelligence and work ethic who do very well because of their abilities.  But do we really think that merely by virtue of being the ancestors of immigrants (for the most part) that we are some how exceptional in these gifts?  In other words, do we think people like William McGuire at UnitedHealth Group or Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs would make the kind of money they made if, say, they tried to be “self-made” in Somalia or North Korea?  Come on…

Now back to my idea.

The people claiming that Global Warming is a hoax made the tired argument that sometimes the weather is actually cooler than normal.  One bright woman pointed out that the weather yesterday was down right cold, in fact! 

Now I don’t want to get into the weather versus climate differences.  Intelligent people understand this difference anyway.  I am suggesting an idea to deal with people not smart enough to understand the simple differences between weather and climate.  Or unable to understand averages in trends, for that matter, too. 

Click on Image for Larger View

Here is my suggestion and it might not be original but I’ll throw it out there anyway. 

A lot of people who deny Global Warming come from the same crowd that thinks they understand economics, business, and investments.  In fact EVERYONE thinks he is an economics and investment expert today! 

So ask them to consider how investments grow.  Peaks and valleys occur over time, but the over all trend is one of growth, right?  The economy today is larger than it was 100 years ago.  Correct?  And barring something like Paul Ryan and his lot of idiots, the economy will continue to grow, with occassional and natural “corrections.”  Am I right or am I wrong?

Cannot a reasonable person assess the overall trend in something like temperatures and carbon emissions as a similar peak and valley trend that is — undeniably — rising on an average over time?

Why would statistics in a science like investments function differently than in a science like climate?

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An Addendum: Food, Inc.

Food, Inc.

After posting my comments about Minnesota State Senator Doug Magnus‘s proposed legislation to outlaw filming farming operations without permission, I thought it might be useful to watch again Food, Inc, a documentary about the food industry in the United States.  I am happy I did and I strongly encourage others, especially anyone who has not yet seen that film, to watch it, too.

The film covers more than the current status of corporate food production in the United States.  The subject serves as an excellent model showing what is wrong with corporate economic and political influence in the United States today.

There’s even a nice little jab at Clarence Thomas who now sits mutely on our country’s Supreme Court earning a tax payer-subsidized public sector job for life serving commercial interests over the interests of the people…

But there are more important people featured in this film, people whose lives are changed and damaged because they do not have the economic means to fight corporate bullying.  Unfortunately they do not have the support they need from their government, either. 

(cf. Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion that favored corporate seed interests by defending plant and seed patents in a way that has been successfully used by companies like Monsanto to place a burden on farmers to prove that they did not violate a patent when patented plants naturally cross-breed with non-patented plants.  Got that?  Thomas was once a lawyer for Monsanto.)

We see real examples of corporations abusing the laws, such as the seed and plant patent ruling, to intimidate and out-lawyer non-complying outliers and essentially get them to comply or go out of business. 

In fact there are several examples of law protecting corporate interests over individual.  Want to know what is happening to family farm?  Part of the answer is here.

We also see the real tragedy of illegal workers in the United States.  They are fine as long as they produce profits, doing work that most Americans will not do and in the process helping sustain an affordable high standard of living here, but expendable in symbolic raids meant to show that hypocritical corporations mean business when it comes to cracking down on illegal workers.  The workers get punished, the execs who seek and recruit them do not.

Overall the film serves as a sort of allegory for what is not working in the consolidation of power, especially corporate power and its political influence, in this country.  It also gives you an eye-opening look at where most of your food comes from.

Of course there are two sides to every story.  There even is a side of the debate offered that shows how doing business with Wal-Mart might be good for the organic food movement.  Perhaps in a way it is.  Take a look.  Overall, however, this film effectively covers the troubling signs of how sheer size and consolidation has changed our food supply change in unsavory ways.

You might not agree with everything, but it doesn’t hurt to think.  Highly recommended.