02/09/2012

The Graph

In the last week or so (31 January, that is), all your 2011 sources of income were supposed to have sent you an accounting of how much you earned.  Adrienne is better at keeping track of these things than I, but I have learned through the years to put my W-2 in the folder on her desk when it arrives in the mail, so we don’t have to sift through the house looking for it six weeks later.

This is also the time of year when I have to start scraping money together to make my annual contribution to my Individual Retirement Account.  It strikes me as perversely appropriate that I make my 2011 contribution in calendar 2012, just as I did the year before and the year before that.

The timing stinks.  I just this morning wrote the check to pay off the credit card bill accrued over the year-end holidays.  (I’m of the age that I don’t yet pay my bills via electronic funds transfers.  I like – well, like isn’t the right word – I need to look at the bill every month, because when I see how much I owe, I always think, “That can’t be right,” then I go through the items and by God, I did spend that much.)  (Yes, I know the email that comes with the EFT is itemized, too, but I’m of an age group that doesn’t pay attention to pixels the way we do to ink.)  (And yes, a good environmentalist should be more avid to save trees.)
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Economy | Tagged , | Comments (1)
02/02/2012

The Weeks of Winter

Happy Groundhog’s Day.  The news reports that the various prognosticating groundhogs cannot agree on whether winter has or has not ended.  Maybe they can’t agree on whether it’s started.  I’m not sure human-groundhog communication is all that sophisticated.

Yesterday was the Imbolc, the Celtic feast of pregnant ewes, a harbinger of spring soon to come.  There are no ewes, pregnant or otherwise, in my vicinity (no groundhogs either, for that matter), so I can’t report on their gestational progress.

I did hear a phoebe sing outside my window Tuesday and again this morning.  The phoebe’s song is one of my favorite voices of spring, but it shouldn’t arrive here for another six weeks.

The window of days likely below-zero temperatures is six weeks long; two of those weeks still remain, but we’ve only had a few days when the thermometer dipped below zero.  Yesterday afternoon was in the high forties.  There’s no snow on the ground and my snow shovels rest in a corner of the front porch, unused.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Global Warming | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
01/26/2012

For the Record

Late in the day last Thursday, federal Judge J. Garvan Murtha ruled the Vermont legislature cannot intervene in the continued operation of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.

In his 102-page ruling, Judge Murtha closely tracks the arguments made by attorneys for Entergy, the owner of Vermont Yankee.  Entergy argued and the judge agreed that while the statute passed by the legislature says that the state’s concerns about Vermont Yankee are based on issues of reliability and economic benefit, the legislators were really concerned with radiological safety and such safety is the sole province of the Nuclear regulatory Commission (NRC), which last year issued a permit for Vermont Yankee to operate for another 20 years.

(The plant’s reactor, which is the same design as the melted reactors at Fukushima, has been running for 40 years, which was the projected lifetime of the reactor when it was built.  Since 2006, it has been running at 120 percent of its design capacity, again with the blessing of the NRC.)
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Nuclear Energy | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
01/19/2012

(Un)Free for All

I’m on Rick Santorum’s side – in a narrow, limited sense.  The former senator from Pennsylvania is not my kind of politician.  There may be a few issues on which we agree, but I’m not inclined to seek them out.

That said, Mr. Santorum meets the qualifications to run for president of the United States.  He’s a native-born American over the age of 35.  His candidacy should succeed or fail based on the number of voters who think he’s best fit to serve in the Oval Office and only on that basis.

That, however, is not what happened in Iowa.  This morning, the Des Moines Register broke the news that rather than losing the Iowa caucuses by eight votes to former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, Mr. Santorum actually won them by at least 34 votes.

I have to write “at least” because the Iowa Republican Party claims the votes from eight precincts have been irretrievably lost.  Due to this, the official word on the caucuses is that it was a “tie” between Messrs. Santorum and Romney.  It wasn’t a tie on Caucus night; it was a “win” for Mr. Romney.  How is an eight-vote margin a “win” and a 34-vote (at least) margin a tie?  (Hint: It’s a “tie” when you’re trying to throw the election to Mr. Romney.) Continue reading »

By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, Electoral Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
01/12/2012

Screaming to Get Out

I’m starting to believe there’s a decent man inside Mitt Romney, screaming to get out.  To my mind that’s the most logical explanation for Tuesday’s famous gaffe and several others.

In a speech Tuesday, Mr. Romney said, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”  The context, which is important, was health care and his point was that under the current system, one can change insurance companies if one is unsatisfied with the coverage provided.

Even if one excuses the gaffe, I think the former one-term Massachusetts governor was already deep in the weeds.  A multi-millionaire like Mr. Romney can no doubt change insurance companies at will.  Most of us have long since ceased expecting to be happy with our insurance coverage, we take hassles and hostility from our insurer as a given and are happy to hold onto any coverage we can.

I think the honest man deep within Mr. Romney understands the point about insurance and is determined to sabotage the politician who appears before the public.  (This is my superficial understanding of Jungian psychology.)
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Electoral Politics | Tagged , | Comments (0)
01/05/2012

To the Window

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to pay closer attention to the weather.  Not the climate, the weather and not for professional or environmental or scientific reasons, but for the pleasure of it, for the purpose of rooting myself in this particular place I’ve chosen as my home.

I’ve paid enough attention to the weather in past years to know it changes every day and not in the obvious way: one day cloudy and the next clear.  I mean that by looking at a photo, I might see clues that tell me it was taken in northwestern Vermont in the second month of winter, rather than the first or third.

This is easy enough in the other three seasons of the year, merely by looking at the state of vegetation (although I still have much to learn then, too), but winter is more subtle and thus, more rewarding to the patient observer.  The quality, quantity and location of the snow most immediately present to the eye, but these metrics grow more unreliable each year.  (Alas, this is where climate and my professional life intrude.)
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
12/29/2011

To Appease the Gods

So the last Americans pulled out of Iraq, eight and a half years later, leaving an uncertain nation with an even more uncertain future.

As I watched the video of the last trucks crossing the Kuwait border, all I could see were the black hulls of the Greek ships sailing away, gray smoke still hanging in the ruined walls of Troy.

Not that Iraq is currently in ruins, but the Trojan war has been on my mind for the last decade, since George W. Bush, like Agamemnon before him, began gathering reluctant allies for a headstrong military adventure that brought grief to nearly everyone associated with it.

To appease the gods for sending a military force to make war on a society in a war in which non-combatants on only one side would be at risk, Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia.  (His wife would later kill him for having done that.)  Mr. Bush made no such sacrifice, nor did he ask the majority of his countrymen to make any sacrifice on behalf of the soldiers he commanded.
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, Iraq Invasion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)