Thirty years ago today was a Monday. After track practice, Dan O’ Hara and I went to Al Oliver’s house to help kill what was left of a keg of Molson’s Golden Ale from Al’s St. Patrick’s Day party the previous Saturday. It was warm, flat and skunky, but we pushed through, as returning a partial keg was unthinkable.
Navigating in heavy weather, Dan and I piled into his dad’s silver ’75 Honda cvcc, picked up subs at the SubYard and headed for my house, where my dad had a challenge.
“You’ve been drinking.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“What day is it?”
“The nineteenth.” (Ha!)
“… of January.” (D’oh!) “Uh, I mean March.”
Busted.
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Like many others, I think the Jon Stewart-Jim Cramer colloquy on The Daily Show was a great, straightforward explication of some of the issues that have caused the recent financial havoc in the financial markets and more important, how the screaming heads on tee vee threw fuel (by which I mean, our retirement funds) on the fire.
Watch both segments of the interview and take note of the good points Jon Stewart makes. There is, however, one point he didn’t make is that Jim Cramer’s network – CNBC – is owned by General Electric, as is NBC. When Mr. Cramer and his colleagues get on the screen and scream “BUY! BUY! BUY!” or “SELL! SELL! SELL!,” there are people at GE who are giving them their screaming orders because they think that manipulating the market via CNBC will help GE’s corporate bottom line.
This notion is not disproved by the fact that GE stock has lost three-quarters of its value since last October, it just shows that the GE stock jocks, like so many of their Wall Street fellows, don’t know what the hell they’re doing.
Jim Cramer was a rich man before he got his own tee vee show. He’s even richer now. That he chooses to act like a buffoon on his show is his choice, but why does he let his bosses at GE destroy his reputation for mere money?
It’s a disease.
Some people don’t like politics because it often seems so stupid and immature. Strike that – people don’t like politics because it often is stupid and immature.
In the month since Barack Obama’s inauguration, we’ve been (mis)treated to some of the worst displays of puerile politics in recent memory, which might be amusing, if the stakes – both immediate and long-term – were not so high.
We all know the immediate stakes are the success of the stimulus package and the health of the economy. You know, can you keep your job, stay in your house, feed your family. Stuff like that.
The long-term stakes have to do with which party will run the United States in the remainder of the 21st century. It works like this: the Constitution says we will have a census every ten years. The next one’s due in 2010. Based on census information, state legislatures redraw congressional districts within their states. We all know this process, gerrymandering, is the worst example of political sausage making we have. Those of us who believe in good government long for the day when the courts step in and prescribe a fair system, so we don’t wind up with congressional districts that look like the Illinois Fourth.
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By floegel
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Posted in Commentary, Electoral Politics
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Tagged Arnold Schwarzenegger, Barack Obama, Bobby Jindal, gerrymandering, Howard Dean, Jim Douglas, Mark Sanford, Rahm Emanuel, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, Tim Kaine
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I Want More
The day after Christmas, the New York Times published a column by Judith Warner in which she discusses the ethics of using cognition-enhancing drugs beyond the boundaries of their prescriptions.
The drugs in question – Ritalin, Adderall and Provigil – are prescribed for attention-deficit disorder (the first two) or narcolepsy (the third). People unafflicted, however, are taking these drugs because they increase one’s mental focus, information retention and retrieval and boost alertness for prolonged periods.
Proponents claim these drugs don’t have the negative side effects associated with previous generations of “uppers” like Benzedrine and Dexedrine. Ms. Warner refers to both sides of the debate without taking one (although drifts toward the pro-drug end of the spectrum).
The “pro” side argues that eschewing mind-enhancing drugs is akin to “pharmacological Calvinism,” that doing so is volunteering for unneeded hardship and besides, if one drinks coffee or deliberately eats nutritious food or gets enough sleep, one engages in the same process, just not to the same extent. If you were about to undergo heart surgery and your surgeon had the opportunity to take a brain-enhancing drug, you’d want him or her to take it, right?
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