This is Why I Read "Some Assembly Required"

I don't miss "Some Assembly Required." Classy, very classy cynicism . . . oh, and truth.

================================

 Walks Like A Duck: US forces have begun conducting “military operations” against the al-Shabaab rebels in Somalia. To date the effort appears to be limited to air strikes, but you have to start somewhere.   

 Dollar Diplomacy: Facing economic threats from the US and UK, Israel has backed down from its plans to steal a thousand acres of land from Palestinians on the West Bank. It seems that taking Palestinian lives is acceptable, but taking their land is not.

 
Supersized: Climate scientists say there is a 50/50 chance for a 'megadrought' lasting 30 years to settle into the American Southwest, with an 80% likelihood of a 10-year 'extreme' drought. Currently over 80% of California is in 'extreme' drought and nearly 60% qualifies as 'exceptional'. Remember the good old days when the Central Valley fed the nation?

Noted: The US health-care system, taken by itself, would be the fifth largest economy in the world.

War Ware Where: The US is opening a drone base in the middle of nowhere the Sahara as a base for surveilling and attacking Islamic jihadists in North and West Africa. Attendance at weddings is expected to plunge dramatically. 
 

Fortune, Cookies: Now that low paid Chinese factory workers have dismantled US manufacturing and turned well paid workers into grab and run clerks, the Chinese assault on high skilled jobs is underway. Training programs for the newly unemployed are futile if there will be no jobs left in the country regardless of 'skills'. What part of 'race to the bottom' didn't you understand? Why do you keep falling for these damned 'trade agreements' that are nothing but suicide pacts?

 
If, Then: If you are one of 2.5 million homeowners who are facing an average $250 a month bump in your mortgage payment within the next 3 years, are you expecting a 10 – 15% pay raise, or are you going to stop eating?

I Got Nuthin'

To say, that is. I've got brain cramps from editing bad prose most of the day. And aside from reading some history about World War I, I've done pretty much nothing today to further the cause of sanity and civilization. But tonight I ran across this on a blog I don't frequent that often. See all those links down the side? I probably visit about half of them in a given year. I have about half a dozen regulars, and no time to add others that probably worthy. It's become the perennial, nay, daily question: where does one find the time to read? No wonder half the world loses themselves in video games and other mindless media. Old fashioned media requires time and concentration. Even if you willing, the first commodity is hard to find in sufficient quantity.

Anyway I was surfing around in this blog "Stop Me Before I Vote Again" (clever, no?) and I ran across this wonderful example of delicious screed directed at one of my favorite targets: New York Times pontificator extraordinaire Tom Friedman. The author of this blog, one Michael J. Smith, has got to have something going for him. He agrees with me and Matt Taibbi. Listen:

I happened to pick up a copy of last Saturday’s NY Times today on the subway and was gobsmacked to find a mighty piece by the apparently retooled, neobionic Thomas Friedman occupying almost the whole of the op-ed page. The online version runs about 2,300 words. Never have I seen a neuron-buster on this scale dropped by the Times, even on a test range, much less in combat. The effect was devastating. As soon as the page was exposed to the air, people all around me began to lose consciousness and snore sterterously. I don’t know why I was spared; perhaps I used to read the Times enough when I was younger to develop an immunity.

But even I didn’t dare read this damn thing of course. There are limits. I cherish what scraps of sanity I have left. A quick browser word search — eyes averted — revealed that this is clearly not the old Thomas Friedman, since there is no reference to a cabdriver anywhere in the text.

I love it.

Blue Oklahoma and Friends

Did you know that there are a number of actually progressive blogs in the reddest state in the country, although Utah might claim the honor?

Here's a list of them:

Alternative Tulsa
Blue Oklahoma
The Brennan Society of Oklahoma
Democrats of Oklahoma Community Forum
Grindstone Journal
JMBzine
Life and Deatherage
Okie Funk
Oklahoma Citizen
Oklahoma Observer
OK Policy Blog
OKWATCHDOG.ORG
Peace Arena

I have not clicked on all these to see if they're up and running. I just lifted the list from Blue Oklahoma, which is a fine example of the genre. There may be more of them.  

Communism!

Here's a snippet from a blog I've just stumbled upon. It's called "the Hipcrime Vocab." (I suggest you read the whole article if you've got time. It's worth it. You may even find yourself drawn to explore more the blog. That's rewarding also. And while you're at it, read the Rolling Stone piece. We're talking real subversive stuff, people.) First of all, I wish I knew what that meant, but I've looked all over the site and cannot find a clue, nor can I find out the name of the person who's writing this blog. But, he's on to something.

A recent article written by an author named Jesse Myerson at Rolling Stone entitled Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For seems to have made certain parts of the blogosphere see red – literally. The article has generated denunciations that border on hysterical, pretty much boiling down to “It’s Communism, Communism, I tell you!!!”

Here are the proposals:

1. Guaranteed Work for Everybody
2. Social Security for All
3. Take Back The Land
4. Make Everything Owned by Everybody
5. A Public Bank in Every State

Matt Yglesias [He's the guy who writes the economic/political column for Slate] describes them this way:

1. Unconditional cash transfers rather than bureaucracy-intensive welfare programs
2. Make-work government jobs for the unemployed
3. Budget surpluses invested in private financial assets
4. A land-value tax to raise revenue
5. Some kind of scheme where a public bank would make subsidized loans

I find it surprising he’s omitted universal health care – unless he’s counting the Obamacare Frankenstein as universal health care. It seems like that should actually be job one, especially since it’s already the current system of every other advanced industrial democracy on the planet (and many that aren’t – Cuba, Costa Rica, etc.). I personally would also include a reduction in working hours, and guaranteed vacation time (again, something already guaranteed by almost every other advanced democracy in the world). I would also strongly push for free university education (again, already provided in many countries).

He goes on to talk about what he really finds interesting . . . the hysterical reaction of the conservatives to this piece. They went "apeshit" in words of one observer. But there's shrewd appraisal here.

The fanatical overreaction to these proposals is almost as interesting as the proposals themselves. To me, it really shows just how scared the elites are of losing their power – and of new ideas. What’s happened is that any rethinking of the current system in light of economic justice is shouted down by one word – “Communism!” Of course, people have no idea what communism actually was – the state owning all the means of production – something, you’ll notice, that the article does not advocate at all. But all this hysterical screaming about communism is telling. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, any attempt at discussing economic justice is seen as communism, and we live with the predictable results. Most of the reforms that made the middle-class lives we enjoy today possible were put in place to head off the threat of communism. Now that it's gone, they're taking away those reforms and privileges and taking us back to the Gilded Age - which they never wanted to leave in the first place.

Door Number Three

Door Number Three: The discussion goes on over the merits of fiscal and/or monetary policies in reviving the economy, with little notice given to the elephant standing over there pointing out that neither has done much good. And few economists seem to wonder why that might be; their theories say that one or the other or both will revive GDP growth. But what if an ever-growing GDP is dead, killed by high priced oil? What if the era of ever-growing GDP based on ever-growing consumption of resources and energy has ended?

This little paragraph is from a blog I just stumbled upon called "Some Assembly Required". Just what I need, another blog to get hooked on so I don't have time to read all the books I should be reading and which I promised myself I'd read when I retired . . . and that was seven years ago on January 3. Do I have to tell you that I've barely made a dent in the books? Retirement, it appears, throws up a bunch of distractions.

But to the point: isn't what's terribly wrong with the world is this foundational principle of capitalism: that success always equals more? Can we really not see that this way of life is going to be the end of us all? The era of ever-growing consumption is ended. Only problem is, millions of people don't know it.

The Big "So What?"

A few days ago my blogger friend Montag had some comments about the readers of his blog, about he was anxious to have people read his stuff when he was "much younger." And now, I take it, he doesn't care that much. Got me to thinking about readers. Actually, I don't have to think that long, because I don't have many readers. And I think to myself: ya know, it'd be great to have hundreds of people wanting to know what I was saying and thinking on any given day, but then I'm brought up by the thought: why? Suppose that were the case. What would be different? What would change? Nothing really. People like Nelson Mandela and Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther King alter the seemingly inexorable arc of history, but if we take a moment to consider, we have to ask how much that arc has been altered by the lives of great and terrible people?

I think not much. We on a wheel of life and death: the only variant being how long we're on it before spinning off into the unknown. Great people and terrible people can momentarily affect the course of the lives of millions of people, who all eventually are swallowed up into the ultimate fate of everyone. The great and terrible can surely affect the quality of these millions' lives, but ultimately to whom does it matter but the persons themselves and those who love them? And to whom does it matter years, centuries, millennia later? What connects me to the victims of Attila or the medieval plagues or a machine gun bullet at Passchendaele or a passenger on the Titanic who went down with the ship in the frigid Atlantic, or the Muslim some Hindu murdered in India in 1947? Why, nothing at all, you might say, and you'd be right. Or you may say something like, participation in the common tragedy of existence, and you would be right also. Or you might see these long gone, long slaughtered or martyred people as intimately connected with the life that is yours, brothers and sisters in the swirl of the great mystery, as much a part of your life and you are of theirs.

I think it must be something like that, or it's just a big "so what?" and either writing or reading blogs is an absurd waste of time.
 

Still Here

Last day of the month. Good day to turn over a new leaf. (Thank you, Paul--you know who you are.) Lest you think I've come down with some crippling illness or left the country or something other that's drastic, be at ease. I've just been unbelievably slothful about writing and can offer no viable excuse. But each day the little voice in my head--perphaps that imaginary crazy person up there--keeps telling me that I'm neglecting my duty. This is a damn curse actually, and I think I got it from my father who was duty, duty, duty about everything. Not that being dutiful isn't a good thing, maybe even a virtue, but is it really necessary to apply the concept to things you do voluntarily, such as blog or read? Alas, I do. So buck up, my little small gaggle of regular readers, if you're still here. I'm back on the job, and I'll be regaling you with my idiosyncratic takes on this folly we call living in the dying empire.

In the meantime, here's a video by a band I've just recently discovered. Enjoy.

Course Correction

You know what? This new way of approaching blogging isn't really working for me. I need to be on more often, but I have to shake the demon that bites me on the neck if I don't post every day. Truth of the matter is, it distresses me to see that my daily readers are down to about half a dozen from the usual 18-20. I'm sure some of you out there have concluded that I have pretty much run out of things to say. Not so. Don't think that will be so till I can no longer type or speak. So once more a course correction. It's my intention to resume more frequent posting. Not doing it but once or twice in a week gives me too much leeway to kick the can down the road, too easy a rationalization that I'm delivering what I promised, when in fact what I'm doing is avoiding a task that, though ultimately very satisfying, is taxing in the way that all creative endeavors are.

Bottom line: expect to see me here much more frequently. The world is passing by without my commentary? No way!

It's a New Year

. . . and a new day for What Powderfinger Said. My faithful readers, all half dozen of you, have doubtless noticed the absence of posts for the past couple of weeks. It was no accident. I just stopped doing blog posts while my two boys were in town for the holidays. I am now resuming the blog, but I'll employ a different approach going forward into 2013 and beyond, God willing. More on that in a few minutes.

I trust you didn't think there was anything wrong with me. Don't worry about the health of the blogmaster. He's fine (although he did experience a bout with the 24-hour bug, as did half his family, including grandchildren and son, who was cursed with the affliction on the airplane flight home to Florida.) No, I am fine for an old, overweight guy. No permanent health problems besiege me as I enter the new year. In one of the world's great marvels, my wife still loves me and consents to share my bed and roof. I am happily engaged--for pay even!--in doing work that I love: writing and editing history. All of my kids are doing well, and my grandkids continue to grow daily in smarts, good looks, and promise. I've found some measure of spiritual peace with the little church I attend now, a congregation of progressive Christians who love peace and justice and believe that God is still speaking to us today in myriad ways.

So on the personal level, everything's more than cool. (Or maybe that depends on who you ask.) Of course, on levels beyond that, there's a hell of a lot that's messed up. I cannot believe the continued idiocy of the people we've sent to Washington to govern us. If you're paying attention, you know that we just dodged one potential lethal bullet with the "cliff" business, and now we're locked and loaded for another vicious fight over extension of the debt limit, which, if you can remember back just three or four years ago was about as controversial as getting in out of the rain.

Of course war and killing still dominate the planet. Humankind has yet to figure out after almost countless millenia that war and killing never solve anything. What war and killing does is engender more of the same for the following generations. And of course with their innate and sluggish stupidity, humankind continues to fall for the same old lies about why war and killing is inevitable and necessary. 

It just makes one want to escape, which is easy for me since I have so many avenues: chess, music, my books, poetry. Hell, even blogging and TV, if it comes to that. But I can never really escape, because I cannot purge my mind of all the imbecility that seems to reign--outside my brain, I should add, but I cannot rule out the other possibility.

I haven't even gotten around to what I meant to say earlier about Powderfinger and where it's going. Well, it's not going anywhere is the bottom line. But unlike my friend Paul over at his excellent and brainy blog, I cannot maintain the daily pace anymore. It's too toxic for my mental peace because I cannot stop beating myself up if I miss a post. So, the sensible move is to scale back. Which is what I'm going to do. Look for Powderfinger 2-3 times a week from now on. Rest assured I'll be as feisty and insufferable as ever . . . and likely more long-winded. But I may even be more interesting since presumably I won't be scraping the basement of my brain for ideas so as to meet the daily grind.

So here's to the new year! May it witness the dawn of universal peace and justice. And if not, may God help me to inch both a little bit further along by calming my spirit and letting go of what I can.

Wisdom Break

Let's take a break from worrying about storms, how the World Series turned out, the possibility of Mitt Romney being elected president. Let's take a wisdom break. My friend Montag over at his always-erudite blog once in a while hits the true heights. He did with these words a few days ago. I have to share them with you.

How many people today are in prison? How many whose lives are lived in a grim, dank dungeon? How many desperately yearn to escape?

We are imprisoned just as the soul of Jacob Marley was, doomed to drag the chains of our assumptions, belief systems, and world views to our graves.

Contrary to the opinion of many people, we are not best served by striving to create coherent "belief systems", for any coherence we achieve is on the surface; we do not go deeply into the realms of the soul.

Faith is better.
Faith is tougher.(Source)

And all the assembled said "AMEN."

Nothing But the Facts

There's been a huge brouhaha about the cover story of the latest Newsweek by Niall Ferguson. The title of the piece will give you a hint as to why: "Hit the Road, Barack. Why we need a new president." I first read about the controversy in the scathing response Paul Krugman had to it, terming it "unethical journalism" because of its "multiple errors and misrepresentations."

Ferguson then responded to Krugman, saying that he had been telling the truth and nothing but. His response was followed by a whole phalanx of fact-checkers, economists and bloggers who trashed the story and Ferguson's rebuttal, saying that both were filled with distortions and falsehoods about Obama's record. (Source)

You can read reams about this controversy, and frankly, if you're honest about it, there's no way Ferguson looks good after investigation. Krugman is correct. The piece is rife with errors of fact and distortions of fact. And it's obvious why, aside from the undoubted fact that Ferguson is a careless researcher. (Why would anyone concerned with his scholarly reputation would be so slipshod with the facts? It beats me.) Newsweek ftat out admits it did not fact-check the piece. What?? I thought this was absolutely sine qua non with mass-circulation magazines. Sort of like tying your shoes before walking in them. You check the facts, verify them, before putting them out before the world.

Indeed, it's comforting to read this ringing affirmation in Mother Jones that this is indeed standard practice in places that care about the truth.

Newsweek might not bother with fact checking these days, but Ta-Nehisi Coates says it's still alive and well where he works:

When I arrived at The Atlantic in 2008, I was subjected to arguably the most thorough fact-checking procedure in all of popular publishing. That meant submitting an annotated version of the story with all sources cited, turning over all my notes, transcripts or audio, and the names and numbers of each of my sources, all of whom were called to confirm the veracity of my quotes.

In case you're curious, Mother Jones works the same way for its print pieces. And yes, it's every bit the pain in the ass you'd expect. Also every bit as necessary as you'd think.

 Amen.

Related articles

• Top Newsweek Cover Reactions (thedailybeast.com)
• Media Hacks: Why Our National Press Corps Is Failing the Public Abysmally (alternet.org)

An Almost Overlooked Gem

Don't know how you handle your email box, but it's typical for me to have stuff in there that goes back a ways. I'm sure a lot of other people do what I do with some stuff that arrives . . . you glance at it, see it's something you want to read, but simply don't have the time at the moment. So you just leave it where it is. And there it may sit for some time. A friend sent me this piece about two months ago. And I finally got around to reading it today, part of my program to clear out the mail as much as possible before Susan and I take off for vacation to the Canadian Rockies for a week tomorrow.* More on that in a moment. But just for teaser's sake, here's the title of the piece in question: "Capitalists and Other Psychopaths." What great stuff. Want a few nibbles?

• Enron, BP, Goldman, Philip Morris, G.E., Merck, etc., etc. Accounting fraud, tax evasion, toxic dumping, product safety violations, bid rigging, overbilling, perjury. The Walmart bribery scandal, the News Corp. hacking scandal — just open up the business section on an average day. Shafting your workers, hurting your customers, destroying the land. Leaving the public to pick up the tab. These aren’t anomalies; this is how the system works: you get away with what you can and try to weasel out when you get caught. 

• There are ethical corporations, yes, and ethical businesspeople, but ethics in capitalism is purely optional, purely extrinsic. To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones. (How the loudest Christians in our public life can also be the most bellicose proponents of an unbridled free market is a matter for their own consciences.) Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself. 

And so forth . . . I'm glad I saved this article. I have an affection for writers who don't bite their tongues.

On the trip, best thing will be getting away from the news for a week. I don't intend to check on anything political while I'm gone. I told Susan just the other day that I'm thoroughly sick already of the presidential campaign and its vapid mindlessness. Plus, I'm an absolute fatalist about the results. No matter who wins, Wall Street wins and the rest of us lose. 

I'll see you all in about a week. Stay cool.

*Yes, I am going to be gone for the next week, so no blogging. I trust you'll hook up with me when I get back, and I promise to post some nice pictures of the trip.

Back on Guilt-Ridden Duty

Believe me, I don't need this frigging guilt about not blogging. I marvel at my blog buds like Montag, who manage to have relatively coherent thoughts several times a day about all kinds of weighty things (and then blog about them) and my daughter who happily blathers on and on about the perfectly mundane at least three times a week. Except she has . . . oh, I don't know . . . is it five blogs and Twitter and Facebook? Or more? Or less? So it's really more than a blog three times a week. A bunch I would judge. Where does her time come from?

While I . . . I cast about my brain for something intelligent to say. It's not as if I don't have thoughts about things, but I'm not at all certain how coherent they are. And they tend often to be . . . shall we say "less than rosy." It's because I'm cursed with this raging contradiction personality. At the personal level I've got a sense of humor, I like to laugh, love baseball, take delight in my grandkids and kids . . . but then there's this other side. The one that's aware of history, that's been framed in a sense of the tragic. The last time my grandson TJ was over we got to talking about the future, and I really didn't have anything cheerful to say about it. Pretty awful to be dumping this kind of crap on an 18-year-old. But I cannot dissemble either. I don't believe things are getting better . . . and it kills me to think what's ahead for my kids and their kids.

The biggest fraud in the world is the politicians of this country, both parties, pretending that things are going to get back to the way they were. We're not going back there. And what they're doing is taking care of themselves and lying to the rest of us. The bastards.

Where Did the Economic Productivity Go?

This is Paul Krugman answering the question:

Larry Mishel has a systematic breakdown of the reasons for worker income stagnation since 1973. He starts with the familiar divergence: productivity up 80 percent, the compensation (including benefits) of the median worker up only 11 percent. Where did the productivity go?

The answer is, it’s two-thirds the inequality, stupid. One third of the difference is due to a technical issue involving price indexes. The rest, however, reflects a shift of income from labor to capital and, within that, a shift of labor income to the top and away from the middle.

What this says is that widening inequality makes a huge difference. Income stagnation does not reflect overall economic stagnation; the incomes of typical workers would be 30 or 40 percent higher than they are if inequality hadn’t soared.

Related articles

• The Wedge between Productivity and Wages (economistsview.typepad.com)

Wanker in Chief

This highly entertaining piece lists the top ten wankers of the past decade in the field of punditry. It's a crowded field, and the competition was stiff (if you will pardon the expression). It's the product of the blogger Atrios, who plies his trade at Eschaton. He's a blessing among bloggers. Short-winded as well as smart on economics and politics. 

I know you're wondering who bears the laurels for Top Wanker of the Decade. I shall not keep you in suspense. It's Tom Friedman of the New York Times. I stopped reading him years ago because I figured out he was full of crap. But he's still there and still churning out his nonsense. 

Friedman possesses all of the qualities that make a pundit truly wankerific. He fetishizes a false "centrism" which is basically whatever Tom Friedman likes, imagining the Friedman agenda is both incredibly popular in the country and lacking any support from our current politicians, when in fact the opposite is usually true. Washington worships at the altar of the agenda of false centrism, and people often hate it. Problems abroad, even ones which really have nothing to do with us, should be solved by war, and problems at home should be solved by increasing the suffering of poor and middle class people. Even though one political party is pretty much implementing, or trying to implement, 99.999999% of the Friedman agenda, what we really need is a third party catering precisely to this silent majority of Friedmanites.

Truly great wankers possess a kind of glib narcissism, the belief that everything is about them while simultaneously disavowing any responsibility for anything. The important thing about an issue is whether it proves Tom Friedman fucking right, but if it doesn't we can just move on to the next big thing that will prove Tom Friedman fucking right. If you advocate for wars that go a bit bad, well, it's not your fault. If only Tom Friedman had been in charge everything would have been great.

Such wankers are impervious to criticism because they're always doing battle with straw critics. They never remember what they said last week, and assume you won't either.

 Source of quote: here.

Related articles

• SHOCKER: NYT's Tom Friedman Bombs on 'Jeopardy!' Don't think this will stop him from making ... (pjmedia.com)
• Tom Friedman's War on Humanity (3quarksdaily.com)

It's This Easy

It's just this easy to blow off . . . what? . . . almost a week of blog posts. A few times during this silence I've told myself I ought to be making a blog entry today. But today slipped into tomorrow and then the next day and before you know it, I've been gone a week from these entries, almost as if I were out of town, which I soon will be for a good period of time off and on over the next few months. Next week, a week from tomorrow, Susan and I head up to Gettysburg. Here I am, a professional Civil War historian and I've never seen anything but photographs of the most famous battlefield in the United States. I'm going to try and resume normal production, but I'm about to enter a period of heavy travel. About a week after Gettysburg, it's to Florida to see my boys, then at the end of May, first part of June in Louisiana, then for two weeks in July to Canada, then a wedding in Houston in September . . . I'll miss lots of blogging during those times.

Housekeeping

Some of you might have noticed that the blog has a kinda new look. No drastic changes. But the rearrangement of elements at the top and their placement over a new thematic photograph . . . well, I'm happy with it. Somehow, it seems to better represent what this blog is all about. At the same time as I did these changes, I removed all the names of individuals from the labels of my posts. Impossible, really, to decide who was mentioned enough to deserve a label beyond the obvious ones. But people will still be eminently findable. The Google search of the blog is instantaneous and accurate. You can still find "Rush Limbaugh" or "Barry Bonds" or "Tom Coburn" or "Benedict XVI" (or "pope," for that matter) just by siking Google on 'em. Plus there are lots of people, such as Michelle Bachman, who are now just as findable as Barrack Obama or George Bush (also found under "vile little pretender").

And the change certainly makes the label list more useful and attractive. At least I think so.

Incredible!

That's exactly what it is. Incredible. This post is #1000 in the continuing series that constitute this blog. The very first post I made to the brand new "What Powderfinger Said" (still a very clever title, I think) blog was about guns, one of my "crazed obsessions" that put in an appearance here fairly frequently. The date was April 25, 2008, before the election of that year, back when I had all kinds of faith in Obama, when I actually thought the political process could make a real difference. Back when George W. Bush, who I habitually refer to throughout as "the vile little pretender in the White House," was still disgracing the White House by his presence there. Back before the great real estate crash, the Great Recession (is that what we're calling it?), and of course the great bailout, which saved the banks so they could continue to rape us all daily, and so they could continue to award their top executives obscene amounts of money and grow even bigger than they were when they were too big to fail. Back before the oil spill. Back before the unbelievable fact of the Texas Rangers playing in the World Series for two straight years.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since April 2008. It occurs to me that we had only been back in Oklahoma for a year at that point. I could have never foreseen that here, three-and-a-half years later, I'd still be keeping up with this blog. Particularly in view of the fact that nobody reads it--or practically nobody-- that it's sometime tedious, often tendentious, or otherwise unworthy of either my time or anybody else's time. But for all that, the blog has survived, and it's undergone some few cosmetic changes until it pretty well hardened into what you see here now.

Recently my daughter changed the theme of her blog and in addition to sprucing up its looks. But the biggest change she instituted was restricting her entries to three a week. A necessary move, probably, because she spends God only knows how many hours on Facebook every week, and she does have a job and my two grandchildren to raise. Cannot understand that Facebook attraction, but do see the wisdom of limiting number of posts. I may seriously consider that idea myself. I'm so compulsive, this blog takes me away from stuff I should be doing: reading more books, writing more poems, walking the dog, chilling myself out with fewer blog entries about stuff that pisses me off but I cannot do anything about.

So here's to another 1000 posts . . . if I last that long.

Fuel

I have to admit being fueled in my latest fury against the way we do health care in this country by a piece I read today. (It's a misnomer to even call it that. It's not about health care, it's about wealth care.) This was exactly the point "Sarah Proud and Tall" made in this piece on the blog Balloon Juice, which I just ran across today. The article, and this is what caught my eye, fetchingly entitled "How long before we can leave David Brooks out on a hillside to die?" We don't need to go into the whole thing. You can read it yourself. But I did want to quote this little snippet simply because it pithily puts the problem with our so-called health care system right out there.

Context: she is repulsed by a Brooks column that appeared in the NYT on July 14 entitled "Death and Budgets." She takes great exception to his assertion that the fiscal crisis is being driven by health care costs and that the health care costs are being driven by the huge sums being spent on people in the final year of their lives. But let me let her speak for herself:

Furthermore, he [Brooks] argues, the reason for these soaring costs is that very old and very sick people insist on clinging on to their miserable lives, when they ought to be civic-minded enough to kick off. It’s not the insurance companies, which reap huge profits by serving as useless, greed-driven middlemen. It’s not the drug companies, which are making out like bandits with virtually no government regulation. It’s not the whole corrupt, overpriced system of medicine for profit, which delivers the 37th best health care in the world, according to the WHO, at more than twice the cost of the best (France). No. It’s all about us greedy geezers. We’re the ones who are placing an untenable burden on the younger, heartier citizenry, with our selfish desire to live a little longer.

There it is. It's not the fault of the people whose fault it is; it's the fault of the people who are sick. Brilliant.

Avalanched II

I couldn't pick her out of a lineup.
This is Flannery O'Connor.

So I'm looking around now at the shelves for books that are in the I-intend-to-read-and-that's-why-I-have-them category. I'm sorry to say, there are sooooo many of them. First off, I should tell you, that if you really like fiction, you probably would not be all that impressed with my library. My tastes in reading have always been much more tilted to non-fiction than fiction. Which, I suppose, is natural for a historian. There's a pitiful little section of a top shelf that has half a dozen (count 'em!) forlorn little books of fiction floating in this huge ocean of non-fiction books. There are three James Michener up there, one Tom Wolfe (I've read everything by this guy.)--I Am Charlotte Simmons--a collected works of Flannery O'Connor, one William Faulkner. Need I tell you that those books are up there because I have not read them?

I hasten to tell you that I do read fiction--my God, I'm not a Philistine!-- it's just (obviously) not my first choice. I'm thinking now about whole boxes of fiction that I got rid of on the moves. I wish I had the sf books back, although I had read all of them.

But it's really depressing to look around at the shelves and seeing all these books that I've got sitting here that I was hot to read at some point (or they wouldn't be here), but that have now melted into the scenery, no longer with that read-me-read-me look they have when they first go up on the shelf. Lots and lots of really good stuff. Just at random, a very tiny sample of this category, and let's not even mention history books, by far the largest category of books in here.

Have I mentioned the categories? I think so: poetry, reference, chess, baseball, religion, biography, and history, and miscellany. A lot of the fun books are in this latter category. In American history I've gotten rid of almost everything but stuff in my specialty--19th century South, slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction. I've got basically nothing in early American history anymore and a smattering of books in 20th century. There are unread volumes in all these history categories. Some of the ones I really want to get to are Civil War battle books, mainly because I'm writing more and more about generals and the military aspects of the war. I've got history books on other stuff too, the stuff that interests me: World War I, Nazi Germany, WWII, Middle Ages, Reformation. (I've gotten rid of tons of this kind of stuff too.)

Guess what? I'm going to let this topic spill over into another post yet again. Which is not good because it keeps you in suspense (ha, ha) but is real good for me because it's a ready-made topic, and I won't have to struggle to come up with one. I have to tell you that coming up with something to write about that I figure you all won't consider utter tripe is the biggest challenge I have to deal with with this blog. So if you think some of the crap I write about is boring, you should see what I reject.