Posts tagged usa
Paintings Without Fish
Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting one in a fruit salad.
40% of US millionaires surveyed by Fidelity Investments said they do not feel rich.
"Drill, baby, drill" is a lie
Oil production in the US is at a 12 year high. Imports of oil from foreign countries, as a % of oil used, is at a 12 year low. Prices are as high as they’ve ever been.
The republican party has made “Drill, baby, drill” one of it’s catchphrases, its mantras, but the idea behind the phrase is simply untrue. According to some reports, the US was actually a net exporter of oil last year, yet prices still rose. Why? Because the prices aren’t determined solely by how much we produce (supply) but also by how much we use (demand). In fact, how much we demand oil is arguably far more important.
Want to reduce oil prices? Use less, require less, make the oil companies pitch prices to you rather than gobbling up massive amounts no matter the cost.
Of course, I am of the belief that high oil prices, while inconvenient, are a good thing for society anyway…
Check out the link above for charts and more info.
A reason to kill
This article, from Salon, looks at how the media simplifies the motives of Muslims, particularly terrorists and insurgents, while desperately trying to draw out complex, confusing and justifying motives for western soldiers who attack and kill civilians. As someone who believes you need to understand a problem to solve it, I think the idea of portraying all muslim attackers as evil, driven by nothing more than the desire to kill, is dangerous. It stops us from finding ways to stop these killings. It puts us in danger. In the same way, reasoning away horrible acts committed by our own people distracts us from stopping them from committing these crimes in the first place and helps the terrorists recruit more followers. This is beyond who is right and who is wrong, whether we’re justified and they aren’t, or the other way around - this is about stopping murders, about saving lives.
Sample: “Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivated U.S. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales to allegedly kill 16 Afghans, including 9 children: he was drunk, he was experiencing financial stress, he was passed over for a promotion, he had a traumatic brain injury, he had marital problems, he suffered from the stresses of four tours of duty, he “saw his buddy’s leg blown off the day before the massacre,” etc.
Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivates Muslims to kill Americans: they are primitive, fanatically religious, hateful Terrorists.”
Political rambling
It makes me sad how many people don’t realize that Socialism and Communism are different, and that every western, industrialized country would be properly defined as a “socialist democracy”. The USA is less socialist than most of our contemporaries in some ways, but universal education, unions, entitlements (Social security, medicaid) progressive taxation and other staples of our society are all socialist. Pure capitalism hasn’t been part of our history for literally hundreds of years.
If you don’t like a proposed policy, argue against the actual proposal, don’t label it “socialist” and stop there.
Land of the free?
Dear pre-Occupied Wall Street
To anyone older than 30, allow me to explain to you why my generation, the Millennials, is protesting and occupying your streets and parks.
We’re protesting because for all our lives we have been told that if we are good little boys and girls who do well in school, go to college and put up with an unfulfilling and low paying job flipping burgers to get ourselves to that 2-4 year degree, we will have a job - a real job. Not minimum wage, not $7.50 an hour serving coffee, but the beginnings of a career. We were promised.
No, we’re not simply entitled brats. We were taught that flipping burgers was for losers who weren’t going anywhere in life, that we should be better, and we could be if we worked hard enough. We were told that waiting tables was a sign of shame, not of a work ethic. So don’t call us arrogant or lazy - your generations taught us these values.
We are protesting because we outnumber you - Gen X’ers, Baby Boomers, you’re both smaller than us, yet you hold all the power. There are no important Millennial politicians, and there are very few Millennial CEOs even though we are just as smart and better trained than you are. We understand technology better, and have an entirely new, more effective way of networking. But you already have most of the jobs and aren’t willing to make more. You’re the ones running the banks that don’t lend, the businesses that don’t hire - all in the name of the bottom line.
I’ll show you a line, it is the line between employed and under/unemployed and over 25% of us are on the wrong side of it despite looking for work. Here’s another - we’re more likely than any group other than the very old to be in poverty. Thanks a lot.
We are protesting, finally, because you are leaving us a short-sighted, messed up world and telling us it’s our responsibility to fix problems you caused. We’re supposed to solve global warming even though you won’t take the steps now to get things started (again, for the bottom line). We’re the ones who have to solve world hunger and endemic poverty despite you having the resources right now (and you have more than we will have). We’re supposed to bring peace and security to the world, even as you erode our rights in front of us and bring us to the act of protest with your abuse.
You run up a debt we will have to pay with jobs that aren’t as good as yours in an economy which won’t grow as fast, while facing greater competition abroad from people in other countries who are likely better trained for the jobs that exist because you’ve been systematically raising prices and gutting the budgets of our education system even as you tell us college is a requirement, not an option. Student loans are a new form of class warfare - protesting on your bridges is our retaliatory strike.
So to anyone out there over 30 watching Occupy Wall Street, understand that it isn’t just about the 1%. It isn’t just about corporate greed and Wall St. executives - it is about the systematic burdening and disenfranchisement of the youth in this country. That is why so many of the protestors are jobless 20 year-olds. If our message sounds confused, it is only because there are so many things to complain about. But never forget that we are out there for a reason - not the least of which is that we’ve learned that you just don’t listen, and we have no way within the system to enact the change we desperately need. Simply put, we don’t trust you anymore.
Understand that OWS isn’t about our failures, it’s about yours.
What is this image, you might ask? A chart, clearly. This chart compares two possible futures on where we (the USA) get our energy from. The one on the left is the year 2030 we will see if we change nothing about our current energy policies. This is the future that will see us wracked by global warming, longing for the ice caps and polar bears of old. This is, according to many people, Armageddon, with the fires of hell burning coal, oil and natural gas.
And to the right? Well the picture doesn’t look all that different does it? Coal looks like it is cut down to about 1/4-1/3 of the other projection, but oil and natural gas still make up the majority of the bar. Nuclear power has shrunk, and the biggest change is that a significant chunk in the bar is “energy reduction” rather than any sort of new, space-age fuel. And it is labelled “550 ppm”, what does that mean?
550ppm is salvation. 550ppm is one of the most stringent proposed goals for worldwide carbon levels. Currently, we are at around 390ppm, up 60ppm from the 1970s. With the rise of China and India and their enormous, industrializing populations the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere is expected to increase at a faster rate than it has, so 550ppm is a pretty lofty goal in the eyes of many.
Most politicians talk about setting goals like 550ppm as crippling our future economy, as demanding we run our grid on financially unviable technologies and throwing oil and natural gas out the window. But look at the chart again. The biggest change is simply being more efficient. Energy star toasters, sleep mode on the PC. We won’t all be driving electric cars, but some people will, and most of us will get 40mpg in your standard internal combustion engine. This future isn’t so different from one where we do nothing, and yet it has the power to save millions of lives if climate predictions are correct.
Now, I am not an eco-nazi. I don’t march on earth day or yell at people who don’t recycle. But when I see how simple, how relatively easy these changes are if we start them now, I can’t help but think we’re fools for not taking action to reach 550ppm - just in case.
Can the Middle Class be Saved?
In America, everyone thinks they are “middle class”, when the actual number of people who officially fall under that category is relatively small. Do you have a 4 year degree? You are far more likely than not to be above the middle class. Are you making 70k a year? Above middle class.
The reality is that the middle class is made up of high school graduates who never completed or even went to college, earn 40 grand a year or less and often struggle to make ends meet. That is one thing, but disturbingly, the problems facing the middle class today are the same problems high school dropouts - the lower class - faced in the 70s and earlier. Divorce, depression, crime, early pregnancy, these are problems we picture among inner city poor, but in fact a much wider population today must confront them. Over the last 40 years, the middle class has drifted ever downward while the rich have gotten richer and the gap between has only been growing.
Click the link above to find out how this has happened and why it will probably continue.
