Year: 2014

(And with the price of Borealis? But first . . .)

KANSAS

This was such a good 45 minutes . . . Chris Hayes, reporting from Kansas, segment after segment (if you have only 7 minutes, here’s a summary):

Kansas as a laboratory for what the right hopes to do nationwide.

Kansas as Koch brothers country.

Kansas Republicans denying the working poor Medicaid (even though the state wouldn’t have to pay for it).

Kansas Republicans cutting back on education (and shutting down the only school in town).

Kansas Republicans putting six-shooters back on the streets of Dodge (Wyatt Earp be damned).

Kansas Republicans working to force you to bear your rapist’s baby.

BOREF

According to its latest weekly letter, Wheeltug has “completed a major slot sale which looks to be announced at Farnborough.  We can expect our slot sales to be in 4 digits soon” — which would be 1,000 or more, up from the currently announced 785.  They say this would represent about 10% of all the 737’s and A320’s currently flying.  Farnborough is just one of several upcoming trade shows and conferences at which they say they will have a presence:

So — as usual — who knows?  But one likes to think this pipe dream, so long in the making, is becoming ever more real.  (At least, one does if one is drowning in Borealis shares, as I am.)  At its current market value of $50 million – about one fifth of that really nice Cezanne — the company remains, to me, a remarkable lottery ticket.

Not least because, if the technology underlying WheelTug is real, as it seems to be, it may have other applications.  In cars, perhaps?  In forklifts or locomotives or elevators?  And the companies other improbable technologies may be real as well.

I have zero capacity to evaluate this post, on a site dubiously titled, “cold fusion now” (quick! run for the hills!).  But as the old line goes, usually with a heavy yiddish accent — “couldn’t hoyt!”

I am also keenly aware this begins to take on the tone of a late night infomercial.  “And that’s not all!  If you order now, you get not just the WheelTug, and not just the Chorus Motors technology, and not just a bag of Power Chips and a carton of Cool Chips.  No, if you are one of the first 1,000 callers, you will also get an interest in the company’s vast Roche Bay and Faraway mineral holdings!  All this for the unbelievable price of $50 million.  Not available in stores.”

Crazy, no?  And yet if there’s not something real here, explain to me how this 737 is taxiing around with its engines off.  And why 14 or 15 airlines, and serious partners like Parker Hannifin, and an airline industry legend like Bob Crandall, appear to be believers.

Fun, no?

THE PRISONER EXCHANGE “SCANDAL” JOHN McCAIN AND THE JOINT CHIEFS ENDORSED

If you have an open mind but think the President botched Bowe Bergdahl, take the time to watch this.  And then perhaps the segment that follows.  Did you know that John McCain endorsed the prisoner exchange before he denounced it?

Like so many “scandals,” it turns out there is no “there” there.

(And when something does go wrong, it’s investigated and sensible attempts are made to fix it.  For example: healthcare.gov — fixed within weeks and working now to the benefit of millions.  For example: Benghazi — the tragedy that might have been averted if  Republicans hadn’t blocked requested funds for beefed up security abroad and that certainly would have been averted if our brave and selfless Ambassador, well knowing the danger, hadn’t chosen to make that trip on 9/11 — but that, in any event, led to 29 recommendations the Secretary swiftly adopted.  For example: the IRS targeting — ordered by a Bush appointee and, as it turns out, directed at left-wing as well as right-wing groups, not for political purposes but as a way to prioritize a flood of applications.  For example: the VA delays — which could have been mitigated if Republicans hadn’t blocked additional funding to handle the demand, and which, happily, it appears Bernie Sanders and John McCain may now have arranged to resolve.)

The real scandals, from my point of view, are that the governors of 19 states have rejected the Medicare expansion that would have been of such help — in some cases, life-or-death help — to millions of their citizens.  And that the American Jobs Act, that would have put the unemployed to work revitalizing our crumbling infrastructure, was filibustered. And that the minimum wage, that would lift millions out of poverty and help to stimulate the economy, has been filibustered.  And that extension of unemployment benefits was filibustered.  And that immigration reform remains blocked.  And that some are working to make it harder to register and to vote.

THE PROS AND CONS OF OBAMACARE

In looking for potentially interesting links for the paragraph above, Google took me to “Pros and Cons of Obamacare.”  (“Too many online sources only want to give you one side of the story, we aim to bring you an unbiased look at both the negative and positive aspects of the Affordable Care Act.”)  It doesn’t relate to the website launch, but I got hooked reading the table of pros and cons anyway.  Consider some of the contrasts.  Pro: “Tens of millions of uninsured will get access to affordable quality health insurance through the marketplace.”  Matched with this con: “In order to get the money to help insure tens of millions there are new taxes, mostly on high-earners.”  Pro: “You can’t be dropped from coverage when you get sick or make an honest mistake on your application.”  Con: “Insurance companies must cover sick people and this increases the cost of everyone’s insurance.”  Right?  Think how inexpensive health insurance could be if it didn’t have to cover sick people!

Hmmm.  I get all these benefits, but people with more than $250,000 in income each year have to pay a little more tax.  I think I’m against it!

I can’t be denied coverage for having or developing a pre-existing condition, but health insurance companies are going to have to insure people with health issues.  I think I’m against it!

Sorry.  I get these little sarcspasms.*

What would be so awful if we all just proudly embraced our significant gains in making our people and our economy healthier, both of which the Affordable Health Care Act does?   Was it really necessary for the Republicans to spend nearly half a billion dollars in TV ads to try to defeat it and — though having failed to do that — to leave so many Americans feeling bad about it?  What IS the matter with Kansas?  (If you missed Chris Hayes brilliant hour on that, I’ll be posting it later this week.)

*Not a word, but is one now: a spasm of sarcasm.  A sarcspasm.

I WILL VOTE

The DNC just rolled out iwillvote.com, with help registering . . . and with guidelines for each state — just click on yours.  (Are you a student?  A felon?  Want to know how to check your registration status?  Or what ID you’ll need?  Have you recently moved?  Wonder whether there will be early voting?)

BUT I WON’T BUY THIS BOOK

Zac Bissonnette — himself an author (Good Advice from Bad People: Selected Wisdom from Murderers, Stock Swindlers, and Lance Armstrong) writes:

“So I came across a book yesterday called How to Write a Sentence. [‘Language lovers will flock to this homage to great writing.’— Booklist] In deciding whether to buy it, I did a test. I flipped to a random page and read one sentence. If that sentence was good, I decided, I would buy it. So help me God if I’m making this up, this is a random sentence (I only read one) from a book called How to Write a Sentence:

They’ve already done that as a preliminary to writing in the service of an intention, and that intention will be substantive, a matter of content–the intention to praise or blame or reveal or complicate or exhort or rejoice or ponder or meditate or lament or anatomize or deconstruct (pardon the word) or “justify the ways of God to Man.”

He did not buy the book.

AND NOW THIS, WHICH WILL TOUCH YOU, I THINK

Who could not feel for — and fall for — this little kid?

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!

The stock market’s at record highs!  We’ve wound down our wars!  None of us need ever again worry about having — or developing — a preexisting condition!  We’ve begun to move on energy efficiency and climate change!  The housing market’s strong in places!  The deficit George W. Bush handed us has shrunk dramatically.  And if you can afford an Internet connection and a smart phone, you have the whole world in your pocket!  I know that may not clear up your concerns over the Benghazi talking points, or the IRS having targeted liberal groups for extra scrutiny, but it’s something, anyway.

Have a great weekend.

I screwed up the Rachel Maddow link yesterday.  Too good to miss, so re-sending this, fixed.

OF INTEREST IF YOU BREATHE OR LIVE IN A COASTAL AREA

Here’s how the proposed cut in coal-fired power plant emissions will help.  (Not mentioned is how it will help mitigate inundation of the world’s major cities.)

It’s urgent and long-overdue that we make these cuts but — of course — all the usual suspects are decrying them.

Here Rachel Maddow shows how reliably they always do that, whether it is to fight the Clean Air Act or to keep us from dealing with the hole in the ozone layer or anything else.  (Count on the Republican Party to fight restrictions on carcinogens — protecting the tobacco industry for so many decades — and to fight universal background checks.  Count on them to fight access to affordable health care and to fight a livable minimum wage.  Count on them to fight to keep from putting people back to work rebuilding our decaying national infrastructure.  Count on them to fight to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and to cut funds for protecting our embassies overseas — but to fight for lower taxes on the very most wealthy and their heirs.)

Did you know that Republicans have spent nearly half a billion dollars on anti-Obamacare ads?  If only the Koch brothers had been around decades ago to defeat Social Security and Medicare and Unemployment Insurance and the minimum wage and the Clean Air Act, we might not be afflicted by these things today.  I hate clean air!

Seriously: watch that Rachel Maddow clip to see how doom is always predicted when we try to make progress.  A pattern that extends back decades.

Speaking of which, yesterday’s quote may bear repeating (my thanks to Jim Burt for spotting it):

A failure on the part of the Republican party to give the national policy wholehearted support, which, of course, includes outspoken criticism of  incompetence, unwisdom and inefficiency, will have to be construed as meaning only one thing:  that the party is gambling on the defeat of the United States and that it is staking its political future on a national disaster.  If the Republican party in Congress merely sulks and opposes, waiting for trouble, and appearing to hope for trouble . . . the Republican party will have placed itself in the intolerable position of having a vested interest in the humiliation and defeat of the United States.

That was Walter Lippmann writing in 1941, days before Pearl Harbor.  (Per Craig Shirley’s, December 1941.)  Plus ça change . . .

Herewith some other . . .

UNFAMILIAR QUOTATIONS

Recent quotes of the day from this quirky site (thanks, Tom):

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one? – Abraham Lincoln

It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it. – Steven Wright

Remember that as a teenager you are at the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you. – Fran Lebowitz

If you’re not scared or angry at the thought of a human brain being controlled remotely, then it could be this prototype of mine is finally starting to work. – John Alejandro King

And one more:

Said the wife to her husband as she emerged from a clothing store dressing room (in a David Sipress New Yorker cartoon): “It’s two sizes too big, but it fits.”

OF INTEREST IF YOU BREATHE OR LIVE IN A COASTAL AREA

Here’s how the proposed cut in coal-fired power plant emissions will help.  (Not mentioned is how it will help mitigate inundation of the world’s major cities.)

It’s urgent and long-overdue that we make these cuts but — of course — all the usual suspects are decrying them.

Here Rachel Maddow shows how reliably they always do that, whether it is to fight the Clean Air Act or to keep us from dealing with the hole in the ozone layer or anything else.  (Count on the Republican Party to fight restrictions on carcinogens — protecting the tobacco industry for so many decades — and to fight universal background checks.  Count on them to fight access to affordable health care and to fight a livable minimum wage.  Count on them to fight to keep from putting people back to work rebuilding our decaying national infrastructure.  Count on them to fight to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and to cut funds for protecting our embassies overseas — but to fight for lower taxes on the very most wealthy and their heirs.)

Did you know that Republicans have spent nearly half a billion dollars on anti-Obamacare ads?  If only the Koch brothers had been around decades ago to defeat Social Security and Medicare and Unemployment Insurance and the minimum wage and the Clean Air Act, we might not be afflicted by these things today.  I hate clean air!

Seriously: watch that Rachel Maddow clip to see how doom is always predicted when we try to make progress.  A pattern that extends back decades.

Speaking of which, yesterday’s quote may bear repeating (my thanks to Jim Burt for spotting it):

A failure on the part of the Republican party to give the national policy wholehearted support, which, of course, includes outspoken criticism of  incompetence, unwisdom and inefficiency, will have to be construed as meaning only one thing:  that the party is gambling on the defeat of the United States and that it is staking its political future on a national disaster.  If the Republican party in Congress merely sulks and opposes, waiting for trouble, and appearing to hope for trouble . . . the Republican party will have placed itself in the intolerable position of having a vested interest in the humiliation and defeat of the United States.

That was Walter Lippmann writing in 1941, days before Pearl Harbor.  (Per Craig Shirley’s, December 1941.)  Plus ça change . . .

Herewith some other . . .

UNFAMILIAR QUOTATIONS

Recent quotes of the day from this quirky site (thanks, Tom):

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one? – Abraham Lincoln

It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it. – Steven Wright

Remember that as a teenager you are at the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you. – Fran Lebowitz

If you’re not scared or angry at the thought of a human brain being controlled remotely, then it could be this prototype of mine is finally starting to work. – John Alejandro King

And one more:

Said the wife to her husband as she emerged from a clothing store dressing room (in a David Sipress New Yorker cartoon): “It’s two sizes too big, but it fits.”

Evgen Dykyj, a marine biologist from Kiev — who is on Facebook — writes:

One, maximum two days for our task group members to get to know each other and to do some last-minute shooting practice, and we are heading out into the welcoming embrace of the Eastern front. . . . I do not know if and when I will be able to chat in the Internet again, so I leave this lengthy text in my place. One always has a strong motive for doing two most unnatural things in the world – risking his life in defiance of self-preservation instinct and taking the life of others. I do not know if I ever will be able to explain my motives (it is war and I am well aware of the danger to my limb and life) and I do not want someone else to explain them in my place, putting alien words in my mouth. So, here are my words about this war. . . .

His words are of special interest coming not as history, after the fact, or from a political leader, or journalist, but from a citizen soldier — unpaid and unconscripted.

That “things take time” is brought into high relief by this entry from the Writers Almanac (thanks Glenn).  A mere 47 years from conception to start building the Lincoln Memorial.  A further 8 to complete it.  And still the keynote speaker was not allowed to sit with the white folks.  (For all the progress since — astonishing, really — there remain those in positions of authority working to disenfranchise African Americans.)

On this day in 1922 [May 30], the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated. The monument was first proposed in 1867, but construction didn’t begin until 1914; the cornerstone was set in 1915. Architect Henry Bacon designed it to resemble the Parthenon, believing that a defender of democracy should be memorialized in a building that pays homage to the birthplace of democracy. The monument has 36 marble columns, one for each state in the union at the time of Lincoln’s assassination. On the south wall is inscribed the Gettysburg Address, and on the north, his second inaugural address. There’s a persistent myth that one of the words in the inaugural address is misspelled, but it’s not true. Stonemasons did accidentally carve an “E” where they meant to carve an “F,” but it was filled in immediately and no evidence remains.

The marble and granite chosen for the monument came from Massachusetts, Colorado, Georgia, Tennessee, Indiana, and Alabama. Bacon intended to show the divided nation coming together to build something of lasting significance.

Sculptor Daniel Chester French studied photographs of Lincoln for years; his Lincoln appears somber, even care-worn, one hand closed in a fist and the other in a more relaxed position. Though it’s commonly thought that the sculpture’s hands are forming the American Sign Language letters “A” and “L,” the National Park Service reports that this was French’s way to show Lincoln’s strength and compassion. There’s also a rumor that the profile of Robert E. Lee — or Ulysses S. Grant, or Jefferson Davis — can be seen in the locks of the sculpture’s hair, but the National Parks Service insists that these are merely wayward strands.

The monument was dedicated in front of an audience of more than 50,000 people. Even though Lincoln was known as the Great Emancipator, the audience was segregated; keynote speaker Robert Moton, president of the Tuskegee Institute and an African-American, was not permitted to sit on the speakers’ platform. Just over 40 years later, on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King Jr. would give his “I have a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in front of an audience of 200,000.

The arc of the moral universe is long, as Dr. King would rephrase Theodore Parker a century later (“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”) — but bend toward justice it does, indeed.

WELL — DO I?

This four-minute trailer is funny — if gay stuff doesn’t make you nervous.  With 39 hours to go as I type, they’ve raised $97,466 toward their $115,000 Kickstarter goal to complete “Do I Sound Gay?” Here is the director’s two-minute rationale for making the film, complete with his cat.  Not least because a (straight) friend is one of the producers, I happily kicked in.

AND SPEAKING OF GAY

Here‘s the much-watched Anderson Cooper segment on the Michael-Sam-kiss-on-ESPN controversy.

MEANWHILE . . .

Have you seen HBO’s new film, The Normal Heart?  It scored 95% among Rotten Tomatoes’ “top critics” — a film about lust and love, ignorance and fear, oppression, indifference, denial, injustice — heroism — and a plague that’s killed 36 million men, women, and children.

I know/knew almost all the characters portrayed in the film, from New York’s closeted mayor and his closeted right-hand man (who made us dinner once) . . . to the central character, Larry Kramer . . . to bronze star recipient and Gay Men’s Health Crisis co-founder Paul Popham.  I even once briefly met Dr. Linda Laubenstein — “Dr. Buzz-Buzz,” as my friends called her for the sound her electric wheel chair made as she maneuvered the hospital, a phenomenally brave, heroic woman played by Julia Roberts in the film.

I never knew Harvey Milk, assassinated in 1978 by one of his fellow San Francisco city supervisors — that movie scored 96% among the Rotten Tomatoes top critics — but I was moved to see him honored last week with this first-class “forever” stamp.

One day, I’d like to see a stamp honoring Larry Kramer and Linda Laubenstein, together.  If you find time to watch, you’ll see why.

From 14 isolated primitive tribes in the Amazon: the great work of the Amazon Conservation Team . . .

. . . to an urban habitat of the future: real estate developers take note.

(I want one!  Don’t miss this under-two-minute video.)

If there are more extreme extremes at either end of the habitat continuum, please let me know.