Random Notes from a Crank

Here are some interesting factoids from the Harper's Indexes from March and May: 

• Percentage of Americans who say that the nation's crime rates are getting worse: 77
• Who say that crime is an "extremely serious" or "very serious" problem in their local area: 17
• Percentage decrease in murders in the United States in the past year: 12
• Percentage change since 2009 in the portion of white evangelical Americans who say that gay people face discrimination: -34
• Who say that white evangelicals face discrimination: +43
• Portion of Americans who say they would not vote for a presidential candidate who has been charged with a felony: 2/3
• Percentage of Americans who say that the United States should spend more money on assistance for poor people: 72
• Percentage who say so when this assistance is called "welfare": 29
• Factor by which low-income Americans are more likely than others to identify as vegetarian: 2
• Percentage decrease in the number of Americans who identify as vegetarian since 2018: 20
• Percentage of Americans who believe they will be harmed personally by climate change: 45
• Percentage change in the total net worth of white Americans since 2019: +26
• In the total net worth of black Americans: -4
• In the total net worth of American adults under 40: +76
• Percentage by which employees who work in person are more likely to be promoted than those who work exclusively from home: 45

Steven Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now, connects to the point that people automatically think crime is always getting worse. 

White evangelicals are the worst. 

We'll see if voters follow through on not voting for a felonious, narcissistic, pathological liar. 

The difference in attitudes about "assistance for poor people" and "welfare" is a classic case of framing language. 

I find it odd that there are fewer people identifying as vegetarian. Perhaps those vegetarians are turning vegan? 

It makes sense that people who actually work with others in person are more likely to be promoted. 

Random Notes from a Crank

 I'm trying to catch up on my public affairs magazine reading. 

Here are some factoids from the last three months of "Harper's Indexes":

• Percentage decrease in the number of flu cases in the United States this season: 99
• Factor by which U.S. police officers are more likely to use force against left-wing protesters than right-wing protesters: 3.4
• Percentage of Black Lives Matter protests during which the police used force against protesters: 5
• Of Stop the Steal protests during which police did so: 1
• Percentage of Americans who identified as Republicans and Democrats, respectively, at the outset of 2020: 47, 45
• At the end of 2020: 39, 50
• Number of U.S. members of Congress who are not affiliated with a religion: 1
• Portion of the American population that is not: 1/4
• Percentage of 2020 Trump voters who feel more loyal to Trump than to the Republican Party: 54
• Who would support a Trump party over the Republican Party: 46
• Minimum number of identified long-term effects from contracting COVID-19: 55
• Factor by which a solar farm was more expensive to build and maintain than a coal plant in 2009: 3.2
• By which a coal plant is more expensive to build and maintain than a solar farm today: 2.2
• Estimated number of Earths that humanity would require to sustain its current level of resource consumption: 1.6
• Year in which humanity  is expected to require two Earths: 2030
• Number of U.S. state legislatures that are considering new voting restrictions: 47
• Number of such bills being considered: 361
• Percentage of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters who are "extremely concerned" about Trump supporters: 82
• Who are "extremely concerned" about voter suppression: 53
• Percentage of U.S. electric-car owners who are concerned about being able to charge their vehicles on the road: 47
• Portion of U.S. electric-car charging outlets that are in California: 1/3
• That support only Tesla vehicles: 1/5
• Minimum number of state governments that are funding efforts to modify the weather with cloud seeding: 6

Usually when I provide the stats and figures from the Harper's Index, I just leave them as for readers to ponder for themselves. But for this post since it's three-months worth of numbers and percentages, I thought I'd comment on some of them. 

With the drop of flu cases, it's clear that masks work, people. That's why people in certain countries in Asia wear masks during flu season. 

In response to the "Blue Lives Matter" crowd, it seems that the police feel conservative lives matter more. 

I hesitantly take the party affiliation changes from the start of 2020 to the end as a good sign. The Republican Party has lost any sense of a moral and/or philosophical compass with people's irrational support of Moscow Don. 

That long-term effects figure should be a part of PSAs about getting the COVID-19 vaccine. 

We need to build more solar farms and electric-car charging outlets. 

Back to the GOP, they want to restrict voting access because doing so helps them. But will it? I wonder if these ridiculous bills like the one in Georgia will only motivate people to vote. That's my hope. 

Random Notes from a Crank

Here are some enlightening factoids from "Harper's Index" and Harper's Findings from the January issue:

• Number of children the Trump Administration separated from their parents at the border whose parents have yet to be located: 666
• Estimated portion of those parents who have been deported without their children: 2/3
• Factor by which the word "hate" is said more often on Fox News than on MSNBC: 5.5
• Number of climate-related disasters worldwide between 1980 and 1999: 3,656
• Between 2000 and 2019: 6,681
• Percentage by which sales on Minibar, an alcohol e-commerce site, exceeded the average on the day Biden was declared president: 76
• By which sales of champagne exceeded the average: 386
• "Five of the six early Homo species were driven to extinction by climate change." 
• "Hot days worsen test scores for black and Hispanic children."

I featured this article in the previous post about albums of the year, but do yourself a favor and read "The Words To Describe 2020," which is a recount of the words that Washington Post readers used to describe the year. The top three were "exhausting," "lost," and "chaotic." But my favorite submission was this one: "Like looking both ways before crossing the street and then getting hit by a submarine." 

Random Notes from a Crank

I discovered a new word that I need to employ more often in my vocabulary: Blatherskite. Its definition is "a person who talks at great length without making much sense." 

That's a solid description of Moscow Don. 

I got it from an article in the May issue of Harper's by Thomas Frank: "The Pessimistic Style in American Politics: And Its Eternal War on Reform." 

For someone like me who is rather particular about the type of toilet paper his family uses, people hoarding TP angers me. I'm a regular user of Cottonelle and Quilted Northern, but those brands are rarely in stock at my local supermarket unless I go early in the morning. The highbrow Aldi brand TP gets the job done, but it is not as comforting on the nether regions as the aforementioned brands. 

This weekend apparently was one that The Spectrum on SiriusXM featured Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks songs. Fleetwood Mac is highly regarded band from critics, but it was never a group I got into. 

Their tunes are all right, but they are not one of those bands or artists that make me turn the channel like Aerosmith, the Eagles, and Journey. 

In an interview in Esquire, Jason Isbell mentioned Neutral Milk Hotel, a band that made two highly acclaimed indie rock albums in the 90s. That's a band that I need to check out, which sent me to Amazon Music to listen to the album In the Airplane Over the Sea. 

Random Notes from a Crank

I've been trying to catch up on my magazine reading, and the December issue of The Atlantic is quite good, an issue that is chocked full of interesting reads. 

I've thought about reading Tara Westover's memoir, Educated, and her short interview titled "Left Behind" in print is titled "The Places Where the Recession Never Ended" online and is quite illuminating. Since I live in a rural part of the Midwest, I tend to agree with a number of the contentions at the end of the interview, such as these areas tend to be the harbinger of the "old economy" and that the opioid epidemic is hitting rural areas hard. 

As pundits and well-seasoned writers are wont to do when examining the Republican Party, "How America Ends" looks at how the GOP under Moscow Don is targeting a shrinking demographic and how the party might be prone to doing all sorts of heinous crap to keep their hold and sustain their perception as "real Americans." 

Here are some factoids from the last two versions of the Harper's Index:

• Percentage of Uber riders who never tip: 60
• Who always tip: 1
• Estimated number of people who could go unaccounted for in the 2020 census because of an "increased climate of fear": 4,000,000
• Average effective tax rate, as a percentage of income, paid by the richest 400 households in the United States in 2018: 23
• By the poorest half of American households: 24
• Percentage by which owning a dog lowers one's risk of death: 24
• Percentage of American men who say they would not feel "very comfortable" with a woman as president: 51
• Of American women who say so: 41
• Percentage of Americans aged 13 to 38 who would be willing to post sponsored content to their social-media accounts: 86
• Number of pending patent applications for variations of the phrase "OK, Boomer": 6

In the online version of The Atlantic, Cohen penned a good piece about Romney's speech about voting yes for conviction: "In the Long Run, Romney Wins." I think he's right. He was the only GOP with guts to do what's right. 

Random Notes from a Crank

I've been catching up on my magazine reading. 

In Harper's there's a solid article by Andrew Cockburn titled "The Military Industrial Virus: How Bloated Budgets Gut Our Defense" that everyone should read. 

Here's a ¶ that you should read now: 
"Yet deep scrutiny indicates that defense contracts are not particularly efficient job generators after all. Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have calculated the number of jobs spawned by an investment of $1 billion in various industries, ranging from defense to health care, renewable energy, and education. Education came in first by a wide margin, producing 26,700 jobs, followed by health care at 17,200. Defense, generating 11,200 jobs, ranked last. 'All economic activity creates some employment,' Pollin told me. "That isn't an issue. The relevant question is how much employment in the U.S. gets created for a given level of spending in one area of the economy as opposed to others.' The fact is that defense spending generates fewer jobs than green energy, education, and other critical industries." 

Nick Hanauer's "Better Schools Won't Fix America" in The Atlantic (titled "Education Isn't Enough" in the magazine) is a worth a read. He lays out the myth of "educationism," the belief that better schools will fix America's problems. Based on his experience and data analysis, the real problem is that we're living in a new Gilded Age. The article reminds me of the adage that my Dad liked to say: "A wise man will change his mind, but a fool never will." 

Parts of what's left of my hair has been turning gray for a few years now, but now I have a single gray hair in one of eyebrows. It looks weird. I don't want to pluck it like I'm some vain person, but I need more gray hair in my eyebrows, so it doesn't stand out so prominently. 

What's really gotten gray is my beard when I grow one. 

Random Notes from a Crank

Any American citizen needs to pick up the June issue of Harper's because one of the articles is a forum done at West Point. The title in the magazine is "Combat High: America's Addiction to War." The panel was made up of former soldiers, most of whom saw combat in Afghanistan and/or Iraq. 

Here are some snippets that should get your attention: 

• Dempsey: "Americans are beset by an attitude of respectful indifference."
• Kreps: "The United States has its tentacles everywhere."
• Dempsey: "It is utterly absurd. It ties in with the idea that the military can do no wrong."
• Dempsey: "Sadly, being played for suckers in other people's wars might just be the purest expression of American exceptionalism." 
• Bacevich: "To acknowledge that is to commit what, in the context of our civil religion, is a mortal sin."
• Daddis: "We have moved from having respect for the military to being unable to criticize it." 
• Daddis: "It's not a job ~ it's a drug. We've addicted our soldiers to war, and to the cycle of war. The costs of being addicted ~ damaging soldiers' psyches, tearing families apart, creating an unhealthy relationship between soldiers and the adrenaline rush of combat ~ are hidden until later." 
• Dempsey: "He's [Moscow Don] almost irrelevant to the argument. He was probably faced with, 'Do you want to be seen as a loser, or do you want to just keep bombing for a couple of years? And keep bragging about how great you are?" 

In addition, the issue has an essay that Seymour Hersh adapted from his memoir. It's about his dogged pursuit of his first and subsequent articles about the My Lai massacre, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. It's titled "Looking for Calley: How a Young Journalist Untangled the Riddle of My Lai." 

On a dumb lark the other day, I bought a tiny bottle of Old Camp Peach Pecan whiskey at my local liquor store. I poured it into a highball glass, took a drink, and hated it immediately. I dumped it out in the sink. 

Why do all these bourbon companies have to corrupt perfectly good whiskey with flavorings? Honey, blackberry, cinnamon, and whatnot are adulterating perfectly fine bourbon. What a shame. The fact of the matter is though that probably most of concoctions use some bourbon and then use grain neutral spirits to make it cheaper and thus not true bourbon. Atrocious.  

Random Notes from a Crank

The other day a friend on Facebook shared a listicle about left handers. One of the few surprises of that click bait was that only 10% of the population is left handed. That's astonishing to me. Only 10 flippin' percent. How is that even possible? I know back in the bad old days, people would "turn" lefties into righties for various stupid, inane, and insane reasons. But you'd think so-called progress would catch up and produce more lefties in this world. 

As you can tell, I'm a southpaw. 

It's not surprising the Raiders got approved to move to Las Vegas. Not soon after the news hit, there are various articles featuring a businessman who is providing the Pirate's Booty Sports Brothel. 

I need to start reading Informed Comment by Juan Cole more often. I've now put it on my "Blog Roll." Check out "The Simple Number That Will Defeat Trump's Attempt to Roll Back Obama Energy Policies." 

In the March issue of Harper's, the magazine has an excerpt from Simple Sabotage Field Manual put out in 1944 by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, which is a manual intended for people living in "enemy states" at the time. What I find darkly humorous about the manual is that many of the recommendations I see happening in organizations -- both public and private, both government and industry -- all the time. Here are some juicy snippets related to to the behavior and actions of Employees, Managers and Supervisors, and Organizations and Conferences (which I quote in full):

• Employees: "When you go to the lavatory spend a longer time there than is necessary." 
• Managers and Supervisors: "To lower morale and production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions."
• Managers and Supervisors: "Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done." 
• Organizations and Conferences: "Make 'speeches.' Talk at great length, illustrate your 'points' with long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Haggle over precise wordings of communications. When possible, refer all matters to committee for 'further study and consideration.' Attempt to make the committees as large and bureaucratic as possible." 

Random Notes from a Crank

Here are some provocative gleanings from the Harper's Index from the past few months:

• Portion of American who think it is safe to eat genetically modified foods: 2/5
• Of U.S. scientists who do: 9/10
• Percentage of deaths in the developing world caused by chronic diseases: 64
• Percentage of all medical development aid allocated to fighting chronic diseases: 1
• Percentage of evangelical Christians under the age of 40 who supported gay marriage in 2003: 20
• Who do today: 43
• Percentage of Americans who believe vaccines are safe and effective: 53
• Who believe that houses can be haunted by ghosts: 54
• Factor by which a Democratic senator is more likely  than the average Amercian to be a lawyer: 127
• Projected portion of global wealth that will be held by the richest 1 percent of the world's population by the end of 2016: 1/2
• Portion of high-school dropouts who say they left school to work: 1/4
• Portion of those dropouts who earn less than $10,000 per year: 3/5
• Number of the ten most challenged books at U.S. libraries last year whose main characters are non-white or LGBT: 8

One of the more depressing articles I've read in a while is "Rotten Ice: Traveling by Dogsled in the Melting Arctic" by Gretel Ehrlich in April issue of Harper's. 

It's officially lightning bug season here in east central Illinois. With all the wet weather we've gotten, they're thick as thieves at night.

Random Notes from a Crank

A couple of weeks ago I was on the website for Arizona State University for some reason I don't even remember anymore. When I was on the site, I accidentally clicked on a link for ASU Online. Now whenever I'm on certain websites, there are these ASU Online ads prominently displayed. I'm being stalked. Stop stalking me ASU Online. I'm done with taking classes. ASU Online, you creep me out. I'm not interested. 

If you get Harper's or have access to the magazine, I highly recommend this article from the June issue: "The Civil Rights Act's Unsung Victory" by Randall Kennedy. It's solid analysis of the act, its influence, and its connection to how people talk about race at present. Here's a passage that's worth noting: "The difficulty is distinguishing nonracist libertarianism from its fraudulent, pre textual lookalikes. There is good reason to be skeptical of those who, in the name of liberty, condemn a law that has rescued millions from the tyranny of unchecked racial ostracism." 

I have a subscription to Esquire magazine because getting subscriptions was one of the elementary school fundraisers this year. The magazine is usually bathroom-quality reading material, but the June/July issue focuses on fatherhood, and there are a number of good articles in it. One in particular is Stephen Marche's "Manifesto of the New Fatherhood." It's a good read for today, which is Father's Day. The last § or ¶ provides a strong summation of the situation: "At the heart of the new fatherhood is a somewhat surprising insight: Men, as fathers, are more crucial than anybody realized. The changing American father is transforming the country at all levels, from the most fundamental to the most ethereal, economically, socially, politically. The epidemic of fatherlessness and the new significance men place on fatherhood point to the same clandestine truth: The world, it turns out, does need fathers." 

Huzzah to good, responsible fathers. 

Random Notes from a Crank

If you care about poetry, I suggest checking out Mark Edmundson's "Poetry Slam: Or, The Decline of American Verse" in the July issue of Harper's. While I find the article to be an academic version of a lit professor saying, "Back in the old days..." with occasional whining and pontificating, he does have some good points. Take these two examples: 

• "What happens when poets at the height of ambition somehow feel the need to be programmatically obscure? The obvious result is that they shut out the common reader. But they also give critics far too much room to determine poetic meanings--and this may be why some critics so love Graham and Muldoon and Carson and Ashbery. Their poems are so underdetermined in their sense that the critic gets to collaborate on the verses, in effect becoming a co-creator. This is a boon to critics, but readers rightly look to poets to make sense of the world, even if it is a difficult sense--and not to pass half the job off to Ph.D.s"
• "It is they [big-name poets] whom younger writers are to look up to, they who set the standard--and the standard is all for inwardness and evasion, hermeticism and self-regard: beautiful, accomplished, abstract poetry that refuses to be the poetry of our climate."

I wonder if the good Dr. Edmundson has read Sullivan's Every Seed of the Pomegranate, Vanderberg's The Alphabet Not Unlike the World, or Williams' The Road to Happiness? I also wonder if Edmundson writes his own poetry. 

Recently I became a subscriber to GoComics.com. I don't know why it's taken me so long to do something like this. First, it's free, so that appeals to my frugal nature. Second, daily I get old strips and current ones. Every day I'm reading Doonsebury, Get Fuzzy, Pearls Before Swine, F Minus, Candorville, Off the Mark, and Strange Brew along with editorial cartoons from Tom Toles, Mike Luckovich, and Michael Ramirez. Also, I'm getting recycled strips of Bloom County and Calvin & Hobbes. Those are my top two comic strips of all time, and I read them when I was a kid.

Coincidentily, I looked at Utne's nominees for the its Media Awards, checked them out, and subscribed to various Web-based magazines like TomDispatch, Grist, and OnEarth. I'm also getting updates from The American Conservative for some variety in my political reading diet, and there's an article about Calvin & Hobbes by Gracy Howard that's worth a quick read: "Imagination and the Artistic Value of Calvin & Hobbes." I look forward to watching the documentary she writes about. The strips below showcase Watterson's artistry. 

Sorry for the bleeding into the right bar, but the only way to see them well is making them extra large. 

Last night Mrs. Nasty and I went out to supper and then watched The Wolverine, the latest Hollywood offering from the Marvel universe. As comic book-based movies go, it's a good one. From my perspective, Jackman seems to get the character of Logan/Wolverine, and this movie provides a good character study. I remember reading the Wolverine four-part series in the early 80s when he went to Japan, which I think the screenplay chose parts to use in the film. I remember the comic book differently though. The love interest angle was a bigger theme, and I vaguely remember him training as a samurai, but I could be wrong. Because I enjoyed that short series back then (1982), I bought the book (below) that collects the issues. I'm looking forward to this rediscovery. 

Random Notes from a Crank

Of all the analysis out there about the Cubs' drafting of Kris Bryant with the second overall pick in the MLB draft, Tim Huwe's post on the selection of Bryant on Bleed Cubbie Blue provides solid points. 

In a recent issue of Harper's, I read about the accounting firm Ernst & Young's "Fraud Triangle Analytics" software that looks at emails in corporate settings to find possible wrongdoing. Here are some words and phrases that raise red flags in their system:

• gray area
• facilitation fee
• offshore
• adjust invoices
• hush money
• friend fee
• massage earnings
• want no part of this
• Everyone does it
• too stupid to figure it out
• tired of this
• It's immaterial
• play ball
• sweetener
• Don't worry about it
• I don't get paid enough

In the same May issue in the regular "The Anti-Economist" column, Jeff Madrick provides some commentary that fits with my point of view:

• The reverence in which Americans of all political persuasion seem to hold Reagan today is absurd. As president, he created a phony -- if romantic --picture of America's past, a schoolboy's fiction of a country forged by individualism. From this fiction came the dream that we could return to an earlier moral order in which citizens were supposedly freer. Of course, America was in part built by both individualists, but it was also built by government investment in canals and railroads, in public water and urban sanitation systems, in highways, scientific research, free K-12 education, college subsidies, and a legal system that encouraged competition while protecting private property. If Reagan brought Americans optimism, it was optimism based on false hopes and misleading facts.
• If Obama must use Reagan as a guide[,] it should be as a guide to what not to do.

Culling the December Index and Findings

I've had a subscription to Harper's Magazine for a couple of decades. I started reading it when I began college if I remember correctly.

Two continuing features in the magazine I always look forward to are "Harper's Index," which is at the start of the magazine, and the "Findings" page that closes each issue. Most people are familiar with the Index, but I'm pretty sure the "Findings" page isn't as old. It provides an interesting and often bizarre collection of published research that's been disseminated recently.

I thought I'd pass along a culling from both features in the December issue that I find particularly rich.

From Harper's Index:

• Portion of income growth since the end of the recession that has gone to corporate profits: 9/10
• Minimum number of pigs stolen in Minnesota this September: 744
• Percentage by which the average contracted project costs the government more than the equivalent government-run project: 83
• Date on which Governor Rick Scott said that Florida doesn't need "more anthropologists": 10/10/2011
• Date on which Scott's daughter received her anthropology degree: 1/11/2008
• Chance that an American between 18 and 24 has read a book in the past year that wasn't required for school or work: 1 in 2
• Rank of non-denominational Christianity among the fastest-growing religions in America during the past two decades: 2
• Rank of "none": 1
• Percentage of the vote received by the Pirate Party in Berlin's September municipal elections: 8.9
• Number of sex dolls distributed to SS soldiers by Heinrich Himmler, according to a book released this September: 50

From "Findings":

• "Columbus may have caused the Little Ice Age." 
• "Bolder bluegill sunfish are likelier to be caught in open water, whereas shy ones are caught near the rocks."
• "Easily embarrassed humans, though not the morbidly ashamed, are seen as more trustworthy and are more often monogamous." 
• "Canadian psychologists  concluded that 'moral disengagemnt' leads to workplace rumor-mongering and collegial sabotage."
• "Psychopathic Canadian murderers, when describing their crimes, more frequently use conjunctions and employ the past tense than do their non-psychopathic counterparts." 
• "The nose smells what it expects." 
• "Extramarital affairs increase a man's risk of a broken penis."   

Cricker Crack?

In the June issue of Harper's, the editors provide a listing titled "Crystal Metaphors." As is the nature of the magazine, they publish some interesting artifacts that they glean from various sources like governmental agencies, court transcripts, et al.

So "Crystal Metaphors" is "[f]rom a list of slang words for methamphetamine, collected by the Utah Attorney General's Office and posted on its website."

The list is both appalling and darkly humorous that this horrible drug has inspired so many different nicknames, but one that is isn't featured is "Cricker Crack," which was/is? a term for it in the Northeast Missouri since people, "Crickers" who presumably live by "cricks" (creeks) out in the country, use it as their crack.

The common name for this crap is "crank" of course, but here's a partial list of terms that I thought readers might find interesting: buzzard dust, Devil's dandruff, dummy dust, gumption, high-speed chicken feed, pootananny, rumdumb, shiznastica, Smurf dope, spun ducky woo, and yammer bammer.

Of those terms, I think I like gumption and Smurf dope the best.

For an even more extensive list from someone else, click HERE if you're interested in how people play with the language of addiction. Still no Cricker Crack though.

Smurf dope has also inspired some pretty darn good songs too since that crap has devastated countless communities. "Methamphetamine" by Son Volt, "You and Your Crystal Meth" by Drive-By Truckers, and "Methamphetamine" by Old Crow Medicine Show come to mind.

One More Day...

Although President Bush has been a lame duck for quite a while, I offer this link from Harper's. In the January issue, the magazine did a special Harper's Index devoted to the past eight horrible years.

Click HERE if you're interested. 

I also wanted to provide a link to Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz's informative essay entitled "The $10 Trillion Hangover: Paying the Price for Eight Years of Bush," but Harper's will only give online access to current subscribers like me. That article by the former assistant secretary for administration, management, and budget within the Department of Commerce and a Nobel Prize winner in economics is sobering.

I will provide some passages of note though:

"The worst legacy of the past eight years is that despite colossal government spending, most Americans are worse off than they were in 2001. This is because money was squandered in Iraq and given as a tax windfall to America's richest individuals and corporations, rather than spent on such projects as education, infrastructure, and energy independence, which would have made all of us better in the long term."

"The Obama Administration, facing the most serious economic crisis in at least a generation, will need to mount an expansionary fiscal policy. The problem is how much the country's debt mountain will crimp our ability to pay for the type of change we just voted for--better health care, public investment in alternative forms of energy, and a renewal of our aging roads and bridges--and that we need in order to rescue the economy."

"Whether we struggle to break our addiction to deficit spending in order to pay off our debts, or wind up inflating them away, the economic mistakes of the George W. Bush White House will cast a long shadow over the next generation of Americans."

That history will not vindicate the Bush administration. 

Good luck, President Obama.  

"Justice After Bush"

In December issue of Harper's offers a detailed proposal about the possible methods by which the Bush administration can be investigated for its torture policy. A bipartisan commission similar to the 9/11 Commission seems to be the prudent move.

The article is from Scott Horton, and by clicking HERE you can read it.

A Good Read: "Imagine There's No Oil"

Harpers Magazine Online has an interesting article up on its website for free. I used this article in my Cornerstone class entitled "Values, Culture, and the Environment" when I was teaching in St. Louis, and students enjoyed reading it even though it sobered them up from their iPods and reality TV. The was originally in the August '06 issue, and the author explores "peak oil," a concept we all should be familiar with.

If you have the time and inclination, check it out by clicking HERE.