Symbolism of food and clothiing

When I was a kid in the 50's, clothing was the social signifier. "You're not going out dressed like THAT! " If you saw someone dressed informally, you knew she was not upper class.  I remember going to the ball parks and the men wore suits, ties and hats. Today billionaires wear hoodies.

Food is now the signifier.  If you see someone eating a Twinkie you know they are prole. Go into a temple of food such as Whole Foods.   Behind the bread counter  there are two slicers, one for organic bread and the other for conventional.  God forbid that little Peirpontle get one crumb of conventional bread  -- he won't get into Harvard.  It'st like the rules of kosher food.

Excellent display of data on deaths in WWII- worth watching

https://player.vimeo.com/video/128373915 

Unpopularity of the Trade Pact

After reading a Paul Krugman opinion piece about the defeat of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiation authorization in Congress, I did what I normally do not do -- I read the comments.  They were almost unanimously, and often vehemently against the pact.  Here is a typical comment.

It isn't about what countries are at the table. It's about the fact the the working class isn't at the table at all. It is about flag-less corporate leaders and their politicians, not about national interests. It is about expanding the property rights of the corporate rich through stricter patents, longer copyrights and other restraints on free trade are a major part of the TPP. It is about limiting the ability of nations to restrain corporate power by allowing corporations to sue for damages if nations try to protect workers or the environment

This is no surprise considering the these are readers of Krugman and the New York Times.  Most of the yes votes were Republican, which on the surface is surprising -- after all aren't they against international agencies, such as the UN, dictating policy to us.  To see where they are at I went to the National Review's site, clicked a pro-TPP piece by George Will, and read the comments.  If you don't count the Obama bashing entries, the comments were very heavily weighted negative.  Here is a typical one.

All the elites in this worthless [Republican] party have fully embraced the idea of crony capitalism and big government. They can fool themselves calling it free markets and compassionate conservatism, but I'm not buying this BS anymore. We're angry as hell and we're not going to take it anymore! This party may well rip down the center after 2016 if the business wing leads us to another defeat.

My take is that even if there are good environmental and labor provisions in the pact as promised (The text is secret -- another issue ), do you trust that they will be enforced by the same crowd that gives Wall Street a free pass.  I think will can assume that Obama's successor will be even worst.

(Mideast) politics Make strange bedfellows

Israel is depending on Hamas and Hizbollah to keep ISIS away from its borders.  As bad as these two are, they do get the hint after massive bombing.  I doubt that ISIS would respond to bombing.

James Webb for President

James Webb is my man.

Right now Webb, who has not declared, is running a lackadaisical campaign.  As a comparison, he has 8000 Twitter followers compared to Sander's  52,000  and Hillary's 3.6 million. He has no chance of going anywhere, but would make a wonderful addition to the debates.

Here are some of his points that I that attract me to him.

Webb pays attention to poverty of all races, not just minorities,  urban and rural. This connects with white voters who have drifted away from the Democratic party, and connects with me because I spent my early teens in a poor white neighborhood.

Geek-out over a shaving brush

Each morning I use a shaving brush.  At the end of the shave I shake it out and put it in its rack.  The next day it is dry.  In a geek-out I became curious.  How many molecules per second are required to dry it in 24 hours?

My kitchen scale showed that the we brush contained 12 g of water.

Before I show the calculations, I will give the result.  4.63E+18 molecules leave the brush every second.  This is a large number.  It means there are 18 places to the left of the decimal point. How large.  Well it is a billion billion.  One billion seconds is 31 years.  Someone has another way to look at it  - it is in the same level as the number of grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth -- and this is just in one second!!
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If you are still paying attention, here are my calculations for the shaving brush evaporation.

War on everything ...

We have a habit of declaring unwinnable wars on nouns, poverty, terrorism etc.  and we end up with more of them.  Maybe we should declare a war of common sense -- we sure need more or it.

Communism and decline of labor unions

Even if you think very little of 20th century communism, as I do, the threat of the workers opting for Communism made the 1% tolerate or even encourage unions.

Communism became less and less attractive to western worker in the 1970s.  The 1% no longer feared communism's attraction to their workers. They started a successful war on the unions.  It succeeded, workers are much worst off then they were 40 years ago.  

The Keystone pipeline is a red herring

The real issue is mining the tar sands, which is environmentally disastrous, carbon heavy and produces toxic crude. Unfortunately that is Canada's decision. They will continue to mine whether is is shipped by rail or pipeline.

Both opponents and proponents have wildly exaggerated their cases.  No, beyond the construction, will we see any significant number of jobs.  No the pipeline will not be more dangerous than rail shipping.

The Keystone has become a proxy for how we want to develop energy, more fossil fuels, or other less carbon intensive means.

In any case, at today's prices, each barrel of tar sands oil is sold at a loss.  No one will build a pipeline unless the price recovers.

Who Has It Better, Farm Animals or Wildlife?

At the headquarters of Denali National Park, there is an exhibit on caribou. They do not have an easy life. Four-fifths of the calves never make it to adulthood, mostly falling to predators who rip them apart and eat them alive. The survivors are plagued by swarms of biting flies and parasites that burrow tunnels in the haunches before they are weakened by age or disease, and ripped apart by a predator.

This contrasts with responsibly-raised farm animals, who have room, board, and medical care, live much longer than their cousins in the wild. They certainly die more humanely than being eaten alive, in fact they die more humanely than most of us do hooked up to machines.

The most insightful statement Pope Francis has made

“Reality,” [Pope Francis] told a large group of young people, “is superior to ideas.”

This is coming from the absolute leader of the Roman Catholic Church, which for two millennia has tried to fit real life onto the procrustean bed of dogma -- often with horrible disastrous results -- inquisition anyone?

What a concise statement of where we all go astray. The real horrors of mankind come when we attempt to impose an abstract idea, be it religion, communism, fascism, or even spreading of democracy, by force.

Richard Dawkins  and others' attack on religion is not really an attack on just religion, it is an attack on all attempts to shoehorn real peoples' lives into an abstract idea, be it religion, communism, fascism or even spreading democracy.

David Foster Wallace and Leo Tolstoy

I recently read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.  I am now one third through Anna Karenina  by Leo Tolstoy.  In common they are large books which not only tell a story, but describe a whole society.  That is all they have in common.

Infinite Jest is a near future dystopian satire about addiction. The book itself is addicting, not matter how much I wanted to, I could not put it down.  It is best described by a comment made about Richard Wagner by Gioachino Rossini, an Italian composer. "Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour."   The book drags, but it has inspired sections that are imprinted in my mind. In one a woman who attempted suicide describes her suicidal thoughts to her therapist.  This has special poignancy because the author, who spent his whole life fighting depression, later committed suicide himself.  In another section, Wallace describes the origin of the wheelchair assassins, a Canadian terrorist group all of whose members are legless. No I did not make the last sentence up.

Anna Karenina never drags but I have to resort to a list of characters to keep track of them.  Tolstoy gets slow at times but is never painful to read.