For my good friend, the poet

Whoever said they were irrelevant? Not this poet.

How long do you think it will take

before the Orange County (California or Florida, doesn't matter) school board proposes this idea for their public schools? (Are you as surprised as I am -- disappointed too -- that the concept took root in Brazil?

Sold out again

Here's the text of a letter to the editor of the SB News Press that I emailed today. I'll update this blog if/when it's published.

Update: It was published on March 23, 2012.

With friends like Lois Capps, who needs Republicans? Once again, our Congressperson has sold out her constituents – the 99%, that is. Not long ago she voted in favor of giving the President the power to arrest and imprison indefinitely any person, including U.S. citizens, who he decided was a terrorist. So much for our personal freedoms. Now, Lois has inserted herself into our pocketbooks, voting in favor of a bill – misleadingly called the JOBS act – that weakens regulation of corporate stock offerings, diluting, and in some cases eliminating, their disclosure requirements and abandoning longstanding rules protecting individual investors from fraud and overreaching by corporations and the sellers of their stock. Companies are now able to peddle stock publicly – using the Internet, for example – without heeding many of the regulatory requirements that protected investors’ pocketbooks in the past.

This enactment is said to make it easier for companies to raise capital. Haven’t we heard this refrain before? Isn’t the absence of regulation precisely what got us into this ugly economic mess? And who benefits from this law? You guessed it – the corporations. And if Representative Capps has the temerity to suggest that the bill will create jobs, I suggest she answer this question: Where’s the evidence? The short answer is, There is none – absolutely no studies, no empirical evidence was submitted to the House supporting the notion that by loosening reporting requirements on corporations more jobs will be created – except, of course, on Wall Street and, eventually, among bankruptcy lawyers

This can't be right

Gerald Ford (not the dead former president) who was the chief stockholder in my bank, having in 2010 bought up 91% percent of the shares of Pacific Capital, my bank's parent company, for the munificent sum of 20 cents a share, will receive $46/ share for his stock in a merger deal under which Pacific Capital Union Bank is acquired by a Union Bank, which is in turn owned by Japanese holding company. That's got to be a typo, right? Nobody's entitled to a two-year return of 2500%. Right?

Not only racist, but stupid

Check out this piece about the "Don't Re-Nig" bumpersticker, and don't fail to read the last two sentences of the article.

I'm a sucker for musical theater

I just watched a presentation of The Phantom of the Opera as shown at the Royal Albert Hall, shown on PBS this evening. I'd seen the show on stage in Cincinnati some years ago and I love it -- the music brought me to tears, really -- but this television production was even better. Powerful, moving, much better than the movie.

Breaking silence

because I'm weeping over this.

A linguist's wish list

is aptly and humorously presented here. But it's much too short. "Don't get me started."

Talk about your litmus test

The Senate race in Massachusetts -- Warren against Brown -- is too close to call. Check out the numbers in the box halfway down the article. The young and the old like Warren, the middle-aged prefer Brown, and most voters could yet change their mind between now and the election. Both have the money to campaign and Massachusetts is a relatively "liberal" state. If a candidate with Warren's views can't get elected statewide there, we're in deeper poo-poo than even I thought.

Born and raised in Arizona

and, for good reason, lately ashamed to admit it. But this...this outrage...takes the cake.

I give up

Okay, I'll vote for Obama, maybe send him a check, but only because of this.

A perfect motion picture

Wonderful cast, terrific story, exquisite pacing, all with a profound, timely and timeless message. The movie? Wargames.

Well, duh...

My reaction to the findings of this study.

I'm still here

I haven't posted on this blog for quite a while, and, looking back several months I note that my posting has become sporadic and increasingly occasional and, frankly, not very interesting. But (mostly because maintaining this blog is free) I'm not quitting, but also not apologizing (much) because the reason for this isn't torpor. I've become engaged in work of a physical nature -- remodeling this condo I bought in May, doing almost all of the work myself -- and I find it such an absorbing activity that it drains all my interest and energy. Furthermore, it's an action I can take that has consequences and payoffs I can see and touch. Much more satisfying than wailing about the state of the world, the result of which is that nothing changes.

I'll continue to post here, and maybe I'll catch fire again, or from time to time, so stay tuned.

Shame on Lois Capps

Here's a letter to the editor of the SB NewsPress that I'm sending today. I'll update this post if/when it's published.

Update: It was published on January 3, 2012.

To the editor:

Transparency. We’ve been hearing that word a lot from politicians, including our Congressperson, Lois Capps. Indeed, she uses it in almost every speech she gives, at every appearance she makes. And so you’d think that when she casts a vote, such as the vote she cast last month, authorizing the president of the United States to arrest and detain indefinitely, without trial, American citizens whom he deems are supporters of terrorist groups, she’d tell us about it, explain her vote to us.

It’s not like it was an inconsequential vote. By voting to pass the 2011 Defense Authorization Act, Ms. Capps, in direct contravention of the fifth and sixth amendments to the US constitution, vested the federal executive with unreviewable power to determine what constitutes “material support” of terrorists, to decide who has provided such support and to slap them in military prisons for so long as he or she deems proper. No hearing, no lawyer, no court review, nothing. Summary indeterminate imprisonment, imposed by a single person, the president. If that sounds like vesting the Chief Executive with the powers of a dictator, it’s because that’s exactly what it is.

And so, on her website, “applauding” passage of the bill, did she tell us any of this? No. Check it out. What she shared with us—the only facet of the bill she mentioned—was a feature of the bill that provides funding of some small business efforts along the Central Coast. Some transparency.

Breaking...

This just in. Why am I not surprised?

For your reading pleasure

this article about the Republican presidential candidates.

Nader nails it

In this concise essay, Ralph Nader assails a fundamental error in "free trade" as it is practiced globally. It happens that the economist, Paul Samuelson, whose works Nader discusses, wrote the Econ 101 text that I carried to class at Stanford five decades ago, long before Samuelson saw the light, and so I was taught the mutual benefits of free trade. Fortunately, I flunked Econ 101 and so the lessons of Samuelson's text never sank in.

I don't know what it will take for Nader's long-standing critique of free-trade agreements to grab hold. He and, notably, 1992 third-party presidential candidate Ross Perot (he of the "giant sucking sound" bite) have been right about the effects of such treaties for at least thirty years, with no apparent effect on our leaders--including Obama, who recently executed a deal with South Korea.

Look around: Besides retail service-industry jobs such as salesperson and wait-person, the arms industry and the military, where are American jobs going to come from?

Despair, wretchedness, sadness

are words that are woefully weak to describe my reaction to this story about the aftermath of our invasion of Iraq.

No shopping today

Not only did I not buy anything today -- Buy Nothing Day -- I returned to Radio Shack a laptop and accessories (more than $500 worth of merchandise) that I'd bought three weeks before and received a full refund. I didn't need the new computer because my old one hadn't suffered a fatal crash after all, but was simply taking a prolonged rest and woke up last night.