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Showing posts from August, 2009

Some Late Summer Reading

I read more history and philosophy than anything else. Other topics of interest include psychology, astronomy, baseball, and classical literature. Every summer, usually in August, the History Book Club has a really terrific sale on books. So, I take advantage of the prices and inexpensive shipping to broaden my private library. Last Friday - just in time for the weekend - my recent order arrived. One way to tell that the Great Recession is still with us is that "standard" shipping gets to you as fast as "expedited" shipping. Nothing is in the delivery systems. There are comparatively few packages moving around. Consumers aren't buying. Anyway, this year I ordered four books - all military history (which is by far my favorite kind of history). The shipment included the third and final volume of Richard J. Evans' history of the Third Reich entitled The Third Reich at War . I immediately started reading this one and discovered that it is just as difficult to p

The Paradox of Health Care Costs

Health care reform is the big political issue at the moment. Some say that President Obama has lost momentum in the campaign for reform to his critics, who have been able to shift the focus away from the debate about policy to a focus on the disruptive town hall meetings many members of congress have experienced this month. In an attempt to regain momentum Obama has been forced to demonize something about the status quo . His villain of choice is the insurance industry . Big health care insurers are now the reason health care doesn't work in America . This is all bullshit on both sides. First of all, the critics of the President's ideas for reform have resorted to ridiculous rhetoric and outright falsehoods about what the Obama administration is trying to do. Recent comparisons by Limbaugh and Palin of the Obama reforms to Nazism are, of course, fundamentally why we elected Obama to begin with. The politics of fear . They are liars and perhaps just plain stupid. They dis

Starry Afternoon

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What is really going on? U.S. bank failures continue . The unemployment rate unexpectedly dropped for the first time in 15 months . Obama is having a tough time getting his health care reform agenda passed . Sotomayor was sworn in today as our newest Supreme Court justice . Meanwhile, if you step back from it all and take a wider view, you realize how vast (and generally indifferent) the Now is. Very hot today. The heat index was about 100 degrees. I bought groceries, then read for a bit after lunch. Despite the sun, I mowed the front half of the yard, pausing to enjoy a Mike's Hard Lemonade and piddle on the computer. In early afternoon, I pulled up Starry Night to check out the US from space. Starry Night is cool for many reasons but one is certainly that it tracks the orbits of hundreds of satellites in addition to all the many wonders of the visible universe. At night, especially on clear winter nights, I sometimes pull the sky up and advance the time into the near future,

Parks Rocks On

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Another hot southern August is here and our shelty mutt Parks keeps on rocking. He was supposed to have died from terminal cancer by the end of March. But things didn't turn out that way. Other than sleeping a lot more you'd be hard-pressed to find anything wrong with Parks. Most of the time he lays around, panting. Occasionally you'll catch him on extended walks or running but those instances are almost always connected with feeding time. We try to always feed him around 5 to 5:30. He's well aware of this. Dogs are creatures of habit. I guess that's one reason I like them so much. Parks, however, must have been a political lobbyist in his previous incarnation because, without fail, about a hour before feeding time he perks up from his comatose state and begins to transform before your very eyes into a vociferous advocate, faining near starvation to hear him tell it, and demanding food with assorted whines and - closer to actual feeding time - persistent, emphatic b