You make me feel guilty. I didn’t think people still cared anymore. He was an older man, African-American, with a small hat and a black jacket. I wonder what his life had brought him that a few people in front of a supermarket asking for food bank donations could seem so unlikely. And I’m grateful that despite my frustrations with things in general, the specifics around me are of people who do indeed still care.
At the risk of offending someone: It’s election day. I’m “watching” returns by refreshing and refreshing four or five news sites. It’s depressing. And it’s frustrating. On the radio today, there was yet another bit of predictive reporting, detailing how the Democrats were going to lose their majorities to conservatives who have campaigned on undoing everything from the past two years. Conservatives who are endlessly in favor of reducing government, reducing taxes. This story was immediately followed by a conversation with someone from the Army Corps of Engineers concerning the weak and damaged status of many river levees in Washington …
Yes, you can say anything you want with statistics. But I’m going to post this anyway: (Image from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine’s Good Medicine via The Consumerist) The American government subsidizes (makes it cheaper for a farmer to produce, and thus for the consumer to buy) meat more than other food items, despite the same government’s official recommendation that we all should eat more of the things it’s not encouraging the producers to produce. This article has some good points about how the chart above visually distorts the data. But I think the point that the chart makers …
Sometimes I wish I didn’t care. That I didn’t know what I know. So I could drive wherever guilt-free and buy whatever stupid plastic toy the kids are clamoring for now. So I could enjoy cheap food and cheap clothes and worry more about whether my hair looks good then the list of ingredients of my shampoo. So I didn’t have to prepare speeches on Why I’m Not Buying That. So that I didn’t evaluate Need vs Want every time I feel the urge To Buy Something. It’s not that I actually want more stuff; I want less stuff in …
I’m still venting about this, apparently. In returning to the airport for our flight home yesterday, we had to stop and return the rental car. For some reason (flu, warm weather, whatever), most of Budget’s staff had called in sick. This meant that we had to stand in line, at the counter, where nothing is ever fast, in order to complete the transaction instead of the check-in-and-you’re-done thing that usually happens really fast in the parking lot. Which, in turn, made us later than we wanted to be when we got to the actual airport. Where we discovered we were …
They were talking about it again this morning, just like yesterday and the day before: the mid-term elections and the odds of the Democrats losing their congressional majorities. The interviews and discussions are sizable, sometimes filling 20 minutes of airtime, and conducted with such breathless urgency a listener might think the elections are next week. But they aren’t. The election is in November, which last time I checked is 8 months from now. That’s a heck of a long time to maintain any level of interest, much less the frantic one the media seems to have whipped up for itself. …
