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Robert Zoellic goes gold bug, and the strange US lock on the World Bank presidency.
Archive for the ‘Handbasket, world going to hell in’ Category
November 8th, 2010
Category: Diplomacy, Economics, Handbasket, world going to hell in, International Affairs, Macroeconomic Policy, Watching Conservatives
November 3rd, 2010
Category: California Politics, Campaign 2010, Energy and Environment, Handbasket, world going to hell in
The initial results in California last night make my state seem like a sane drop of blue in the country. Jerry Brown won for Governor; Barbara Boxer was re-elected; and Proposition 23, which would have reversed the state’s landmark climate change law, was resoundingly defeated. Voters also approved Proposition 25, which allows the state budget [...]
October 8th, 2010
New Jersey is a living embodiment of why political boundaries should never be drawn along rivers, and always along ridgelines. Nine million people live in two enormous clusters attached economically and culturally, but not politically, to the cities of New York and Philadelphia across the major regional rivers. These clusters anchor the ends of an [...]
August 27th, 2010
“She was a fat, resentful woman. The kind who is always behind the counter at the DMV when you need to renew your registration” –P.J. O’Rourke, A Parliament of Whores “There are days when we don’t let the line move at all” –Patty and Selma, The Simpsons I generally ignored the protestors with the “Obama-is-a-Radical-Muslim-with-a-crazy-Baptist-preacher-in-Chicago” [...]
August 7th, 2010
Category: Gay marriage, Handbasket, world going to hell in, Struggle Between Good and Evil, Woolgathering
Occasionally my training as an engineer prompts me to ask, “why aren’t conservation laws more useful in social science?” In economics, everything is held together with bungee cords (which is OK, all physical mechanisms are more or less elastic) but the quantities of everything, including money, seem to be spongy as well. Analysis of gay [...]
July 29th, 2010
Category: Energy and Environment, Handbasket, world going to hell in, Journalism (Online and Otherwise), The wayward press
Spoiler alert: if this post doesn’t spoil your week, or worse, you and I don’t share the same reality. What makes human life worth living? Content, obviously: news, art, music, conversation – social intercourse in all media. What makes it possible? Food and drink, broadly defined: fresh water and all the plant and animal products [...]
February 22nd, 2010
Category: Handbasket, world going to hell in, Israel
Anti-Zionists need not worry: they’ll get their way in about 40 years.
September 24th, 2009
Tonight was the big Cal teach-in before tomorrow’s day of walkout/protest/demonstration scheduled for all University of California campuses….Back in the day, a teach-in was teaching: faculty who knew something about an issue tried to explain it, sometimes just propagandizing but preferably illuminating complications and subtleties of the state of affairs (Vietnam War, racial injustice, etc.) triggering the state of protest. Tonight, not so much; the six speakers were earnest and lively, but the critical thinking of which we’re supposed to be a veritable factory had mostly left the building.
September 21st, 2009
On Wednesday evening I attended a “teach-in” sponsored by the local chapter of student “government” at Berkeley, the Senate of Associated Students of the University of California. A half-dozen faculty (not me) offered ten-minute perspectives on current events, which are heading to a university-wide walkout on Sept. 24; Friday the Senate voted unanimously to support [...]
