Enough is enough…
I’ve had enough of this violence, especially the gun violence. But what irks me the most is that so many Americans refuse to admit that we collectively, as a country, have a huge problem. Why is it that when I tell people how much safer Europe is than America they scoff at my remarks and label me as “anti-American”? Look, I’m only offering a comparison, that’s all. I don’t dislike America or Americans, I just want to see progress, not a descent into even more violence. And if Europe might offer some ideas about how to improve our society, then why shouldn’t we consider their example? Let me ask you this: Would you feel comfortable letting your child take public transportation alone (that is, if in fact we had public transportation)? Having lived in both Germany and Latvia and traveled through much of Europe, I can say that it is not at all uncommon for children (both alone and with their friends) to hop on a tram or bus and travel across town to, for example, school or another public space, such as a park. Perhaps I am way off here, but my sense is that most Americans would not let their children (and I’m talking here about young children, like maybe an 8 year old) maneuver through the city by themselves. Why is this? Well, perhaps they are afraid their child will get lost, but mostly I think it is because we don’t trust each other. We are afraid that someone might harm our child. And this, even more than the ridiculous prevalence of guns in our country, says a lot about the lamentable state of our civil society. And one simply cannot realize until living somewhere else just how much this unstated fear damages the milieu in which we live. Only then can one fully realize that, just as President Obama suggested in his remarks at the vigil in Newtown, we Americans are in essence being held hostage by our obsession with individualism, by our “exceptional” (yes, in this way we are an exceptional people) notion of “freedom,” and by our continued slide into an ugly, violent, atomized society in which it is everyone for him or herself. At its core, freedom is not a law or a political right, it is an intellectual state of being, a worldview, a Kunderian feeling of lightness. Our strange sense of freedom has paradoxically resulted in a society of burdened, selfish people. Just look at the question of gun control. The argument for “more guns” is rooted in two strains of thought: that 1) I don’t trust you; and 2) I WANT my guns. This — fear and selfishness — is slowly destroying our society. Let’s hope that this latest tragedy causes us to reject fear and selfishness in favor of hope and a renewed commit to creating a new and better society.
America’s plutocracy…
Here is another edition of the news section. Today I am focusing on America’s plutocracy. Enjoy.
1. Last month I read a number of interesting articles about the legacy of Ronald Reagan, who seems to have been in the news quite a lot over the last month due to the 100 year anniversary of his birth, and also because Wisconsin’s controversial governor, Scott Walker, apparently has a cult-like obsession with Reagan and his unabashed assault on America’s common man (or so we learned as a result of the prank David Koch phone call–see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/25/AR2011022507246.html). Browsing through the articles about the anniversary of his birth, I discovered that very few actually discuss the long-term impact of Reagan’s key agenda, the implementation of his economic policies, which are often collectively referred to as “Reaganomics” or “trickle-down economics.” For those of you who do not remember, the four main pillars of his economic ideology were: 1) reduce government spending; 2) reduce income tax and capital gains tax; 3) deregulate the economy as much as possible; 4) tighter control of the money supply to fight inflation. As a result of these policies, the predominate source of tax revenues changed from taxes on higher earners (the tax rate was dropped from 70% to below 30%) and capital gains on existing investments to payroll taxes and taxes on new investments. Coming out of the economic doldrums of the 1970s, the supporters of Reaganomics argued (and still argue) that by giving huge tax breaks to the rich and shifting wealth upwards, the economy would/will be stimulated because, in theory, those rich people will reinvest those savings through new economic ventures which, so the theory continues, will create new jobs and enable the money to “trickle down” through the rest of society via the guiding principles of the open, capitalistic marketplace. Here, via Inequality.org (http://www.demos.org/inequality/numbers.cfm), are the long-term results of Reaganomics (click on the charts if you want to enlarge them):
In addition to the charts, just consider these numbers: Between 1950 and 1980, the average American saw their income increase from $17,719 to $30,941. Since then, over the last 30 years, the average American’s salary has risen a mere 303 dollars, while the cost of healthcare, energy, etc. has skyrocketed. Contrast that with the nearly 350 percent increase that the top 1 percent has enjoyed since then, and you can see how drastically Reagan’s policies have changed America. But somehow, shockingly, the American public continues to buy into this economic strategy, as evidenced by the midterm elections. Consequently, in the middle of the Republicans’ discussions about cutting funding for much-needed infrastructure projects, public education, etc. because of our national debt, they passed an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts that will cost some $858 billion over two years. Yes, that’s right, 858 billion dollars over two years, and at a time when we are ostensibly so broke that, for example, there will be no Social Security cost-of-living increase for the first time in many decades.
2) In case you did not see Forbes’ latest list of the world’s richest people, here is a summary. Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecom and media giant, continues to hold off Bill Gates as the world’s richest person. In 2010 his wealth jumped an incredible 38% ($20.5 billion) to $74 billion…Bill Gates is worth $56 billion…For those of you who are Facebook users, perhaps you might be interested to learn that there are now six people associated with Facebook who are billionaires…Combined, the total worth of all the world’s billionaires is $4.5 trillion, an all-time record…America continues to hold the top spot with 413 billionaires. And get this, those 413 people collectively have more wealth than over 50 percent of the rest of America’s population combined (over 150 million people). Put another way, if all the billionaires moved to the same city, that would mean that a town half the size of Bertrand would hold more wealth than the collective worth of over 50% of the rest of America. Incredible!
3) The results of the “Tea Party-led” midterm elections? One of the richest legislative freshmen classes in U.S. history. According to the report from the Center for Responsive Politics which was released this week, over 60% of Senate freshmen and 40% of the freshmen in the Congress are millionaires. Here are a couple more statistics: the average wealth of incoming senators is $3.96 million, while the collective wealth of the new Congress members is estimated at $533 million…
It’s cold…
Hello, everyone, here is another installment of the news section. Enjoy.
1) Latvia and the Baltic States are no strangers to the cold. However, over the last month the weather has been much colder than normal. In fact, there have been many nights of record-setting lows for the month of February. As a result, the Daugava River and Bay of Riga have become unnavigable due to the thick ice that has amassed during this stretch of bitterly cold weather. Naturally, this is a major problem for the busy port of Riga, as evidenced in the picture below. According to government reports, as of last week, some 40 ships were trapped in ice, a situation which has spurned the government of Latvia to become involved in the operations to rescue the stranded crews.
A picture from our trip to the Baltic Sea. We are standing somewhere near the water's edge.
2. Here is a scary story about the dangers of genetically modifying plant organisms (GMOs). Just a few weeks ago Dr. Don Huber, a plant pathologist and professor emeritus from Purdue University, contacted the USDA about a shocking discovery that he had uncovered. Dr. Huber has found previously unknown microscopic pathogens in high concentrations in genetically modified Roundup Ready corn and soybeans, which he believes may be causing infertility and other abnormalities in livestock, in addition to diseases in crops. Dr. Huber believes that the threat to America and the world’s food supply from these GMOs is so high that he used the term “state of emergency” in his formal letter to Tom Vilsack, the current USDA Secretary. And, of course, besides concerns about the ability of the pathogen to cause diseases in both plants and animals, which is extraordinarily rare, Dr. Huber’s work only raises more red flags about whether GMOs are safe for human consumption.
3. More depressing news on the media front. As of Wednesday Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation got the go-ahead from the British government in regard to the company’s controversial buy-out and takeover of BSkyB, the parent company of, among other media outlets, Sky News. One wonders how we will get access to unbiased news when all of our news outlets are being bought out by a handful of media conglomerates, such as News Corp. And this is particularly dangerous when corporations like News Corp. have such active political ambitions, as evidenced by the fact that Fox News has employed or is currently employing four of the assumed 2012 GOP presidential candidates… In case you don’t know, here is a list of News Corp.’s television and publishing assets (which, according to official SEC filings, are worth approximately $57 billion, with annual profits of around $30 billion):
Fox Broadcasting Company; the Big Ten Network; Fox Business Network; Fox Movie Channel; Fox News; Fox College Sports; Fox Sports Enterprises; Fox Deportes; Fox Sports Net; Fox Soccer Channel; Fuel TV; FX; National Geographic Wild; Speed; STAR; Stats, Inc.; ALPHA; Big League; Daily Telegraph; Donna Hay; Dow Jones; Gold Coast Bulletin; Harper Collins Publishers; Harper Collins: Australia, Canada, Children’s Books, India, New Zealand, United States, United Kingdom; Herald Sun; Inside Out; New York Post; News America Marketing; News International; News of the World; NT News; Post-Courier; Smart Source; Sunday Herald Sun; Sunday Mail; Sunday Tasmanian; Sunday Territorian; Sunday Times; The Advertiser; The Australian; The Courier-Mail; The Mercury; The Sunday Mail; The Sunday Telegraph; The Sun; Sky News; The Sunday Times; The Times; Times Literary Supplement; The Wall Street Journal; The Wall Street Journal Digital Network; Weekly Times; Zondervan.
Finally, here are a few more photos from our visit to the Baltic Sea in Jurmala. As you will see, the sunsets here are breathtakingly beautiful.
Fox Broadcasting Company
Big Ten Network
FOX Business Network
Fox Movie Channel
FOX News Channel
FOX College Sports
FOX Sports Enterprises
Fox Deportes
FOX Sports Net
FOX Soccer Channel
Fuel TV
FX
Nat Geo Wild
National Geographic Channel United States National Geographic Channel Worldwide
Speed
STAR
Stats, Inc.
ALPHA
Big League
Daily Telegraph
donna hay
Dow Jones
Gold Coast Bulletin
Harper Collins Publishers
Harper Collins Australia
Harper Collins Canada
Harper Collins Children’s Books
Harper Collins India
Harper Collins New Zealand
Harper Collins US
Harper Collins UK
Herald Sun
Inside Out
New York Post
News America Marketing
News International
News of the World
NT News
Post-Courier
Smart Source
Sunday Herald Sun
Sunday Mail
Sunday Tasmanian
Sunday Territorian
Sunday Times
The Advertiser
The Australian
The Courier-Mail
The Mercury
The Sunday Mail
The Sunday Telegraph
The Sun
The Sunday Times
The Times
Times Literary Supplement
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal Digital Network
Weekly Times
Zondervan
Lucy and more Latvian folk songs…
Week 3 of the news segment:
1) A study published last week in the journal Science confirms the importance of the skeletal remains which have been nicknamed “Lucy.” The skeleton, discovered in 1974 in the Ethiopian Rift Valley, has been key to helping us understand the evolution of our particular human species, as scientists have long been certain that “Lucy” was different from other, older and slightly different humanoid skeletons. However, there has been much speculation about whether or not “Lucy” spent the majority of her time upright because the bones from her feet were missing. But now, after another discovery of skeletal remains in the Rift Valley, scientists have confirmed, thanks to the fact that these remains included foot bones, that Lucy would have indeed walked upright. Their evidence is the confirmation that humans at that time had a fourth metatarsal, meaning that they had an arched foot. As a result, scientists and archeologists believe t hat humans began walking upright about 3.5 million years ago, since a study of older remains (4.4 million years) from a different subspecies has proven that prior humans lacked the elongated, rigid metatarsals needed for upright walking.
2) For those of you who might be thinking about buying a new laptop, perhaps you might want to consider the following: Last autumn the Chinese government unexpectedly announced that they were going to strictly limit the exportation of so-called “rare Earth” elements such as niobium and scandium, which are used to produce a wide array of electronics, including laptops. This was, of course, huge news, given that in past years China has accounted for nearly 100 percent of the world’s supply of rare Earth elements. On Friday, then, in a desperate attempt to find alternative sources, representatives from the Japanese firms Mitsui & Co. and Sumitomo Corp. met with Russian officials about a potential plan to begin the mining of rare Earth deposits in Siberia. According to reports, the meeting also ostensibly involved a renewed discussion of the 65 year dispute over a group of four islands off of the northern tip of Japan. According to one estimate, it is thought that the island of Yakutia alone contains a deposit of rare Earth elements that is much larger even than Brazil’s famed and relatively untapped deposits, which are believed to hold enough niobium to meet the current rate of demand for some 500 years…Last year, manufactures used approximately 124,000 tons of rare Earth elements.
3) Today, in Moscow, the contingent of international astronauts participating in the Mars 500 Project emerged from their windowless steel tubes (which are meant to simulate a spacecraft) after 8 months of continuous confinement. The men, who are from Russia, China, France, and Italy, came out of their “spacecraft” and performed a series of simulated experiments on a “Mars-like” sandpit at the Moscow institute where the project is being conducted. Over the coming days the crew will engage in further exercises and experiments before they retreat back to their “spacecraft” for their “return” to Earth, which means another 240+ days of confinement in the steel tubes…The end goal of the project: to see how humans might mentally and physically react to a mission to Mars.
Finally, I’ve heard that many of you enjoyed the last folk songs I posted. So, here are a couple more:
First a more “traditional” song:
And second, a more “modern” folk song from Prāta Vētra, one of the most popular bands in Latvia:
I guess the rich folks are doing just fine…
Here is my second installment of the news section. Enjoy!
1) I guess the rich folks haven’t really been hit too hard by the recent economic turmoil of the last few years. Why do I say that? Because Christie’s International, the high-end London-based auction house (their other main auction house is in New York), released their sales numbers for 2010. The total sales for the year: $5.2 billion. And the surprising figure for many analysts was that some $965 million of that total came from auctions of contemporary art. For instance, someone paid $106.5 million for Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust,” while another buyer forked over $42.6 million for a Roy Lichtenstein painting. I very much appreciate art, and would indeed enjoy owning a Picasso, but, in all seriousness, these figures are a bit distasteful when there are so many people around the world who are in need of help.
Picasso's "Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust"
Roy Lichtenstein's "Ohhh, alright"--yep, $42.6 million for this...
2) The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced this week that the global consumption of fish was at an all-time high in 2010. On average, each person worldwide consumed 17kg (37.4 lbs) of fish. The FAO is quite concerned about the steady rise in this number because they estimate that 32% of all the world’s fish stocks are either overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion. I guess it’s a good thing, then, that Nebraskans love to eat beef rather than fish, otherwise that number would be much higher! I was also surprised to learn that fish is the most-traded food commodity in the world (I assumed it would be a grain or something), with total sales reaching $102 billion in 2008.
3) The European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) announced earlier this week that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will continue to run through 2012, before they shut it down to prepare the collider for full-energy collisions. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this project, the LHC was built to enable scientists and physicists to attempt to recreate the “Big Bang” in the hopes of finding the theorized Higgs boson particle, which is thought to be the base matter of the plasma which would have been created one millionth of a second after the Big Bang.
Here are some stats about the LHC:
1) On November 7, 2010, scientists smashed together ions for the first time (instead of only protons) and created a collision which resulted in temperatures a million times hotter than the center of our sun.
2) To combat these insanely high temperatures, the inside of the LHC is cooled to a temperature of -271.3 degrees Celsius — colder than deep space.
3) The electric bill for the LHC is roughly 19 million Euros per year (25.8 million U.S. dollars).
4) The LHC is housed in a 27 km-long (17 miles) tunnel some 100m below the Swiss-French border.
A picture from inside the LHC...
What must Mody think?…
So, I have decided to add a new feature to our blog: a weekly rundown of my favorite news stories. As some of you know, I spend way too much time reading the news, as I became convinced in the aftermath of 9/11 that it is necessary to read articles from multiple websites and multiple countries in order to get a better sense of what is really happened in the world. Consequently, as a result of the death of independent, investigative journalism, I spend hours and hours reading the news. But besides making Brittney annoyed, I have discovered that all this reading can be quite a benefit. For example, when I am teaching classes at the university, I begin each Friday lecture with a run-down of my favorite news stories of the week. At first the students seemed to think this was a bit strange, but by the end of every semester I can tell that many actually look forward to this weekly occurrence, and, even better, some begin to share their own favorite stories with the class. Anyway, since I am not teaching this semester, I decided to simply post my favorites here. I hope you enjoy this segment. Here goes…
1) No, it’s not a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” it’s just the evidently routine work of the USDA. The story: The USDA finally admited that it has been poisoning millions of birds after thousands of starlings were found dead in a park in Yankton, South Dakota. It turns out that a dairy farmer in Nebraska had complained about starlings feasting on his feed pile, so what does the USDA recommend? Not cover your pile, Mr. Farmer, but let’s just kill all of them! How strange. But it turns out that in fact this is nothing new, as the USDA has killed millions of Blackbirds over the last few years as part of a program that evidently was started back in the late 1960s. Perhaps all of those recent weird stories of massive bird deaths in Arkansas, Kentucky, etc. were also the work of the USDA?…I’m not quite sure what to make of all of this, as I always think it is dangerous for mankind to play God, but I do know that it makes me think of Mody and wonder what she might be thinking from up in heaven. For those of you who don’t know, Mody, as we called her, was Gram’s mom, and she was such a cool person. And one of my fondest memories of Mody was her daily battle with the Blackbirds. You see, Mody had numerous bird houses in her yard and very much enjoyed watching the songbirds as she sat on the front step of her house, which was just on the outskirts of Cozad. But the Blackbirds drove her crazy because they were always scaring away the other birds. To solve this problem, then, Mody would sit there on her front step armed with a slingshot and a mountain of pebbles. And let me tell you, she was a dead-eye when it came to hitting those birds. But now, looking back, I am starting to think that perhaps she was actually sort of fund of those Blackbirds, as I really think that she very much enjoyed their daily battle.
2) A recent study of polar bears resulted in an amazing statistic. Scientists tracked a polar bear that swam continuously for 232 hours (and 426 miles) in search of sea ice. Unbelievable!
3) This is not a recent story (I shared this one with my class last semester), but given that it involves the Baltic Sea, I thought I would share it with you… In July divers stumbled upon a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea, where they discovered cases of bottles that were perfectly preserved at the bottom of the dark, cold sea. Not knowing what was inside, a diver grabbed a bottle and started his ascent. Then, suddenly, when he got to the surface, the top popped off, and that is when they discovered that it was champagne. This is not just any champagne though, but perhaps the world’s oldest, at some 200 years. In November, then, the decision was made to sell this sunken treasure, but before they did so two bottles were opened to allow sommeliers to taste it. Their verdict? Unbelievably well preserved, and still crisp with a nice amount of acidity to offset the sweetness. As a result, the sommeliers estimated that each bottle might sell for around $135,000! I wonder how one might decide when an event is special enough to warrant cracking open a $135,000 bottle of champagne…
Until next week…
crookedtimberofhumanity 