What a Disaster!

Monday, January 3, 2011 by Dick.

Policemen police. Runners run. Writers write. And we all look over our own shoulders now and then.

This week I write about what I missed. And what I didn’t.

I cherish a few beliefs about myownself. This blog isn’t about me. These columns are what Faux News calls fair and balanced. And I AM™ never w-r-r-rong.

OK. Two out of three ain’t bad.

Last month, in writing about millionaires, I admitted that I’d rather be a millionaire than not. I’m not going to increase my personal wealth much by putting a Paypal button on this site. The week before that, I confessed that I now understand why liberals don’t geddit. And just two weeks before, I told the story of my mom at the corner of High and Gay.

This is my 333 entry since I started blogging in 2008. 220 of them have been in the op-ed category I call Random Access. Many of those (151) fell in the Politics and News category. I imagine you can figure out what topics I covered.

“Politics is like the weather,” I wrote in 2008. “Everybody talks about it. People think they can predict the weather. Or change it.”

The pieces that had more impact were more personal. 2010 was a busy year. Liz Arden sent me a family picture of herself with her parents and I riffed that into a story about my mom as an elderly woman who could have been slain by a taxi. We learned that “full” in a small town parking lot is different than “full” in Miami or New York. gekko and I wrote an ongoing series together.

My family didn’t have a lot of stuff when I was growing up. We had a boat but not a lot of cash. My dad’s job was the typical junior exec and we shared the homestead with my grandfather; we all had to work for what we did have. I came out of that feeling depraved but not deprived.

Rufus missed [bleep]ing Asbestos Dust back in May. He was amazed. The rest of us about died. A week earlier, I had written that “Kids aren’t allowed to eat dirt.” Number One daughter had been banned from classes because she wore a t-shirt to school.

I did spend some time wondering why my friend Swampy Swamtek, with all his brainpower, with all his education, with all his belief in conservation, can’t remember to turn out the lights when he leaves a room. I remembered that, since the heady days of Apollo 13 forty years ago, no man has had to walk twenty-five miles to school every morning, uphill, barefoot. Both ways. According to this president’s plan no American man ever will again.

And I took some time off from worrying about the claim that women’s hot flashes are responsible for Global Warming to reminisce about my sports car races in the 70s.

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I somehow missed the fact that the Mets did not make the World Series. I didn’t once write about the United/Continental airline’s merger that brought together 700 planes, dropped employment from 88,000 to 77,000, and shared 7 bags of 2003 peanuts among us. Airlines put fares up $20 across the board. I never once mentioned Christine O’Donnell’s Rhodes Scholarship in comedy which is at least as credible as her candidacy turned out to be.

I’ll keep hammering the small town politicians who want you to believe that paying twice as much for half as many police officers in your town is a way to save you (tax) money. And when Congress acts on H.R.6907, a measure to ban further activity at Eyjafjallajökull, you’ll hear about it here first. Most important, in the spirit of WikiLeaks, pretty much everything personal rattling around between my ears will sooner or later fall out on these pages.

Politics is like the climate. Everybody talks about it. People think they can predict the climate. Or change it.

Posted in Writing, Politics & News, PC, Media, Random Access | 2 Comments »

How Many Millionaires?

Monday, December 20, 2010 by Dick.

“Rich politicians take care of their own,” Fred Grimm wrote in the Miami Herald yesterday. “The rich are different from you and me. Well, me anyway. And they’re damn well positioned to keep it that way.”

Here’s his proof: Florida has a fabulously wealthy governor-elect who spent $73 million of his own money to get elected and a Legislature “laden with millionaires.” 18 millionaires will be “slumming in the state Senate. That’s 18 out of 40 senators.” 34 millionaires vote in the House. Out of 120 state reps. “Rich reps are forced to mingle with the unwashed rabble,” Mr. Grimm wrote.

“The U.S. Congress wallows in even more disproportionate affluence than our elected moneybags in Tallahassee.” He used the Center for Responsive Politics to find that 261 members of Congress are millionaires, and 55 are worth more than $10 million. Median wealth in the Senate rose from $2.27 million to $2.38 million last year.

I apologize in advance. I tried to make this funny. It isn’t.

This kind of writing irks me. My neighbor Stan is a millionaire. He doesn’t feel rich. In fact, he complains about anything but rich. A Texas friend, Billy Bob, is just about on the median wealth of the Senate. He feels richer than I do, but he ain’t buying jet airplanes. Not many other millionaires are, either. So the Herald columnist who wants grimly to stick it to we fabulously wealthy types mingling with the unwashed rabble seems to have left out a fact or two.

Let’s look at some real figures, albeit from 2009 before the electoral shakeup. Only about 17% of Congress Critters are women although 51% of Americans are. 178 representatives and 58 senators are lawyers although only .3% of Americans are. 400 representatives and all but two senators have earned college degrees; many have advanced degrees although only 27% of Americans do. The average age in the House is about 56 and in the Senate, almost 62 although the average age in America is 37.

So, it looks as if our Congress critters are mostly rich, white, college-educated lawyers between 55 and 64, and the general population isn’t.

The general population is about 37 years old, and a mixed bag of ethnicities and schooling. Just .7% of them overall are millionaires. Zero point seven percent.

So what happens when we compare Congress critters to mostly white, college-educated lawyers between 55 and 64? Or even just to college-educated Americans?

The Federal Reserve Bank looks at the median value of financial assets for most folks in America, primarily so banks can sell us checking accounts. The median is the “middle number” of a sorted list of numbers so half the numbers in the list will be less and half the numbers will be greater. The smaller numbers can be a lot smaller or just a little bit smaller but, in this case can never be less than zero. The bigger numbers can be just a teeny bit greater or can be hugely larger.

The Fed reported on those median values. It turns out that households of people aged 55-64 had about $95,200 in cash and stocks in 2007 (college graduates of all ages held slightly more at $99,400). Household median “nonfinancial assets” like your house and your car was $347,000 for the Congressional age group and $435,400 for college graduates of all ages. So the mid-line for college grads of any age is to be half a millionaire.

Half the college educated households are worth more than half a million?

Mr. Grimm didn’t tell us that.

27% of Americans have a college degree. 5% of Americans are “rich” millionaires. That means that about a fifth of Americans with a college degree are probably millionaires.

Mr. Grimm didn’t tell us that either.

Perhaps Mr. Grimm spent Thanksgiving with a can of Spam so he wants us to swallow his turkey.

Perhaps we need more college educated households although that offers no guarantees. The BLS reports that more than 482,000 college-educated Americans are customer service reps. Over 100,000 college-educated Americans are maids and janitors; 5% of those have a Ph.D.

And perhaps, as Mr. Shakespear reminds us, our bigger problem with Congress is the number of lawyers rather than the number of rich lawyers.

Mr. Grimm irks me because he trotted out an abundance of ogre words and a sparse few facts to back them up. I guar-an-damn-tee you that being a millionaire ain’t what it used to be.

I searched for a biography of Mr. Grimm who says “the way [the rich] see things . . . well, they’re different from you and me.” No joy. He was a general assignment reporter at the Herald after working for other newspapers. He has been a columnist there for about 20 years. I’m going out on a limb here without giving you the data I wanted him to give us, but I’m thinking Mr. Grimm is a limousine lib. He probably has a college degree. He certainly rubs elbows with the very same kind of folks lounging around Tallahassee and Washington that he excoriated yesterday. After all, the BLS also reports that the top 10% of news analysts, reporters, and columnists (meaning senior staff at major metro dailies) earned more than $77,480 per year.

Columnists are supposed to make waves. I do.

But Miami columnists ought not complain about how cold it is in South Florida when the fact show it is 60° colder in North Puffin. We do better making waves with facts that stand up to daylight scrutiny.

Warning: Unexpected transition ahead. Follow along and be careful where you step.

I will address the question, Is Liberalism really Liberalislam another time.

The Herald column does what so many limousine liberals and fundamentalist Muslims alike want to do: drag down the rich so everyone is poor and scrabbling in the dirt.

Me? I’d rather be a millionaire so here’s my proposal. If you are so apologetic for your personal wealth, give me your fortune. I guarantee I will hire a dungeon master to help you feel really ashamed.

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You libs want something worth groaning about? Mr. Grimm could have offered a couple of valid statistics:

• In about 40 years, the average U.S. CEO pay has grown by an order of magnitude. Mine hasn’t.
• Congress critters upped their average wealth by 16% in 2009, a year the rest of us took a hit.

Americans should celebrate that some of us can become wealthy. Want to do better? The answer is not to tear down those who have but rather to improve the odds for the have nots.

Posted in Writing, Newspaper "Science", Society, Politics & News, Random Access | 7 Comments »

Did You (Can You) Pass Math?

Tuesday, November 9, 2010 by Dick.

Did You Pass Math? is a blogware plug-in that “restricts comment spam by throwing the commenter a simple math question.” It works about 100% of the time against automated coments. Unfortunately, it also works about 50% of the time against real coments. When it fails, it eats your comment. I think it fails most often around suppertime.

Here’s the scoop. Either include a nice, Dunning-sized scoop of rum raisin ice cream with your comment or write your comment in a separate app like Notepad or your word processor of choice, then copy and paste it into the comment field.

Thanks!

Posted in Writing, About Me | 5 Comments »

I Can’t Be Arsed

Monday, October 18, 2010 by Dick.

I don’t usually use George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” in public and rarely write them.

Mr. Carlin’s original words are what we now call “vulgar slang,” seven nouns, two of which often stand as verbs. Two excretory functions, four that denigrate, two action terms, and one that is every boy’s favorite body part. I’ve never been fond of bleep-censoring but it is still used by American network broadcasters to titillate us.

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
–Mark Twain

Although Twain pretended he did not have a typewriter, he was a pretty smart feller. The modifiers we use in writing can take away from the message. That doesn’t stop us from specially crafting flowery, robust, descriptive text.

Some simply avoid the “dirty words” by substituting clean ones.

Liza Arden has said she “couldn’t be arsed” at work more than a few times this week. Ms. Arden is an engineer and no relation to the cosmetics conglomerate. Her cow orkers were unmoved by her phrasing which surprised her and sent me on this flight of fancy. Thanks to PBS and the Internet, there are probably few British substitutes for bothered that we haven’t heard before.

Substitutes? Google offers about 210,000 results for alternate swear words.

Bleep and fweep and meep and yeep are popular.
RedDwarf adopted smeg as an all purpose curse.
The movie peeps use airhead for rectally enhanced individuals.
Freak (and the ever popular freak off) explain themselves.

As Andy Rooney might say, “Gosh is for people who don’t believe in heck. Who the frell do they think they are?”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports on “Y U Luv Texts, H8 Calls.” Teens send 3,339 texts a month. Adults, just 323 per month. Me? I get two or three incoming texts in a busy month and those are usually mistakes.

Although Ms. Arden calls me a Luddite, that’s not because I cannot text.

“Yeah, right,” she said. “You’re too cheap to buy a data plan.”

Texters started abbreviating to save space and stay under SMS limits or to encode the looming presence of authority (LTTIC). Unlimited text plans have largely eliminated the need for brevity but typing on a micro keyboard is still typing on a micro keyboard.

I don’t text because I see brevity, misspelling, malaprops, and corruption replacing the richness of language. And I hate the tiny keyboard, not to mention picking out letters on a phone keypad.

“I sooo no ur thinking about me. So I thot I wud say hi! LH6″
“My luser cat did the CRZest thing. Off to vet.”
“Orf to home garden sho. I luv U. TBL”

DQMOT: I think the Brits do this better than we do but sooner or later it’s so satisfying just to have a good fuck.

Posted in Writing, Sociology, Random Access | 5 Comments »

Pravda

Tuesday, July 13, 2010 by Dick.

My friend Dean “Dino” Russell is a roofer in the middle Keys. Dancing about on roofs all his life has made him the most physically fit man in the Home Depot; it also gives him an overview of life. He is the third-most conservative man I know.

This morning, Dino emailed me a copy of the CyberAlert compilation of news items reported in the daily BiasAlert. Calling itself “America’s Media Watchdog,” the Media Research Center News Analysis Division “document(s), expose(s) and neutralize(s) liberal media bias.”

The following examples aren’t very exciting but they lead to an important discovery about the “news.”

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Tuesday July 13, 2010

1. Matthews to Democrat: What Percentage of Republicans Would You Put In the ‘Nut Bag’?
Chris Matthews, on Monday’s Hardball, brought on his own personal Congressman, Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen, to review how his party was going to distinguish themselves from the GOP in the midterms with Matthews asking the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee head if they were focusing on all the “crazy” Republicans, or in other words “nut collecting.” Matthews, after playing a clip of Barack Obama singling out Republicans Joe Barton, John Boehner and Roy Blunt, also reminded Van Hollen the President missed another “crazy” person with “B” name as he proclaimed: “If you’re going out looking for nuts, it would seem like you’d put [Michele Bachmann] in your basket.” Matthews even tried to pin down Van Hollen by demanding: “What percentage of the Republican Party would you put in the nut bag right now?”

Yawn. Chris Matthews is a syndicated “commentator,” not a reporter. Beck probably asked a guest “What percentage of Dumbocrats would you put in the ‘nut bag’?” yesterday, too.

2. CBS’s Schieffer Interviews Eric Holder, Ignores Black Panther Case
While devoting all of Sunday’s Face the Nation to an interview with Attorney General Eric Holder, CBS host Bob Schieffer failed to ask a single question about the Obama Justice Department dropping a voter intimidation case against the Black Panthers or allegations that the department has adopted a policy of ignoring such cases. At the end of the interview, Schieffer even asked about Holder’s infamous comment that the United States was a “nation of cowards” when it came to discussing race. However, the Face the Nation host failed to use that comment as a transition to the Black Panthers case, despite the fact that former DOJ attorney Christian Adams recently testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, accusing the department of adopting a policy of refusing to pursue voter intimidation cases that involved black defendants and white victims.

Yawn again. I watched FTN and included some of it in Sunday’s commentary. Bob Schieffer didn’t ask General Holder about a lot of things. He didn’t ask about U.S. v. Microsoft. He didn’t ask about Goldman Sachs. He didn’t ask about ACORN. He didn’t ask about the voter intimidation accusation made by Christian Adams.

Some of his questions were softish but they weren’t bad.

3. No Balance Required? MSNBC Features Only Pro-Gay Side of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Debate
MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer on Monday appeared baffled as to why more U.S. politicians weren’t ’standing up’ to demand the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” touting it as “a civil rights issue.” In the span of two hours, the cable network featured a gay member of the military and a conservative to discuss the issue. However, both guests favored allowing homosexuals to serve openly.

That is the most troubling of these examples, although not surprising. Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) criticized Brewer live on the air; he said she was “absurd”, “fundamentally dishonest”, “irresponsible” and lacked “integrity” for her handling of interviews. She’s allegedly a news anchor, not a commentator and did her time as general assignment reporter. We should expect better.

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None of this should worry us but for one terrible truth: the American news audience — including Dino and Rufus — has come to believe that Brewer and Colbert and Matthews and Beck and Limbaugh and O’Reilly are reporters and what they do is news.

Posted in Writing, Politics & News, Random Access | 3 Comments »

What a Freaking Difference!

Monday, June 7, 2010 by Dick.

“I missed fucking Asbestos Dust?” Rufus said. He was amazed. The rest of us about died.

For those just whooshed, Asbestos Dust is the nom-de-Net of a writer from Texas or Arkansas or maybe Alaska. I met him at a party in Pennsylvania to which Rufus was invited but did not attend.

Word choice makes a difference. Even word position makes a difference. “I fucking missed Asbestos Dust?” has a very different meaning than what Rufus actually said.

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be,” Mark Twain wrote. Regular readers will realize that I use little profanity in real life and even less in my writings. I will not use any of the other seven dirty words here today; younger readers need not tune to a different channel.

On the other hand, I will take issue with how the anti-science crowd uses its words.

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NPR’s Science Friday focused on new nuclear technologies in the episode broadcast March 5, 2010 . Guests included Earth Policy Institute founder Lester Brown, Scott Burnell, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission public affairs officer, John Deal, CEO of Hyperion Power Generation, and Professor Richard Lester who heads the Nuclear Science and Engineering Department at MIT.

“What is the future of nuclear power,” Mr. Brown asked himself. “It’s cost cost cost.”

Waste could kill nuclear power, he said. “Imagine if the billion dollar price tag [the per plant cost of the Yucca Mountain project] had been on the table when they were being considered, most of them would never have gotten off the ground.”

A billion dollar “extra” cost per plant sounds excessive, doesn’t it? It is exceptionally expensive if all you know is that one partial factoid.

“The volume of waste produced is very, very small,” Professor Lester said. A nuclear plant produces a couple of ounces of waste per person per year; a coal plant produces about 10 tons of waste per person per year. “We can afford to spend a lot of money on safely storing this material. The impact on the cost of nuclear electricity is actually very small.”

“Our cost … is just under 10 cents per KW-hour,” Mr. Deal said later. That includes the waste.

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“What we have in this country, and that’s not going to help with the image of nuclear power, is the discovery that there are now 27 older plants with underground pipes that are leaking tritium, and tritium is a carcinogen,” Mr. Brown said. “In Vermont, as I recall, with the most recent instance occurring at Vermont Yankee.”

Tritium leaks sound pretty dangerous, don’t they? They are excruciatingly dangerous if all you know is one partial factoid.

The hydrogen isotope tritium is a by-product of modern nuclear reactor operations. It combines easily with oxygen to form “tritiated water” which can be ingested by drinking or eating organic foods. It is a radiation hazard when inhaled, ingested via food, water, or absorbed through the skin but, since tritium is not much of a beta emitter, it is not dangerous when simply nearby. It has a 7 to 14 day half life in the human body. That means a single-incident ingestion is not usually dangerous and it precludes accumulating tritium from the environment in your body long-term.

“There have been 27 instances … [but] they are not all ongoing,” Mr. Burnell said. “In the case of Vermont Yankee … the contamination is not reaching any drinking water sources; it’s not reaching the nearby Connecticut River. So it is not presenting any public health issue and we, at the NRC, are closely watching how Vermont Yankee is evaluating the situation to discover where the leak is coming from. We will make sure that they do identify it properly, that they fix it properly, and that in every instance they are doing what is necessary to operate the plant safely and in accordance with our regulations.”

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“I’m not a geologist or an engineer,” Mr. Brown said as he evaluated the complex dance of creating and running a nuclear power plant. Ya think?

Word choice — what we actually say — makes a difference in what listeners understand. Mr. Brown certainly knows that. This is a real example of choosing words to propagandize rather than choosing to disclose the facts.

So, did we fucking miss A.D. or did we miss fucking him?

“It’s been too long since I had a taste of the Dust,” Rufus said.

There is no hope.

Posted in Newspaper "Science", Writing, Science (not-so-real), Science (real), Politics & News, Random Access | 3 Comments »