Are Rail Subsidies Too High?

December 21st, 2008

I always hear people say that passenger rail in America should not get subsidies and that if it can’t sustain itself in the open market, it shouldn’t exist. Actually, I could agree with that — if the playing field were even and automobile and truck traffic weren’t so heavily subsidized. So here are a few little figures to contribute to that debate:

  • 60: percentage of the 53.3 billion dollars the government spends each year that is covered by gasoline taxes and fees and vehicle registration fees.
  • 60: percentage of costs on Amtrack covered by passenger fees according to a 1997 Cato Institute study.
  • 14: percentage of damage caused by trucks paid for by the taxes and fees on trucks.
  • 150,000: miles of railroad track in the US currently (approx).
  • 429,883: miles of railroad track in the US in 1930.

How many miles of track might we have today and what might the relative ticket prices be if our streets and highways were not so heavily subsidized? Or what level of subsidy is appropriate for maintaining infrastructure? Those are open questions, but let’s not pretend that passenger rail subsidies are abnormal and some supposedly free-market highways system is normal.

Sources:

  • “America in Motion,” Lorraine Moffa and Nigel Holmes, American History, vol. 43, n. 6 (Feb 2009), pp. 42–43.
  • “Amtrack Subsidies:This is no Way to Run a Railroad,” Stephen Moore, on Cato.org

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Ranter Index 12/08

December 16th, 2008

I’ve been meaning to publish a new Ranter Index, modeled on the old Harper’s Index for quite a while. Focus on healthcare in America. The number in square brackets refers to the source, given below.

  • 4 dollars: portion of the cost of a $299 iPod made in China that actually stays in China, according to University of California study [1].
  • 160 dollars: amount that stays in the United States [1].
  • 800,000: gallons of water per day that an ethanol plant in drought-ridden Florida plans to use [1].
  • 5.25: number of gallons of water for every gallon of ethanol produced [1].
  • 40: percentage of illegal immigrants who enter the US legally and overstay their visas [2].
  • 90+: percentage decline in worldwide shark population, due in large part to the multi-billion dollar shark fin industry, supplying shark fin soup (and subject of the documentary “Sharkwater”) [3].
  • 37,000: number of officers in the New York City Police Department [4].
  • 84: number of countries worldwide having fewer than 37,000 soldiers in their military [4].
  • 14: percent of plastic water bottles that get recycled [5].
  • 1,000: number of persons worldwide who sign up for cell phone service every minute [6].
  • 90: percentage of likely voters who say they are Christian [7].
  • 46: percentage of likely voters who say they are born-again or evangelical Christians [7].
  • 16 billion: Rough number of kilowatt hours burned by video game consoles annually [8]
  • 16 billion: Rough number of kilowatt hours burned to power all of San Diego annually [8].
  • 160: dollars required to run a PlayStation 3 for a year at $0.10/kWh[8]
  • 15: dollars required to run a PlayStation 3 for a year if the user turns off the unit after use [8]
  • 140 million: number of Americans who attend a pro sporting event each year [9].
  • 800 million: number of Americans who attend a museum each year [9].
  • 55: percentage of Americans who think the US has the best quality health care in the world [14].
  • 1: US rank in terms of health care spending per capita ($6,697 per capita in 2007, 20% higher than second highest Luxembourg) [14].
  • 28: rank in terms of infant mortality (i.e. 27 countries including Greece, the Czech Republic and Portugal have fewer deaths per 1000 live births than the US) [14].
  • 19: rank, out of 19 industrialized countries, of US in averting deaths that could be prevented with medical care (i.e all other industrialized nations studied are better than the US at avoiding medically preventable death) [14].
  • 44,000–98,000: US deaths annually attributed to medical errors [14].
  • 4th out of four: US rank in survivability of cervical cancer, among US, Italy, Ireland and Germany [14].
  • 4th out of four: US rank in survivability of breast cancer among US, Switzerland, Norway and Britain [14]
  • 922,000: dollars per year of salary to Leonard Shaeffer while running California Blue Cross as a non-profit [10].
  • 19.2 million: Schaeffer’s salary in dollars ten years after conversion of Blue Cross of California to a for profit, not counting over $100 million in bonuses [10].
  • 900,000: salary in dollars of Norwood Davis when running Blue Shield/Blue Cross of Virginia in 1995 as a non-profit [10].
  • 6.5 million: salary in dollars of Thomas Steen six years later when running BlueShield/Blue Cross of Virginia as a for-profit, plus $16 million in stock options [10].
  • 2/3: proportion of administrative costs of for profit insurers spent on health-care denial [11].
  • 1/2 trillion: number of dollars of our health care costs attributed to inefficiencies by a 2007 report on health care in 124 countries [12].
  • 75 billion: number of dollars wasted compared to other countries, according the same report, due solely to the fact that those other countries have publicly-financed health care [12].
  • 20: percentage of American households where a language other than English is spoken in the home [13].
  • 42.6: percentage of Californian households where a language other than English is spoken in the home [13].
  • 92.5: percentage of households in Hialeah, Florida households where a language other than English is spoken in the home [13].
  • 5.5 million: number of American households considered “linguistically isolated”, meaning that nobody over the age of 14 speaks English well [13].
  1. Economist, March 1-7, 2008, pp. 56, 36.
  2. Newsweek, Jan 28, 2008, p. 36
  3. National Geographic Adventure, March 2008, p. 34.
  4. 60 Minutes Online
  5. Elizabeth Royte, author of Bottlemania, in an interview excerpt on Marketplace, on NPR, June 17, 2008, during the letters section of the program.
  6. Minute Waltz, New York Times online, citing Star.com, May 16, 2008.
  7. AP-Roper Poll, Sept. 5-10th, 2008
  8. Lowering the Cost of Play: Improving the Energy Efficiency of Video Game Consoles by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
  9. 24 November 2008, All Things Considered, National Public Radio.
  10. Free Lunch, p.225.
  11. Free Lunch, p. 228.
  12. Free Lunch, p. 232.
  13. USA Weekend, Nov. 14-16, p. 17, “English Loses Ground”.
  14. “The Myth of the ‘Best in the World’”, Sharon Begley, Newsweek, March 31, 2008, p. 47.

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The Value of Education

December 4th, 2008

I was recently listening to someone on the radio who had worked with the Rwandan truth and reconciliation commission and she was saying how one of the things that surprised her was how the people who participated in and fomented the genocide were often the best educated. Priests, doctors, teachers. The heros she found were often simple people.

That got me thinking of one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books (Journey to the End of the Night by Céline), also speaking of Africa:

“The natives, they don’t do anything without being beaten with clubs. They retain that dignity, whereas the whites, perfected by public education, they work on their own. The club ends up just making the one who wields it tired, while the hope of becoming rich and powerful force fed to the whites costs nothing, absolutely nothing.”

Or, in the original:

“Les indigènes eux, ne fonctionnent guère en somme qu’à coups de trique, ils gardent cette dignité, tandis que les blancs, perfectionnés par l’instruction publique, ils marchent tout seuls. La trique finit par fatiguer celui qui la manie, tandis que l’espoir de devenir puissants et riches dont les blancs sont gavés, ça ne coûte rien, absolument rien.”

Louis-Ferrand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit<, p. 175, Denoel et Steel, Paris, 1932.

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Guess what? Obama is Black

November 6th, 2008

I’ve been hearing a few people complain that the media and McCain and Bush have focussed too much on the fact that Obama is black. I have to say, it remains to be seen whether the election of the man Obama is a great thing, but the election of a black man to the presidency is, I think, hugely inspiring.

The first candidate I ever supported based on an independent decision, was Shirley Chisolm, the black congresswoman who ran for president in 1972. I was nine, but I had made a lot of progress in my own head. Only a few years earlier I had asked my mother if the new and first black family moving in on our block was going to burn down the neighborhood because, at four years old, all I knew about black people was what I saw on the news during the Newark riots. She assured me “They’re just like us” and all subsequent encounters and friendships bore that out, so I took this to be conventional wisdom that every adult knew.

Though it wasn’t important to me in 1972 as a nine year-old to have a black female president per se, I did very much want to live in a country where people wouldn’t pay much attention to race and thought that if Shirley Chisolm could get elected, that “visible evidence” of progress would fuel much more progress. My nine-year old mind didn’t see how premature that wish was. This was the election where George Wallace, running on a blatantly racist and segregationist platform, took 42% of the vote in Florida’s Democratic primary.

So I think about Obama’s race a lot and see it as a watershed moment. I’m still registering it. In some weird way it’s like the visible evidence that maybe we’ve arrived, in this one respect, at the America I was hoping for when I was nine.

Still a long way to go, but a journey of thousand miles begins with a single step and this was one hell of a step.

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Republicans put Obama on $10 with watermelon and fried chicken

October 16th, 2008
Bill created by Chaffey Community Republican Women, Federated

Bill created by Chaffey Community Republican Women, Federated

This is completely beyond belief. A California Republican group made up a fake $10 bill with Obama’s image on it, surrounded by fried chicken, watermelon, and ribs. I’ve never been surprised by the latent racism in the Republican party. What blows me away is that the woman who’s responsible could say:

said she had no racist intent. “I never connected,” she told the newspaper. “It was just food to me. It didn’t mean anything else.

I think I might just puke.

According to the Press Enterprise article this image is being circulated in emails in Republican circles. This comes on the heels of another local Republican party affiliate circulating an image of Obama in a turban advocating waterboarding Obama.

Why is the Republican party still so hateful? Why is it still so redneck? Is there any hope for it?

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Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA

October 15th, 2008

If you want to be really afraid, read Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, a prize-winning history of the CIA based heavily on recently declassified internal documents and hundreds of interviews with former and current agents, including most living directors and some dead ones (the author has been covering the intelligence beat for quite a while). Legacy is a tragic and depressing read, but a good read for any citizen. It’s what I would call a “managerial” or “administrative” history of the CIA in the sense that it floats mostly on the level of policy and general direction and doesn’t get deeply into the details of CIA operations. In some way that’s disappointing, but it’s an eye-opening overview of the CIA.

I always knew that the CIA’s “successes” had deeply damaged American security (I mean Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Chile, Honduras, and so forth), but I never realized how many catastrophic and damaging failures there were that they managed to keep under wraps during the Cold War. Nor did I fully understand the structural reasons for the idiocy of overthrowing governments and installing dictatorships (i.e. it goes beyond Cold War ideology and to the fact that the CIA was incapable of producing any useful intelligence on the Soviets or the Chinese, who had much more disciplined spy agencies).

The Bay of Pigs is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s also Indonesia, abysmal intelligence on the Soviets and the Chinese (worse than worthless). Not to mention fact that the CIA inadvertently supplied much of the operating budget for the Italian communist party for over a decade!
The book gives little hope that the CIA has gotten better or even can as currently structured. Virtually every president has asked the CIA to operate illegally and spy on US citizens within the US in direct violation of its mandate.

That said, Nicholas Dujmovic has a very long review of Legacy of Ashes that calls into question many of Weiner’s basic assertions and has some compelling demonstrations of Weiner’s fast and loose style that mistrepresents facts and quite often simple gets them wrong. In other words, these errors concern not complex matters of interpretation where careful scholars might reasonably disagree, but simple, verifiable facts like what year the president made a given speech. Carelessness is one of the cardinals sins of a historian and Dujmovic’s corrections are constitute an important critique of Weiner’s work.

Dujmovic is a CIA historian and his review appears on the CIA site. Despite the obvious bias inherent in that position, I do think there is a difference between a historian and a journalist, no matter how serious the journalist is. The standard for proof and how far one is willing to go from the facts, and the level of immersion in the specialty are different. In general, this is what makes historians more accurate and more boring than journalists. Of course, there are good historians and bad, good journalists and bad, but historians write primarily for other historians, so the impulse is to get it right even at the cost of being complex, boring and perhaps difficult to follow. Journalist write for non-specialists readers, so the impulse is to make the story compelling and readable and have an interesting narrative arc. Often scrupulous adherence to the facts suffers.

Being only a casual reader here, I can only guess at who to believe, but when it comes to basic facts, I would bet on Dujmovic. When it comes to broader interpretation, though, it’s an open question that I don’t feel qualified to answer. And thought Dujmovic quibbles with Weiner’s facts and his blanket judgements, in between is what I think are the essential conclusions of the book:

  • the CIA was generally poor at intelligence, especially human intelligence and that was not just a recent failing. It has always been true. The US was never able to get decent intelligence on what was happening within the Soviet Union or China. Dujmovic would add that the CIA was good at surveillance intelligence (satellites and spy planes).
  • Presidents need good, ideologically neutral intelligence and need to act on it, but that has never happened either because of the CIA’s inability to provide it or because of the president’s unwillingness to accept it. I think both authors agree on that.
  • The CIA has been a weak institution, adept at creating mayhem, but not at keeping operations secret, except from the American public. I think they more or less agree on that, but would put it in starkly different terms and lay the blame in very different places.
  • covert ops have, overwhelmingly been damaging to the United States and have achieved little of value. Perhaps the one exception, the ultimate outcome of which remains debatable of course, is arming the Afghanis, which played a significant role in bankrupting the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War. Since neither the future of Russia nor Afghanistan has been worked out, we can’t really know the legacy of those operations. Clearly, the covert ops in Iran, Chile, Indonesia, Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were deeply damaging both to the people of those nations and to the long-term interests of the US. Dujmovic would disagree, no doubt, but then that conclusion is as much a matter of philosophy and the long view versus short view as it is a matter of fact in any way.

When it gets down to more specifics, Dujmovic certainly gives me pause to question many of Weiner’s assertions and, me being in journalist mode, or even worse, “journaling mode” here, this is from memory… so caveat lector. But here are some of Weiner’s other assertions as I recall them:

  • Until Nixon, every president says he’s opposed to the covert service and just wants intelligence, and then quickly becomes drunk on the power of overthrowing governments and throwing elections and they all behave pretty much the same. With Johnson, and then with Nixon, intelligence, however, becomes entirely subservient to politics, a trend that of course had tragic consequences during the Bush admin. Dujmovic has some quibbles about Weiner’s assertions that the CIA more or less conned presidents into covert ops, but that critique, I think, supports the idea that the presidents could not resist the thrill of covert ops.
  • The US overthrew governments and controlled or attempted to control elections in more countries than you can count: Guatemala, Honduras, Iran, Iraq, Chile, all the ones you know about. But the US also controlled the elections in Italy for twenty years through cash infusions and propaganda. Johnson actually spent more per voter on the elections in Chile than he did on his own presidential campaign. I’m not sure how one can prove that the US controlled democratic elections, but certainly money has its influence.
  • Through the 1960s, the CIA had few intelligence successes. They predicted that the Soviets were at least three years from an atomic weapon and probably more like seven. Within the week the Soviets exploded a nuclear warhead. They said that the Indonesian government would not respond militarily to the CIA coup attempt for at least six months. As they were giving that briefing to the president, the president received a cable saying that the Indonesian army, [b]with intelligence help from the US military who still regarded Indonesia as a valued ally[/b], had bombed the CIA proxy forces to smithereens. Dujmovic particularly takes issue with the idea that the CIA intelligence was worthless and notes that Weiner gets some of his basic facts wrong, like saying that a CIA report from 1960 grossly understimated the number fo Soviet ICBMs, when in fact the report was from 1957, projecting ICBM levels for 1961.
  • The CIA was full of loose canons and for many years the head of covert ops did not even report to the head of the CIA, but straight to our beloved Attourney General Bobby Kennedy. Dujmovic takes issue with many of the claims here as well though not specifically with regard to Kennedy.
  • After failing utterly to gather intelligence on the Soviets (fact partly disputed by Dujmovic), the CIA got its act together in SE Asia and started getting good, actionable intelligence. Unfortunately, what their intelligence said, as early as 1964, was that the war was not winnable and we should get out. This was completely unacceptable to the hawks in the Kennedy and Johnson admins (Bobby, MacNamara, Bundy, all those). At one point, the CIA estimated there were at least 500,000 VC in South Viet Nam and probably more. The response from the White House and the Pentagon was that number was unacceptable and needed to be below 400,000 or the entire hiearchy of the CIA would be on the chopping block. The report was rewritten to say that there were only 399,000 VC in SVN.
    With Nixon it just gets worse and intelligence is put to political purposes to a degree previously unseen, at least in Weiner’s account.
  • And Dujmovic essentially agrees with the tragic account of US intelligence in the Clinton and Bush years, that we all know too well.
  • And then there’s the legendary incompetence and bumbling of the CIA (and Dujmovic would say that Weiner exaggerates). For decades, the covert ops service sent agents into Eastern Europe, North Korea and China with money and guns to organize local cells. Every one was rounded up and executed. During the 1950s, Kim Philby was passing coordinates of the drops to the Soviets. They rounded up these hapless “commandos”, had them radio back reporting a successful rendez-vous with the partisans, then executed them and took the gold bars and sent them to the Italian Communist Party. For over a decade, most of the funding for the ICP came from CIA gold.

One thing Weiner’s book brought home and Dujmovic’s review did little to dissuade was the feeling that Bobby Kennedy was an evil man. Of course, we know that he got his political start as a lawyer for HUAC hunting communists with another young, ambitious attourney, Richard M. Nixon. Bobby was also, of course, a foot dragger and obstructionist on civil rights issues who got religion on that issue late as well. Now, from Weiner’s book, one can see Bobby really coming into his own as Attourney General when he gets into his elbows with running covert ops, knocking off foreign leaders, throwing elections and generally usurping the power of the Director of Central Intelligence. I don’t know what was in JFK’s mind regarding Viet Nam, but I think this thing about how great the world would have been if John had lived or Bobby had gotten elected is a canard and the one thing the CIA got right is that we didn’t belong in Viet Nam and we weren’t going to win.

Meanwhile, every president ordered the CIA to conduct missions that were illegal by the terms of the CIA charter – spying domestically on peace activists, black civil rights leaders and so on. All the files on the CIA secret drug programs tested on Americans were destroyed because Helms felt that if released they would destroy the agency. Secret prisons and torture have always been a part of the CIA.

Anyway, as I said at the outset, and I am little dissuaded by Dujmovic’s critique, I always knew the “successes” of the CIA had had tragic consequences for the world, but I had never realized that their failures had done so much damage. And finally, I never realized that when they finally did have some intelligence successes, as in Viet Nam, it made no difference because the politicians didn’t want to get out.

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Where the debate lies: fact checking the second debate

October 8th, 2008

Well, the second presidential debate was a dismal affair. It was short on inspiration, long on tit for tat, and, as usual, long on stretching the truth. It’s always worth it to head over to FactCheck.org to get the skinny on what the candidates lied about misstated. I think the most important misstatement belonged to McCain who said that Obama would fine small business owners who did not provide health insurance to their employees. Actually, as it turns out, the Obama plan specifically exempts small business owners.

McCain seems to want to try to scare small business out of supporting Obama. Of course, if I felt like digressing, I would point out what a collossally bad idea it is for any of us to be getting health insurance through our employers and how there is almost no system on earth that could be worse for both workers and business owners, but that’s a long discussion. In fact, the only system I can think of which would be worse is the one proposed by McCain which will add five million uninsured almost immediately though the latest analysis says that it will roughly even out with Obama’s plan by 2010 (though it will cost 2 trillion dollars for 2010 to 2019 compared to 1.17 trillion for Obama).

The lowlight of the debate was the very end. Someone sent in a great question: What do you not know and how would you learn it? This would have been a chance for Obama, who went first, to say that he doesn’t know what the future will bring but that he’s a fast study and that he would surround himself with knowledgeable people. Indeed, one can see already in the choice of vice president the difference between the two candidates. It could have given him a big boost. Instead, he blathered on mindlessly about being from a single-parent household, and rising to where he is and wanting all Americans to have opportunity in the greatest nation on earth. I felt two million Obama votes evaporate as he blithered and blathered and it’s the first time when listening to Obama I thought “What a frickin idiot.”

Had he been paired up with a great debater like Reagan, the death blow would have followed: “Well, there he goes again. Unlike senator Obama, I plan to answer your question.” Lucky for Obama, he was paired with John McCain, a man with less debating panache than John Kerry. McCain blathered out the same frickin answer as Obama and I felt two million Obama votes rematerialize and I respected both of them less than before the debate.

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The Society that Created Abu Ghraib…

October 2nd, 2008

…was trained in the in supermarkets and the farms of America. This is how your food is raised, and California Prop 2 aims to change that. As Shakespeare said: “All pity chok’d with custom of fell deed” (Jul. Caesar, Act III, scene I).
Battery Cage
Pig Gestation Crate
Veal Cows

Just a sampling of the photos and video on the Yes on Prop 2 website.

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It’s not the experience stupid!

October 1st, 2008

Remember Bill Clinton’s winning line: “It’s the economy, stupid!”. This election cycle the debate rages about “experience”. Does Obama have it? Does Palin? How can Obama supporters be such hypocrites to say Palin doesn’t have enough experience? Well, it’s not the experience stupid. First, let’s just name a few of the most experienced presidents and vice-presidents: Cheney, Nixon, Johnson, Truman. Let’s look at some presidents relatively inexperienced in politics at the national and international level: Kennedy, Carter, Clinton, Harding. Good and bad in both groups, though it is perhaps a bit troubling that Obama’s career is most like Harding’s. Harding arrived on the national stage due to a convention speech, served as a one-term senator and then won the presidency. Anyway, the point being that the presidency seems so unique as a job that it is not always clear what “experience” really counts.

The problem with Palin is not her inexperience, it’s just simply that she is a moron. George W. Bush is often tongue-tied and mangles the English language, but he is not a moron. He has had terrible judgement, but it’s more due to a triumph of ideology over fact (a problem that Palin would likely share). In truth, as Bush has served and seen the limits of his approach, he actually has become a better president. Sadly, he can’t undo all the damage he did in his first seven years of on-the-job training. And remember, Bush worked closely with his father during his father’s campaigns and presidency, and surrounded himself by one of the most experienced staffs ever to walk into the White House.

But Palin, who seems to share all of Bush’s weaknesses, adds flat out stupidity to the mix. Witness this response from an interview with Katy Couric.

COURIC: Why isn’t it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries; allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

PALIN: That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the—it’s got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.
— quoted by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek

This is beyond Bush’s mangling of the language. It’s not just that she doesn’t answer the question. It’s not just that it’s utter nonsense and completely incomprehensible. It’s that she seems to be laboring under the idea that she actually did answer the question.

She reminds me of some Maranatha Church members I’ve met. I’ve met some who are intelligent, knowledgeable and well-considered, but Maranatha seems to encourage their people to start proselytizing from day one. The problem is that some of these new converts only have the vaguest notion of what’s in the Bible and several of them have quoted the same few verses at me and a few have told the same story about a friend who was at a prayer meeting and a man started speaking in tongues and it was perfect “High German”. They say it like High German is somehow impressive as being a language of distinction, which shows that they have no idea what High German (Hochdeutsch) actually means:

High German is a geographical reference to where the dialect family that forms High German originates. It refers to the mountainous areas of central and southern Germany and the Alps. This is opposed to Low German, which is spoken along the flat sea coasts of the north (Wikipedia).

Along with the irrelevant and misunderstood detail, it’s always “a friend” who was there, a key marker of any urban legend.

In other words, they’re okay if they stick to the script and can recite the few verses and bogus stories they’ve been taught, but they get tripped up if the person they’re preaching to has actually read the Bible or knows what Hochdeutsch is. So it is with Sarah Palin. The $700 billion bailout was new news and the McCain campaign had not had time to give her a script. She’s the new convert, the person that most denominations would not put up on a soapbox in the public square with a Bible in hand (and even the Maranatha Church is more judicious in a public situation like that). Nevertheless, there she is and, if she has to speak for more than a few minutes or, God forbid, respond to a question for which nobody has handed her a written script, she runs out of Bible verses and urban legends and has to resort to nonsenical babbling.

At least someone should teach her to say “I don’t know” in an intelligent way as in “Well Katie, that’s a rapidly developing situation and I haven’t had the opportunity to meet with the economists who helped draft that plan, but as vice-president getting those briefings would be a top priority”.

So right now she’s locked in a closest memorizing scripts for the vice-presidential debates. If she comes off as anything other than a complete idiot, we’ll have to admit that she’s at least got a good memory, because she’s obviously starting from zero.

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Ten Everyday Technologies That Can Change the World

September 19th, 2008

I think the headline is a bit overblown, but this is pretty cool – wind generators that don’t turn (cheap and no dead birds), pedal-power charged batteries and more from Discover Magazine

Popularity: 9% [?]

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