“I promise not to kill you if you give me your wallet.”

“I promise to let all the passengers go if you give me $200,000 and a parachute.”

“I promise not to destroy the country if you keep paying for the things I bought last decade and take the money out of the poor, elderly, and middle class.”

Someone remind me why there was ever any debate about who was responsible for nearly bringing about default.

In November of 1980, I turned in a paper that got the only F of my college career.  I had written it on election night, and had trouble concentrating when the spectre of Reagan’s voodoo economics looked to be an enormous threat to the nation.  Never knew how much I’d miss those dream-filled days (Warren Haynes meant something else by that, but I hope he’d approve).

Sure, he (Reagan, not Haynes) doubled the public debt as a fraction of GDP, but at least then you could make the argument that maybe we were on the side of the Laffer curve with negative slope.  Today we have 30 years of data that says we weren’t.  At least he raised taxes when the shit hit the fan.  Today any talk of tax increases is met with a fusillade of rhetorical 16mm shells.

Why is that?  My tax rate is lower than it’s been since I started working, and unless you’re filthy rich so is yours.  Hell, I could easily pay a few points more in taxes, and I’m nowhere near the top rate.  We can’t afford all this spending, we keep hearing.  Well no, not if we don’t pony up and pay for it.  Yes, the gross public debt is ridiculously high right now.  And why is that?

Recent contributions to the deficit, from the NYT

Oh look, it’s the wars and the tax cuts.  Which, it seems, are permanent.  End those, and the problem almost goes away.

And what’s the buzz?

“Obama is addicted to deficits.”

“In 40 years Medicare costs will be over 100% of federal revenue, therefore we have to default on our existing debts.”

“If we raise taxes on the rich, they won’t have any money left to pay me.”

Oh yeah?  The data says otherwise.

Top tax rate and marginal growth

It took me 15 seconds of Googling to find that.  Top tax rate is un fucking correlated with GDP growth.  When did facts become unrelated to the discussion?  Even on NPR, it’s all about cutting, and nothing about significant tax increases.

The problem is simple.  We chose to fight not one but two utterly pointless and extremely expensive wars, and then wrote ourselves a big check of tax cuts.  And now we have to have a balanced budget amendment?  Doctor, I can’t afford it when I do this.  Fucking don’t do it then.

So here we are, seriously talking about voluntarily defaulting on our debt because we can’t be bothered to pay our bills.  Something seems wrong about that.

Not just wrong; stupidly wrong.

A significant release of methane due to melting of the vast deposits trapped by permafrost and clathrate in the Arctic would result in massive loss of oxygen, particularly in the Arctic ocean but also in the atmosphere. Resulting hypoxic conditions would cause large extinctions, especially of water breathing animals, which is what we find at the PETM.
—Skeptical Science

Is it “alarmism” to yell fire in a crowded theatre if the building is in fact on fire? And you’ve come to realize the basement is full of gasoline tanks?

I know you had that whole earthquake thing, with the shaking and the breaking and the aftershocks and the tsunami and the entire towns washed away and the 13000 dead and all. And also that thing where a quarter of your power is missing and there’s radioactive iodine visiting places it really shouldn’t, and your electricity is turned off a few hours every day and will continue to be so for the forseeable future. And I do realize this was a natural disaster of a size unseen in over a century.

And sure, through it all you are keeping your international space projects on schedule, to the point of continuing meetings the moment the shaking stopped, and moving work from Tokyo to Komaki where there’s power all the time, and promising to repair your test facilities in time for the planned tests with our hardware.

Yes yes, I know all that, but it turns out that people in our country are using contraception. This is unacceptable, and as a result we are unable to continue working on our portion of your space projects.

しつれえします。

Fisherman’s wife waits
Praying for his safe return
The sea chooses her

Nuclear reactor operators say that their profession is typified by the same kind of esprit de corps found among firefighters and elite military units. Lunchroom conversations at reactors frequently turn to what operators would do in a severe emergency.

The consensus is always that they would warn their families to flee before staying at their posts to the end, said Michael Friedlander, a former senior operator at three American power plants for a total of 13 years.

They go on to point out that Japanese workers are even more tied to their jobs, and brought up with much more of a sense of shared sacrifice than we are. Which is right where I was when I thought of my friends there.

By “there”, of course I mean in Tokyo and Niihama, far from Fukushima, but still of the same bent. I’m quite sure that any of the workers I know at Sumitomo Heavy Industries would go down with the plant if there were some emergency where others’ lives were threatened. And they never signed up for danger. It’s just what you do.

So yeah, I guarantee that everyone still at Fukushima-I is doing whatever is possible to maintain control of the situation, regardless of the danger. Watch for the stories that come out of this. There will be heroes.

福島の人わ、かんぱい！

I must not think bad thoughts.
When is this world coming to?

How would Delegate Hubbard or Delegate Valentino-Smith have voted?  There was no vote. HB 175 was shelved until next year.

Next year?  Next year? How many people will have their rightful inheritance taken from them in that time because they weren’t married when their partner died? How many will be turned out of emergency rooms? How many excluded from their partners’ health plans, pension plans?

I’m guilty of murder
of innocent men,
innocent women, innocent children,
thousands of ‘em.

Would my call have made any difference?

I give up,
why can’t they?

I called when the Senate was voting.
It passed.
I called when the House Judiciary Committee was voting.
It passed out to the House.
I didn’t call when the House was voting.

My planes, my guns,
my money, my soldiers,
my blood on my hands.
it’s all my fault

My call, my vote. Delegate Hubbard would have voted yes. Geraldine, no. I voted for a bigot, and I forgot to call and tell her that.

I must not think bad thoughts

Then I guess I have to come up with some stuff to say.

So yeah, I finally saw it. And it gave me nightmares. Nightmares where I had written a script that was really dark and gritty and parallel to a classic work, but in the end was just a bunch of stuff that happened. So I guess it must have been a good movie, to affect me that much, eh?

I guess what bothered me the most was that there never was a clear indication of what was real and what was hallucination. Which is weird since usually I’m all about the ambiguity. I have a whole box of it over there. But somehow it was ultimately unsatisfying in this case.

But first things earlier. If it’s supposed to be a descent into madness, I’m not understanding why the cinematography is gritty (grainy) and unstable (handheld) and dark (dark) from the first frame. And oppressively depressing throughout. Even Whedon throws in a light moment now and then, ferchrissake. Anyway, it didn’t feel so much like an arc as a short hypotenuse.

Portman is getting raves for her acting, and it is impressive. But in a bit of irksome self-reference, it’s too technical. I see the moments affecting her, but not a depth to explain her disorder. We got a Van Halen solo, and I was looking for Zappa.

The real killer for me was the failure of the payoff. Again, what really happened? She didn’t kill Lily, obviously. Did she kill herself? No. No no, a thousand times no. You don’t dance an entire act of ballet with a 2″ shard of glass in your belly. You don’t dance at all with something like that. Not to mention the blood appearing, disappearing, and reappearing on her costume. So, if her big death scene is just hallucination, the whole story becomes a bit of a so what? (And if it’s supposed to be real then at least I know a director never to watch again.)

Good movie, could have been great.