To Love the Country or the Countryside

How about this for getting to the root of the problem?

The Chevy Volt (an electric car) is being pushed by General Motors as the first production electric car, to hit the market in 2010. GM unveiled it at a NASCAR event, and they're understandably trying to drum up excitement about the car. But GM has to be careful about pushing the Volt too hard as a patriotic, pro-American car that can help free us from our dependence on foreign oil. While they want to take advantage of the desire by nationalists to see the US become energy independent, they're reluctant to get to stars-and-stripes with the Volt.

Pete Lewis, who works in program operations at GM, puts it this way.

"There is a fear that if we position this as a 'pro-American' car, it will upset some of the environmentally conscious crowd, and we want it to be embraced by everyone."

Mr. Lewis is justified in his concern about offending the green-ers by becoming too pro-American, but I find it tremendously sad.

The most "green" or "environmentally conscious" among us are, by definition, the most anti-American. Take a look at Hollywood, PETA, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club (sorry Steven), and any other such organization if you disagree with me.

And the flag-waving, America-loving nationalists among us tend to be decidedly less concerned about environmental issues. Take a look at any NASCAR event across the country for further proof.

How has it come to this? How have we gotten to the point where, to care about our environment, we must hate our country?

Hubble Repair?

Over the last several years we've seen article after article about how the Hubble space telescope is a dinosaur and not worth repairing. Space geeks get all up in arms when talk of giving up on Hubble surfaces, and NASA officials always calmly explain why Hubble isn't worth maintaining at this point.

Each time this happens, I check Hubble off in my mind as a done deal. It's over. No longer being maintained. Fine.

And then I see stories like this. . . about a planned shuttle mission to repair the Hubble telescope.
I don't get it.

Is the United States Behind. . . or Ahead?

With Barack Obama as the Democratic candidate for president, critics of the United States talk about how our country might just finally catch up with the rest of the civilized world and elect a non-white president.  The implication, of course, is that the rest of the world cleared this discriminatory hurdle decades ago.  

I got to wondering, though. . . has the United Kingdom ever elected a non-white Prime Minister?   I don't think so. And it goes without saying that they've never had a black king or queen.

Have the Germans ever elected a non-white Chancellor?  I'm pretty sure they haven't.  How about Italy?  Or Spain?  

For that matter, how about Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, or Sweden?  Have any of these countries ever had a black national leader?  

I'm not an expert on the history of any of these countries, certainly; to tell you the truth I can't even name the current leader of half of them.  I guess there may be one in there that has elected a black person as their national leader at some point, but I can't think of one off hand. 

Do we still have discriminatory hurdles to conquer here in the United States?  Sure.  But is the US really so far behind on this particular issue?  Or might it just be out in front on this one?

I possess a neat antique brass spyglass of some sort, and I've always wondered about its origins. It's a collapsable (telescoping) spyglass like you'd see a 19th century ship's captain using to scout the horizon. It is 48" long when fully extended. Engraved on the section near the eye piece is:



Docteur Arthur Chevalier
158 Palais Royal
Paris

I looked the dude up and found that Chevalier's company mostly made microscopes and other scientific instruments back in the second half of the 19th century. I couldn't find any real references to telescopes of this nature, so I contacted the Oris group, a trio of scientific instrument enthusiasts in Italy who specialize in the research and identification of antiques such as mine. They can be found at http://www.bononiaemicroscope.it/

They’ve been very helpful to me so far, expressing interest in my spyglass turning me on to this Chevalier catalog from the mid 1800s.

http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/trade-literature/scientific-instruments/files/51671/

I've sent the Oris Group some pics of my telescope and hope to hear back from them soon. I'll keep y'all posted on what (if anything) I find out.

Reality Check

My apologies for the caesura in my blog postings. Work and school conspired to wear me out there for a while, and I reverted to bad habits, namely emailing about blog-ish stuff to a core group of friends instead of blogging about those things here.

I hope to be back on track now, for better or for worse.

The Affluent Society

As the government announces today that special tax rebate checks will be delivered early this year, I can’t help worrying about what a fiasco the whole thing is shaping up to be. I understand the intention behind the policy. But given where we are with the economy, where Americans are with debt, where industry is with regard to decreasing productivity, etc. . . I just can't see how the Fed thinks these rebates will do anything but make things worse.

I'm certain that the economists the Bush administration is listening to HAD to have read John Galbraith back in their graduate school days. As Galbraith said over 40 years ago:

• Economy is production-driven. Production drives consumption; not the other way around as we're told to believe.
• Industry has manufactured artificial demand for products we don't really need (therefore possessing zero marginal utility). Reference my quest for a Wii as an example. Or tennis shoes that cost $12 to manufacture and ship and sell for $200. Manufactured demand for goods with zero marginal utility.
• This artificial demand for valueless items is what has sustained production (and the economy) in the 20th century.
• Industry and the country have cashed in on the economic benefits of heightened production by driving that production past all points of reason.
• American consumers have supported this production via over consumption, and they have over consumed by saving zero and leveraging credit.
• Collectively, Americans have maxed out their credit and can no longer support the given levels of production.
• They can definitely NOT support the ever increasing levels of production needed to continue economic growth.
• Consumption has flattened and will begin falling.
• Industry will back off production, staunching the flow of money that the production pumps into the economy.
• Private incomes will fall further, making even less money available for consumption.
  

We know we’re in for a hurting with the whole economy thing, right? It might be just a short slow down. Might be a small recession with a quick recovery. Might be a long recession with a slow recovery. But it'll be something.

Americans can no longer turn to credit expansion as a way to support their consumption and the economy as a whole. So what does the Fed do? They hand maxed-out Americans some money. . . money that Americans are borrowing from their own future selves. . . so that Americans can spend that borrowed money now and continue to artificially support production by increasing debt.

But instead of Americans spending their own credit dollars gotten from unsecured credit card debt, Americans will now be spending borrowed money secured by U.S. Treasury bills. It’s a debt that can’t be wiped out with Chapter 11 bankruptcy or a windfall from an insurance settlement. It’s debt (along with a few trillion other dollars) that our kids and grandkids WILL HAVE TO ACCOUNT FOR.

Don't get me wrong. I'll cash the check when it arrives. But I'm not chipper about it.

What do you mean, “No?”

I wanted a Wii game console for my daughter. I wanted one for Christmas ’07, but none could be found easily. So I waited. In April 2008, I started checking again, and I STILL couldn’t get one. Retailers all told the same story. Each store receives a shipment of 10 units on a random basis, every few weeks. No telling when they’ll be in. No way to reserve them. You just have to be lucky.

Most retail stores had taken to putting Wii status messages on their automated phone recordings. “If you are calling about a Wii, please press 1 and then go away, because we don’t have any.”

Not being able to get a Wii really started to bother me. . . so much so that I started wondering about why it bothered me so much. And I came to realize that we really are spoiled, folks.

We live in such an affluent society that the idea of scarcity is foreign to us. Anything we want is readily available; the only reason we don’t have everything we want is because we don’t have the money. You want a bushel of pomegranates? Those are exotic fruits and only avaialbe in the fall here in the US, right? Nope. Go on-line and buy a bushel now. You want a hundred pairs of designer jeans? Go get ‘em. No sweat. You want designer Indian tea for breakfast? Go to the store and get some.

It seems almost un-American for me not to be able to go out right now and buy a Wii (or ten Wiis) if I want to.