Dubai: defined by money

At Vanity Fair, A. A. Gill offers this portrait of Dubai:

Dubai has been built very fast. The plan was money. The architect was money. The designer was money and the builder was money. And if you ever wondered what money would look like if it were left to its own devices, it’s Dubai . . . Dubai is the parable of what money makes when it has no purpose but its own multiplication and grandeur. When the culture that holds it is too frail to contain it. Dubai is a place that doesn’t just know the price of everything and the value of nothing but makes everything worthless. The answer to everything in Dubai is money. In the darkness of the hot night, the motorways roar with Ferraris and Porsches and Lamborghinis; the fat boys are befuddled and stupefied by sports cars they race around on nowhere roads, going nowhere. Taxi drivers of their ambitionless, all-consuming entitlement. Shortchanged by being given everything. Cursed with money.

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The most important things for the federal government to work on

Check out this list of America's priorities, as voted on by real Americans (these are results from a Gallup poll). I've been looking long and hard at this list for many of the priorities announced by the Republican Party (here are some), but I don't see any of the following:

  • Keeping gays out of the military or keeping gays from getting married.
  • Attacking worker's unions
  • Making certain that the Federal Government embraces the worship of God.
  • De-funding public broadcasting (NPR
  • De-funding Head Start
  • De-funding the Department of Education.
  • Deregulating businesses who provide America's food.
  • Promoting fossil fuel usage.
  • Prohibiting abortion.
  • Investigating American Muslims.
  • Protecting the wealth of the wealthiest Americans.
  • Enhancing the profitability of Wall Street banks.
  • Tearing down laws and regulations that protect the environment.
What else am I missing?

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Snowy shades of gray

St. Louis had a late-March snow yesterday, leading to some grumbling about the interruption of the long-anticipated Spring. But this was a wind-blown sticky snow that gave rise to some extraordinary photo opportunities. Many of these photos were color photos that looked as if they were taken with black and white film. For instance, this photo of a side entrance to the St. Louis Zoo.

My favorite photo, however was taken by my 10-year old daughter Charlotte, who gave me permission to post it here. This is a completely unretouched photo of a statute in Forest Park. It had a startling 2-D look, especially in this photo (click to enlarge):

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Federal Reserve ordered to disclose recipients of bailout funds

Here's some good news from the U.S. Supreme Court:

The Federal Reserve will disclose details of emergency loans it made to banks in 2008, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an industry appeal that aimed to shield the records from public view. The justices today left intact a court order that gives the Fed five days to release the records, sought by Bloomberg News’s parent company, Bloomberg LP. The Clearing House Association LLC, a group of the nation’s largest commercial banks, had asked the Supreme Court to intervene.
It takes some real chutzpah to deny the public the right to know how $3.5 trillion in public funds were used.

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