Offbeat Christmas Observations

I've been diligently avoiding the unavoidable visual and auditory warnings of the impending Yule since mid-October. But in the second half of December I'm ready to embrace "The Christmas Station" and decorations and such. However, I always preferred the offbeat things, like Weird Al's "Christmas at Ground Zero" [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsvZHHLQ8-c[/youtube] and…

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Frank Rich: Rod Blagojevich is a small fry in our metastacizing culture of corruption

Rod Blogojevich is not a big fish by any means.   Most of the big fish remain nameless and free, according to Frank Rich of the NYT: What went down in the Land of Lincoln is just the reductio ad absurdum of an American era where both entitlement and corruption have…

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It’s Conflation-mas time!

You'd never know that there was an energy crisis in South St. Louis, based on the extravagant use of Christmas lighting.   My family and I walked through one neighborhood that pushed the envelope even further than the usual level of extravagance, drawing dozens of cars.  The tradition is apparently to…

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Just Looking

The story is famous and might be just a bit apocryphal, how Galileo turned his new telescope on the sky and offered to show many important people what he had found.  They refused to look, afraid to compromise the world view that bound them to their place and time.  Afraid,…

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The things that bother us

Tonight I’m feeling anxious about the possibility of an immense economic collapse.  I’ve been reading about lots of people being laid off.  Most of us with 401K’s are afraid to even look at our quarterly statements.  The country is running out of fossil fuel and there isn’t anything realistic to…

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