Sisters...Because the Internet Was Invented to Share Cat Photos

Things aren't always so serene.  If I ever have my camera handy at just the right time, I'll make a video of them when they're "fighting." 

A Demographic Nighmare

From a Russ Douthat column:

In Japan, birthrates are now so low and life expectancy so great that the nation will soon have a demographic profile that matches that of the American retirement community of Palm Springs. “Gradually but relentlessly,” the demographer Nick Eberstadt writes in the latest issue of The Wilson Quarterly, “Japan is evolving into a type of society whose contours and workings have only been contemplated in science fiction.”

 Thanks to increasing life expectancy, by 2040 “there could almost be one centenarian on hand to welcome each Japanese newborn.”  Over the same period, the overall Japanese population is likely to decline by 20 percent, with grim consequences for an already-stagnant economy and an already-strained safety net.

The traditional stigma against having children outside of marriage still exists in Japan, and is cited as one of the contributing factors.  Another is the traditional suspicion of immigration. 

So....the next time some culture warrior cites the rise of out-of-wedlock children as an example of America's declining moral core, remind him of Japan and the fact that out-of-wedlock children are better for the country than no children. 

And keep the immigrants coming.

Unexceptionalism: A Primer

A wonderful essay by E. L. Doctorow.

TO achieve unexceptionalism, the political ideal that would render the United States indistinguishable from the impoverished, traditionally undemocratic, brutal or catatonic countries of the world, do the following:

Spoiler alert: we've already done everything on the list.

It's Only Going To Get Uglier, I'm Afraid

For anyone inclined to dismiss the NY Times as East Coast, Elite, Liberal....whatever, be advised that the ridiculous cartoon below is copied from the NYT website.  And, no, it is not from a story about the inane way in which the right is portraying Obama; it is from one of their regular contributors, Glenn McCoy, whose similarly-hilarious cartoons are available all the time.  The only thread which connects them all is his over-the-top, seeming almost personal hatred for the first family.

One of the truly amazing things I have noted about the irrational anti-Obama rants is the fact that he is, apparently at the same time, a bumbling fool who is in completely over his head who can do nothing right and a socialist/communist with a master plan to take over or destroy democracy as we know (or imagine) it. He has also been simultaneously, probably even by the same people, compared to Hitler and Stalin. I know that someone (Einstein? Mark Twain?) said that the mark of a genius is the ability to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in his mind at the same time.  It is also the mark of a lot of slack-jawed, knuckle-dragging idiots (all of whom have a vote, remember.).

Here is a link to an article by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship called, "The Ghost of Joe McCarthy in Today's Republican Party.


Where are the responsible leaders in the Republican party who will challenge this kind of nonsense from Florida Representative Allen West? 

A Republican and Tea Party favorite, he was asked at a local gathering how many of his fellow members of Congress are “card-carrying Marxists or International Socialists.”

He replied, “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus."

By now, little of what Allen West says ever surprises. He has called President Obama "a low level Socialist agitator," said anyone with an Obama bumper sticker on their car is "a threat to the gene pool" and told liberals like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to "get the hell out of the United States of America."

The Good ´Ol NRA

From a NY Times article about gun violence.

Chief Flynn recounted pleading with a state senator to include a provision in Wisconsin’s concealed weapons law that would ban habitual criminal offenders from obtaining permits. The senator, he said, told him, “Here’s the phone number of the National Rifle Association lobbyist in Washington, D.C. If it’s O.K. with him, it will be O.K. with us.” The provision was not included, Chief Flynn said.

 It´s ironic how politicians always defer to the generals when it comes to military matters, but the nation´s police chiefs get no such respect and their requests regarding gun control are always ignored.

We Gotta Pay Taxes?

Just a little over a year ago, the mayor of Miami lost a recall election by a tremendous margin.  I think one of the key factors was the public funding of the new Miami (formerly Florida) Marlins baseball stadium, which must have pissed off a lot of people.

An article in today's NY Times about the new stadium, which is a real 21st-Century departure from all of the retro-looking parks that have been built since the opening of Camden Yards in Baltimore, rather off-handedly includes a link to a 2000 publication of the CATO Institute which shows that the supposed economic benefits of publicly-funded sports stadiums are almost always fictitious.

From that publication, I picked this quote:

“We play the Star Spangled Banner before every game
—you want us to pay taxes too?” —Bill Veeck

Good 'Ol Self Reliance

Virginia Foxx, the idiot North Carolina congresswoman who said on Gordon Liddy's radio show a week or so ago that she was tired of hearing college graduates whine about their crushing debts, has a very convenient memory.

According to the Education Sector blog, Foxx paid tuition of $87.50 per semester when she went to the University of North Carolina in 1961.  That equates to an inflation-adjusted $671.30 per semester today.

It was possible to work your way through college in the 1960's; it isn't anymore.

By the way, is there a double standard about the way Republicans glorify their convicted felons? Don't Gordon Liddy and Oliver North both have radio shows where political leaders are wont to show up without a hint of embarrassment?

Veterans and Brain Disease

There are a lot of numbers being tossed around about suicides among active duty military personnel and veterans returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, and I don't have any idea which are correct, but they are obviously horrific.  I have found two different sources that say a member of the active-duty military commits suicide every 36 hours and that suicide now accounts for more service deaths than combat.  I've heard this elsewhere as well.  The same two sources say that a returned veteran attempts suicide every 80 minutes. (I'd give you links, but you can do a google search and find the same things I did, if you wish.)

What if Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome is physical and not psychological?  According to Nicholas Kristof's column today in the NY Times, autopsies of veterans who have committed suicide show the same degenerative brain damage as that suffered by boxers, football players and other athletes who take repeated blows to the head. It has a name, abbreviated to C.T.E. 

"In people with C.T.E., an abnormal form of a protein accumulates and eventually destroys cells throughout the brain, including the frontal and temporal lobes. Those are areas that regulate impulse control, judgment, multitasking, memory and emotions"

"So far, just this one case of a veteran with C.T.E. has been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. But at least three groups of scientists are now conducting brain autopsies on veterans, and they have found C.T.E. again and again, experts tell me. Publication of this research is in the works"

 As Kristof points out, soldier returned from Vietnam did not have nearly the same level of suicides as do those from Iraq and Afghanistan, probably because they had much less exposure to the kind of brain-crashing blasts as the current veterans. I don't know if that is true, thankfully, but there isn't a columnist going that I trust more than Kristof.

If this is true, the worst is yet to come.

Fiscal Responsibility in Action

In the best Republican tradition of talking fiscal responsibility while running up the debt, Newt Gingrich will end his campaign owing more than $4 million.

And Santorum owes just a little less than $2 million.

Cool Parenting

A Prediction...Want To Bet?

I was just reading one of Andrew Sullivan's blog posts, and something in the way of a prediction occurred to me.

In the course of the campaign, Mormonism will of course be raised in various ways that reflect unfavorably on it with the intention of generating doubts about Romney.  It will be Republicans leaders and the right wing press who do a 180 and declare indignantly that a person's private religious convictions have no place in the political marketplace. 

I can just imagine the rightous outrage and indignation at Fox already.

Psst, Kid, Wanna Have A Good Time?

Reverting to an old theme of differences between Brasil and the U.S., here are a couple of examples from our neighborhood in São Paulo of a type of business I'm not familiar with in the U.S.  They are little kiddie party palaces.

It should be no surprise that  middle-class Brazilians romanticize their kids and pets as much as anyone else, and when little Bruno or Paula have a birthday, they want a party.  But nobody except the very wealthy has a house big enough to host hordes of kids.  Most people live in high-rise apartment buildings and, even the people with houses, do not have back yards for the kind of rent-a-party events that are available in the U.S. So you have your party in one of these spaces.

With any luck I'll never be inside one, so I can't tell you what fun options are available or shoot interior photos.

Excuse Me, How Much Insurance Do You Carry?

I wrote a couple of years ago about my positive experiences with my Brazilian dentist.  A root canal on a problem tooth that involved I don't know how many visits cost me about the equivalent of US$300-400.

Well, that problem tooth finally broke and had to be extracted a couple of days ago.  Total cost for the extraction and sutures was about US$54.00.

I'm not sure why dentistry is so inexpensive here, although to be fair, I've only had experiences with this one dentist (why would I change?), and it is possible he just likes Heitor and me.  His sister used to be Heitor's boss, which is how I found him in the first place when a toothache demanded it not be ignored.

He has an office, with a receptionist and what would appear to be the normal dental office accoutrements, although he doesn't have the overhead of a dental assistant.  The only significant difference that I can imagine between the US and here is the cost of malpractice insurance.  Brazil is not a very litigious country; next time I see him, I will ask if he has insurance.  Probably, coming from an American, that question will scare the bejesus out of him.

Personal Accountability

I want to go back to the subject of a post from a few days ago, i.e. the need to hold corporate leaders criminally responsible for corporate crimes, and who better to start with than BP executives?

As Joe Nocera pointed out in his column from April 14th,

"money solves everything."  BP has a horrific record.  "...time after time over the past 15 years, BP put profits over safety and created dangerous conditions for its workers, which resulted in serious industrial accidents that brought criminal investigations. Every time, BP wiggled out of trouble by paying money and promising to do better — and then went right back to its recidivist ways.

Abrahm Lustgarten, author of the book Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster (cited by Nocera in his column), argues with a ton of data in an OpEd piece in the April 19th NY Times that

"BP has already tested the effectiveness of lesser consequences, and its track record proves that the most severe punishments the courts and the United States government have been willing to mete out amount to a slap on the wrist."

Finally, investigative reporter Greg Palast charges in an article at the EcoWatch website that BP, two yers before the blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico, illegally covered up (and continues to cover up, in collusion with the government of Azerbaijan) a nearly-identical blowout in the Caspian Sea off the coast of Baku.  If these allegations are true, without a doubt a BP executive perjured himself in Congressional testimony a few months before the Gulf blow-out.  That is prosecutable.  Ask Roger Clements.

At least 26 BP employees have been killed in accidents since 2005.  The long-term cost in human and animal lives of the Gulf disaster is probably unknowable, as is the complete story of the environmental damage.  And nobody has yet been held accountable.  BP has paid fines and they've paid some cleanup costs, but these are apparently just viewed as the cost of doing business.

To quote Nocera again, "Prison is what makes the difference. Otherwise, it’s only money"