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Yearly Archives: 2012

Freebird!

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It was a crisp Spring day winding down as I drove to get my daughter Thryn at school.  She usually takes the bus, way cooler than Dad picking her up, but this day she had to be somewhere else.  I had parked and was wandering around the lot when she and her friends bubbled out in a small knotted mass of clumsily developing suave.  Thryn ran over to excitedly ask some question about The Beatles, which album a song was on or some other small fact.  I told her as her friends gathered around.  One of them asked me another Beatles question and I dutifully replied.  Then another came.

I saw in their faces a look of wonder as to how anyone could know all this as questions started boiling out of them.  I was the sage, dispensing wisdom vital to the ages.  And the horror rose from deep within me.

No, no, nonono, you can’t think your parents’ music is cool!  You can’t think your parents are in anyway cool!  This just isn’t right!

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Labor Day – Holding On

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This Labor Day is more important than most.  It signals the start of the endgame of the election, the time when everything starts to count even more because everyone is paying attention.  And this year, what people are paying attention to more than anything is labor itself – the state of jobs.

Barataria has dealt with the job market many times over the summer.  While there is a net gain in jobs over the Obama administration the growth in jobs barely absorbs the young people entering the workforce.  It’s not exactly the material for a strong re-election.  But that’s not all there is to the jobs picture.

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The Real Power

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Between the political conventions, the people running for the second most powerful office in the land have to stand down for a moment and let the Big Guy speak.  That would be Ben Bernanke, who delivered his annual address at the Jackson Hole conference today.  You want real power?  If being able to print $1.6T ain’t it, I don’t know what is.

The speech was highly anticipated because in the past the occasion was used to announce rounds of Quantitative Easing.  There was hope there would be a third round of it, which is to say more greenbacks flowing out into the economy hot off the Fed presses.  It didn’t happen.  Bernanke spoke instead about what’s gone wrong and what they’ve done to try to get things to start back up.

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Hurricanes

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The scene is New Orleans, right about now.  20 inches of rain is falling in alternating torrents as Hurricane Isaac spins out over the mouth of the Mississippi.  A huge hole in the atmosphere sucks the Gulf of Mexico up and sprays it over the city, spinning out condensed vapor high above where the atmosphere is cold and barren.

The scene is near Port St Lucie, Florida, in 1979.  Hurricane David, a strong killer in the Lesser Antilles, is scraping the Florida coast and unloading what little is left of its once mighty strength.  Below, a few cars on the Florida turnpike struggle to inch ahead under blinding torrents of rain.

The scene is a classroom at FC Martin Elementary in Richmond Heights, south of Miami.  Ray Gunderson is going over hurricane preparedness with the sixth grade class as they plot out the latest storm.  Many of the kids come from Yankee families, so the curriculum includes heavy doses of how families should prepare for the storms that will come one day.  The lessons teach three things good for kids – some atmospheric science, a little Caribbean geography, and a fair dose of plain scaring the bejaysus out of them.

These scenes define at least one life of hurricane obsession.

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Convention(al) Wisdom

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Why do we still have political conventions?  There is a legal requirement that they actually sit down and have the formal vote on who their nominee will be, but that does not take days of speechifying and pageantry.  If another political party like the Greens or Libertarians tried to get their conventions on prime-time teevee night after night they’d be laughed at.  So why do the two parties get so much unfiltered airtime?

Because people watch it.

About 40M Americans watched Obama’s acceptance speech in 2008, and nearly 2/3 of all Americans watch at least some of the conventions.  That’s about the same as the Olympics, generally speaking.  People actually want to hear the candidates speak without filters, and they want the party to tell the world what it stands for.

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