Visual Thinking and Occasional Odds and Ends

Forty years ago I complete my studies in college.   For reasons that elude me now, I didn’t attend the graduation ceremony.   It was not a protest against the school; I loved my four years at The Cooper Union, and I did well too.   But graduation came at an odd time for me.   My father had died the summer before my senior year, and I was working weekends just to stay afloat.   My mother was working too and still had two younger kids to manage.   So there was no graduation party and no celebrations.   Oh well! As I said, I didn’t attend.  Ours was a commuter college with no real campus, just three building at the meeting of 8th St and Third and Fourth Avenues.   With no dormitories or   campus quadrangle, the experience felt was more like being at work than like attending the typical college, which are places which replicate the town square but for students and their friends only.   Most of us arrived at school between 9 and 10 each morning, and left school sometime between 5

No doubt you’ve seen heard about the Paul Ryan budget.  If you remember Ryan from during the fall campaign, you may remember how he insisted that his earlier budget was meant to save Medicare, but he never said from what.  Ryan is back again, and it is roughly the same plan, so Medicare is an issue again.  It won’t effect me since I will be Medicare eligible in a little over 3 years, but if you were born in 1959 or later, Ryan’s plan will hurt you.   He will also gut Medicaid and much of the social safety net.   The deficit hawks (or scolds) seem bent on cutting Medicare in the worst way.  And by that I mean the WORST way.   The problem with Medicare is the same one  that troubles all medical insurance, costs have been rising far faster than inflation.  So simply limiting how much the Feds will give to seniors to pay their Medicare premiums is a terrible idea.  Without a serious attempt to control cost, and one backed up by the force of law, so that those who follow the cost cont

--> As the Catholic Church goes about selecting a new Pope, this lapsed Catholic wonders if the men who run the show really believe in the message.    I mean the old men with the dresses and funny hats, the ones in charge.    Do they really believe that they can turn bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood?   That what looks to all like a tasteless wafer becomes the “true presence” of Jesus Christ?    “True food” and “true nourishment.” Really? They must know how ridiculous it all sounds.   And with their education, surely they know that in the early church there were no priests at all, nor was there a communion ceremony or wafer of any sort (yes, I know there was a meal, but it was a real one!)   As the Church grew, it built a complex and intellectually convoluted set of beliefs, usually culminating in a mystery when the story got too ridiculous for even the wiliest theologian.   And then there is the notion that we needed to be saved anyway.  

Taxes, Debt and the GOPs Double Bind. No matter what they do regarding the Sequestration process, the Republican Party is screwed.   Their dilemma represents a form of double-bind.   In fact, theirs may even be a triple-bind.     And it never had to happen. The binds:   1) if they give in and raise taxes, their voters will be angry; 2) if they cut expenses, the economy will only get worse, so most of their voters will still end up dissatisfied (the rich ones will not be).   The possible third bind is with the voters who don’t vote for the GOP.   These voters are now in the majority – and demographic trends suggest things will only get worse.   The GOP’s bad behavior, both in 2011 and now is only turning off voters even more. Do you think I am wrong when I suggest that Republicans brought about this crisis?   Sorry, Sequestration was not an Obama plan - even if the plan came from the White House.     Remember, the Republican House held a virtual gun to Obama’s hea

The Republican talking point goes like this, the sequester was Obama’s idea, so any drastic cuts that occur will be Obama’s fault.   This is odd on a number of levels, but if they can’t score points this way, the have added fear mongering over defense cuts, hoping to scare Congress into replacing defense cuts with even more cuts to domestic spending.   If they get there way, the impact of the cuts on the average American will be even worse than proposed under “Obama’s” sequester plan. Bizarre. Here is a headline on the Fox News website:   “Rep. Roby leads Republicans in asking Obama to take lead to avert drastic cuts”   Here is more from Martha Roby:   “In his State of the Union address, President Obama himself admitted that these cuts are a really bad idea,” Roby said Saturday …   “What the president failed to mention was sequester was his idea.”   (From FOX – allowed under fair use).   Again, this is funny.   In 2011, Republican Congressmen held a vi

Valentine’s Day is a Real Holiday. Yes, it is. If you don’t think so, how about this.  Halloween is real too, with the candy and the cheap costumes.  And Christmas presents and trees are the real Christmas. And Easter….  Ok.  How about Superbowl Sunday ?  That too is more or less a holiday. Ok, I’m pushing the word holiday a bit, but then Easter in not a holiday in the sense that we understand it now – which is to say a day off.   We don’t have an English word for what the days are, but let’s try Special Days .  We can all agree that the Superbowl, Valentine’s Day and Haloween are special days . In the middle of the 19 th century, the visit of a national figure to a large town would have drawn attention and a crowd, but nowadays we gather in virtual communities to watch the Superbowl, or a series of big games on Thanksgiving Day.  We also gather to see the last episode of Seinfeld.   But a major speech?  Not really, and by the way, do spe

Drones – a Time Bomb All policy choices come with a downside risk.   For example, our post WW2 attempt to foster global free trade ended up empowering competitors and led to the decline of much US manufacturing, even as we remain a manufacturing nation.     Of course, it was unreasonable to expect that the party would go on forever, after all, in 1945 we were the world’s leader in most manufacturing, with an undamaged industrial base.   As prosperity returned to Western Europe and Japan it was natural that we would lose market share.   And then the third world stepped in to take heavy manufacturing as well as the manufacturing of low value items of all sorts.    And remember the decision to build the interstate highway system?   It was a great idea, that was started partly in response to the threat of nuclear attack.   We suddenly needed a way to quickly evacuate cities in the event of a war.   States added their own highway systems and as highways began to

My real interest is art.  Visual Art.   And for me, visual art is about the joy of seeing.  That joy (or excitement) can be expressed by what we think of as realism, or by other means.  But once an artist has to explain the art, watch out.   The next two images come from a show at MOMA.  While I believe the creator is serious, what she is doing is not visual art.  It may be performance art but it has little real value beyond giving writers something to write about. If you want to find out just who and what the show was about, Google MOMA NAKED LADY. The triumph of American Painting in the mid 1940s through 1960 was the product of critics.  They were useful tools, but became quickly bored and so moved on to each now idea - and the interplay of artistic ideas with criticism and feedback from the critics delivered privately warped the art world.  Universities also changed the way artists earn money.  So instead of making things for persons, they began to seek c

I thought I would start by listing a group of ideas that are held by the majority of educated Americans.  If after you read them you think that no, these are “liberal” ideas, think again.  In fact, if you were a Nixon voter, you probably agreed to all of them but the one on climate change, which was unknown at the time.  In fact, these are not political ideas at all.      Noah’s Ark is just a fable     Evolution is the founding principal of modern biology (and so modern medicine).     The science is strong that the burning of fossil fuels has started climate change.     Tax rate changes within a narrow range have little to do with the rate of growth in our       economy.      Cutting tax rates does not pay for itself through growth.     Gasoline prices are set on the world market and will not be influenced significantly by US oil       production.     The free market leads to the fairest price.  It does nothing else.  And I said educated