Pumpkin Time
My sister, Lin, at Avila Barn at Avila Beach. Not long until Halloween,
judging from all the stuff they've been selling at Safeway since September.
~~~~~
It seems that Senator George Allen, "the man who would be president",
forgot to tell Congress about some stock options. In another hilarious
turn of events, most evangelicals
blame Foley on his choices, not the Republican party, and remind us that the
Dems are "the party that is tolerant" of homosexuality. I have to agree
with
Ben
Stein, though, that none of this is as important as the ongoing genocide in
Darfur.
Is everybody else getting mountains of email titled "Employer was just not
hired" and "Owner has been suspended from work" and "Supervisor substitute" and
the like? They all promise to help you make "1.5K to 3.5K per day" and
supply an 800 number (you have to wonder: K-what? Bananas? Mexican
pesos?). I called the 800 number for the hell of it and got a recording
asking me to leave my name and phone number. That's as far as I took the
joke.
The Atlantic is of passing interest this month. One article that my
sons should read is titled A Matter of Degrees. Its thesis is that
a) it's increasingly true that higher education leads to significantly higher
income, and b) there's really no good reason, it's mainly a matter of
"educational requirement inflation". Simply stated, perfectly competent
non-college grads (like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates) can't get past the door of
the HR department nowadays. In what struck me as a work of fantasy, Joshua
Green states in Do Polls Still Work? that, yes, they do and the pollsters
were ultimately correct in their diagnosis after "all the data was properly
weighted and balanced". Does that sound like the bewildering difference we
saw between exit poll results and GOP gains in 2004? Americans now believe
strongly that we our support for Israel is "too strong" (62%), with 0% of the
polled sample believing it was "not strong enough". In other words, Hamas
is on our list of international terrorist organizations, but the IRA
isn't. Also there are half a dozen Palestinian groups, most of which are
zero threat to the U.S. Then there's Carriers of Conflict:
hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees are flooding into Jordan, Kuwait, Iran,
Syria and Lebanon with unknown future effect on the region's stability. As
a measure of New Orleans comeback, 85% of the hotels are now open, but then only
50% of the hospitals and 29% of the schools. In the past 6 years, both
Republican and Democratic voters have held CNN, NPR and the WSJ in declining
trust. Fox (Faux) News has gained slightly with Republicans and declined
slightly with Democrats. In a long and interesting article on Hillary
Clinton (you'll just have to buy or borrow the issue), Joshua Green concludes
that Ms. Clinton's success in the Senate (which includes attending prayer
meetings and working with conservatives) may cost her the presidency.
Gotta run. More tomorrow.