Imagine Baltimore

Imagine the Baltimore metropolitan area including the suburbs and Towson. The population of the MSA is right around 2.5 million, which was the approximate population of the original 13 colonies at the time of the Revolution.

Living in the colonies at that time were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (left). I haven't actually been in Baltimore for a while, but I did watch quite a bit of The Wire, and I don't recall a similar sprinkling of genius; but maybe you have to be there to fully appreciate the talent level of that fine city.

If you extrapolated those seven men into the current U.S. population of over 300 million you'd expect to find about 840 people in today's United States with similar talents and vision; nearly 17 per state. But that's an average. Utah might only have 7-8 while California could have 85-90.

I suppose I should draw some conclusion from these statistics but that would just insult the audience.

Sarah says...

"This is stemming from, I think, a greater problem when we're all sitting around asking 'Oh no, what are we gonna do,' and we're not having a lot of faith that the White House is gonna come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea's gonna do."
— Sarah Palin

My wish for you...

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

The Tea Party is...

I usually avoid just throwing red meat to the beasts who visit these pages, but sometimes it's just too hard to resist. One of my favorite journalists, Matt Taibbi's latest piece in Rolling Stone is a complete deconstruction of the Tea Party. I love Taibbi (who coined the term "Vampire Squid" to describe Goldman Sachs) because he speaks so plainly. Here's a quote from the article:

"Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them."

Enjoy.

It’s on

In case you were wondering when the GOP was going to start making good on Mitch McConnell’s promise to do everything possible to sabotage the Obama administration I think the answer is, “they have.”

Senator Jon Kyl, the GOP leader on negotiations with the White House over the START treaty has backed out of his deal to approve the treaty signed by the President and Medvedev. He declined to be interviewed when asked by the Times, he offers only a one paragraph explanation on his web site that says nothing, and the only thing I’ve read or heard all day as a rationale says they want more money than the extra $4 billion they squeezed out of Obama already.

So apparently stopping nuclear war is not as important as a Republican victory in ’12, and we’ll now have an even bigger budget hole to plug. I can hardly wait to see what’s next.

*******

Tom Freidman had an interesting piece today about Anderson Cooper challenging Michele Bachmann’s assertion on his show that the President’s trip to China was costing $200 million a day. I wish he’s taken her on on the air, but at least it got challenged the next day.

*******

There were five more U.S. KIA soldiers listed in the paper today. The oldest was 28. There were two 20-year-olds. But at least we got a full and spirited debate from our political leaders this election cycle.

Deficit Rubik’s Cube

The New York Times created something very interesting that they call the “deficit puzzle.” It contains two large boxes segmented into smaller boxes, each of which represents one billion dollars (or 1/418^th) of the projected FY20015 total Federal budget deficit, or 1/1355^th of the projected 2030 deficit.

Below the boxes is a list of 40 different actions that could be taken to either cut expenses or raise revenues along with their estimated financial impact; for example, cutting all farm subsidies would reduce costs by an estimated $14B while returning the estate (death) tax to Clinton-era levels would raise an additional $50B in 2015. By making a check-mark next to the programs you would cut, or the taxes you would raise, the deficit boxes are filled in and you can see what it will actually take to eliminate the deficit.

WARNING: You may find this exercise very depressing. What it illustrates more than anything is the enormity of the task, and you don’t have to be a deep political thinker to recognize that we are light years away from having a government with the courage to even publicly discuss what needs to be done, let alone the foresight to begin making the changes that will be necessary to keep the United States from becoming Greece.

If the political discourse now is reminiscent of the years leading up to the Civil War just imagine what’s coming.

An accompanying article by David Leonhardt can be found here.

Today at the Y

I was grinding away on the elliptical this afternoon, listening to the Moth podcast on my i-pod, staring through the floor-to-ceiling window in an anaerobic stupor, out across the vacant field behind the Y. Blue-gray clouds hung over the flat central Florida plain. Beyond the field lay the municipal airport and the sky-diving school. First one, then two, then a swarm of brightly colored parachutes emerged silently from the low ceiling, midway between the top of my view and the horizon.

They fell in swelling uncountable clusters, each chute dressed in its own multi-hued pattern – as if a circus troop were invading the Dutch low country in ’44. Masses of vertical squiggles twisted and swayed from their horizontal vessels of air, as they descended soundlessly from the billowy vapor – an HD video of sperm invading a viscous cloud of salmon eggs ran in reverse just for my amusement.