This Modern World’s Post 2010 Election…if the Republicans win

Scaling of Graphs and Charts for effect.

Paul Krugman makes an economic point in this article: if one measures government spending by percentage of GDP, this number can grow in two possible ways: the spending can go up, OR the GDP can go down. That is true, and in fact, our GDP has dropped. But what I am interested in here are the charts:

Oh my, look at the line go up the chart! That represents about a 16 percent increase in spending as a percentage of GDP.

Now look at absolute spending:

Gee, that is, well, rather flat. Oh wait, over the same length of time, that is about a 25 percent increase in spending.

Yes, I know, “percentage of GDP” is a different measure than absolute. But the scaling cracks me up; it adds visual effect.

Old Vacation Photo

In 1984, I toured Balboa Park in San Diego. I took lots of photos. Here is one that I didn’t set out to take: a hot mom showing her hot daughter how to wear tight blue jeans.

Old Family Photos

I scanned in some old Barbara shots (from 1995-1996)

Fall of 1996

Her “moon” dress, in 1996

One of my office photos

1995 with her family. We are eating pasta; she can’t have this now (celiac disease). Note the big blue jean butt.

12 October 2010 Rehabilitation

Shoulder: slight ache last night; probably due to the tough shoulder workout (“tough” meaning “tough given my tender rotator cuff).

But it was slight; not at all like the days past. This morning I saw the PT and we did the massage thing.

Walking: hilly 6.3 mile course in 1:28:35. My yoga teacher called me and told me that I was super focused and didn’t hear her harassing me as she drove past (she often yells “NICE ASS” at me…yes, I bring it on myself and no, I don’t mind. )

I did feel some twinges at first; my quads are tight. I’ve been neglecting stretching.

Barack Obama: why I like him so much and others don’t.

Great article here:

IF YOU have waited to see Barack Obama lose his cool, your moment has come. After the president finished giving the interview published in the October 15 issue of Rolling Stone, he charged back into the room to deliver a parting salvo. Stabbing at the air, Obama berated Democrats for “sitting on their hands complaining.” He even questioned their motives. “If people now want to take their ball and go home,” he said, “that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.”

How has it come to this—the president publicly doubting the motives of his own political base? Consider the grievance that stoked his anger: that progressives are unwilling to make the compromises necessary to achieve anything. Obama mocked the Left’s attitude toward health care reform: “Well, gosh, we’ve got this historic health care legislation that we’ve been trying to get for 100 years, but it didn’t have every bell and whistle that we wanted right now, so let’s focus on what we didn’t get instead of what we got.”

Saying this aloud may not help Obama. But his point is revealing. Obama and America are disenchanted today less because they have different values within the American political spectrum than because they have different orientations toward politics as a whole. More than any American president within memory, Barack Obama embodies the “ethic of responsibility” identified by the sociologist Max Weber in his lecture Politics as a Vocation. Obama weighs possible consequences carefully and tries to produce the best result. This comes in contrast to the “ethic of ultimate ends” favored by large swaths of the American public.

The president’s detractors—from the Tea Party to his progressive base—prefer moral imperatives to the weighing of consequences. Do what is right, they say, and if others lack the insight to follow, that’s their problem. Foreseeable consequences are beside the point. To Obama, this posture has always seemed like empty moralizing masquerading as morality, a rejection of politics itself. What seems truly right, to him, is to act in ways likely to make this world better, not to insist on noble extremes that will backfire. [...]

Follow the link to more examples. I should put forth the caveat though: sometimes, the correct answer is at one extreme or another; e. g., I agree with Paul Krugman that the stimulus was too small to be successful.

But take health care: sure, I’d like “single payer” but if things were fixed so that poor people could see a doctor when they needed to, I am happy. Yes, I know, the devil is in the details (would care be overused? what sort of rationing? etc.)

When You Hear “Obama has X Democrats” in Congress Remember…

Many of those (so called) Democrats are like this:

“57 Democrats” is nothing, nothing, nothing, like 57 Republicans.