Jonathan's blog

Via the August 18, 2006, issue of The Week, from an opinion piece in the LA Times by Niall Ferguson:

It was 99 years ago that Leo Hendrik Baekeland invented the first plastic based on a synthetic polymer - Bakelite - and ushered in the age of plastic. From that moment, a new kind of pollutant entered the sea; one that took a century or more to degrade. The plastic plague is a global epidemic. According to the United Nations Environment Program, about 46,000 pieces of plastic are floating on every square mile of the world's oceans. The problem is more than merely aesthetic. Last week, this newspaper carried a shocking report from Midway Atoll, which is about as isolated a spot as the world has to offer. Hardly anyone lives there, so the number of bottles thrown in the sea can't be large. And yet birdlife on Midway is being devastated as albatrosses inadvertently feed their chicks lethal fragments of plastic picked up from what's known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, a virtual island of trash formed by the currents of the North Pacific subtropical gyre.

The Eastern Garbage Patch on Wikipedia.

Via the August 18, 2006, issue of The Week, from an op-ed piece in the LA Times by Jonah Goldberg:

There are few issues for which the political consensus is so distant from both common sense and expert opinion. Right-wing economists, left-wing environmentalists and almost anybody in-between who doesn't receive a check from the Department of Agriculture or depend on a political donation from said recipients understand that Americans are spending billions to prop up the last of the horse-and-buggy industries. At this nation's founding, nearly nine out of 10 workers were employed in agriculture. By 1900 that fell to fewer than four in 10. Today, fewer than one in every 100 workers is in agriculture, and less than 1% of gross domestic product is attributable to agriculture. Yet this country spends billions upon billions of dollars subsidizing a system that makes almost everyone in the world worse off. Our system is so complicated - i.e. rigged - that it's almost impossible to know how much agricultural subsidies cost U.S. taxpayers. But we know from the Washington Post's recent reporting that since 2000 the U.S. government paid out $1.3 billion to "farmers" who don't farm. They were simply "compensated" for owning land previously used for farming. A Houston surgeon received nearly $500,000 to alleviate his hardship. Cash payments have cost $172 billion over the last decade, and $25 billion in 2005 alone, nearly 50% more than what was paid to families receiving welfare. But those sorts of numbers barely tell the story of our appallingly immoral agricultural corporatism. Subsidies combined with trade barriers (another term for subsidy) prop up the price of food for consumers at home and hurt farmers abroad. This is repugnant because agriculture is a keystone industry for developing nations and a luxury for developed ones. This keeps Third World nations impoverished, economically dependent and politically unstable. Our farm subsidies alone - forget trade barriers - cost developing countries $24 billion every year, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis. Letting poor nations prosper would be worth a lot more than the equivalent amount in foreign aid. But Big Agriculture likes foreign aid because it allows for the dumping of wheat and other crops on the world market, which perpetuates the cycle of dependency. Then, of course, there's the environment. Subsidies wreak havoc on the ecosystem... There's a lot of romance about the family farm in this country. But that's what it is: romance. Most of the Welfare Kings are rich men - buffalo farmer and CNN founder Ted Turner is one of the biggest. Of course, there are small farmers out there, but they have no more right to live off the government teat than the corner bakery I so loved as a child but that couldn't keep up with the times. We don't have a political system addicted to keeping bakers rich.

A while back I heard a segment on This American Life about Gene Cheek and his book The Color of Love: A Mother's Choice in the Jim Crow South. His is an amazing, sad, and tragic story. It caught my special attention because it occurred in Winston-Salem, NC where I grew up. I ordered the book and and read it during our vacation in the mountains of NC. I think the book would have been more powerful had I not already known the basic outline of the story from the radio show...I knew what was coming. So, if you're gonna read the book, I recommend not listening to the radio bit first. It was kind of a shock to me that in 1972, the year when I was born, inter-racial marriages were still illegal in NC and that Gene Cheek's story was happening in the previous decade. I'm so thankful that my parents raised me such that I wasn't taught any of the racism that was the norm when they were growing up and still wasn't nearly dead when I did.

From a NY Times article of the same title by Virgiania Heffernan:

EIGHT months ago a mysterious image showed up on YouTube, the video-sharing site that now shows more than 100 million videos a day. A sinewy figure in a swimming-pool-blue T-shirt, his eyes obscured by a beige baseball cap, was playing electric guitar. Sun poured through the window behind him; he played in a yellow haze. The video was called simply "guitar." A black-and-white title card gave the performer's name as funtwo. The piece that funtwo played with mounting dexterity was an exceedingly difficult rock arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon, the composition from the turn of the 18th century known for its solemn chord progressions and its overexposure at weddings. But this arrangement, attributed on another title card to JerryC, was anything but plodding: it required high-level mastery of a singularly demanding maneuver called sweep-picking... I was able to trace funtwo's video to Jeong-Hyun Lim, a 23-year-old Korean who taught himself guitar over the course of the last six years. Now living in Seoul, he listens avidly to Bach and Vivaldi, and in 2000 he took a month of guitar lessons. He plays an ESP, an Alfee Custon SEC-28OTC with gold-colored detailing.

Here's the video. I had seen it and was pretty amazed but wondered if it was a real peformance or just an elaborate job of pretending to play something completely pre-recorded:

It's easy to complain about the state of TV content these days, but last night I watched episodes of Real Time and Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason. Now that was some interesting television! Last week I also watched When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Spike Lee's documentary about Katrina and New Orleans. Sad and disturbing. New Orleans...Iraq...someone, not knowing better, might mistake us for utterly incompetent.