Category: Politics, Religion & Money

But is the Corn Still as High as an Elephant’s Eye?

Oklahoma has been having a tough time over the past several years, with an unbelievable number of earthquakes, undoubtedly caused by oil/gas shale fracking. To make matters worse, state politicians actually chose to not capitalize financially from the fracking boom!

The British publication “The Economist” explains what is happening in Oklahoma. The article focuses on the public education crisis in the state, which is really an indictment of the state’s overall approach to government, dominated by a Republican agenda. Here are some highlights:

“Most of our teachers work second jobs,” says Darlene Adair, Wagoner’s principal. “A lot of them work at Walmart on nights and weekends, or in local restaurants.” Ms Adair hopes that Walmart does not offer her teachers a full-time job, which would be a pay rise for many.

I know a retired high school teacher who, 30-40 years ago, also worked at a K-Mart, so I suppose things haven’t really changed all the much. A lot depends on where someone teaches, of course. In Massachusetts, real estate taxes pay for public schools, and as you would expect the richest towns around Boston have the best public schools. And yet some parents in those towns send their kids to exclusive private schools.

As in Oklahoma’s northern neighbour, Kansas, deep tax cuts have wrecked the state’s finances. During the shale boom, lawmakers gave a sweetheart deal to its oilmen, costing $470m in a single year, by slashing the gross production tax on horizontal drilling from 7% to 1%.

Old Orange Hair

I’m not going to watch the State of His Mind speech. He will of course tout the roaring economy. Obama took over when the economy was truly on the brink of catastrophe, and GM was about to go under. When he left, the economy was in relatively good shape, despite Republicans refusing to provide enough fiscal stimulus money in Obama’s first term, leaving the Fed to take up the slack with monetary policy. Trump insisted that the economy was a disaster a year ago at his inauguration, but now it’s doing great of course, and he’s taking credit in his always immodest manner. What a loser.

The result of interest rates being held so artificially low is that the only way to make money is to put it in Wall Street. Investments have inherent risks and are not insured savings! If there is another financial crisis, the Fed doesn’t have any leverage left, and with taxes being cut so steeply there won’t be any money for the government to spend. Worse, individuals and retirement funds stand to lose as much of their worth as they did in 2008. This is one of those formulas for disaster, so we’d all better hope things stay as they are and there isn’t another crisis!

Sweden’s Neglected Composer

By chance, while cleaning up my lists of favorite channels on the cable TV DVR, on Music Choice I happened to hear the beginning of a symphony that sounded interesting, by a Swedish composer I couldn’t recall ever hearing before. Kurt Atterberg.

I ended up sitting through the entire piece, and enjoyed it enough to buy a CD copy on Amazon. Here is Atterberg’s 8th symphony, taken from the same performance that I ordered:

Why is Kurt Atterberg’s name not more familiar? When he wrote his 8th symphony in the 40’s, Romantic music was still popular, at least with general audiences.

After ordering the CD I went looking for an answer, and found a possible explanation. Atterberg was believed to be a Nazi sympathizer.

Another musical figure with a Nazi connection, the German conductor Herbert Von Karajan, found terrific success after the war, but Atterberg’s career faded. He stayed on at his day job in Sweden’s patent office, apparently ignored and embittered.

Pushing Back on Push-Back

As I recall from college history courses, French philosophers, such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, were hugely influential on Thomas Jefferson’s writing of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, going back to the Pilgrims, there has been an intellectual dialogue going back-and-forth between America and Europe, from politics to popular culture and fashion.

Perhaps the most important outcome so far while the Groper-in-Chief holds the highest office in the land is the #metoo movement. Trump is, as yet, untouchable in any way, including his admitted sexual assault. Harvey Weinstein got nailed instead, and it stuck. Finally, the old “he said, she said” trap was broken! Then came the allegation landslide, with Al Franken rather than Trump paying the political price.

I have no doubt at all that most assertions of sexual misconduct are true, with the accused having no acceptable excuse. Putting it all out in the open is good, from the horrors of the Catholic Church’s abuses of kids, to movie stars exposing themselves to women. I also have no doubt there are minor offenses where a sincere apology should suffice.

Although I think that “slippery slope” arguments are often overstated, the distinctions between assault, abuse, and harassment seem to be getting blurred. If it continues to the point where the bar is set so low that normal social interaction is affected, we’ll be heading back towards the repressive mores of the Puritans.

Catherine Deneuve

In France there has been a call for a more nuanced dialogue regarding the dynamics between men and women, where some behaviors may not be socially acceptable, but are privately enjoyed by both parties. And yet in the United States, even that call to clarify the definition of harassment is considered by abuse victims to be offensive, and it has been met with a forceful rejection. So the back-and-forth between the cultures continues.

I’m not expecting women in the United States to adopt the more generous tolerance of men that is held by Catherine Denueve and other women in France. François Mitterrand’s funeral was, after all, attended by both his wife and his mistress. France’s inexplicable appreciation of Jerry Lewis aside, here is something that was hugely popular in France, that elsewhere might be considered unacceptable, even exploitative, entertainment.