Friday Music Post - FFHAWDWM

Wanted to say that The Moral Arc has broken well over 1000 page views at this point and I am very grateful for all who have contributed to that.  Hope you enjoy this song and have a great weekend everyone!

WaPo's Myth Series

If you haven't checked out the Washington Post's Five Myths series, they are highly interesting reads (though sometimes my own myths get challenged and then I think WaPo is full of it).

Five myths about Americans in prison:
3. Helping prisoners rejoin society will substantially reduce the prison population. Ninety-five percent of American prisoners will return home someday. While reentry programs can aid reintegration into the community, they do little to reduce our reliance on incarceration. Prison appears to make inmates as likely to commit crime as not; about half of released inmates return to prison within three years. Congress appropriated only $83 million for reentry in fiscal year 2011, or less than $120 per released prisoner. Even with additional state funds, one is not likely to overcome a lifetime of low educational attainment, substance abuse and/or mental health disabilities with this meager commitment.

What Eric Cantor Really Means

The Onion: Members of the U.S. Congress reported Wednesday they were continuing to carefully debate the issue of whether or not they should allow the country to descend into a roiling economic meltdown of historically dire proportions. "It is a question that, I think, is worthy of serious consideration: Should we take steps to avoid a crippling, decades-long depression that would lead to disastrous consequences on a worldwide scale? Or should we not do that?" asked House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), adding that arguments could be made for both sides, and that the debate over ensuring America’s financial solvency versus allowing the nation to default on its debt—which would torpedo stock markets, cause mortgage and interests rates to skyrocket, and decimate the value of the U.S. dollar—is “certainly a conversation worth having.” "Obviously, we don't want to rush to consensus on whether it is or isn't a good idea to save the American economy and all our respective livelihoods from certain peril until we've examined this thorny dilemma from every angle. And if we’re still discussing this matter on Aug. 2, well, then, so be it.” At press time, President Obama said he personally believed the country should not be economically ruined.

There is no chance that the government will actually default on its debt, and I say that with the utmost confidence in how much money controls politics.  There is a small chance, however, that Eric Cantor watched Kevin Costner's The Postman and wants desperately to play that roll in real life. 

-Tim 

Michelle Obama Fights Food Desserts (I spelled it the way I meant it)

NY Times: Executives from Wal-Mart, Walgreens, SuperValu and other stores joined Michelle Obama at the White House on Wednesday to announce a pledge to open or expand a combined 1,500 stores in communities that have limited access to nutritious food and are designated as “food deserts.”

I have taken the drive from Chicago to Northwest Indiana on a number of occasions (don't ask me why), and consequently can attest to the fact that for vast vast stretches of the south side, the only things I ever saw were laundromats and liquor stores.  It sounds like the program above won't be as much about building new stores as making existing stores sell produce.  A good step, no doubt, but hopefully a preliminary one. 

Also, if anyone has any information on what it takes to actually get kids to eat healthy food, I would be much obliged.  I like this video, but I don't think imagining vegetables as sentient beings is a good step. 

-Tim

The Tea Party: Playa Hater's Ball

The fact that I am still thinking about the Tea Party bothers me quite a bit.  It seemed inevitable that they would be a short lived fad.  Granted in the overall scheme of things, it hasn't been very long, and other grassroots, American, "third" (not really third at all I know) parties have survived with some semblance of relevance longer.  But we stand amongst serious things such as budget time bombs and presidential primaries, and somehow the Tea Party is showing itself to continually be a major player.

What is the most disturbing to me about this whole matter is that the Tea Party seems more to be about hatred of an abstract evil liberalism than actually being for something.  Fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets are their main tenants, and while I do not doubt there are true libertarian ideologues amongst them, for the most part what I see is a group of people who hang their hats on political theories for the sake of public and private justification whilst actually being about blaming the ills of their lives on a lie the Republican party fed them about the way in which degrading family values are sending America into a spiral of satanic, founding father *******, Jesus murdering, socialism.   

There is the typical great irony of Tea Party rallies full of medicare loving seniors on tax payer funded wheelchairs, or touting the constitution while telling Muslims where they can and cannot build mosques, or supporting a party whose establishment benefited the most from government bailouts, or championing states rights where federal powers are not explicit and then trying to put in a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage because states are doing something they don't like, but to me the more perverse irony is the thought of Christian Tea Party members professing to be working for the kingdom to come while standing on a platform of demonizing hate.

-Tim

Charts are Always Great for Feeling Guilty

Environmental Working Group: The chart shows the lifecycle total of greenhouse gas emissions for common protein foods and vegetables, expressed as kilograms (kg) of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO₂e) per kg of consumed product. We compared our production emissions data for the main meat proteins to several mostly peer-reviewed or government-sponsored studies in the U.S. and Europe that assessed greenhouse gas emissions from animal production systems. Only a handful of other studies showed lower emissions, and these were within 25 percent of EWG’s figures, indicating that our results may be conservative.

If you eat lamb, you're a monster anyway.