Walmart

When I was in Boston, I was lucky enough to be invited to a local Union hall to watch the documentary "WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Prices." If you haven't seen it, you can watch the movie at their website.

Any movie attacking Walmart shown in a Boston Union hall is sure to have a receptive audience. However, you may not know that Walmart, as famous for its low wages as it's low prices, is now the number 1 company in the world according to Fortune magazine.

Flowingdata.com has posted an interesting map showing the spread of walmart across America. I think substituting the green dots for yellow 'evil smiley faces' would have made the map much better.

Euless!!??

Euless is a small Texas bedroom community quietly tucked between Dallas and Fort Worth. Like it's neighboring towns, Hurst and Bedford, it is only remarkable at being unexceptional; so much so that the entire region is often called by the unsatisfying acronym H.E.B. Having grown up in Bedford, I remember more colorful names for these three towns. Worst, Useless and Dreadford.

There is no town center in Euless. No community commons. No museums or opera houses. Nothing which speaks to any higher form of functioning. Instead, there are supermarkets, business centers and shopping malls which are scattered unattractively alongside Highway 183.

In fact, the highway is the only place the residents can see the famous spring time carpet of Texas blue bonnets but you have to do so at 75MPH and occasionally dart your eyes towards the small stretches of blue between the medians.

Euless is like that ugly kid in school who never was noticed by anybody and nobody seemed much bothered about the fact, least of all the ugly kid.

So imagine Euless's surprise when it was ranked #34 of the top 100 places to live by CNNMoney.com.

You'd think Euless got a make-over and the ugly little duckling transformed itself into an attractive and lithe swan, but you'd think wrong. This is no story about urban renewal or the success of town planning. Euless is #34 because that's what the database said it should be.

Apparently, CNNMoney.com crunched a wide variety of numbers and spit out a list of the top 100 small cities to live in. Now, this would be perfectly reasonable if Euless was popluated with computers but since small cities are usually made up of people, I take some exception to this ranking.

Not that I don't like computers and I would never be so thoughtless as offend them as a group. I'm sure they would think Euless is a fine place to be, if computers thought, or lived or cared.

As Mark Twain once said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

You might be wondering why I called you into my office...

John saw the flier for psychological test subjects on the Yale campus bulletin board a week ago. Easy money. A few hours out of the day and some spending cash in the back of your pocket. A good thing when your parents aren't footing the bills, but this was turning into something he didn't sign up for.

"Please continue.", buzzed the overhead speaker.

"Hey wait! Is that guy alright? Didn't you hear him screaming and banging on the walls?"

The intercom crackled, "The experiment requires that you continue."

John had already pushed the red button six times, once for every wrong answer the test subject gave. The first shock he applied was just a few volts, enough to get your attention. But for each wrong answer the voltage doubled.

"Hey, didn't you hear him say he had a heart problem? Can't you see the needle is pointing to red?!"

The first time he pressed the button, the subject let out an involuntary yelp. John pushed a laugh down into his gut imagining the guy's hair standing up like some cartoon character. Hell, it could have been him getting the electric shock treatment if he hadn't drawn 'tester'. John was lucky that way.

As the voltage doubled and doubled again with each incorrect answer, the brief yelps turned into shouts that increased in length and volume and intensity. When John applied the sixth shock, it issued an unrestrained scream that lasted several seconds after the juice was shut off.

"It is absolutely essential that you continue!", said the metallic voice.

"Look, I'll give the 50 dollars back OK? I don't need the money. Would you just tell me that guy is alright! Professor! Jesus Christ!""

John's chest pumped up and down, swallowing air in thick chunks. This wasn't worth it. Nothing was worth it.

"You have no other choice," The professor boomed through the intercom. "You MUST go on!"

John braced himself, expecting a scream that would spend years lurching and shambling inside his nightmares, but when he opened his eyes it was only the weight of silence pressing on his clammy skin and the scent of ozone fluttering in his nose.

The intercom squawked opened.

"Thank you for your time, John." smiled the voice through the speaker. "The experiment is over.", and the intercom went dead.

-- short untitled story, by Kevin

Soon after the war crimes trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in 1961, Yale Psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to test the ability of subjects to perform unethical acts under the direction of an authority figure. The experiment, now known as the Milgram Experiment, was testing the veracity of the Nuremberg Defense where a defendant states "I was only following orders". Nobody was actually subjected to electric shocks, but an actor in another room made the experiment seem very realistic to the participants in the study.

Now, the idea that anyone could be manipulated to do anything under the direction of an authority figure is pretty frightening, but apparently someone thought the experiment didn't go far enough and proceeded to try their own anonymous Milgram experiments over the phone.

As strange as it sounds, a person posing as a police officer or company executive placed phone calls to several fast-food restaurants around the country including Taco Bell, McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, Ruby Tuesday and Applebee's and successfully persuaded managers to perform strip searches on employees.

Weirder still, the caller sometimes reversed the tables and convinced the managers into submitting to strip searches themselves administered by the same employees they had just finished examining. These occurrences continued for about a decade and came to be known as the Strip Search Prank Call Scam.

Freedom Fries

An American and a Chinese were arguing about their freedom to talk in their countries.

American : The Constitution gives us the freedom to shout that George W. Bush is an idiot right in front of the White House!

Chinese : Thats nothing. We can shout that George W. Bush is an idiot right in front of our president... and get a reward too!

It's getting near the 4th of July weekend, and I suppose I am reflecting on the idea of "Freedom" more than I normally would. I have met many amazing people but there are only a select few that I would consider free or whose pursuit of freedom manifested itself in ways that were interesting to me.

One person that comes to mind is Dr. Ala Bashir, former personal physician to Saddam Hussein and respected artist who also penned "The Insider", a book based on his experiences inside Iraq.

Dr. Bashir is tall and thin and possesses a stillness of character one usually associates with men of great spiritual discipline. He moves slowly and speaks with great thought and gentleness and his calmness creates a subtle magnetism that tugs you a little closer.

Dr. Bashir's relationship with freedom was something I witnessed during an exhibition of his art in New Haven, CT. Surrounding him were local real estate developers, magazine publishers, Yale professors and more than the fair share of the idle rich.

The showing featured works he painted during the Hussein regime and they are extraordinarily powerful in symbolism and dramatic use of primary reds, blues and greens. I often felt my breath involuntarily leave my lungs as I came upon one of his paintings in the gallery.

Surrounded by people bearing wine glasses and fruit plates, Dr. Bashir would introduce each painting, giving the audience the meaning of the symbols as he knew them and the circumstances under which he was inspired to paint them, which were usually in his dreams.

After Bashir spoke, the audience would ask many questions,

"Did you mean this when you painted it?", "Could the use of this symbol mean....", "Was this a political statement of...", "Do you believe in God?"

I say the audience asked questions, but the truth is most were statements disguised with a question mark, designed to aggrandize the intelligence of the speaker rather than a call for understanding and I silently suppressed many cringes as I listened.

To each question, Bashir would politely say no, I did not mean that, I did not mean this, I do not think this work shows I believe what you say, I do not feel that way. This painting was in my head, and I needed to paint it.

As I stood there with a glass of red wine and a pressed white shirt, it occured to me that as Dr. Bashir battled these attempts at philosophical rationalization of his art, he was actually engaging in a personal battle for his own freedom.

Instead of being surrounded by a group of wealthy Americans, it seemed to me that Dr. Bashir was in a sea of tiny dictators, each one saying "You must be this! You must think this! You must believe this! You must be what I believe you to be and nothing else, because I say it must be so!"

Bashir replies, "No."

I hope Dr. Bashir will forgive me if I imagine him thinking that the word 'no' is unique in all the world because it is only free men who can can speak it without fear.

I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.

America is a different and unfamiliar country from the one I grew up with in High School.

This was the nation where George Orwell's 1984 taught us government sanctioned surveillance, propaganda and torture can control a nation and even outlaw love. Fairenheight 451 by Ray Bradbury taught us that declining readership leads to loss of critical thinking and ignorance. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, taught the need to advocate for the oppressed and To Kill a Mockingbird taught us to emphasize tolerance and decry prejudice and stand for justice no matter the cost.

And yet, the America we live in today practices and defends it's use of torture by waterboarding, the capture of detainees through extraordinary rendition, advocates the suspension of habius corpus through indefinite incarceration, engages in covert military operations, shamelessly twists intelligence information to create Casius Belli and passes laws guaranteeing immunity for warrentless surveillance.

But some days, we wake up and see a news article that not only makes America seem more familiar but makes us proud of High School Literature as well.

The Gulf of Tonkin non-incident

Thirty years since the last American soldier left south-east Asia, the word 'Vietnam' still has the power to conjure images of Huey helicopters, soldiers torching grass huts with zippo lighters and war protesters shot dead in Kent State by national guard units.

Prior to 1964, American involvement in Vietnam was in the form of financial aid to France who struggled to regain control over it's south-east Asian colony. While America was more interested in containing the spread of communism than propping up a failed colonial empire, the distinction was likely lost on the people of Vietnam themselves.

Nevertheless, what changed Americas monetary involvement into a military engagement was an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin where naval forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam engaged two American destroyers.

However, recently declassified NSA reports show the American people were grossly misled on the actual events of August 2 and 4, 1964 and it was this misrepresentation that gave President Johnson the broad authority to wage war in Vietnam on August 7th, 1964. Five years later, the first lottery drawing since WWII was held to draft men into military service on December 1, 1969.

The war LBJ started would last 11 years and cost over 58,000 American lives. Had the American people known the full truth of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Congress would never have given authority to escalate American involvement.

"For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there." -- President Lyndon Bains Johnson, 1965.

With these declassified documents, similarities between the lead-up to the Vietnam war and the current conflict in Iraq are self-apparent.

Whether you agree with the Iraq war or not, we all must acknowledge that the intelligence data used to justify the Iraq conflict was grossly skewed. I would not debate the who-knew-what-when's of the matter because without a thorough congressional investigation (and the political will to carry it through) we will never know.

However, the detrimental effects of unjustified conflicts has upon a Democracy cannot be overstated because if a democracy can be led into war as easily as a dictatorship, then the difference between democracy and tyranny has become very small indeed.

An article on www.fair.org about the Gulf of Tonkin incident is an excellent summery of the new findings.

Post peak oil America.

Today, the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline is $4.067 and despite some belt tightening and an explosive increase in bicycle sales, the average American is pretty much living as they have for decades. In other words, the life Americans are leading today is indistinguishable from the life led a few decades ago, but that is about to change.

"It is increasingly clear that the outlook for oil supply signals a period of unprecedented scarcity,...Despite the recent record jump in oil prices, oil prices will continue to rise steadily over the next five years." -- statement by analysts led by Jeff Rubin at CIBC

The great unanswered question is what is the dollar-per-fuel ratio which will make the current American lifestyle unsustainable? When does the average two-income American family decide that using two cars to commute between work, grocery shopping, school, soccer practice, church and girl scout camp simply cannot happen any longer? Furthermore, what does a world look like when the average American crunches the numbers and discovers the life they lead, indeed the lives their cities were built for, is no longer economically feasible on an individual level?

To find an answer to the future of America, we will need to look into the past.

America as we know it today has its beginnings during a 1919 Transcontinental Motor Convoy experiment which tested the mobility of military vehicles on American soil. A young Lieutenant Colonel named Dwight D. Eisenhower participated in the exercise which took 62 days to traverse 3,251 miles from Washington DC and to San Francisco. Thirty-seven years later, when the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956 was going through congress, automobile industry lobbiests found a powerful ally in President Eisenhower whose unsatisfactory two month long commute is the reason we can start a car in Washington, D.C. and arrive in San Francisco less than two days later.

Suburbs were born in the era of the trolley and commuter train but only reached brobdingnagian proportions in the age of the automobile and the super-highway. The creation of the Eisenhower interstate highway not only changed how fast Americans could travel but also the shape of their communities as well. The super-highway network had the ironic effect of both connecting remote suburbs to cities as well as dividing those communities through which they were built. As anyone in North Texas or Atlanta knows, the idea of hopping on a bike or walking to the local grocery store would be every bit as suicidal as jumping off a building if that store were on the other side of a major highway. The fact is that safely purchasing a gallon of milk or a pound of suger requires the turn of an ignition switch - not a bad thing when gas was less than half the price than milk.

However, as analysts forcast the price of gasoline rising to over 7 dollars a gallon over the next five years, the use of petrol fuel becomes far more problematic and, by extension, so does the very existence of the American mega-suburbs.

The fact remains that at some point (perhaps when Exxon credit bills look more like rent payments) America will undergo a very rapid and painful change but I believe this change will be for the better. Here are a few predictions for the next 10 years.

1. Mass transportation, such as trolleys and light rail will make a comeback.
2. "White flight" will reverse course, back into cities where trains can deliver food and products.
3. Outlying suburbs will shrink or are abandoned to be changed back into the farmlands they once were.
4. Cities and town will be restructured for a pedestrian existence, allowing families to walk to schools, work, shopping.
5. Food will be grown locally, even in our own backyards, and our consumption of meat will be dramatically reduced.

In addition to these fundamental changes comes the very real effect on those people who must live through them. The price of suburb housing, by reason of supply and demand, would drop dramatically in an age of 7 dollar per gallon fuel, likely leaving people owing far more than what the property is valued at. However, this is merely one of many changes that America will undergo as we retool our economy, our cities and our lives to accommodate the post-peak oil century. Perhaps the only way to know how our lives will change is to live through the changes so we may look back and see where we have come.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/10/bicycle_sales_a.php
http://www.fuelgaugereport.com/
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/gasoline-could-hit-7-oil/story.aspx?guid=%7B824E895C-F649-4526-89F1-50C198A8A0D5%7D
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/dl/1919Convoy/1919documents.html
http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch5en/appl5en/oildisruptions.html
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/mcrimus1m.htm
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/26/congress.energy.ap/index.html
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Traffic/Story?id=485098&page=1

Maybe you already suspected...

So I was thinking the other day, what is it with these red states anyway? On a lark, I decided to overlay the national teacher salary ranking with a map of red vs. blue state as measured by the past four presidential elections. The results were pretty interesting.

The top ten states for teachers salaries also happened to be solidly blue states where the last ten states were decidedly red.

Discuss!



http://www.aft.org/presscenter/releases/2007/salary_map.htm
http://www.270towin.com/states/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Red_state%2C_blue_state.svg

10 Reasons Gen Xers Are Unhappy at Work

This post by Tammy Erickson generated 97 comments from gen-Y'ers, gen-X'ers and Boomers and a lot of the posts were quite heated. Some people were surprised to discover the tensions simmering between these generations as well as within themselves. Perhaps the one thing all generations could agree on was the apparently unique gen-X trait of 'whining' a lot.

As for X-ers whining, yes, I believe there is that element...if nothing else, a lot perceive that they are accomplishing 'less' than their parents were able to while making more. They are looking at a future which not only has an uneasy economy, political uncertainty, a seemingly unending war,... they also are remembering who they were and some of us are wondering how we became who we are presently. -- C Erickson

It got me to thinking that perhaps the reason for Gen-X dissatisfaction was that they belonged to a political party that didn't exist, but the theory didn't pan out so well on the forums.

What do you think? Is Gen-X really the constituents of the Progressive Bull-Moose party?

Would we use Bullwinkle as our mascot?