is that every analyst of health status knows as though from birth that socioeconomic status has to be adjusted for; i.e., poor people are significantly less healthy than wealthier people.

mind you, whenever i've been laid off, i've found that i eat less, exercise more, sleep better, lose weight, have more energy, and generally feel better; but that's just because i have severance and/or unemployment coming in to pay the bills. it's not the bad economy that's good for your health, it's not having to work for a living.

check out this

http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/0810EnergySeminar.pdf

particularly page 24, where he maps out the physical "footprint" required to provide enough energy to power the US road vehicles; check out the wind power footprint

the associated paper is here: http://www.rsc.org/delivery/_ArticleLinking/DisplayHTMLArticleforfree.cfm?JournalCode=EE&Year=2009&ManuscriptID=b809990c&Iss=Advance_Article

when you're in a college dorm, you're just thrown together. and when you leave, you maintain that kind of connection for years, out of sheer momentum. after a while, you start to recognize that everybody you meet who wants some sort of relationship with you (in the general sense of the word) is doing it because they want something from you; certainly you're not getting emails and phone calls and mail from strangers, or strangers walking up to you because they'd like to do something nice for you; so you start restricting your contacts to your family (birth and/or of choice) and your coworkers. and even then, very often you find that the ones who are more interested in contact with you want you to play a role in a lopsided relationship (again the general sense of the word) that you're not interested in.

i'm reminded of Chris Rock's take on the Trenchcoat Mafia (remember them?) at least in their popularized form, as a dozen "loners and misfits". as rock put it, "how can you be loners and misfits if you have a dozen friends? i didn't have a dozen friends in high school. i don't have a dozen friends now, and i'm rich!"

nobody can hear your IQ drop

in the sense that if enough people say something that the first couple if pages of google search answers don't find any different answer, then it must be the truth. printed material is not as amenable to clean and easy change, so that now we've paved the road to brave new world/1984.

it's also notable that, while you can get a vast amount of detail on your favorite computer game or porn star, older stuff is vanishing, literally. anyone who used to do real research; cranking through microfilm and digging through old photos in newspaper morgues, for example knows that there's a vast amount of stuff out there, and not only is it not getting digitized, let alone put on the internet, it's too expensive to be maintained so it's getting chucked.

we're not trying to occupy Iraq; we're just not very competent and getting out of it!

jeez, that's a thing of beauty.

Oh well, about that, life just comes around and smacks you hard all the time. What does not kill you makes you stronger, except for most of the time when it really injures you for a long time mentally, emotionally, and/or physically, sometimes for life. Don't expect that even when there is an obviously correct choice you can make it and thereby alleviate having your soul get a bad case of the wish-for-the-sweet-embrace-of-deaths.

But that's ultimately liberating, in that you don't have to worry about whether or not to torture the little girl is the correct choice, instead you are free to just not goddamn do it.

like most mixed race kids of single mothers growing up in indonesia.

not like that Bush feller, he was jes' folks who rose above his humble origins to become such a fine leader.

doesn't anybody in this august body understand politics in the slightest? the israeli government is in flux right now, nobody's got much of an upper hand; the population is on the swing to the right, after the past swing to the left failed to get them any relief from eternal war, after the previous swing to the right failed to get them any relief, etc. etc. so no politician with any pretense of wish to get elected is going to smile at the rocketeers and say "kids will kids", in the hope that the voters will agree.

meanwhile, back at the ranch, hamas is managing gaza worse and worse; what funds, food, fuel, etc. there are are being sequestered for the ruling class when in fact on a per capita basis there are more resources available than among the population of Jordan, Egypt, etc; Hamas' bigwigs pirating fuel from hospitals, etc. for their own needs. so, when the population starts getting wise, what does a smart leader do? cancel the truce, send a shitload of rockets over, doesn't matter if they hit anything, you just want to prod the israelis into a response (knowing the above paragraph to be true), at which point the population will rally behind you once again. hey, it worked for bush, didn't it?

let me point out once again that, by and large, with very few exceptions, revolutionaries turn out to not be very good at doing things like keeping the streets clean after the revolution.

obama, being wise, is going to stay the hell out of it as much as possible, as should anyone who doesn't have anything constructive to offer. he can't solve it, and all he can do at this point is lose the support of one side or the other, or both. he's going to need that support when he gets the reins of power and put some teeth into his "suggestions".

and bush will be bush and do something forgettable.