Pre-Thanksgiving randomness

The sun has been out here in PGH all day long today. I was out partying late last night, so I thought I might still be in a hungover stupor or something this morning when bright sunshine - sunshine!!! - awoke me, filtering through my blinds as a rather welcome stranger. In fact, there has not been a single cloud in the sky for most of the day. So basically, I just want to say that it was nice knowing all of you guys. I can only logically assume that an event of this magnitude foretells the coming of the Rapture, which will most certainly happen in the next few days.

Anyhow, my last dose of Sunday randomness before Thanksgiving - when I won't be blogging - and the arrival of my new format.
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• I've already voiced my opinion in favor of the bridge loan for Detroit's Big 3 automakers, and I can only reiterate - strongly reiterate - that here. And in the name of God, can this be done sooner rather than later? I can understand the requirement to mandate a feasible business model from the senior management of these companies before disbursing taxpayer funds, but all of this ridiculous bickering about the source of the money - whether it will come from the $700 billion financial system bailout versus another appropriation for "greening" the auto industry versus somewhere else - is a prime example of why common people have lost their faith in our government. While the Democrats and Republicans bicker about inconsequential shit like this, people in industrial Midwestern towns like Moraine, Ohio face the prospect of having their livelihoods annihilated two days before Christmas. Enough is enough. As a person who has close family members working in auto plants - in fact, an aunt whom I love dearly was just furloughed from her job recently at a plant that manufacturers carburetors after working there for nearly two decades - this type of nonsense makes me boiling, Lou Dobbs-mad at the seeming incompetence of paper-pushing, Ivy League-educated idiots in our government to realize how their actions (or lack thereof) affect the lives of millions of innocent, hard-working people. This is not about the privileged elite who sit atop those glistening skyscrapers in Wayne County, Michigan; we can deal with them in due time. This is not about "failed business plans" of those companies, which are in the past and irrelevant to the current situation. This is not about preserveing "free-market capitalism", which is a failed model that only the Paultards and Randroids dare attempt to defend. This is about the livelihoods of millions of Americans, who are only a few months away from total economic collapse if we allow these companies to fail.
• The media has been all abuzz recently with talk about the increasingly aggressive pirates in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Somalia. How interesting is this? Somalia has long been one of the most outrageous humanitarian disasters in the world, a land of unimaginable chaos and suffering, and yet most Americans could not even point to its location on a map; remarkably little attention in the Western media was focused on this failed state until Western commercial interests fell into risk. I think that, in many ways, much of the Western world decided to conveniently ignore this nation after the unfortunate events in the early 90's there. But perhaps the rapidly escalating piracy problem will force industrialized powers to reconsider their options for dealing with this perennially troubled region. It's really International Politics 101: a failed state is like a cancerous tumor; you can ignore it for a certain time, and during this period you may not even notice any materially negative side effects, but sooner or later it will catch up to you with a vengeance.
• And a simple thought on Africa in general; I'd just like to fiercely echo the sentiments of those who have said that when the United States - still a white-majority nation - can peacefully and forcefully elect a black man as chief executive, it is time for Africans to consider the sheer lunacy of the types of wanton violence that have long dominated news emanating from that continent. Blacks killing blacks, often in a rabid pursuit of unearned political power; there is no moral excuse for this type of action, and perhaps Obama's victory will serve as a way of stripping away the legitimacy from "thug Presidents" like Mugabe in Zimbabwe, who have long bolstered the illegitimate argument that only a strong-handed black leader could protect Africans from the "racist imperialist power" of white Europeans.
  
• When Sarah Palin and other such "populist" Republicans launched into tirades against the "liberal elites" in Washington, I typically cringed. Though I make no qualms about my strong middle class upbringing and no frills down-to-earth orientation, I thought that such attacks were merely another derivative of the tried-and-true Rovian "us versus them" political game. Well, at least until I came to Carnegie Mellon, and more specifically to a highly-regarded (i.e., elite?) public policy school, and began to observe how these future Washington DC denizens behave. Let's ignore my own program in MIS, which is culturally different from the rest of the college but still an abject social failure for its own unique set of reasons. I'm not even strictly referring to the public policy kids here, but more specifically the subset intent on going into government or NGO and becoming part of the "Inside the Beltway" culture. Such a remarkably homogenous group; incredibly homogenous. And to say that most of these students are "cliqueish" is an understatement of the magnitude of saying that George W. was a "slightly bad" President. At the large state school where I established my academic roots, class-based distinctions certainly existed, but people freely intermingled in a down to earth, lighthearted manner without really placing an enormous amount of emphasis on superficial details. People were friendly, approachable, and most importantly, gave social newcomers the benefit of the doubt. Au contraire, the social scene here is a veritable mine field littered with unspoken faux pas's, somewhat similar to the movie Ridicule, where wearing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, acting the wrong way, will irreparably damage your social status based on somebody's set of "haute culture" and "political propriety" metrics. But it's not "wrong" in the sense of being a total asshole at a party; it is "wrong" in the sense of supporting a NGO that somebody else thinks "hasn't done enough" to advance a certain cause; it's "wrong" in the sense of not drinking the right thing, not reading the right novels, not enjoying the same types of art, not approaching a certain political issue from the "correctly enlightened" perspective. That type of nonsense did not exist at the University of Florida, by and large; people did not have large objects firmly inserted up their asses. People in this college really do believe that they are better than the rest of the world; they believe that they arrived here on a golden carpet with a mandate to change the world by enlightening it with policy prescriptions taken from New York Times editorialists and Brookings Institution fellows. I've been fashionably polite when dealing with those things to this point, but after a rather arduous semester of coexisting with these bags of Hamburg Hot Air, my patience is running extremely thin. The next time somebody snidely calls me out for something, they are going to get a piece of my mind; how's that for political correctness? While I don't agree at all with Palin's viewpoint, I do at least somewhat see where she's coming from. These types of snotty-nosed Hamburg Hall policy kids, isolated in their feeling of divine superiority and running on undiluted hubris, are going to become the next generation of movers and shakers in Washington DC. I'll have more on that subject later, I'm sure. It suffices to say that my viewpoint on the issue of the existence of a "liberal elite" has evolved somewhat over the course of this semester. And as a proudly middle-class, down to earth kid who also happens to be extremely liberal, I want absolutely nothing to do with those bastards.
  
• I'm going to spend the vast majority of this Thanksgiving break working my ass off to prepare for the last two weeks of the semester. Well, last full week and then another week of exams. But the time with family is always great - something I have truly learned to cherish over the course of this year - and I will be able to at least partially relax for the first time in a rather long period. I can only hope that most Americans get the same opportunity; to just relax and, in the comfort of a family setting, and enjoy a great meal and great conversation. We do indeed have many things for which to be thankful.
  
• I want to retire in 2045. I'll be 58 then; I think that's a suitable age. And I vow to never be the type of retiree who sits around in Naples playing golf all day; I'd like to do community work with inner-city kids (assuming we still have those problems in 2045, which is likely) as well as the neglected kids from small towns and rural areas, who often see no path to escape that lifestyle. Mentoring is an excellent way to give back to the community, and I personally find it to be fun as well.
• One of the things that I strongly hope to see emerge out of this financial crisis is a collective sense, among Americans, that we cannot continue to exist as a debtor nation without seriously endangering our future security and sovereignty. And not just government; individuals who are shackled with the burden of tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt are not saving money for their children's college education and for their own retirement, meaning that those obligations will either go unsatisfied or passed on to the public sector. It is nothing short of laughable to think that we will remain the world's financial powerhouse when our government drives itself into debt by giving tax breaks to the wealthiest citizens and we collectively have a negative personal savings rate.
• As long as I can remember, I cringed going to Kentucky for Thanksgiving and having to deal with weather in the 40's and 50's, occasionally even in the high 30's. with some snowflakes. Now I find myself dreaming about the relative warmth of 50 degree weather. A year can radically alter your perspective, can't it?
• I am going to rewrite my A Measure of Change article this summer, greatly expand it, and try to get it published. I find Florida to be a fascinating case study in demographic change, and a microcosm for what is happening across the entire Sun Belt region. There are many effects of this change; significant among them, I expect that we will continue to see Florida become more and more of a true Blue state over the next few election cycles. We'll support moderate Republicans like Charlie Crist, but I think that the days of the state being a sure bet for Republicans (if those even ever existed!) are now long gone. The proof of that is Sarasota County, a longtime Republican bastion that was essentially split 50/50 this year. It is also a Modern Florida county with a growing creative class citizen base, quickly antiquating its stereotypical identity as a sleepy retiree community south of Tampa Bay. I never imagined that Obama would be as competitive as he was in this county, even though the 2006 13th District debacle did demonstrate political shifts in the area. Interestingly though, Buchanan maintained her seat with an impressive margin this time around (just proving how hard it is to oust incumbents, I suppose.)
• And as a closing thought, I was left sitting on my bed in somber thought for a full half hour after reading the Miami Herald's article today on the state of child malnourishment in Haiti. If you've had a shitty week, month, or year and have convinced yourself that you have little to be thankful for, you should reconsider. As I said earlier, for nearly all Americans, just the opposite is true. And with a little personal reflection, I am certain that you will come to the same conclusion.

Have a great, food-filled Thanksgiving! I will return on Monday, December 1.