The caramel-chocolate flavored candy bar looked so innocent, like the Sky Bars I used to love as a child.
Sitting in my hotel room in Denver, I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more. I figured if I was reporting on the social revolution rocking Colorado in January, the giddy culmination of pot Prohibition, I should try a taste of legal, edible pot from a local shop.
Not at first. For an hour, I felt nothing. I figured I’d order dinner from room service and return to my more mundane drugs of choice, chardonnay and mediocre-movies-on-demand.
I left a very brief comment. Click here to read it.
How did this Portland couple go from $30,000 of debt to homeownership? They ditched many of their material possessions, quit the jobs they hated, and settled down in a 128-square-foot cottage. “Part of the reason we moved into a tiny house,” they explain, “was to get rid of all this stuff and the trappings of daily life.”
To watch the video clip on The Atlantic site, click here:
Over the past few weeks, my wife Deb and I have been reporting on Mississippi’s efforts to move itself up from the bottom in rankings of educational achievement, and similarly to move itself up from being overall the poorest state in the nation.
Question for the day, from readers: whether any success it achieves will necessarily come at the expense of other places, especially in the North. Of course movement in rankings is by definition zero-sum. The real question is whether greater prosperity for Mississippi has to mean less somewhere else.
No sooner had the yellow ribbons started to come down from the trees than the backlash started up. Not everyone is delighted about the Obama administration’s deal to free American POW Bowe Bergdahl by exchanging him for five Guantanamo Bay prisoners.
It’s pretty easy to view this cynically, as a sign that in these times, everything is political and the country can’t come together over anything. And to a certain extent that’s true: If dueling, pro-forma charges of politicization from official Democratic and Republican spokesmen don’t instill pessimism, what will? But while there are plenty of controversies that seem far from producing any meaningful revelations, despite extensive inquiry—Benghazi comes to mind—there are important constitutional and policy issues at stake in this case.
The students were randomly chosen to try out the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers test. That meant spending 150 minutes in March and 180 minutes in May taking a trial test rather than being taught math. After hearing another teacher joke that they should be paid for that time, students approached their math teacher, Alan Laroche:
“I thought it was unfair that we weren’t paid for anything and we didn’t volunteer for anything,” said [student Brett] Beaulieu. “It was as if we said, ‘Oh we can do it for free.’”
WHENEVER Abraham Lincoln felt the urge to tell someone off, he would compose what he called a “hot letter.” He’d pile all of his anger into a note, “put it aside until his emotions cooled down,” Doris Kearns Goodwin once explained on NPR, “and then write: ‘Never sent. Never signed.’ ” Which meant that Gen. George G. Meade, for one, would never hear from his commander in chief that Lincoln blamed him for letting Robert E. Lee escape after Gettysburg.
Lincoln was hardly unique. Among public figures who need to think twice about their choice of words, the unsent angry letter has a venerable tradition. Its purpose is twofold. It serves as a type of emotional catharsis, a way to let it all out without the repercussions of true engagement. And it acts as a strategic catharsis, an exercise in saying what you really think, which Mark Twain (himself a notable non-sender of correspondence) believed provided “unallowable frankness & freedom.”
WASHINGTON — IF you think your commute is getting worse, it’s probably not your imagination. And no, it’s not because there are more cars on the road. The potholes, the stalled construction projects, the congestion — it’s because the highway trust fund is almost empty and, without a fix, could run out of money this summer.
Federal transportation funding relies heavily on user-based fees, in the form of gas taxes. While that worked for decades, it began to break down after Congress stopped raising the tax, which has been stuck at 18.4 cents a gallon for over 20 years. Since then, people have begun driving less and using more fuel-efficient cars, which means less tax is paid. Even worse, the tax is not indexed to inflation.
Unfortunately, this congress is nowhere near passing laws that are going to address the problem in any real way. In the absence of the enactment of a real infrastructure and jobs bill since 2010, and the exhaustion of stimulus funds, states have been scrambling to find ways to meet their needs. Many states have resorted to privatizing roads. Obviously, putting toll booths on every highway of every state is not a workable or fair solution.
We hear from McClatchy-DC that congressional Republicans want to siphon money to transportation from cutting USPS mail delivery to 5 days a week.
“Rather than raise the tax or find some other stable source of revenue, Congress has borrowed $54 billion in general funds since 2008. The House Transportation Committee projects that as much as $15 billion would be needed to extend the highway fund for just one year.
A while back I published an article titled “The Rich, the Right, and the Facts,” in which I described politically motivated efforts to deny the obvious — the sharp rise in U.S. inequality, especially at the very top of the income scale. It probably won’t surprise you to hear that I found a lot of statistical malpractice in high places.
Nor will it surprise you to learn that nothing much has changed. Not only do the usual suspects continue to deny the obvious, but they keep rolling out the same discredited arguments: Inequality isn’t really rising; O.K., it’s rising, but it doesn’t matter because we have so much social mobility; anyway, it’s a good thing, and anyone who suggests that it’s a problem is a Marxist.
The Giles piece, in many ways, is worse than the Reinhardt and Rogoff “error.” There is no error here; only an attempt to tarnish and discredit, all a part of the right’s mission to pull the wool over the world’s eyes. That’s right. I am saying it. The right wing conspiracy is an international one.
It’s really sad that the Financial Times is complicit in the lie. It’s sad that so many of the trusted institutions that make up the media are divided between right and left, truth and lies, facts and fiction – engaging in propaganda.
That Piketty’s book contained errors is normal for such a huge book. US data, the lion’s share of capital, was not in question. The errors change nothing.
