Salt City Sinner

They're calling that patch that starts in Texas and goes north (including where I live!) the "Zone of Sanity." And, since I'm gainfully employed and recently bought a condo at a very reasonable 30-year fixed rate, I'm not going to disagree. One of the nice things about living in Utah is a feeling - perhaps deserved, perhaps not - that no matter how bad things get in the economy overall, what we experience here will always be much milder.

A consensus seems to be building amongst a few political writers and policy wonks that the economic situation in America right now is far worse than it seems - that, in fact, what we are witnessing is nothing less than a coup d'etat. Simon Johnson of the Atlantic : In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again)... But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to a...

Growing up, Easter was always a weird holiday for me. I've been Type I diabetic since I was just over two years old, so the candy factor wasn't really there for me. I was raised a pretty devout Catholic, and so the religious aspect of the holiday was appealing, but also entailed a long, boring Mass that had pretty much the same message and same sermon with the same liturgy every year (I've never been a fan of re-runs). One thing I always liked about Easter was dyeing eggs. Not because of the pretty outcomes, mind you, but because I found the process of hollowing out an egg fascinating, and the fragile shell left behind was always slightly amazing to me. That beautiful, ornately decorated and fragile shell, devoid of any content it once might have had, is a pretty damn good metaphor for the Republican Party as of 2009. Perhaps the best embodiments of the state of the GOP right now are its most recent spokespersons. Let's start with the most market-friendly: Meghan McCain...

Keith Knight's K Chronicles is an awesome comic published in many city weeklies throughout our great nation. Citing SLC bargoers as "the drunkest, rowdiest" crowds he would encounter on his tour with his band, the Marginal Prophets , he has seen fit to give our city its propers . Thanks, Keith - and don't worry, I doubt that July will mean the end of our drunken, rowdy bar culture. If anything, it should be the beginning of a glorious new chapter. Cheers!

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this so-called “ Tax Day Tea Party ” phenomenon for some time now, and so I’m going to have to be careful parsing how very much it bothers me, on how many levels, and why. The Angry Mobs Storm the Mansions of the Elites: "We're Here To Cut Your Taxes!"* Let’s start with the operative metaphor here – namely, the co-opting of the Boston Tea Party as the big symbol of this movement. Bob Cesca from the Huffington Post wrote an excellent and very insightful piece on why this is not a particularly astute metaphor: It turns out that that the tea baggers, led in part by Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds and the Coward Rick Santelli, are politically more in line with the tax policies of King George than the views of the Sons of Liberty and the colonial patriots. The tax baggers emulating a protest against a corporate tax cut -- but, oddly, in support of tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Furthermore, King George was against a corporate...

Longtime friend and unindicted co-conspirator Daniel Doyle brings rude thunder with the first in a series of podcasts documenting the ridiculous pot arrests in South Carolina that were related to those pictures of Michael Phelps smoking marijuana. Daniel has done some amazing original research here - it is great, interesting stuff, and not to be missed (his Twitter feed ain't too shabby either, I should point out).

I fully intend to stop using Glenn Beck as a punching bag, but damn it, there are a few things that I just can’t let slip past me without comment. In a previous post, I linked to a video of a weepy Beck flogging his latest project/marketing vehicle, the so-called 9/12 project (the intent is to bring us all back to that kumbaya, trans-partisan state of nationalism that followed the greatest American tragedy in recent history). As I stated in said previous post, I’m a big believer in giving people a fair shake, and so I have been giving the 9/12 Project’s website a thorough going-over. One thing I will admit that I like about the project is that it encourages people to read – and, unlike Michael Savage or Bill O’Reilly or any of the other pontificators of the right, Beck actually wants his followers to read *real* books, stuff like the Federalist Papers and Tom Paine’s “Common Sense.” There are some unfortunate right-wing revisionist biographies of various founding fathers tucked i...

Speaking of environmental issues, Peaceful Uprising , the group associated with Tim DeChristopher , will be speaking on KRCL's excellent community radio program, RadioActive . None other than my sister Flora should be there to bring the ruckus, so listen here from 6:30 - 7:00 PM MST. UPDATE: got the time wrong in my initial post. It's 6:30 - 7:00, not 7:30 - 8:00.

The SL Tribune reported today that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has cleared EnergySolutions to store and dispose of depleted uranium at its Utah site. Great news, right? Depleted? Means less radioactive? Well, yes and no. The USNRC decided to classify depleted uranium as a class A low-level waste, which may or may not be fair; "low-level waste" just means that DU doesn't qualify as high-level waste, mill tailings, transuranic waste or spent nuclear fuel. That said, that does not mean that DU is safe, or that it's a good thing that we Utahns will be getting a heaping helping (1.4 million tons! huzzah!) of it. Depleted uranium is, indeed, less radioactive than other forms of uranium (thus the word "depleted," I would imagine). However, converting it for disposal is extremely dangerous : Conversion of uranium hexafluoride to oxide or metal may involve hazardous chemicals in addition to UF6; specifically, ammonia (NH3) may be used in the process, and H...

I wanted to use my first post here to flesh out an exchange I had with a friend about Glenn Beck's recent turn for the hysterical, in particular, some problems I have with both his "We Surround Them" and "9/12 Project" storylines. I decided to start things by giving the guy a fair shake, and read his founding principles or however he refers to them. Right off the bat, this jumped out at me: “ America is Good.” What does this even mean ? There’s no extrapolation here, not even some out-of-context quote taken from Washington or Lincoln. “ America is Good.” What are we calling America here? What are we calling good? This almost seems like a deliberate anti-thought instead of a thought: as in, what we are secretly agreeing to here is that we aren’t going to think very deeply or in a mature fashion about this question. America Good. Unamerica Bad. Ungh. “We surround them” vs. “the Spirit of 9/12” Weepily , Glenn Beck asks us to think back to the day...