 of people in the 75 to 100 thousand range, and he sees that they blow money on stuff they don't need. It still seems strange, but I think he associates the million a year person with some amazing invention or something, and that they worked hard to get that money. I tried to point out that such people make enough that they can pay higher marginal rates on very high amounts of income, but he tells me that they deserve what they get. I think eventually people in the middle class will get mad at the super rich, and if they do, those guys up top better watch out. When the scales fall from peoples' eyes, they are going to be out for blood.
One other note, today's links showed me one of the best post titles of all time: Longtop Financial: lessons in the morphology of sin, loss of virginity and your 17 year old daughter, at Bronte Capital.
I'm not sure what to make of this. I think it falls in with the concerns of Don Huber at Purdue, about potential sterility in livestock fed Roundup GM corn. I think there probably ought to be a number of research projects funded to look into it, but I don't know that any results will satisfy the seriously anti-GM anti-Monsanto folks. I wouldn't think Bt itself would be very serious, since organic gardeners use it as an insecticide, but this is well outside of my area of expertise (breaking things).
Every night they sit in this mostly empty bar, throwing back some beers and eating a communal dinner of hamburgers or crawfish or whatever was brought in by the last person to visit a grocery store. They tell stories, watch television and talk about any number of things, but usually about the latest measurements of the river, the state of the levees on which they depend for survival and their disappointment in the less hardy souls who took off at the first hint of danger.
“A bunch of people are real sorry they left,” said Tim Stennett, 52, a building contractor who took over the bar when Strick himself — Mike Strickland, formally — handed off the keys.
Mr. Stennett’s wife, Sheryl, became the bartender, though the Stennetts leave the keys with anyone who wants to drink late. Drinks are paid for on the honor system. In keeping with the handwritten admonitions posted throughout the bar, overnight tabs are frowned upon.
If you have to wait out the flood, this seems like a good way to do it. I'd guess if I were in the town, the chances are better than 50-50 that I'd be hanging out there.

As many grass-roots Republicans remain in search of a conservative candidate with the pizazz to go toe-to-toe against President Obama, a man from deep in the heart of Texas who was tea party before the tea party was cool appears to be giving the presidential race some thought.
A Texas pol who is close to Perry has been telling a few key strategists that the nation's longest-serving governor sees a vacuum and is waiting to be summoned into the race. This source believes that could happen by late summer. Without fellow Southerners Haley Barbour or Mike Huckabee in the race -- and with Newt Gingrich's early troubles raising further doubts about the current lineup -- there could be a glaring niche for Perry to fill.
According to another well-connected Republican, at least one Perry confidant has been very quietly making inquiries about the political terrain in the nation's first voting state of Iowa. A third Perry associate, RCP has learned, has been heralding a small contingent of Iowans with the time-tested line that is often used by would-be candidates who are leaving their options open: "Keep your powder dry."
This governor doesn't seem any brighter than the last one, so I hope to goodness that the Perry bandwagon doesn't get any momentum. I would think that we ought to steer clear of Texans for a while, after the turd GWB dropped on this country.
One's sense of self and one's beliefs, as well as, the mythos and traditions of a people are inextricably bound with place, landscape, and social situation. When I was a child, growing up in Alabama and Georgia, on occasions such as backcountry fishing expeditions, I would, at times, come in contact with rural African American farmers who still lived by the agrarian rhythms of the nineteenth century.
Occasionally, taking refuge from the afternoon heat of high summer, we would lounge on wooden porches and snap green beans, and I would listen as they quoted scripture.
The Jesus of their belief system was born of humble beginnings (a mere seed) and grew beneath the hot sun, but, at the height of maturity, was cut down, sacrificed so they may live, then, like their life-sustaining crops, was resurrected as next year's seed crop. Suffused with a metaphoric analog of the criteria they lived day to day, these tales held resonance for these rural, farming people; the metaphors resounded with the verities of place and circumstance. The figure of Christ was as real to them as the snap beans beneath their fingertips.
Now, in an era in which the destination of most all of our objects and accoutrement is the landfill, Deep South mega-churches espouse a cosmology that resonates from a junk food paradigm: a Gospel of The Drive Thru Jesus…when The Rapture comes our corporeal bodies will be cast aside like fast food wrappers.
All in all, for both Christians and for secular-minded, market economy true believers, a belief in economic providence has proven our undoing -- an insistence on its miraculous influence left us mistaking ad-hoc, bubble-borne affluence for a soul-vivifying portion of divine grace. The corporate/consumer state's trickster gods of fast buck commerce offer drive-thru-window epiphanies. Members of the congregation of the Church of Free Market miracles believe their prayers will always be answered: Instantly, the consumer state's homilies of perpetual gratification arrive -- their voices crackling like a burning bush from drive-thru order-boxes.
It really blasts on working class hicks from Georgia and Alabama desperately clinging to their guns, religion and big trucks and SUVs, but it makes some interesting points, the veracity of which we will soon discover. Actually, for me it was worth reading to find someone more pessimistic than I.
Queen Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip resisted the temptation to sup the perfect pint of Guinness on a visit to the Irish cultural icon's home brewery on Wednesday. The royal couple were given a tour of the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, one of Ireland's top tourist destinations, as part of the queen's historic first state visit to the Irish Republic.
All eyes were on whether they would get stuck into a jar of the black stuff -- an indelible part of Irish life.
Up in the seventh-floor Gravity Bar, designed to look like the head on a pint, they were shown round the commanding 360-degree views over Dublin.
Master brewer Fergal Murray then took the royal couple through the stages of pouring a perfect pint of the stout, one of the world-famous cultural symbols of Ireland.
Prince Philip, who is known to like a pint of bitter, seemed in his element and asked if it was made with water from Dublin's River Liffey.
"No! Pure and pristine from the hills!" Murray replied, dismissing the "urban myth". The Guinness website says water for the brewery comes from springs in Ireland's Wicklow Mountains.
If they didn't drink a pint, they shouldn't have gone to visit, geez. I could damn well care less about the Queen herself, but I do like being able to get Ireland into some posts, and she's definitely been providing that opportunity.
It goes on to say that Moody's is indicating the four banks are too big to fail, and if the Australian government backs off on implicit guarantees, they'll really cut the ratings. Way to protect the banksters and investors at the expense of taxpayers, again. We've got bad stuff brewing in Asia and Europe, while we plod along looking at huge government cutbacks sooner or later with a still highly-leveraged private sector. I don't see this ending well.
This competition is not new, but it seems to have heated up since 2009, when Kansas passed a law that lets companies relocating to the state keep 95 percent of their employee withholding tax for up to 10 years. This has lured several companies to move from Kansas City, Missouri, to Kansas City, Kansas (known locally as KCK) and its suburbs, bringing several hundred jobs with them. Stung by the moves, the Missouri KC has offered multi-million-dollar packages to keep firms, like the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and AMC Entertainment, from decamping to the Kansas side.
In Kansas and Missouri, all this has reached the point that even businesses in the two KCs, which presumably could benefit from these bribes, have told their two states to grow up. Seventeen leading businessmen from both sides of the border sent an open letter to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback and Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, urging them to voluntarily "agree to a bilateral halt" in this "economic border war."
Nixon responded positively. Brownback basically told the businessmen to go jump in the Missouri River. This probably has something to do with the fact that, so far, Kansas has been winning most of these battles.
Republicans have staked their political future on being able to prove that lower taxes mean more jobs, so they have to go