We need to have an economy within the confines of nature. Never ending growth, GDP, just can't happen. I shall look at the 20th C. as our tutorial on limits of what we can do: naively and blindly, as we've done, and keep doing, with fossil fuels, what we can do working with Nature and each other, as Mohammed Yunis does, as in micro loans, recycling, with our eyes open to effect, - how terrible we can be, as in WWI & WWII, how pigheaded, as in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. I wonder if we can see it as a great revelation of how to proceed for the future. We've already tipped the balance in global warming/carbon footprint, so we know that we can't fool, definitely can't fool around with, Mother Nature. It's just self deception. WE are Mother Nature. WE are not separate, and we are no more important than the snail darter we eradicated, the dodo, the passenger pigeon, the Lord God bird, we're just more important to us , but hey, the Horse Nebula doesn't even know we exist. And the Honey Badger don't give a shit...

Amen! to tonight's Game! Now, the debate...? there's no 'amen', nothing really happened. Santorum should brush up on the constitution: there's separation of church and state in this part of the world. And something I'm not getting is: trying to pin loss of jobs on the federal government? Didn't we outsource almost all of our manufacturing ages ago? And that was, is , the private sector who did and do the outsourcing and downsizing to keep the profit margins big enough for the shareholders, (who don't occupy Wall Street), to stay invested.

I was there thinking...

Prior to the 1980s, conservatives were fiscally conservative— that is, they were unwilling to spend more than they took in in taxes. But Reaganomics introduced the idea that virtually any tax cut would so stimulate growth that the government would end up taking in more revenue in the end (the so-called Laffer curve). In fact, the traditional view was correct: if you cut taxes without cutting spending, you end up with a damaging deficit. Thus the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s produced a big deficit; the Clinton tax increases of the 1990s produced a surplus; and the Bush tax cuts of the early 21st century produced an even larger deficit. The fact that the American economy grew just as fast in the Clinton years as in the Reagan ones somehow didn't shake the conservative faith in tax cuts as the surefire key to growth.

Fukuyama, Francis - Newsweek, Oct.3rd, 2008

EuRail Global Pass Give-away

Dear EuRail:

I have never travelled on Eurail before, so I need you to give me the opportunity to have a Eurail story to tell you. The best is yet to come! Merry Christmas!

My niece is opening a restaurant in Berlin...I could write you a stellar review, having eaten very well all over the place. Once I did a 'tournée gastronomique' in Burgundy and ingested over 80 Michelin stars in less than a month! I didn't even gain any weight and it was Burgundian cuisine!! I had some 1914 champagne in Rheims; and ate white truffles. 'Twas the season. In one town the menu read so well, promised so much, that we made reservations to stay the night so we could experience more of what we'd just read!!!

Needless to say, I did not travel by train from America. I traded in my airline miles, bought other peoples miles, ( you could still buy other's miles), traded those miles and took a ride on the Concorde! Now, if only I could take a ride on a EuRail, where shall I eat after Berlin, lol!