Jun 18 2008
 Muse in the Morning |
State of the Onion X
So what was I going to say from that forum I tentatively occupied. It was painfully going to be about me much of the time, but I had to have an underlying message.
One learns. One teaches.
Art Link Red Neon
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Please join us on the inside to celebrate, venerate, regenerate and/or motivate our muses. Currently mine is a little constipated when I would prefer it be syncopated.
Jun 18 2008
I saw something rather startling in Northwest Connecticut on the weekend. Each pump at the local gas station had a handlettered sign taped to it, informing customers that all purchases must be paid for in advance. I asked Michael, behind the counter, if he had a lot of customers drive off without paying. “Not anymore,” he deadpanned.
Mind you, this is an area where many people don't lock their houses; hell, some locals don't even have locks. But drive-offs have become a national problem as soaring gas prices in this car-dependent society have more and more people desperate. Up 60% this year in the Lynchberg, VA area. 10% in Pell City, AL. Almost doubled in Bismarck, ND.
This hits gas station owners pretty hard. As a rule they make a profit of 1.5 to 3 cents per gallon — at best — on gasoline sales. So if somebody guns it out of the station after topping off the tank with $60 on the pump, they have sell an extra 2-4,000 gallons to make up for it.
And drive-offs can be controlled by demanding pre-payment, like Michael has been forced to do. Station owners face other, less tractable problems. Soaring fuel prices have meant that more drivers are using credit cards to buy gas, because they simply don't have 50 or 60 bucks in their wallets. On top of an initial transaction fee, the credit card companies charge 2-3 percent. In a low-margin, price-competitive business like selling gasoline, that's a nasty bite. The Robinson Oil Corp. of California, for instance, is no mom and pop operation–they own 34 stations. At six of them, credit card fees are the largest single expense, more than rent or labor!
Perhaps the biggest problem of all for station owners is operating capital–they need more. They are paying twice what they did a year ago to fill their storage tanks, but competition keeps the profit per gallon in the same 1.5 to 3 cent range. They just don't have the dough on hand to handle the increased nut. Suppliers resist giving additional credit or stretching out payment schedules, and, as you may have noticed, banks aren't doing much lending these days.
To rub salt in the wounds, the owners have to listen to jokes about how rich they're getting with the higher prices. But thanks to the magic of the free market, the picture isn't totally gloomy. True, drivers are in a world of hurt. True, the small businesspeople who own most of the gas stations are being stretched beyond their limits. But look on the bright side: Exxon Mobil's take last year was $40.6 billion, the largest corporate profit on record, and they are on track to beat that number this year.
Oh, yeah, company spokespersons announced Monday that Exxon Mobil will be selling all 2,200 of the U.S. gas stations they don't license, but own outright. Just not profitable enough, the company says.
[This is one more in a series of short snapshots of aspects of the economy I've been posting over at Fire on the Mountain under the heading “Bite Size Bad News.”]
Jun 18 2008
Once upon a time, there was a story that began, “
for pfiore8
You who read this grant me life. I was born not long after the towers fell, when perhaps the strangest thing happened to me, the boy who wouldn’t shut up; I took a job where my responsibility was to always be present but silent, to hear and not to say. My father once said, “Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.” But some of us make a different choice. Seeing ourselves as a poor man’s Rosencrantz, we volunteer to be the supporting cast of a more brilliant story. We forbear our own audition-worthy monologue in the hopes that the luster of refracted light from more brilliant sources shall bathe us in its reflected glory.
Jun 18 2008
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Style-go ahead talking about style. You can tell where a man gets his style just as you can tell where Pavlowa got her legs or Ty Cobb his batting eye. Carl Sandburg – Chicago Poems |
A lotta style. A sexy Soviet secret agent dancer, an old-time movie-gangster glamour moll, the thousand years Scottish-glen mystery woman. An over-the-top beauty with enormous sex appeal and the best legs evahhhh in the business has left the stage.
Jun 18 2008
“I’ve said from the beginning that we can’t reform immigration laws until we control immigration, and we can’t control immigration unless we control our borders and our ports.” – Lou Dobbs
We’ve heard that statement in various forms a millions times, repeated ad infinitum by various politicians and talking heads since Frank Luntz first advised anti-immigrant Republicans to stress that “”A country that can’t control its own borders can’t control its own destiny” to sell an anti-immigrant agenda to the American public.
But it has always gone without saying that the border that needed to be controlled has been the one to the south. Rarely, if ever, has the northern border been mentioned in most border security screeds.
Jun 18 2008
The American Medical Association has issued its first ever guidelines on the practice of travel outside the United States for medical care. Transportation fuel prices have skyrocketed, raising travel expenses, but health care costs have risen more. Rational consumers (and those paying the bills) are increasingly finding it is worth all the expenses of travel to procure medical services elsewhere. The AMA couches its interest as concern for Americans seeking health care, but the primary purpose of the medical association is to serve the interests of its members. When Americans travel outside the country for big ticket health care, AMA members are cut out of the deal.
“Come on, why be so cynical?” you might think, picturing a kindly old doc who always cracks a smile. I’ve seen medical associations in the United States put the interests of their members above the needs of their patients before, that’s why. To this very day, in the United States, the associations give license to their members to make a quick buck at the expense of patients.
Around the world, medical associations have taken strong steps toward enacting a Genital Integrity Policy for newborn patients. Without demanding their members never perform a non-therapeutic circumcision, their policies make clear that cosmetic surgery on normal male infants should not be standard practice, and may constitute a breach of medical ethics. They encourage physicians to ensure that parents know circumcision is unnecessary, is not justified on medical grounds, and interferes with normal sexual function. The consequence has been dramatically reduced rates of neonatal circumcision, and dramatically increased rates of male genital integrity.
The United States lags behind the rest of the world. Introduced here by doctors before the advent of modern medicine, circumcision of males (and, at the time, females) was thought to help prevent masturbation, which itself was considered harmful, and a myriad of other ills. Although all the rationales have been discredited, the practice has become so institutionalized that doctors have come to justify its continuance based on its prevalence. They have come to believe that no medical justification is needed to perform surgery on an infant. They have not found the fortitude to give up this cash cow. And since a circumcision is not expensive enough to justify travel overseas, I don’t know what will get them to pay attention.
Ironically, medical tourism outside the United States is something doctors and their associations can’t directly control, but they can preserve the genital integrity of most patients by simply heeding the admonishment: “First, do no harm.”
Jun 18 2008
This is an old Lakota myth as told by John Lame Deer in Lame Deer Seeker of Visions.1
I’m paraphrasing a bit here:
Iktome was an evil spiderman, a smart-ass who liked to play tricks on everyone. One day he was walking by a lake and he saw some ducks swimming around. He suddenly grew hungry for roast duck. So he stuffed his bag with a bunch of grass and then walked over to the shore. The ducks saw him and cried out, “Where are you going, Iktome?”
“I’m going to a big powwow.”
“What’s in your bag Iktome?”
“It’s full of songs which I am taking to the powwow. Good songs that you can dance to.”
The ducks begged him to sing the songs for them. The tricky spider made a big show of not wanting to do it. He said he didn’t have time for it. Finally, he pretended to give in because they were such nice ducks. “OK, I’ll sing for you, but you have to help me.”
“O yay! We’ll do whatever you want. Just tell us the rules.”
“Well, first you must form three rows. In the front row I want all the fat ones. In the middle row go all those who are neither fat nor thin. The scrawny ones go in the back row. Now you have to act out the song. Do whatever the words tell you. Here goes the first song… ‘Close your eyes and dance.'”
The ducks in their rows shut their eyes and started flapping their wings. Iktome took a big club from underneath his coat. “Sing along as loud as you can and keep your eyes shut. Whoever peeks will get blind.” He ordered them to sing so that their voices would drown out the “thump thump” of his club as he hit them over the head. One by one he went down the front row bashing the ducks. He was in the middle of the next row by the time one of the skinny ducks in the back row opened his eyes and saw what Iktome was up to.
“Holy crap! Hey wake up!”, it yelled. “Iktome is killing us all!”
The ducks that were left opened their eyes and ran away. Iktome didn’t care. He already had more duck than he could eat.
Jun 18 2008
| Muse in the Morning |
State of the Onion X
So what was I going to say from that forum I tentatively occupied. It was painfully going to be about me much of the time, but I had to have an underlying message.
One learns. One teaches.
Art LinkRed Neon
|
Please join us on the inside to celebrate, venerate, regenerate and/or motivate our muses. Currently mine is a little constipated when I would prefer it be syncopated.
Jun 18 2008
Chinese story of now we support you, now we don’t.
Stress of living in a country where reality is bought and sold.
Distant realities, the realities of others, mutual realities.
Myths of woman private and NFL player.
Myth of democracy.
Television reality–everything’s chipper all the time.
The river crossing.
Jun 18 2008
The guy behind the ultra-successful marketing campaign known as “IRAQ HAS WMDs!!!! IRAQ HAS MOBILE WEAPONS LABS!!!!” believes he should have been better-rewarded for his efforts.
In a series of interviews with Los Angeles Times reporters John Goetz and Bob Drogin, the Iraqi Intelligence Salesman Formerly Known As Curveball whined about how he isn’t appreciated in his own time.
The guy has a point. I mean, when you think about how much money has been made by leveraging the dubious-at-best assertions made by a guy who graduated with a D average from university – and, just to be clear, I’m talking about Curveball here, not any leaders of the free world – you’d think someone, somewhere could’ve seen fit to at least throw the guy a half a pallet or so of shrink-wrapped $100 bills, right?
Jun 18 2008
Hi gang, anything happen while I was gone?
I need to stretch those atrophied blog-muscles, so here’s a melange of things to ignore before going straight to comments.
Tucson weather forecast:
http://www.intellicast.com/Loc…
Hot flashes underreported and linked to forgetfulness
well, duh, they just forgot to report them.
http://www.physorg.com/news132…
More importantly
Flash & The Pan