marinelli's miscellany

Geary, the official Republican candidate, refused to abandon his campaign, despite a public request that he do so by the Henrico County Republican Committee.

The political battle reached a peak weeks before the election when Geary called Republican leader and county Sheriff Mike Wade a liar at a Republican breakfast in front of Cantor and other Republican leaders.

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Matthew Geary found dead in apparent suicide | Richmond Times-Dispatch

Normally I’m glad to see local Republicans going at each other, but this row got especially brutal, and today, a man is dead, leaving behind a shattered family, and so many talking heads mouthing inevitable mantras of ‘thoughts and prayers’ going out to them.

I began this book in the spring of 1987 in the belief that America was passing through a period that increasingly resembled the moral slackness of the spendthrift twenties, a new Gilded Age, and one that, like then, would extract a price for its excesses. That belief has been borne out, but there the comparison ends. Unlike the twenties, the eighties were not a romantic period, and it’s doubtful that the characters who gave it special flavor will be remembered with nostalgic affection. Oliver North and Ronald Reagan, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Arthur Laffer and his curve, the yuppies and the LBO kings, the hustlers and quick-buck promoters—all typified a self-indulgent and imitative age when entertainers became public leaders and when celebrities, not pioneers, scientists, or artists, became cultural heroes.

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Haynes Johnson, in epilogue to Sleepwalking Through History, America In The Reagan Years.

[Excruciating personal subtext: My mother’s mother was the campaign manager for her county during Oliver North’s Senate run. Yes really.]

Should we feel weird about the computers and phones we use, all the clothes that we wear that are made in faraway factories in Asia under harsh working conditions? …the mainstream view that you would hear from lots of economists would be no, you shouldn’t feel weird. The famously liberal Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Prize for economics and New York Times columnist, has argued that in places like Indonesia, terrible factories, far, far worse than anything you’ve heard about here today, they raised the economy. They made everybody better off… [says] Krugman:

‘It is the indirect and unintended results of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs. It is not an edifying spectacle, but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful, but nonetheless significantly better.’

- Ira Glass, citing and quoting Paul Krugman, This American Life (Ep. 454: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory).