potluck
.
John Steele is hyper-steamed about a Washington Post article on Starbuck’s coffee and law school debt. “Javanomics 101: Today’s Coffee is Tomorrow’s Debt,” June 18, 2005). A career counselor at Seattle U. Law Schools says a five-day-a-week $3 latte habit on borrowed money can cost $4,154, when repaid over 10 ears. The “Stop Buying Expensive Coffee and Save Calculator” shows that making your own coffee rather than buying a $3 latte daily for 30 years, could save $55,341 (with interest)..
John’s right that expensive coffee alone does not create the massive law-student debt that so limits career choices. However, it is a very representative symbol for a generation whose spending habits are so impractical and unnecessarily expensive, that they price themselves out of a lot of career options — refusing to accept cheaper alternatives for food, entertainment, transportation, housing, and more, that would be perfectly acceptable to about 90% of the adults in Western Europe. [see our prior law-school debt discussion here] Why, when I was a . . . .
record heat —
a moth the color of heather
on the heatherlate evening–
a cloud covers the moon
and our steps falter
midsummer —
childhood pathways
lost to wildflowers.
on the Alaska Haiku Society website —
—more potluck
Over at his Dude Ranch, Al Nye has taken a transparent approach to the
Blawg Review #11 submission process — revealing secrets along with links to some
good weblawg reading options.
politics can look very different from the other end of Upstate New York. For instance,
the lead story today in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle is about the possibility of
local billionaire Tom “PayCheck” Golisano running for governor as a Republican (with
George Pataki choosing not to run), even though Golisano ran in the past 3 gubernatorial
elections at the head of his own Independence Party. Since Golisano uses his own cash
for his campaigns, some think the NY GOP will swallow hard and accept Golisano, so that
fundraising can be targetted at defeating Hillary Clinton. It is expected that Eliot Spitzer
will be the Democratic candidate for NYS governor.
Steve Bainbridge — a/k/a ProfessorBillboard — is suspicious of Marci Hamilton’s
conservative bona fides, because her new book God vs. The Gavel: Religion and the Rule of
Law, has been praised by folks he tars as being not just liberals, but “Worse yet, . . . the type
of left-liberal who wants to drive religion out of the public square.” I think Prof. B continues
to confuse not wanting the symbols of religion (especially any specific religion) “in the public
square,” with wanting to ban religious values and perspectives from politics and government.
Icons are not what is important about religion, and acting as if they are cheapens the meaning
of religion. Steve’s attitude — along with his smug notion that there can be no meaningful moral
code outside of established religion — suggests that the Religious-Iconophiles want a particular
kind of religion, with a particular restrictive view of morality, “established” in stone within our
political system, and etched in stone in our public square. Like, Steve, I’m no Religion Clause
scholar, but I plan to draw my own conclusions about God vs. The Gavel, rather than seeing
who lines up for and against it.
