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East vs. West in World Records and Conception of Self (should we bail out California)
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If I may for a moment, go off on a bit of a tangent....
I know the label up there says "Dallas Liberal Examiner" which is fine with me in a certain respect. I guess those three words are accurate. If they are accurate to me, it means I get to define them myself (that's the fun part about semantics). In this case we are going to go after the word "liberal" and some of what that means, to me.
The news of the day and the metaphor of the day comes from the birthplace of the English language, England, and one young woman's ability to suspend herself using only her teeth (like I said, it's a bit of a tangent).
Check this out, very impressive stuff.
Iona, who is 28 and lives in West Hampstead, London, held a pose called the "Marinelli bend" for 33 seconds, beating the existing world record by 11 seconds.
The Marinelli is an inverted backbend where the whole body is supported by the mouth by gripping onto a short post that is held between the gums.
If you go and look at the picture, you will be mighty impressed. A record, even, in the Western World, as per those great beermaker's from the birthplace of the English language, English.
So the Guinness record is 33 seconds....and what the heck is this?
And so we see a "world record" as an everyday performance.
Which brings us back to the liberal view of the world, so to speak. As China and India and much of Asia catches up to the Western world is terms of technology and efficiency, we will begin to see a great many "word record's" get broken. I'm talking a million people eating one single mile long burrito kind of stuff.
Selling a hundred million cars a year will be like child's play, when the market is 2,000,000,000 and not 200,000,000. And so we see a global trend in business oozing East, where the action is. Where the action has been for a long time. Where world records are daily performances.
And so we get to California, a bankrupt State, in the United States.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - If AIG was too big to fail, how about the world's eighth-largest economy?
In a move with only one modern-day precedent, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic lawmakers are pressing the Obama administration and members of Congress for federal loan guarantees to help the state out of a desperate, multibillion-dollar jam.
California is not asking for cash, like the tens of billions given to AIG, General Motors or Morgan Stanley. (MS) Instead, the state with the worst credit rating in the nation is asking that Washington act as a sort of co-signer on the state's borrowing, to be backed up with money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
California leaders say that would make it easier and cheaper for the state to borrow money on the bond market, reducing the interest rate by as much as half and saving taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
The article goes on for a bit about the various reasons things have gotten to this point. I'm not going to go into them, ultimately, as my argument boils down to the last few sentences of the article, plus the reasoning I'll include after it.
In 1975, President Gerald Ford rejected a similar plea from New York City, prompting the not-entirely-accurate headline "Ford to City: Drop Dead." With the city on the verge of bankruptcy, the president ultimately relented, signing legislation for federally guaranteed loans. The loans have since been repaid with interest.
California is just as likely to repay its loans, said Matt Fabian, a bond analyst at Municipal Market Advisors, based in Concord, Mass. He and others noted that the state has never been late on a payment, and is always collecting revenue and has the option of raising taxes.
"California's not going to default," Fabian said.
There is a bit of precedent here, and I think Cali is good for it, ultimately. We are facing a very competitive future, which was my point with the whole East v. West thing, and keeping California, home to a number of our most profitable, futuristic, and exportable industries, functioning as a viable entity will pay off many dividends in the future. As will having a domestic car industry that can tap that 2B people market.
We are, and I say this more as a person than as a liberal, in this global, flat, competitive, world economy together. The days when two or three or four American companies could dominate every global market are ending. The shift is becoming quite painful. But I think if we just chill out, stop spending so much time on facebook and twitter (ha!) and get to working, realize that we are closer to a level playing field and have to work that much harder, smarter, and together, and doing...something to help out, we can come out of this much stronger as a nation, a people, and a culture.
The United States is a mix of many things, many peoples and places and things. That diversity, to the liberal mind, is a strength. It comes with a cost, as we must keep out minds open to better ways of doing things, and accepting differences that are often unpalatable, but if we can do so, my opinion is that we'll all be better for it.
And with California still attached to the West Coast, and not off floating somewhere between East and West.
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