heat waved

Define irony, Winona Rider commanded Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites: The mismatch between intended meaning and literal meaning, or between what we think and what's actually there.  When I left for a 20 miler this morning at 6.20, it was about 80 degrees, and the sun was coming up bright and strong, and clutching a chilled water bottle, I was fully prepared to call the run if it got too hot, and the route I had planned was a series of shady roads looped around local drinking fountains.

The heat wasn't intolerable, but neither did it go unnoticed.  I drank the 16oz bottle between miles eight and ten, and then stopped at a drinking fountain at mile 16, and then again at 18, and when I finished the sun was bright and high and as when I began leaves, some of which had dried and gathered in the street, were still.  But as I write it's cooling off, getting cloudy and breezy, and the hoped-for storm just might be imminent.

Here's a good article arguing for a junk-food tax:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24bittman.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

While it's hard to believe such a salutary measure would past muster with the anti-government fanatics who decide on such things, Mark Bittman makes a decent case for the health-care cost savings, for the distorted incentives that subsidies provide, and for the revenues it would generate that could be put into further public health measures.

But the fuck-em-let-em-die, they-made-their-own-choices side of the argument believes that the government has no role to play in correcting or reducing any of the negative externalities of the free market, so they'll never be convinced by any of these arguments, least of all healthcare cost savings argument.  This is because they think we shouldn't be giving anyone anything for free--the government doesn't owe anyone anything.

You always hope that this libertarian conservatism is like a heatwave in the political weather, something that's feverish, uncomfortable, and temporary, but I'm afraid it's the new normal, and now politics has to countenance all sorts of argument that twenty years ago would would have seemed absurd.  What's disappeared from politics is any notion of the social--why it's a good thing, why we have obligations to it.  We're soon to have an object lesson in these arguments when the anti-social folks take over.