More Haiku

Does the TEA Party
Belong to the GOP
Or the TFG?

To give credit where it is due, the TEA Party movement didn't get bought off with cheap social wedge issues the way your pie maker expected. Bully for them. Your pie maker grew up expecting something to see entitlements gutted before he was likely to retire, and now they are! Hopefully the rest of the government continues to function.

In other news, someone looking for a government he could drown in a bathtub should probably catch a flight to Mogadishu to see what it actually looks like.

Time for fiance haiku again

This effort began right about the time of the TARP vote and quickly descended from mildly insightful commentary to cheesy narrative (with romantic subplots!) explanations of things to questionable Haiku about finance.

As of July 28th, 2011, every worthwhile thing about the state of markets and the US debt ceiling that could be written has been written, often at great length. Even Simon Johnson is getting a bit repetitive because, frankly, we ran out of new things to discuss sometime in June.

So, this time around the crisis block, your pie maker will skip the analysis and stories of how we got here and go straight to the poetry.

On Congress Today
Markets wait with baited breath
Or was that a yawn?

An interesting take on sustainability

For all that this blog tries to avoid being the hair-shirt wearing prophet of sustainability, albeit with pies instead of locusts, it's a recurring theme.

Readers might find this post by Gail Fisher of Mendstate interesting, as it addresses the key differences between economic and governmental sustainability in Afghanistan.

Pie in the sky (er, space)

Two bits of space news that caught the interest of your pie maker:

(1) One-way space exploration

The age in which exploration was the province of indispensable national heroes is over. The goals of developed nations appear to be limited to providing physical security for their citizens and economic stability for their investors, and the resulting safety culture in government drives up the cost of almost everything it does.

If, instead, we view space exploration the same way we viewed Western expansion or seafaring pre-1900, the costs fall dramatically. The number of deaths will certainly climb, but danger has not discouraged a booming trade in Everest expeditions or recruiting for the All Volunteer Force. With disgruntled youth movements sweeping the Middle East and Europe, and The Week and NYT publishing articles about how it could happen in the US, we're reminded that humanity needs more to live for than retirement.

(2) Space Solar Power

Space infrastructure to support colonization would have a lot of terrestrial benefits as well.