Vacation Time

I'll be going to Springfield, N.Y. for the 4th of July. (hometown) I plan to visit family and friends. Since many of these folks are far enough off the net to preclude a connection faster than snail mail, I'll save whatever posts I come up with for my return. Can the boy think without the background click and hum? Can lack of ubiquitous media drone produce withdrawl symptoms? I'll know soon enough. In the meantime I'm going to clear my link-list and pack.

• The G20's Twenty Agendas: Heads of state from the Group of Twenty (G20) advanced economies meet in Toronto on June 26 and 27 to discuss policies to balance global growth and strengthen global financial supervision. The meeting follows an early-June gathering of G20 finance ministers in Busan, South Korea, which stressed the need for fiscal tightening and "sustainable public finances."
• The Financial Times highlights a concern we had raised early on about the effort by BP to drill a relief well to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf. While many analysts have acted as if the BP forecast, that the well would be completed by August, there is no reason to assume the initial effort will succeed, particularly at this depth, which is unprecedented for this effort.
• What the Earth Knows: Any serious conversation about the planet’s climate and our energy future must begin, paradoxically, with a backward look at geologic time. The reason for this is that the way forward is fogged by misunderstandings about the earth. Experts are little help in the constant struggle in this conversation to separate myth from reality, because they have the same difficulty, and routinely demonstrate it by talking past each other.
• Soviet Arlington: Though I had heard his name mentioned a time or two, I keep myself sufficiently out of touch with the FOX News/Weekly Standard/National Review crowd not to have known much of anything about Lt. Col. Allen West (Ret.). My first inkling that I’d not think highly of him came as I stood outside a ladies’ room at O’Hare, unintentionally eavesdropping on the forty-something man (hardly of a gentle nature) who spoke on the phone nearby.
• The Two Faces of the Tea Party: As a student in the exciting new field of Tea Party Studies, I’ve noticed that no one agrees on what the Tea Party actually is. Is the anti-Obama, anti-big government movement simply AstroTurf fabricated by Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks? Is it a bunch of Birthers, Birchers, conspiracists, and white power misfits .. Or are the Tea Partiers nothing more than indulgent Boomers who combine 1960s social libertarianism with 1980s laissez-faire economics?

Hope you have a good Fourth of July.