This election term, what’s in your wallet?

These statistics predict….more money than last election term.

This graph came out of the Washington Post.  It is called a Bartels Chart (Larry Bartels is a political scientist and author of several books), and it was shown on the Rachel Maddow Show.

Income percentile – This is roughly how much money you make compared to the rest of Americans.  If you’re in the 95th percentile, you make a LOT.  If you’re in the lower 20th, you don’t make as much.

Income Growth Rate – This is how much more or less money you make over some time or event.

Another way to look at this data is this:

I found this chart on Dani Rodrik’s weblog American political economics in one picture.  In his article he explains the chart and its implications.

When a Republican president is in power, people at the top of the income distribution experience much larger real income gains than those at the bottom–a difference of 1.5 percent per year going from the bottom to the top quintile in the income distribution. The situation is reversed when a Democrat is in power: those who benefit the most are the lower income groups.

And then I found this graph on the Rachel Maddow Show Blog.  It goes a few steps further than the first two Bartel’s charts because it breaks the data down into President and Congressional majorities.

This graph shows the average income growth rate on the y-axis and the income percentile on the x-axis.  Each bar of the graph describes growth under either a Republican majority

  1. Senate
  2. House
  3. Senate AND House
  4. President
  5. Senate AND House AND President.

Under a Republican majority of ANY of these groups, the income percentile on the right (i.e., the richest Americans) usually experienced the largest growth rate over all other brackets.  The exception appears to be when a Republican President is governing with a Democratic majority in both the House and Senate.

The second graph (blue) shows that when there’s a Democrat President plus a Democrat majority in the House and/or Senate, the income percentile on the left (i.e., the poorest Americans) experience the largest growth rate over all other brackets.  ALSO, when ANY Democrat majority holds sway in the House or Senate or White House, EVERYONE has at least a 0.5 positive growth rate over any Republican majority.


Food for thought as we go into the next election in less than two months.
This election term, what’s in your wallet?
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Godless Morning Reading

Who doesn’t love a little god with their Corn Pops and grapefruit juice?

Two excellent (and decently short) articles from The Guardian.  Via the Religious Kooks and Other Superstitious Nonsense Facebook page.

Is God scraping the barrel for miracles? – Martin Robbins.  As Mr. Robbins puts it:

God used to be able to part seas and flood planets. By the end of the Old Testament he was turning people into pillars of salt and Aaron’s rod into a snake. At the time of Jesus, God our omnipotent deity was basically down to party tricks, and now, what, easing an old man’s backache for a few months?

Sex and death lie at the poisoned heart of religion – Polly Toynbee.  This article has a more serious tone to it.  Toynbee explains how the church’s controlling grip on reproduction, our bodies and sexuality,  and how we perceive and handle death are the seat of the church’s power.  My favorite snippet from the article:

As Ben Goldacre pointed out in this paper on Saturday, while this pope claims condoms “aggravate the problem” of HIV/Aids, two million die a year. Ann Widdecombe’s riposte that the Catholic church runs more Aids clinics than any single nation was like suggesting the Spanish Inquisition ran the best rehab clinics for torture victims.

And now for something on the lighter side: This video of Steve Martin performing “Atheists Ain’t Got No Songs” with the Steep Canyon Rangers at MerleFest 2010 has been out for a while, but it’s always good fun.

Godless Morning Reading

We're not all nerds.

Last Thursday I was working in the lab, and so I was wearing my prescription safety goggles.  I worked all morning long, and went to lunch at 1:45 – 15 minutes after the cafeteria closed and me with no bag lunch that day.  No problem, I figured I’d drive over to Taco Bell* to pick up a late lunch.

I arrive at Taco Bell and walk up to the counter.  The register clerk gives me a strange double-take and asks “Are you wearing safety glasses?”  I reach up and touch my face, and sure enough I’d forgotten to swap out my lab goggles for my regular frames.  “Oh yeah, they’re prescription and I forgot my other glasses at work.  Guess they’ll have to do for now.”  I give the guy a sheepish grin and open my mouth to place my order, but he interrupts me and says in an incredulous, semi-disgusted voice, “How could you forget that you were wearing safety glasses?  They’re huge!” 

And I’m thinking “You’re weird and need to stop obsessing over my glasses and please take my order now, k?” but I decide to insert a little humor into the situation so I look at him and say – with a conspiratorial (sexy spy) grin and a completely joking voice – “Actually, I always wear safety glasses when I leave my house; it’s a dangerous world out there and ya gotta be safe.”  And then I give him one of these used-car salesman double guns gestures and wink broadly at him and giggle (dammit, yes, I actually giggled). 

He rolls his eyes at me and (finally) asks “Sooooooo… what can I get you today?” 

How high school “I’m-so-way-cooler-than-you-and-can’t-believe-we’re-stuck-in-the-same-place” is that?  But happily, I am no longer in high school, so instead getting my order to go, running to my car and dying of embarrassment, I thought “what a douche this guy is”, ordered my food and enjoyed a leisurely lunch while reading a copy of “A Tour of the Calculus”.

*Mmmm…Taco Bell with it’s salty goodness!  Ooo, and now they have these “cantina tacos”, double corn softshell tacos served in foil with a lime slice on the side – finally!  I’ve had tacos like this before at the traveling lunch trucks that specialize in Mexican food and they are the best!  Taco Bell’s cantina tacos can’t hold a candle to the lunch trucks, but they’re tasty for chain fast food.

This post was inspired by Jen from Blag Hag’s “Sometimes I forget that not everyone is a nerd“, although her article is much more fun and light-hearted and there are no jerky Taco Bell employees involved.

We're not all nerds.

We’re not all nerds.

Last Thursday I was working in the lab, and so I was wearing my prescription safety goggles.  I worked all morning long, and went to lunch at 1:45 – 15 minutes after the cafeteria closed and me with no bag lunch that day.  No problem, I figured I’d drive over to Taco Bell* to pick up a late lunch.

I arrive at Taco Bell and walk up to the counter.  The register clerk gives me a strange double-take and asks “Are you wearing safety glasses?”  I reach up and touch my face, and sure enough I’d forgotten to swap out my lab goggles for my regular frames.  “Oh yeah, they’re prescription and I forgot my other glasses at work.  Guess they’ll have to do for now.”  I give the guy a sheepish grin and open my mouth to place my order, but he interrupts me and says in an incredulous, semi-disgusted voice, “How could you forget that you were wearing safety glasses?  They’re huge!” 

And I’m thinking “You’re weird and need to stop obsessing over my glasses and please take my order now, k?” but I decide to insert a little humor into the situation so I look at him and say – with a conspiratorial (sexy spy) grin and a completely joking voice – “Actually, I always wear safety glasses when I leave my house; it’s a dangerous world out there and ya gotta be safe.”  And then I give him one of these used-car salesman double guns gestures and wink broadly at him and giggle (dammit, yes, I actually giggled). 

He rolls his eyes at me and (finally) asks “Sooooooo… what can I get you today?” 

How high school “I’m-so-way-cooler-than-you-and-can’t-believe-we’re-stuck-in-the-same-place” is that?  But happily, I am no longer in high school, so instead getting my order to go, running to my car and dying of embarrassment, I thought “what a douche this guy is”, ordered my food and enjoyed a leisurely lunch while reading a copy of “A Tour of the Calculus”.

*Mmmm…Taco Bell with it’s salty goodness!  Ooo, and now they have these “cantina tacos”, double corn softshell tacos served in foil with a lime slice on the side – finally!  I’ve had tacos like this before at the traveling lunch trucks that specialize in Mexican food and they are the best!  Taco Bell’s cantina tacos can’t hold a candle to the lunch trucks, but they’re tasty for chain fast food.

This post was inspired by Jen from Blag Hag’s “Sometimes I forget that not everyone is a nerd“, although her article is much more fun and light-hearted and there are no jerky Taco Bell employees involved.

We’re not all nerds.

Nice ad, Macy's!

Yay, Macy’s!  I was flipping through a Macy’s advertisement this morning – which I usually don’t do, but I was waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, plus they had a kick-butt $10 off coupon on the front cover of the ad, so why not?

A few pages in I ran into a page dedicated to the clothing and accessories and saw this:

No, not the shoes – the beautiful, curvy, plus-size model in lingerie.  I thought, “Oh, I must have found the “women’s” section (read: the plus size clothes), but no!  There are no other lingerie or clothing ads in the pamphlet.  Macy’s chose to use a plus-size model as the only lingerie model in the entire ad, which is pretty awesome.

Maybe people are starting to figure out that not only can curves be sexy, but that it’s even okay to admit it!

Nice ad, Macy's!

Nice ad, Macy’s!

Yay, Macy’s!  I was flipping through a Macy’s advertisement this morning – which I usually don’t do, but I was waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, plus they had a kick-butt $10 off coupon on the front cover of the ad, so why not?

A few pages in I ran into a page dedicated to the clothing and accessories and saw this:

No, not the shoes – the beautiful, curvy, plus-size model in lingerie.  I thought, “Oh, I must have found the “women’s” section (read: the plus size clothes), but no!  There are no other lingerie or clothing ads in the pamphlet.  Macy’s chose to use a plus-size model as the only lingerie model in the entire ad, which is pretty awesome.

Maybe people are starting to figure out that not only can curves be sexy, but that it’s even okay to admit it!

Nice ad, Macy’s!

Weather ~ Links ~ ACES Tragedy

I don’t know about the rest of the country or world, but here in Minnesota Fall just came along and placed a major smackdown on Summer.  I can’t believe I wore a long-sleeve button-up shirt and a coat to work this morning.  It’s a pretty bizarre time of year because the trees and grass are still green and lush, but I step outside expecting 80°F and it’s only 55-60°F. 

~~~~~

I’ve added two blogs to my blogroll sections to the right:

AmeobaMike – I followed this blog home after it’s owner left a comment on one of my posts yesterday.  AmeobaMike is about science and science education.  Dude has ATP and Golgi in his popular tags section AND he’s got a cartoon for his blog avatar AND he makes science cards.  Silly and science always work well for me.   

Richard Wiseman’s Blog – I follow Richard Wiseman on twitter and always end up following his links back to his blog, so I decided to finally skip the middleman and get him up here on The List.

~~~~~

Have you heard about the tragedy at the crocodile sanctuary in Belize?  Two children who had been out selling limes went missing and they haven’t yet been found.

It gets worse.

Villagers received information from a local psychic that the children had been kidnapped and fed to crocodiles at the American Crocodile Education Sanctuary.  They went to the police and demanded action.  

When the police didn’t act fast enough for the villagers, they took the law into their own hands based on the “evidence”: The psychic’s tale and the fact that they saw limes in the kitchen when they peeked through the windows (remember that the missing children had been selling limes at the time of their disappearance).  The villagers stormed the sanctuary and burned it to the ground.  No humans were physically harmed, but it has been claimed that at least two crocodiles were slaughtered and over a million dollars of property destroyed.  Animal Policy Examiner has written up an account of the events leading up to the incident.

CNN also covered the story:

[cnnvideo url=’http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2010/09/08/romo.belize.croc.sanctuary.cnn’ inline=’true’]

Now according to ambergriscaye.com the psychic is being charged with “psychic pretense”.  None of those from the mob have yet been charged with any crime, and a public meeting to discuss the incident with the town is scheduled for Sunday.

This ain’t going to end well for anyone, is it?

Weather ~ Links ~ ACES Tragedy

Men have fragile egos too?

Have you heard of vanity sizing?  It’s the gradual increase over time in how we define our clothing sizes.  Vanity sizing is a trick that clothing manufacturers play on consumers to make us feel better about the clothes we’re buying from them.  For example, they might make a size 10 skirt, but label it as size 8.

You’ve heard that Marilyn Monroe wore a size 14?  She was gorgeous and a size 14, so why should today’s size 14 gal worry about her waist?  A blog called True Life covered this topic in 2007:

Marilyn was a size 14…back in 1950.  Kate Dillon is still smokin’ hot (and I like the red hair, so I’d say hotter than Marilyn…and how can you not love that green swimsuit???) but her 14 is not Marilyn’s 14.

Vanity sizing is the reason why you may prefer Old Navy jeans to Gap jeans or Target jeans, or vice versa.  It’s the reason why you may have to buy boutique-style clothing two sizes “bigger” than ready-to-wear off-the rack clothes.

It’s sneaky, and we let them do it, because we’re vain.

And I’ll be honest – I thought it was something they only did to women.

Let’s look at women’s clothing sizes: 00, 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28 and so on.  Those “sizes” don’t mean anything – a size 10 jean doesn’t mean one has a 10-inch waist.  Then there’s the ridiculous S, M, L, XL, 2XL, 3XL, 4XL size chart – pretty subjective.  Some plus size clothing manufacturers  have even tried to eliminate the standard prejudices associated with the previous two systems and use vague 1, 2, 3, 4 designations for clothing – especially clothing that would normally fall into the XL, 2XL, 3XL, 4XL system like shirts and dresses, or other other clothes that can adjust via belts, ties, adjustable straps, or *shudder* elastic.

Since the scales (hehehe) are subjective, I can understand how there’s some fudge factor room in creating women’s clothing in one size and calling it a smaller size.  You convince a woman that your store’s size 14 fits here, and if she goes to another store (that doesn’t vanity size as much) she’ll have to buy a size 16.  Ugh!  I would rather wear the 14 if given the choice!

Men’s clothing is more standardized.  A 32″ waist means the waist measures 32″ around.  There’s not a lot a room to maneuver here.

Unless they just…lie.

Esquire Magazine’s “The Style Blog” published an article by Adam Sauer yesterday about vanity sizing – or “down-waisting” – of men’s clothing.  On a recent shopping trip he carried along a tailor’s measuring tape and got the skinny (yes! pun-ilicious) on some big (ooops, I did it again! mwah ha ha!) names:

Sorry guys.

Men have fragile egos too?

…and boy are my arms tired!

Four and a half hours of driving later and we finally arrived back home to Minneapolis from “Some-city-named-after-a-fish”, Wisconsin.  The weekend went amazingly well – I can’t believe all of the things we managed to do in two-and-a-half days!

Friday night

The Hubby, C. and I caravanned from Minneapolis.  The Hubby and I had to leave early on Monday morning, and C. wanted to stay in Wisconsin through Monday afternoon, thus two vehicles.  I rode with C. for the trip down and we had a blast.  We’re both big musical fans so we spent the entire trip singing selections from Avenue Q, 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Wicked, Legally Blonde, Phantom, Rent, The Producers, Repo the Genetic Opera, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Spring Awakening, Sweeny Todd and more.  I say singing, but by the end of four and a half hours of belting music it was was more like slaughtering, although C is classically trained and can belt like a pro.  The Hubby was really happy that he had his own car for this trip.

We stopped in a little podunk town for dinner and made the not entirely wise decision to eat at the KFC.  Blech.  KFC is awful food, but after I’ve gone without it for several months I forget about how painful and gross the entire experience was and think…mmmm…fried chicken.

Sadly, the KFC once again lived up to past experiences.  The chicken was overdone, and it had soaked up enough oil so that it wasn’t dried out, with the end result being that the meat fell off of the bones and the bones crumbled as we tried to eat the meat.  Ugh.  At least the cole slaw was all lardy goodness.

One of the highlights of the stop was watching the Hubby eat chicken.  It’s an old joke in our family: The Hubby didn’t eat fried chicken in front of me until we had been dating for at least six months so he wouldn’t scare me away.  When it comes to table manners, the Hubby is usually a neat, tidy, perhaps even fastidious, eater.  But give him chicken on the bone and his lower brain kicks into overdrive.  This was how dinosaurs ate, I’m sure of it.

Think about how you eat fried chicken: You pick it up and nibble away at it.  Easy, right?  But how do you hold the chicken?  If you’re like C. and me, you hold it like this guy from the twttrstream debate “Should Fried Chicken Be Eaten With A Fork or With Your Fingers?”:

See the technique?  You use a couple or three fingers to lightly grip the chicken on each end and you eat the damn thing.  Not so with the Hubby.  He gets in there with all ten fingers, plus the palms:

Not only that, but he tears the bird into tiny shreds in the search for that last, tiniest morsel of remaining meat, leaving bits and pieces of discarded bone and fat on the plate, tray, or a napkin on the table, until a mound of inedible bird remains are left in a sad, oil-saturated pile off to the side.  We tried to show him a less messy alternative, but he just looked so damned uncomfortable that we let him go back into chicken berzerker mode.

After that entertaining stop we continued up to the cabin.  The cabin is about 45 minutes off of the main highway, nestled deep in the woods.  When we finally arrived at about 9:30-10pm we bustled everything inside, said our hellos and goodnights to C.’s parents and hit the hay.

Saturday

I’ve been to C.’s cabin on one other occasion, but had forgotten how beautiful the area is.  For starters, their home is really more of a high diamond-class resort than a “cabin”:

The upper deck

View of the back of the cabin

The dock and pier from the upper deck of the cabin

Closer to the dock and pier

Gorgeous, right?  It’s very quiet in the area, even though C.’s cabin has neighbors close on each side.

So we woke up on Saturday and C.’s mom made this amazing breakfast of egg bake casserole (made gluten free so I could eat it!) and cinnamon rolls (not GF, but apparently de-li-cious as told by the gluten-eaters).  Saturday morning started out very, very chilly and looking a bit like rain.  We had planned on taking the boat out to do some fishing, tubing and maybe a little bar-hopping around the lake (you dock your boat at these bars, grab a drink and then boat to the next bar – it’s a blast!), but because the weather wasn’t cooperating, C.’s parents surprised us with a trip to a horse ranch/go-kart amusement park that their family used to go to all the time when the kids were younger.  I ask ya: Who doesn’t love horseback riding and go-karts?

We had a 45-minute wait between go-karts and horseback riding so we took a short ride to some nearby cabins where C. and her family used to vacation.  It was a very pretty camping spot right on a lake with about six cabins situated together in a “village” .  I took nerdy nature pictures while we were there:

After wearing ourselves out with go-karts and horseback riding, we headed back to the cabin.  We stopped at a couple of very interestingly-named shops (I made sure to Foursquare them!) along the way:

Snack stop!  This place had the best fried chicken wings ever.  Really.

Two thirds of the places up here – stores and cities – are named after wildlife.  We call that “charming”.

C.’s mom made an incredible dinner for us on Saturday night, and C. introduced me to Rose’s Cocktail Infusions.  Her mom had the entire set as seen below: 

Yum, yum, yum.  We ate dinner, sang “Happy Birthday” to C., drank pear, raspberry, mango and pomegranate martinis, and watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the original, of course).  We all started to wander off to bed around 11:30-midnight.

Sunday

I woke up at about 9am on Sunday, which surprised me because I could have sworn that I set my alarm for 7:30, but ah well.  C.’s Mom came through with another delicious breakfast of egg casserole leftovers, fruit salad, bacon, and cheesy hash browns.

C. was determined to take the family’s new jet ski out for a ride around the lake, even though the air was only about 60-degrees Fahrenheit when we headed down to the dock.  First C. took the jet ski out for a ride with her brother so she could learn how to handle the thing, then she took the Hubby out for a ride.

By this time she returned with the Hubby, C. was getting more comfortable on the jet ski and she was ready to take a more adventurous ride.  I hopped on the back and off we went!  She drove out to the center of the lake and made tight circles to stir up some waves, and then she would cross the wake, making us lift up into the air!  At one point we switched places so I could tool around for a while.  It’s harder than it looks, but you learn quickly from trial-and-error how to make the thing go!  During one pass I managed to hit the wake with the nose pointing down a little too far, causing a huge wave to come up over the top of the jet ski and soaking both of us like some sort of thrill ride at a water park.  Later when C. was driving again she did a few more tight turns, one of which threw both of us off the jet ski into the water!  But at 66-degrees Fahrenheit the water was warmer than the air!  Brr…we had a chilly ride back home, though.

After that C. went water skiing (and by went, I mean attempted…so close, girl!), and we all tried kneeboarding.  After some practice C. succeeded beautifully, the Hubby managed to get upright, but crooked, and I was an excellent bellyboarder.

One more try, C!

C. kneeboards – doin it quite well, akshully.

The Hubby kneeboards.  He kneeboards sideways on the board, but definitely not bad for a first couple of tries.

I…bellyboard.  But I won the Stubbornly Hanging On award, by gosh!  At the end, C. forgets that she’s filming and palms the camera, but you can hear her imploring me to let go of the rope.  But I won’t!  I was getting up on that damn board if it…ohhh…they cut the engine.  *mumbling* I was almost there, too…

After kneeboarding we came in to pick up C.’s Mom, and found that she had prepared a fabulous lunch for us while we were out!  We dined on lunchmeats and salads, and then headed back out to the lake to do some tubing.  Tubing was great, but we were bounced around pretty well.  We all came back that evening grumbling and groaning about newly discovered muscles, and I’m still sore as I write this on Tuesday morning!

That evening we played Apples to Apples (truly an excellent group game) and snacked on hors d’oevres.  C.’s brother put on this hilarious and awful History channel show called Swamp People, which is a documentary/sporting show about Louisiana’s thirty-day open hunting season for American alligators.  It’s awful because you see alligators being slaughtered and hilarious because the people are very much your stereotypical big, burly, macho manly-men out huntin’ ‘gators.  But read carefully – no one is saying these guys are rednecks!  In fact, the websites I’ve browsed all use this *same phrase* over and over to describe the hunters as “the proud descendants of French Canadian refugees who settled in the swamp region of Louisiana in the 18th century”.  Ah-yup.

After that we pulled out the Rose’s Cocktail Infusions again, and things got really classy as we settled down to play a few old-timey card game favorites such as Bullshit and Circle of Death.  I wanted to play Spoons, but concerns were raised about the length of some of the gals’ fingernails so we ended up playing a few dozen rounds of Catchphrase instead.

And so passed another lovely evening!

Monday

The Hubby and I decided to get up at the crack of dawn and get our butts back to Minneapolis before Labor Day traffic became unbearable.  I was also hoping to spend a few more hours at the MN State Fair as it was ending that day.  The crack of dawn ended up being about 8am (that’s early enough on a holiday, thank you very much!), and we rolled into town at 2:15pm without hitting any major traffic.  The Hubby ran into work to get a few things done, and I ended up watching an episode of Warehouse 13.  It was raining off and on in the cities, so I decided not to go to the State Fair (sad Brianne is sad), so I got some reading done in this calculus book I’m currently tackling.  Later that evening we had a delicious dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Dinkytown called Shuang Cheng.  I had something with shrimp and scallops in it, and I don’t think I’ve had such fresh, well-prepared scallops since our trip to San Diego last winter.  Nom-my!  I think school starts at the U of MN tomorrow, and we saw groups of students walking with parents up and down University Avenue and through Dinkytown.  It all felt very exciting.

And hey – now it’s a four-day work week!

…and boy are my arms tired!