My original travel plans did not take into account that this is Memorial Day weekend, but it should be a nice getaway anyways. I'm off to Portland for a couple of days (there's a Nurse With Wound record release party at the Cobalt Lounge). It's a rare opportunity to step away, even if only for a couple of days. I expect it to be nice. If anything, it will be nice to leave the laptop behind and as much of the world behind as possible. And, I'll get a chance to check out Powell's in person.
The world continues in its downward spiral, which will be nice to get away from:
- The debt increase looks likely to balloon by another trillion dollars. "The $984 billion increase, to $7.38 trillion, would be the largest ever."
- All of the states are running huge deficits, cutting programs, and getting little or no help from the federal government - especially on government mandates such as security. With a huge bloody debt, and the fiscal situation in the states, why is it that tax cuts make sense? Oh yeah - political trickery to keep those who have money in power to help those with money.
- Molly Ivins has an excellent writeup about the nonvictorious peace in Iraq. No WMD's, no real damage to Al Qaeda, no real blow against terrorism, absolutely NO help in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and more American soldiers AND Iraqi citizens are likely to die in this "peace" than in the war (which, given the current Iraq Body Count could be grim indeed).
- Watching Law and Order last night, I was pummeled with ads for NBC's summer lineup full of insane game shows and bad clones of Fox's reality series (and Fox is already doing bad clones of its own!). The game shows remind me of Your Money or Your Life (a game show the parents in Time Bandits are addicted to), which just cannot be good. When life imitates a Terry Gilliam movie, well... I'm just happy I have a fair amount of summer reading stacking up.
- Oh yeah, and the U.S. wants to start building and testing new nukes nearby. sigh.