Various Interesting Things

Various things:

• Sometimes they make it so easy. Joe the Plumber:

  "Wanting a white Republican president doesn’t make you racist, it just makes you American," Wurzelbacher wrote on his website Oct. 10. (Link)

• This is insane, and should be considered criminal: Global wealth inequality: top 1% own 41%; top 10% own 86%; bottom half own just 1%. Someday it will be. 
• The coastal exodus begins (as it should):

  Sharp increases in federal flood insurance rates are distressing coastal homeowners from Hawaii to New England and are starting to hurt property values and housing sales in areas just beginning to recover from the recession, according to residents and legislators.

  Oh sure, the affluent love their government subsidies (read the whole article).... Look, this will be going on for the next thousand years or so. You can't fight physics, and you can't tell it where to put its coastlines.... There is not going to be a trustworthy coastline for the next several centuries. Just imagine how society's psychology is going to be affected for the next N-hundred years as the seas keep rising and inundating coastal cities across the planet. You think Venice has troubles? You ain't seen a thing yet.... There will, in the not so far future, be drowned cities everywhere, half-submerged, sad pathetic places ruined by ignorance and greed, and trying to figure out what to do -- import gondolas, or move to the mountains?