The other day, I overheard a news story extolling the virtues of yoga in combating stress.  That was fine.  Yoga has proved to be of great value for people in high stress conditions. What absolutely floored me was the section on elementary and secondary schoolchildren.  This is far from the first time I’ve run across the issue of stress in schools.  In fact, most of the college students at my wife’s university complain about how stressed they are.  One of the most common phrases is:  “I’m so stressed out.”

What I want to know is why they think their lives are so stressful. Are their lives really filled with that much stress?  Have they created that stress themselves because they’ve filled so much of their lives with the time-consuming trivialities, such as texting, Facebook, and video games, that they’ve left no time for the necessary?  Or have they been so coddled that any pressure on them to perform and meet any type of reasonable standards creates stress?

I know I’ll sound like an old fogy, but… the generation represented by their great grandparents faced the worst economic conditions in more than a century and the largest world-wide conflict in human history. The generations before that faced the First World War and, before that, the Civil War, the bloodiest war in U.S. history. In all these cases, most young men faced the pressure of being drafted and dying in battle.  Their grandparents faced the Vietnam conflict, largely fought by conscripted forces, plus wide-spread civil unrest with bloody riots across the nation… and far wider racial and cultural discrimination, not to mention gender/sexual discrimination,  than any of today’s young people can possibly imagine. 

In the past, although the youngsters of today don’t believe it or understand it, academic standards were either far more rigorous… or the local schools were truly terrible.  Until the 1950s, polio was an ever-present threat, and I still recall contemporaries of mine in wheelchairs and braces. Academic curricula were rigid and unyielding, and woe betide the student who was different, or ADHD, or developmentally challenged.  First year students in college faced opening assemblies where they were told that a large percentage of entering students would fail academically within a year.

Today’s students are told how wonderful they are.  They have extraordinarily high grade point averages, and almost none of them are failed.  College students today spend less than half the time studying  as students of their parents’ generation did, but there are more scholarships and far more financial aid than was available a generation earlier. Even if they drop out of school, they don’t face being drafted into a war where tens of thousands of conscripts die.   And yet… huge numbers of them have little motivation and no goals.  

And  they’re stressed out.

 Stress is and has always been the human condition.  Welcome to the real world.

Perhaps because I was always the boy who had trouble convincing anyone of anything, even when facts and events proved I was right, I’ve always been skeptical of the glib, polished, and oh-so-convincing fast talkers who also seemed so earnest.  Then, it might be because I lost more than one girl-friend to the type… or because I saw so many of them in politics over the twenty years I spent in Washington.

I’d be among the first to admit that Mitt Romney was smooth, polished, carefully passionate, and superficially convincing… and he scared the hell out of me.  President Obama showed the not-quite-controlled frustration of a man who understands that absolutely nothing under discussion was as simple as Romney made it sound, a man who knows that trying to point out the details that would undermine Romney would merely make Obama himself seem like a quibbler, especially given the insatiable American appetite for the easy and simplistic.

The problem with really good politicians – and psychopaths – is that they have no problem shedding inconvenient facts or even saying that they didn’t say what they did, and doing it so convincingly that most people believe them.  This first Presidential debate showed that Romney is a master of this, and Obama is not.  Obama can shade the truth with the best of them, but it’s clear that he’s uneasy in totally denying it.  Romney shows no such hesitation.

Before this debate, I gave Mitt the benefit of the doubt.  I thought that, even if I didn’t agree with him, he honestly believed in what he was saying, but when a man who has spent months pushing a five trillion dollar tax cut and cutting tax rates for everyone blatantly denies having done so on national television, he certainly disabused me of the notion that he was a true believer in magic tax cuts.  Then, yesterday, he denied what he said about the 47% of Americans, which, while unpopular, actually had some truth in it… and people are buying everything he says now, because, all of a sudden, he “looks and sounds Presidential.”   All this tells me that Mitt’s just like all the smooth talkers I’ve encountered over the years, and it’s pretty clear that the only true belief he has is that he’s so fitted for the job of President that he’ll say anything that will convince anyone.

Is Obama any better?  All I can say is that he was trying harder to stick closer to the truth, and that’s also what all the political fact-checkers have been saying and writing.

As for me… I still have trouble with those oh-so-earnest types who are so convincing… and care so little for the facts… all the facts, and not just those that support their view of the world.

What is it with young American men… or maybe with young men across the world? Everywhere I look – from on the street, to some businesses, to glimpses of television shows and movies, since I’ve been traveling recently – I see young men with what amounts to a two-to-three-day scruffy shadow beard.  I don’t have anything against mustaches or beards, especially if they’re sported by men on whom they look good, but facial hair on men is like extraordinarily long hair on women, and neither looks good on most members of both genders. And I do know, because I once had a handlebar mustache that, in pictures and in retrospect, looked truly awful. Still,,, if that’s what people want, that’s their choice.  

 But the scruffy look… what’s the point?  It’s not a beard.  It’s not a mustache, and on 99% of all men it just looks dirty.  Is it to prove that you’re a he-man?  Or that you don’t have to conform to social norms, or that you’re following the trends?  Or is it because you have sensitive skin and are too cheap to buy sensitive skin aftershave balm?

 Or is it a subconscious desire to be sort-of Middle East macho, but clean-shaven enough to still be identified as western? Or are you too lazy to shave regularly, but not willing to go for a full beard?  Or could it be that a beard wouldn’t look good on you, but you want the world to know that you actually could grow one?

 Or maybe I’m all wet and just missing the fact that three-day beards are irresistible aphrodesiacs?

Several days ago, poor Mitt Romney committed the unforgivable. He said something so obvious, so accurate, and so to the point that people, especially Obama and the leftists, are jumping all over him.  Now… as must be clear to most of my readers, I’m generally appalled at the Republican positions on many issues, but what I find ironic is when someone whose positions I dislike says something that is absolutely obvious… and gets roundly criticized.  I fully admit that I supported Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter, but I applauded when Carter made the obvious statement that, “Life is not fair,” for which the media and everyone condemned him.

What was it that Mitt said?  In effect, he was saying that he was never going to reach 47% of the population because they were getting benefits from the government for which they weren’t paying.  And he’s absolutely right.  When only 53% of Americans pay federal income taxes, then the 47% who don’t are getting all the federal programs paid for by those taxes for nothing.  Should they get such benefits?  Of course, some certainly should – such as the truly deserving poor, hungry children, and others that have a true need.

Some of the liberals have made the point that many of the “47%” do pay taxes, such as Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes, and they’re right. Many do pay those taxes.  But what the left wing ignores is that those taxes do not fund most government programs, and for all the hullabaloo about deficits, Medicare and Social Security are not yet contributing to those deficits.  The deficits are caused by outlays in programs funded by federal income taxes.

But the larger questions raised by Mitt’s offhand, if honest, comment, go beyond that. As some courageous Republicans and many Democrats have noted, Americans now pay the lowest percentage of their income in federal taxes in more than 70 years… and yet the Republicans, the Tea Party, and the Libertarians are all demanding that taxes be lowered more.  Given the current deficit, this isn’t possible without literally eliminating not only a wide range of existing federal programs, but also ALL tax deductions, and that includes the cherished mortgage interest tax deduction, the earned income tax credit, credit for college and education expenses, and certainly various subsidies and business tax deductions.

All that isn’t going to happen, not in the current political climate of “I deserve it and someone else should pay for it.”  Why not?  Because it would destroy too many people.  For example, although “only” about a quarter of U.S. homeowner mortgages are technically underwater [owing more than the house is worth], close to 50% are realistically underwater and unsalable in the current market because of the other additional costs required in selling a house and moving.  If Congress were to remove the mortgage interest tax break, that would make the situation even worse, because the vast majority of homeowners would have even less income to make mortgage payments.  Similar problems would arise with the elimination of the earned income credit, and others… and what politician is really going to have the nerve to eliminate deductions that will make things worse for their constituents… and the immediate economy, regardless of the possible long-term impact?

How did it come to this? That’s a chicken and egg question, but one thing is very clear.  Americans, both rich and poor, have a lot more “things” than they did sixty years ago. The average new house being built is almost three times the size of those built in 1950, even while family size has declined since the 1960s.  In 1950, the average family had one car; by 1995, the average family had more than two cars… again with a smaller number of people in the family.  Almost every statistic – except for food consumed at home – dealing with personal consumption shows a significant real increase over the last 60 years – at all levels of income.  Likewise, government programs have grown enormously since 1950.  The one thing that hasn’t kept pace on a per capita or per family basis is the amount of federal tax revenue, and, as I’ve pointed out time and time again, while the taxes of the wealthiest individuals – and to a lesser degree those of the working poor – have decreased proportionately far more than those of other groups, even massive increases in taxes on the wealthy won’t close that revenue gap.  And, remember, that “wealth” isn’t the same as income, so that under our current income tax system, income taxes can’t reach the huge amount of assets already held by the extraordinarily wealthy.

In essence, Americans as a whole have come to expect a combination of personal and government benefits greater that we are willing to pay for, and many of those increased personal benefits have come through deficit spending at the cost of more money in our pockets and less going to government. Even though most people will protest violently that this isn’t so… it is, and simple arithmetic proves it time after time.

So… whether I like Mitt Romney and his proposed policies or not, he was right about who’s paying for what [even if I disagree, which I do, with how much who should pay]… and especially who’s not.

But then, regardless of political party, no one likes embarrassing accurate facts.

What just about everyone loves about the Internet is its speed and convenience, and what’s not to like about instant messaging, near-instant email, Tweets and Twitter, and instant on-line shopping?  Yet there is a high and hidden cost… one far greater than most people realize or consider – and a number of these costs were detailed in a front-page story in The New York Times on September 23^rd, which outlined the results of a year-long study.

For example, on a world-wide basis, internet data centers, now numbering more than three million world-wide, “use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants.”   The United States alone accounts for about thirty percent of that.  One of the most staggering figures revealed by the study was that actual computer/server computations and data processing only took six to twelve percent of that electrical load.  The rest was merely to keep all systems “on alert” to handle intermittent peak loads and information surges.

It’s not that the technology to make data centers more efficient doesn’t exist.  It does.  The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center has refined its systems to achieve more than 90% efficiency, and a company called Power Assure markets a technology that enables commercial data centers to safely power down servers in off-peak periods.  Yet Silicon Valley Power – the utility that serves Santa Clara and Silicon Valley – has not been able to entice a single data center to adopt such energy saving programs.

Not only is the internet energy wasteful, but these data centers are significant sources of air pollution. In just the states of Virginia and Illinois more than a dozen data centers have been cited for violations of air quality standings.  In northern Virginia alone, Amazon – one of the larger operators of data centers – was cited with 24 violations over three years, including running diesel generators without a permit, and was fined over a quarter of a million dollars.

So why is there so much waste and unnecessary pollution caused by internet data centers?

One reason is that companies that live by the “instant” fear that failure to always have instant access will have an adverse impact on sales.  A corollary of that is that data center managers aren’t rewarded for saving on the electrical bill or reducing air pollution.  They’re rewarded for having data centers on-line and able to handle anything 99.999% of the time.  That’s another reason why Northern Virginia’s data centers together have back-up diesel generators with a combined output almost equal to a standard nuclear power plant… with air emissions far greater than most conventional power plants.

Another aspect of the problem, and one not touched by the Times’ investigation, is that this increasing electrical usage created by the internet puts additional strain on the national and regional power grids, an infrastructure that is already overstrained in many areas… and this is getting worse. For example, data centers in Northern Virginia now draw over 500 million watts of electricity and plans on the drawing boards suggest that load will double in five years.

Instant access… it’s wonderful… but can we really keep this up?