Cloudless skies this afternoon on California’s north coast and abundant sunshine — but still a bit cold, but nothing like the past few days. We’re at about 53 degrees right now with a low tonight forecast to be well-above freezing.
Enough weather, already.

In the precarious events-cycle this PM, a quick surf indicates a semi-slow news day, with regular mundane episodes of living, spliced with the extraordinary, or just dumb.

Last night, we went into the black. A electrical-power outage in the late afternoon came suddenly — as all shit like that does — but with a quick, early warning. A short sputter of electricity, my reading/typing lamp dimmed, as did the laptop, then back on full power, followed a second or two later by another little dim-witted power flutter. The lamp flickered, the laptop’s brightness dulled a bit.
And then as-quick-as-a-flick — natural light only.
The neighborhood was without power about five hours or so, according to the Lost Coast Outpost, and some 2,550 PG&E customers — the utility has yet to determine what caused whatever happened to stop the electricity. They apparently fixed it.

Oddly disconcerting at first when all the ambient noise so routine and so much a part of the environment suddenly ceases to function, and even in late afternoon with pretty of daylight left, my apartment kind of darkened, seemed to fade into shadows. Crazy how much we depend upon electricity and how we don’t even think about it until it’s gone.
Read by candlelight last night for the first time that I can remember — modern life is strange and fragile.

Yesterday, I was going to touch upon the bitch-fest budget deal just passed by Congress, but alas no power, no post. The big deal was that it wasn’t that big of a deal except this: The package does not include an extension of unemployment insurance, as President Obama had sought, for an estimated 1 million jobless Americans whose benefits expire after Christmas.
The gut of the jobless.
Ezra Klein at the Washington Post cued the deal right:

A little-known fact about the economy is that short-term unemployment — the percentage of the labor force unemployed for five weeks or less — is back down to where it was before the recession.
It’s long-term unemployment — which lasts more than 27 weeks — where the crisis lingers.
No one has a very good answer for these workers.
They’re often stuck in areas of the country where jobs are scarce.
They face a vicious cycle of employment discrimination in which employers don’t want to hire them because they’ve been unemployed for so long, which in turn extends their unemployment and makes it even harder for them to find a job.
And now we’re just cutting them loose.
…
But the political system isn’t erring on the side of extending jobless benefits.
It’s erring on the side of further deficit reduction.
The deal Murray and Ryan struck replaces a bit less than half of sequestration for this year and a lot less than half of sequestration for next year but it adds about $20 billion in fresh deficit reduction to the top.
Democrats wanted to add unemployment insurance to the deal but found Republicans implacably opposed.
Which is to say that Republicans were able to add extra deficit reduction to the deal but Democrats weren’t able to add help for the long-term unemployed to the deal.
It’s a reminder of where the political system’s priorities are — and a reminder that they’re grossly out of line.

Details about all you’d want to know about the budget bullshit is at the link.
And in further semi-economic news is this piece in the Harvard Business Review by Umair Haque, a “management thinker,” with an interesting spin on modern life in the US — a few snips (h/t The Big Picture):

This is the first generation of Americans in modern history expected to enjoy lower living standards than their forebears.
It is the first generation in modern history whose life expectancy is dwindling.
It is the first generation of modern Americans whose educational attainment is declining.
It is the first generation of modern Americans who face less opportunity than their parents.
Shorter, nastier, dumber, harder, bleaker.
That’s the future for not only Americans, but for many in the world’s richest countries.
Let me be clear why this is so remarkable.
It’s not that the great wheel of prosperity is merely decelerating.
It is that it actually seems to be turning backwards.
The great wheel of progress already ground to a halt—several decades ago, if measured in terms of average incomes. And the real danger now?
That it may be beginning to spin—in reverse.
…
I can think of almost no other example in the history of modern democracies of progress actually becoming regress.
Short of war or cataclysm, it is literally unprecedented.
And that’s not the half of it.
It’s unprecedented…because it should be impossible.
If the rich get richer, it should be precisely because they create goods of real value to people, which elevate their living standards.
In a working economy, “growth” should reflect real prosperity multiplying.
But when growth rises and living standards fall?
That begins to hint that there is something wrong—very wrong, perhaps terribly wrong—with the way things are.
It suggest that what is happening to this society is not merely a simple, passing, self-healing ailment; but a chronic, possibly permanent, definitely debilitating condition. Not a flu—but a cancer.
…
We have no words for this condition because economics has no concepts with which to fully grapple with—let alone understand—it.
And economics has no concepts with which to understand this condition because economics believes, more or less, that it simply isn’t possible.
Progress cannot go backwards when an economy is “growing”; because growth, as I’ve noted, is believed by the acolytes of the cult of economics to be the alpha and omega of human prosperity.
…
Given that the growth rises even as life expectancy, mobility, and educational attainment fall — that GDP expands even as the lives of the vast majority contract from shrinking health, intelligence, income, wealth, relationships, stability, security, meaning, and purpose — I suggest we call it a Great Inversion.
In this post-recession twilight zone, our economy is upside-down and inside-out.

Although Haque attempts some optimism towards the bottom of the past. Even with a glass-half-full mindset, the nowadays are looking a bit rough.
Add into the mix, the in-layered problems with combating climate change — mankind’s most-immediate and most-hopeless disaster-in-waiting.
Via Crooks and Liars:

Republicans in the House of Representatives on Wednesday held a so-called “factual” hearing about climate change and used the testimony of skeptical witnesses to conclude that about half of scientists suspected global warming was a hoax.
At a Subcommittee on Environment hearing titled “A Factual Look at the Relationship Between Climate and Weather,” Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) asked University of Alabama in Huntsville Professor John Christy — a well-known global warming skeptic — if it was really true that “97 percent of climate scientist think that climate change is real.”
“No, not at all,” Christie replied.
“The American Meteorological Society, by the way, did do a survey of its professional members and found only 52 percent said that climate change of the past 50 years was due mostly to human kind.
So, 52 percent amount is quite small, I think, in terms of confidence.”
“You think the 52 percent is much more credible than the 97 percent?” Smith pressed.
“Oh, yes,” Christie insisted.
“It included over a thousand respondents.”
“Fifty-two percent, I don’t think by anybody’s definition, is a consensus, by the way,” Smith noted.
“So I would so say that there’s not necessarily a consensus.”

A consensus of ignorant assholes.

And on into the night — due to the power failure, I missed Stewart and Colbert last night on Hulu. And must continue the saga of Scully and Mulder on Netflix.

(Illustration above found here).