Cool multi-track recording - New Whitacre

Check out this track of "Close Your Eyes" from Eric Whitacre's musical Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings. It features a chorus member who recorded himself 4 times on each part on SSAATTBB, that's 32 tracks! A mix of 80's techno, japanese animation or anime, and modern choral work equals pretty awesome. Take a listen.

Valid Republican Idea of the Day! - Wage Insurance

I thought I would inaugurate a brand new segment and start highlighting positive ideas from across the aisle.  And with all of this bitching and moaning from the crazy right about the "handout" of unemployment benefits which Americans pay into, I thought I would highlight a reasonable idea from Republican policy makers that actually has some real merits over the outdated and relatively liberal system.

Wage Insurance

I will concede that my Republican friends are correct when they point out that the first few months of unemployment are probably not the most productive of one's life. You're probably angry and part of you might even be glad that you don't have that crappy job or crappy boss anymore.  You're probably getting productive with potato chips and making a bigger dent in your Netflix queue.

However, unlike some of my Republican friends, I don't believe that most people who are unemployed for an extended period of time are really living it up and enjoying the money that they get from the Federal Government.  I'm sure the relaxing and soul-searching part of unemployment starts to wear thin at around month number three. I also believe that it's a necessary - and highly effective - part of Keynesian stimulus policy. However, the current unemployment insurance model is in need of reform and here are some flaws worth considering:

It's boring and emotionally tiresome - I don't care what kind of job you have or had, people enjoy the feeling of being productive and DOING something. Sitting at home and looking for jobs on craigslist.org, monster.com, or careerbuilder.com all day is just the WORST.
Extended unemployment decays valuable skills -  Being unemployed for a long time doesn't only hurt your ego, it also affects the skills you invariably learn while on the job and makes you less prepared for a new job, when the economy does indeed recover.
Loss of valuable (and needed) productivity - The country and businesses, large and small need workers working, they just don't have the savings or credit access during a recession, especially a recession caused by the collapse of the financial markets that make lending possible.

Here's why wage insurance might have some real benefits over the current system.

In 2008, John McCain, included the idea in his acceptance speech as the Republican nominee for President. Although John McCain's version of wage insurance was not perfect, it still is an interesting method of maintaining overall productivity. John McCain's policymakers advocated that if you got laid off from your job that paid $60,000 per year, and you were able to secure a lower paying job at $20,000 per year, the government would subsidize your wages to as close of your old salary as possible, while continuing job training programs.

Although this particular policy of wage insurance solves the productivity problem, it does not solve the issue concerning the maintenance of valuable skills that help stem the problem of structural unemployment.  You're not going to be learning that new web design program while flipping burgers at McDonalds! My proposal would allow you to choose between traditional unemployment benefits and "wage insurance" benefits directed to your employer as an option that would keep you at your same job by subsidizing your salary to your employer.  That way you can keep your job, keep learning new skills, and your employer gets the labor it needs while getting some time to heal from the government.  You have your job and money in your pocket, the business gets its labor at a temporary - recession/depression - discount, and the government gets a GDP that doesn't shrink dramatically from millions out of the workforce.

Long story short, although there are some kinks to be worked out with this policy this is a Republican idea worth considering.

Your Valid Republican Idea of the Day!

Oh my G-d, you've got to be kidding me!

Israel, are you serious? You're really starting to scare me now.  This week, an Israeli court sentenced a man named Sammy Kashur, 30, to 18 months in prison for "rape by deception" for having consensual sex with an Israeli woman in her late 20s because he lied and said he was a single Jewish man looking for a committed long-term relationship. Mr. Kashur however, is an Arab.  Here's the official summary:

According to the indictment, Kashur met the complainant in September 2008 in downtown Jerusalem, presenting himself as a Jewish bachelor looking for a serious romantic relationship. The couple then went to a nearby building and had sex, after which Kashur left the building without waiting for the woman to get dressed.

Uh...newsflash ladies, men will say anything to get into your pants.  But, seriously Israel, rape? Here's what the Israeli court had to say for itself.

"The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price — the sanctity of their bodies and souls."

I'm not too sure this lady was that concerned about her soul, seeing as she hooked up with the guy after meeting him in a grocery store "went to a nearby building and had sex."  I don't think that soul is heaven-ready quite yet, even if he was Jewish.  I think Kashur's public defender, Elkana Laist put it best,

"The test the court adopted is problematic, because it means that every time a man tells a woman he loves her, based on which she sleeps with him, he could be convicted of rape."

Ladies, before you have intercourse with a man who you hope is interested in a long-term relationship, make him take you to a movie and buy you some popcorn or for crying out loud have him take you to dinner and buy you the most expensive thing on the menu before you go "to a nearby building and [have] sex." That way you know he's in it for at least the medium-haul if not the long haul.

And if this story wasn't creepy enough, check out this public service announcement about "lost" Israeli's who, heaven forbid, married outside their faith.

Full of it....

The Republican Party on spending.  Just watch how congressman Pete Sessions of Texas can't identify one program that he'd cut in order to balance the budget and reduce the national debt.  I mean the answer's pretty clear right?  Just stop funding poor kids' breakfasts and foreign aid and you're half way there! Oh wait, these programs are only like 0.08% of the annual budget, not to mention an even smaller chunk of our long-term deficit.  But hey, it sounds good to "live within our means" doesn't it?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

We all know the big ticket items that need to be reformed / reduced in order to make a significant dent in our long term debt.

Social Security - slow but steady increase in the retirement age as well as getting rid of the salary cap around $125K?
Medicare - means justified benefits and a raise in salary cap
Medicaid - hospital payment reform and increased primary care access for low income communities
Department of Defense - phasing out and canceling outdated weapons systems and ending $3 Trillion wars

Things were much better when I was young...NOT

Caitlin Flanagan, of The Atlantic has written another essay about the coarsening of sexual culture for our youth!  Waaaaa....Waaaaa, These poor girls are recovering from the land of ubiquitous oral sex and are now revolting to a moral norm of the loving and caring boyfriend. What has happened to the younger generation? How did we let it come to this? When I was a young adult WE didn't do stuff like this blah, blah, blah.  Here's an excerpt:

"What might we expect as the next thing for today’s girls? They just spent the better part of a decade being hectored—via the post-porn, Internet-driven world—toward a self-concept centering on the expectation that the very most they could or should expect from a boy is a hookup...And now the girls have had enough. We’ve sunk pretty low, culturally speaking, when we’ve left it to the 14- and 15-year-old girls of the nation to make one of the last, great stands for human dignity. But they’re making it, by God."

...Barf

Every adult generation bitches and moans about how the kids are "doing it" younger and younger and every time they do they are proven wrong by the statistics that show that sexual activity in adolescents has stayed essentially the same since scientists like Alfred Kinsey began surveying and recording sex statistics in the late 1940s and early 1950s. And the results are...that the average age for loss of virginity worldwide from 1940 - 2010 is between the ages of 15 - 19 years old, regardless of marital status. Culture, no matter how strict and puritan (a la the 1950s) to a "coarse" culture such as our own (the 1990s-00s), has little to no effect on the biological and evolutionary cues of sex and mating practices. Carolyn Butler, of The Washington Post, writes about the new Center for Disease Control survey on sexual behavior in teens:

This survey of more than 2,700 teenagers across the country found that 43 percent of boys and 42 percent of girls between ages 15 and 19 say they have had sex, a figure that's more or less unchanged since 2002 and compares with 55 percent of boys and 51 percent of girls in 1988.

Oh, wait a second. What did I just read there?  Oh, overall sexual activity DECREASED from 1988? Take another look at teenage sexual trends from 1991 to 2009 and you'll find that the only statistics that have increased since 1991 is use of a condom during intercourse and use of birth control.  Sounds like good news to me.  Way to go younger generation.  As we contemplate this information about how this generation is MORE chaste than earlier periods (within that general region of roughly 50% losing their virginity between 15-19), let's hear some more from Ms. Flanagan.

"Unlike the girls of my era, who looked forward to sex, not as a physical pleasure (although it would—eventually—become that for most of us), but as a way of becoming ever closer to our boyfriends, these girls are preparing themselves for acts and experiences that are frightening, embarrassing, uncomfortable at best, painful at worst."

Yes, the world of distant oral sex is much more uncomfortable and painful than having intercourse through their own "Boyfriend Story" as Ms. Flanagan calls it. Here she recounts how even her progressive mother who told her to not get married just so she could have sex, but "just have sex with him" in order to retain her independence and her chance for a career.  According to Ms. Flanagan, her mother could not have envisioned the HORROR of today's youth sexual culture.

"But no matter how forward-thinking, no matter how progressive, those long-ago women might seem to us now, they shared one unquestioned assumption about girls and sex, a premise that, if expressed today, might cast doubt on one’s commitment to girls’ sexual liberation: all of them, to a woman, believed in the Boyfriend Story."

Let me tell you what the "Boyfriend Story" brought Ms. Flanagan's generation.  The "Boyfriend Story" got girls in the 1970s and 1980s PREGNANT, because all of those tender girls did the right thing that didn't hurt their tender souls and they made sweet tender love to their boyfriends - and I'll say it again, THEY GOT PREGNANT.  Some of them got abortions, some of them had shotgun weddings and then divorced in record numbers, and some of those girlfriends watched their "Boyfriend Story" walk out on them when they got knocked up.

Yes, this younger generation performs a lot more oral sex than generations preceding it.  Why?  Because we've learned from our parents that getting pregnant before we're ready can lead to more disastrous results than some oral sex that we may have felt ashamed by.

Are there instances where girls are coerced by corrupt boys and a culture that makes them feel like they have to "hookup" to be cool, or win a guy? Yes, and that is something we need to work on teaching our adolescent boys.  But trust me, if I were a father I'd rather have my teenage daughter be upset about an oral sex encounter that she felt "not pure" about, then be lured by her own perfect "Boyfriend Story" in the back seat of a car and have the rest of her adolescent life be ended by the arrival of a responsibility so big, it could crush her.

The younger generation and sexual culture has evolved to reduce their instances of unwanted pregnancy, we should salute their progress. It's Ms. Flanagan's assertion that certain sex acts are more kind than others just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

U.S.A. (Sigh...)

Hey, 2 readers.  I've been so bummed about the U.S. Soccer team's loss to Ghana (2-1).  Will post soon.