Monday morning procrastination link-a-roo

We begin this morning with a cosmological riddle.

People often say that time speeds up as we age, but if the latest scientific theory is true the opposite could well be the case.

The radical theory by academics suggests that time itself could be slowing down - and may eventually grind to a halt altogether.

The latest mind-bending findings - put forward by researchers working at two Spanish universities - proposes that we have all been fooled into thinking the universe is expanding.

The universe being  the huge place that it is, these effects may be localized relative to your point of view.  For example, in New Orleans, we're already aware that time begins slowing down around the beginning of July and virtually grinds to a halt somewhere between Independence Day and the start of football season.  This is also prone to happen at any given moment where Jackie Clarkson happens to be speaking.

Oddly, though, there are places when and where it is most certainly speeding up, such as the Monday morning interval between the alarm going off and whenever it is I'm supposed to be at work.  Today our standard Newtonian conception of time tells us that is 2 hours.  But here all I've done is glance at my phone and put on the day's first gallon of coffee to brew and over half of that has gone by.  One barely has time to even muster the resentment necessary to carry one's momentum forward into the day.

In pursuit of that end, though, here is some of the news one might glance at this morning.

• This  New Republic article is titled Whatever Happened to Bobby Jindal? but it's really about how the longstanding animus between Jindal and David Vitter has shaped state politics over the course of Jindal's term in office. The article dates the beginning of the schism to the height of Vitter's lady troubles in 2007, but I'm pretty sure it goes further back than that and would have been inevitable under any circumstances.


• The Advocate picks at some low hanging "government waste" fruit in the form of an occasional controversy over City Council members each getting their own sheriff's detail assigned ostensibly for their personal security but mostly to just drive them around places. Like most readers, I was hoping for a fun Marie Antoinette style quote from Clarkson here, but it turns out the closest thing to that we get comes from Susan Guidry.

  “I find it very comforting,” echoed Councilwoman Susan Guidry. “We’re going out all the time in the community. I think there are possibly some things I would not do at night” without the protection of an armed deputy.


According to Stacy Head, though, the deputies have other functions such as investigative reporting. Did you know, for example, that Head's driver blew the lid off of the NOAH scandal?

For instance, Head said that Deputy Gregory Malveaux, who has been assigned to her for years, helped jump-start a celebrated investigation into New Orleans Affordable Homeownership, the city nonprofit whose leader has been charged with taking kickbacks. Malveaux drove around in 2008 and documented how various houses remained blighted even though NOAH had paid to fix them.

He does similar work helping to put together cases against problem barrooms and corner stores.

Oh and he's also shutting down your neighborhood bar for you. Forgot to mention that part. These guys have all sorts of uses. Not sure any of them are appropriate, strictly speaking but, well there you go.

Meanwhile, those of us without personal drivers might find other ways of getting around town. Like bicycling for example. This is a story from Boston but it picks up on an annoyance I've been talking about for some time in New Orleans as well. Other people riding bikes are pretty much ruining bike riding as a viable transportation alternative.

Even as Mayor Thomas M. Menino continues his push to unseat cars as king in Boston, cyclists are starting to sound like drivers. They’re griping about rack hogs who take up more than one space. They’re avoiding areas where they know there won’t be a single rack, parking meter, tree, gate, fence, railing, or sign that’s not already hosting one or more bikes. And just like the very motorists over whom they lord with their zero body fat, they’re complaining if they have to walk more than a couple of blocks from bike parking spot to destination.

Paul Krugman hits on a favorite political theory of mine here. People are willing to accept just about any horrific conditions as long as they happen slowly enough to seem normal. Long term unemployment, for example:

You might think that a persistently poor economy — an economy in which millions of people who could and should be productively employed are jobless, and in many cases have been without work for a very long time — would eventually spark public outrage. But the political science evidence on economics and elections is unambiguous: what matters is the rate of change, not the level.

Put it this way: If unemployment rises from 6 to 7 percent during an election year, the incumbent will probably lose. But if it stays flat at 8 percent through the incumbent’s whole term, he or she will probably be returned to power. And this means that there’s remarkably little political pressure to end our continuing, if low-grade, depression.

Let's see.. what else? Oh look, the freedom seems to be spreading well in Egypt.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Gehad Haddad, a spokesman for Muslim Brotherhood, said that at around 3.30 in the morning, army and police forces started firing at sit-in protesters in front of the Republican Guard headquarters in Cairo.

“We have people hit in the head, we have bullets that exploded as they entered the body, cluttering organs and body parts” said Haddad.

“Every police force in the world understands how to disperse a sit-in. This is just a criminal activity targeting protesters.”

Okay that should do it. We've wasted more than our share of elusive time and now have to go be late for work... unless there's some way to slow things down even further. Is Tommy Tucker on the radio right now?