Who Am I?

Weekend Update 01-01-2011

Posted: January 1st, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Weekend Update | Comments Off on Weekend Update 01-01-2011

Happy New Year! I hope this post finds all of you healthy, wealthy and wise. My update, as usual, contains the links I found interesting and sometimes my brief thoughts about them.

This is an audio recording of a presentation by David Brooks on some of the things we know and are learning about the brain. I tend to find such things interesting.

The New York Times has an interesting discussion, So You Think You’re Middle Class?. If the overwhelming majority of people identify as “middle class,” does the term even mean anything?

After funding nearly $900 billion dollars in tax cuts for those who need them least (and which by most theories will actually hurt our economy and the foundations of our social constructs) entirely on credit, Senate Republicans balked at the $6-$7 billion dollars required to fund health care for the 9/11 first responders. It’s a statement on our times that the news media almost completely ignored it and it took a comedian to shame them into doing the right thing.

I do want to highlight again, on this first day of 2011, Politifact’s lie of the year for 2010.

A personal example from LaVonne Neff on how health care “works” right now in the US.

It seems that Robert Reich’s economic prediction for 2011 is the most likely scenario. Sadly.

Fr. Ernesto (Orthocuban) exposes the nativist underpinnings of the Tea Party and bias of Fox News. Actually, “exposes” is probably too strong a word since they’ve made little effort to hide it. I’ve commented in discussions that the “Tea Party” movement shares some of that flavor with the Civil War era American Party (the “Know Nothings”).