Empathy Gap

Somehow this headline doesn’t surprise me. Self-Reported Empathy Dropped Over Last 30 Years (Scientific American) Nearly 14,000 student questionnaires that were completed in the last three decades were used for the study. And 75 percent of those surveyed today rated themselves as being less empathic than what was the average score 30 years ago. From the [...]

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Time to learn Mandarin

A few months back I wrote a post titled This is why aren’t leaving.  From the NYT article linked in my post: The corruption that is already rampant in the Karzai government could also be amplified by the new wealth, particularly if a handful of well-connected oligarchs, some with personal ties to the president, gain [...]

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One-sided conversations

Why is it that the “honest conversation” we are all supposed to be having never includes OUR voices? We live in a world where plutocrat front men get to propose the most horrific attacks on the ordinary people of America using major national megaphones and then the friends of the working class, filled with dread, sputter [...]

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Some stuff I read today

Mike the Mad Biologist: I Agree With Bob Somerby’s Challenge to Ezra Klein & Kevin Drum: Will Progressives Stop Engaging in Willful Ignorance About Education? There’s a simple reason why the data are ignored: if you accept the data, then we have to look elsewhere, to politically incorrect things, such as poverty, public health, and [...]

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The Press and Social Security – Why they continue to get it wrong, and what they can do to get it right

Most of us out here in the liberal blogosphere must feel like we’ve been pissing into the wind when it comes to discussing Social Security. I know I do. No matter how many times we insist that Social Security is not welfare (“entitlement”), that it does not add on dime to the deficit, and is [...]

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Christmastime is here

Happy Christmas!

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How much do you really know about poverty?

Take the quiz. Then sign the pledge.

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A rubber band and the power of suggestion

Power Balance wristbands exposed as a sham Dr. Harriet Hall gives us the rundown. Power Balance representatives demonstrate their products in sports stores at malls. They purport to test your strength and balance and then give you a Power Balance card to hold or put in your pocket. When they retest you, you miraculously do [...]

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Heifer International

If you’re thinking of a last minute gift, you can’t go wrong with Heifer International. We’ve been giving the gift of goats and chicks and geese for years. One of these days I would like to go here. Our kids eventually decided that the best answer to our various problems was to pool all of [...]

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Executive Order on tap for indefinite detention. On American soil, no less.

Tell me about that Hope and Change thingie again? So much for electing a “Constitutional scholar” to the White House. The Obama administration is preparing an executive order that would formalize indefinite detention without trial for some detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but allow those detainees and their lawyers to [...]

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