Timothy Geithner’s Nine Lives
Simon Johnson explains eight times why Tim Geithner's should not have a job with the U.S. government, and that upon the next stumble he won't be so lucky.
The demise of the American middle class
These 22 statistics from Business Insider are shocking. In the aggregate they forcefully demonstrate that America's middle class is being wiped out. They also suggest a bleak economic future where, for instance, 61% of Americans always or usually live from paycheck to paycheck, and where 43% of American workers have saved less than $10,000 for their retirement.
Books for freethinkers
The Center for Inquiry has published this list of books for freethinkers recommended by well-known freethinkers.
Camp for skeptical children
The Center for Inquiry's week-long camp for skeptical kids is underway, as described by this article in Huffpo. To be clear, this is not a God-bashing camp. Rather, it is a place where the campers "share is an interest in taking a reason-guided and evidence-based approach to all of life's questions." Imagine sitting around the camp fire reciting this passage by Carl Sagan:
[W]hen the people have lost their ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
Family values
At Salon.com, Amy Benfer has roasted Bristol and Levi with an article beginning with this paragraph worthy of bronzing (the entire article constitutes a clinic on how to write, IMO):
She has been a (perhaps unwitting) symbol of her mother's ultimate pro-life commitment; he cut off his mullet and agreed to wear a suit for the Republican Convention. She spent her first year postpartum making bank telling other young women not to even think of having sex; he was dubbed "Sex on Skates" by New York magazine and stripped down to his skivvies for cash. But perhaps, like the boy who pulls your pigtail on the playground, all those differences and petty squabbles were a sign of true love; according to this week's Us Weekly magazine, it was all just a prelude to a big white Alaskan wedding: Bristol Palin, abstinence educator, and Levi Johnston, Playgirl model, have announced their (second) engagement.I am pleased that, so far today, I have kept to my pledge to avoid discussing Sarah Palin on this site. Ooops.