Over at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi has proposed a Supreme Court of Assholedom. This kind of court is long overdue, for the reasons suggested by Taibbi, and for the comic relief one gets by reading this snarky piece.
Based surveys by the Brookings Institute, Americans fervently want to believe that hard work pays off in America. They believe that you are not locked into a particular strata of social and economic mobility by the lot of your parents. Yet the evidence doesn't bear this out.
While cross-country comparisons of relative mobility rely on data and methodologies that are far from perfect, a growing number of economic studies have found that the United States stands out as having less, not more, inter-generational mobility than do Canada and several European countries. American children are more likely than other children to end up in the same place on the income distribution as their parents. Moreover, there is emerging evidence that mobility is particularly low for Americans born into families at the bottom of the earnings or income distribution.The truth is that the United States is a low-mobility country:
In the United States and the United Kingdom, about half (50 percent) of parental earnings advantages are passed onto sons. If trends hold consistent, it would take an average of six generations for family economic advantage to disappear in the United States and the United Kingdom.Paul Krugman sums it up: "[T]he right is winning economic debates because people believe, wrongly, that there’s something inherently moral about free-market outcomes." We Americans are dreamers, even when it blinds us to the need for real change. "American children are more likely than other children to end up in the same place on the income distribution as their parents." The real numbers contained in the linked report are real eye-openers. All of this was predictable. The Economist wonders where the anger is:
It's striking how little inchoate public rage has actually boiled to the surface in the rich world. Rising inequality, especially at the top end, combined with stagnating middle class incomes, has been a feature of the world for at least the past ten years. It's been two years since the biggest bail-outs and the rise toward double-digit unemployment. And the anger is...where? Europeans are demonstrating against budget cuts, but these are rarely explicitly directed at national plutocrats. In America, the language of the angriest is very similar to that of the plutocrats themselves. Indeed, the complaint that today's elite lack the noblesse oblige of the aristocrats of old, and are therefore risking public anger, seems to badly misread American public opinion. The middle class doesn't want hand-outs from condescending rich people. They want moralistic language and complaints about deficits.
At Huffpo, Josh Silver of Free Press points out the utterly painful trend we've seen regarding the President of "Hope" and "Change."
President Obama is being squeezed by a corrupt Washington that is run by industry lobbyists, fake grassroots groups, massive political spending and PR machines that make the most basic public interest protections impossible to advance. But rather than tell that story, dig in, and fight like a true leader would, Obama has chosen to hire corporate-friendly advisers, compromise on the most crucial substance, and attempt to eke out weak, symbolic, half-victories gift-wrapped in flowery oratory and spin. It's a losing strategy that has become brutally transparent.But what about all of those protections of the public that the FCC built into the merger terms.
This merger will touch all corners of the media market, and you won't be immune. Comcast will jack up the prices that other cable and online distributers pay for NBC content, and those prices will be passed to you. That means higher cable and Internet bills, even if you don't subscribe to Comcast. Comcast and the FCC Chairman argue that there are "conditions" applied to the merger that protect the public, (details about the conditions are not out yet) but they fail to mention that the key provisions are either voluntary (no, that's not a typo), or expire after a few years. Then, all bets are off, as the merger squeezes out what's left of independent, diverse voices from television dials, and forever changes the Internet as we know it.
Although St. Louis was founded as a fur trading post, it is no longer well known as a place to view wildlife. But you can still spot wildlife. Yesterday my family traveled about 10 miles north of downtown St. Louis to the "Old Chain of Rocks Bridge," which spans the Mississippi River. 
The bridge was for a time the route used by U.S. Route 66 to cross over the Mississippi. Its most notable feature is a 22-degree bend occurring at the middle of the crossing, necessary to allow river traffic to have uninterrupted navigation on the river. Originally a motor route, the bridge now carries walking and biking trails over the river. The bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006.
I do need to add that this was a brilliant use of an old narrow bridge. Click on the
thumbnail for a panorama showing the view south from the bridge (Downtown St. Louis is on the horizon to the left). The bridge is located in a big wide relatively quiet area (except for one other bridge that runs parallel), where one can enjoy the Mississippi River and the surrounding undeveloped areas, just north of the Chain of Rocks rapids and a bit south of the confluence between the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. For one weekend each year, this wonderful bridge is featured as the venue for Eagle Days, a prime spot for viewing American bald Eagles. This is rather cool, to be able to spot wild bald eagles right in the heart of the Midwest. Here's a bit more description of their migration relevant to the Mississippi.
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In the December, 2010 edition of Discover Magazine, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio sets forth his understanding of human consciousness. Damasio has recently published a new book on this topic, Self Comes to Mind. Here's a short excerpt from page 66 of his deeply thought-provoking article at Discover (not available yet online):
Conscious minds result from the smoothly articulated operation of several, often many, brain sites. The ultimate consciousness product occurs from those numerous brain sites at the same time and not in one site in particular, much as the performance of a symphonic piece does not come from the work of a single musician or even a whole section of an orchestra. The oddest thing about the upper reaches of a consciousness performance is the conspicuous absence of a conductor before the performance begins, although as the performance unfolds, a conductor comes into being. For all intents and purposes, a conductor is now leading the orchestra, although the performance has created the conductor--the self--not the other way around. Building a mind capable of encompassing one's lived past and anticipated future, along with the lives of others added to the fabric and the capacity for reflection to boot, resembles the execution of a symphony of Mahlerian proportions. But the true marvel is that the score and the conductor become reality only as life unfolds. The grand symphonic piece that is consciousness encompasses the foundational contributions of the brainstem, forever hitched to the body, and the wider-than-the-sky imagery created in the cooperation of cerebral cortex and sub cortical structures, all harmoniously stitched together, is ceaseless forward motion, interruptible only by sleep, anesthesia, brain dysfunction, or death.Damasio, well known for his groundbreaking work in his early book, Descartes's Error, takes special care to describe the complexity of the mind, the marvel of this emergence of consciousness, and he specifically points out the importance of the emotions for a thorough understanding of consciousness: Emotions are complex, largely automated programs of actions concocted by evolution. The actions are carried out in our bodies, from facial expressions and postures to changes in viscera and internal millieu. Feelings of emotion, on the other hand, are composite perceptions of what happens in our body and mind when we are emoting. As far as the body is concerned, feelings are images of actions rather than actions themselves. While emotions are actions accompanied by ideas and certain modes of thinking, emotional feelings are mostly perceptions of what our bodies do during the emoting, along with perceptions of our state of mind during that same period of time. [More . . . ]