Friday, August 26, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
Jon Stewart at his finest
Here is Jon Stewart's take on the right wing's response to Warren Buffet's op-ed in the NYT that he and others in his income bracket are not taxed enough. In today's WSJ, Harvey Golub of American Express is using the line that the Faux News commentators threw out: 50% of American don't pay any income tax.They need "skin in the game."
The section on how well of the poor have it is particularly devastating. Interestingly, blaming the poor for their condition is not new. Even Ben Franklin felt this way in the middle of the 18th century, as I found out in Nash- The Urban Crucible
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| World of Class Warfare - Warren Buffett vs. Wealthy Conservatives | ||||
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Here's part two.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| World of Class Warfare - The Poor's Free Ride Is Over | ||||
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Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Very Good New Yorker Articles
by Stephen Greenblatt, a pre-eminent Shakespeare scholar and general editor of the The Norton Shakespeare. This is on his reading of The Nature of Things by Lucretius, which I read for a Latin Lit in Translation course in college. I of course never got nearly as much out of it as he does. He writes at one point how his mother obsessed about her own death and would frequently tell him that he might not see her again when he went off to school. This passage from Lucretius is especially profound.
The other article I like from this week's is
I have a friend, an analytic philosopher and convinced atheist, who told me that she sometimes wakes in the middle of the night, anxiously turning over a series of ultimate questions: “How can it be that this world is the result of an accidental big bang? How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose? Can it be that every life—beginning with my own, my husband’s, my child’s, and spreading outward—is cosmically irrelevant?” In the current intellectual climate, atheists are not supposed to have such thoughts. We are locked into our rival certainties—religiosity on one side, secularism on the other—and to confess to weakness on this order is like a registered Democrat wondering if she is really a Republican, or vice versa.
The other article I like from this week's is
I have a friend, an analytic philosopher and convinced atheist, who told me that she sometimes wakes in the middle of the night, anxiously turning over a series of ultimate questions: “How can it be that this world is the result of an accidental big bang? How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose? Can it be that every life—beginning with my own, my husband’s, my child’s, and spreading outward—is cosmically irrelevant?” In the current intellectual climate, atheists are not supposed to have such thoughts. We are locked into our rival certainties—religiosity on one side, secularism on the other—and to confess to weakness on this order is like a registered Democrat wondering if she is really a Republican, or vice versa.
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