Hold your applause for the recovery

For my 600th post, unfortunately, some sobering news. All around us, we’ve been hearing about how things are picking up, more people are working, etc.

I give you the latest Gallup employment survey – Flatlining. Note the lines from February of 2010 (larger graf) or January, 2010 (smaller one below it) to April, 2011, are running more or less flat, as is the line for underemployment (19.4 percent!!).

This is not a recovery.

Later,

Some pretty bad things, and some good, occurred today

In 1865, Abraham Lincoln, shot in the back of the head by the scumdog John Wilkes Booth the night before, passed away.

One can only imagine how the world would have been different. Certainly, the Republican Party would be.

In 1912, the ocean liner Titanic sank, taking more than 1,500 lives with her. The story was later made into one of the most profitable motion pictures in history (but I didn’t like it very much).

And in 1947, Jackie Robinson broke major league baseball’s infamous color line and took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

And, born this day, Leonardo da Vinci

and Emma Thompson

Later,

Oh, THAT explains it

In the new issue of Current Biology is an article that finds the difference between liberals and conservatives is in their brains. No, it’s not that one group has one and the other doesn’t, but they’re built differently. Liberals’ brains accommodate complexity and uncertainty better; conservatives’ brains are larger in the area that processes fear (imagine that) and tend to react more to threats with aggression (nothing that I see explains their penchant for making up threats in order to express aggression).

You can’t get to the text on the magazine’s website w/o a subscription, but Raw Story posted a short news piece – It\'s a matter of brains

Later,

And, remembering a giant who fought to make us better than we were

And, it’s worth remembering, 43 years later, as organized labor comes under ferocious assault, that Dr. King had come to Memphis to support a strike.
Dr. King and the labor movement

Later,

More on Inequality

This time, from Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, writing in Vanity Fair – Stiglitz: even the rich will regret this

AND – a blog I just discovered that follows this issue, courtesy of the Institute for Policy Studies – Too Much

Later,