Top 1%

Income inequality has reached insane levels in the U.S., and the Republicans seem intent on widening that gap as much as possible.  It's not the gap between college grads and non-college grads that's grown so much, it's the gap between the top 1% (the top 0.01% actually) and the rest of us.

The wealthy have been waging class warfare on the rest of us since Reagan, and they've been winning.  So, what should be done about it?  Get a rope? 

From Paul Krugman's blog:

Inequality Trends In One Picture



Just an addendum on the role of the top 1 percent versus the college-noncollege differential. Here, from the CBO report, are the changes, in percentage points, of the shares of income going to three groups. The top quintile excluding the top 1 percent – which is basically the abode of the well-educated who aren’t among the very lucky few – has only kept pace with the overall growth in incomes. Just about all of the redistribution has taken place from the bottom 80 to the top 1 (and we know that most of that has actually gone to the top 0.1).

 
 
It’s a tiny minority, not a broad class of well-educated Americans, who have been winning here.



Original.

Pat Condell

I hadn't even heard of this bloke until today.  This video ROCKS, if you don't particularly care for Islam, that is.

 

Happy Birthday, BL!

I hardly knew ye...from FFRF's Freethought of the Day

November 2

On this date in 1913, Burton Stephen Lancaster was born in New York City into an Irish Protestant family. He was one of five children. Lancaster grew up in a tough New York neighborhood ("just fists and rock fights"). Always intensely physical, he was given an athletic scholarship to attend New York University, where he played on the basketball team and participated in baseball, boxing, track and gymnastics. He dropped out of college after the first two years to form an acrobatic team with his boyhood friend, Nick Cravat. The act of Lang and Cravat traveled and performed with several circuses, including the Ringling and Barnum troupes, from 1932-1939. In 1945, at the age of 32, he was discovered while on furlough. A producer's assistant, upon seeing the tall, muscular Lancaster, asked him to try out for a role in a play called "The Sound of Hunting." Lancaster starred in his first film, "The Killers," based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway, which was the beginning of a long career that lasted until 1989. Due to his immense physical prowess, Lancaster performed his own stunt tricks, much to the consternation of his producers, in that it caused him to become a high insurance liability.


Lancaster was not only tough physically, he was also tough in his religious, ethical and political stances, and was willing to risk money and status for what he believed in. In 1947, he was nearly blacklisted after signing a letter deploring the anticommunist witch hunts in Hollywood. The FBI kept a file detailing his activities. Lancaster was a self-described atheist, turning down the role of Ben-Hur, but taking on the role of a corrupt evangelist in "Elmer Gantry" (1960), because he wanted to make an anti-Billy Graham statement. He won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as the oily preacher. Lancaster participated in Martin Luther King's March on Washington in 1963, was an active campaigner for George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election, and was one of 575 people named on President Nixon's 1973 "Enemies List." He appeared in the movie "Go Tell the Spartans" (1978), which is widely considered one of the foremost antiwar movies about Vietnam. He publicly associated himself with AIDS research in 1985. In 1988, in response to George H.W. Bush's comment deriding the fact that his presidential-race opponent Michael Dukakis was a "card-carrying member of the ACLU," Lancaster was featured in a television commercial "confessing" that he, too, was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. The concluding line in the commercial sums up Lancaster's unwavering liberal political viewpoint: "No one agrees with every single thing they've done. But no one can disagree with the guiding principle--with liberty and justice for all." D. 1994

“The Ten Commandments, he said, were fine -- but not for him.”

— Kate Buford, Burt Lancaster: An American Life, 2000, p. 277

Warren Buffett Act

Another one makes the rounds...What's real, and what isn't? Some of the below is true, and some isn't. Can you tell which is which? Ah, the bane of the internet.

Warren Buffett:

"I could end the deficit in 5 minutes," he told CNBC. "You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971 before computers, e-mail, cell phones, etc. Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land...all because of public pressure."

If you forwarded this message to 20 people in your address list, in three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.

*Congressional Reform Act of 2011*

1. No Tenure / No Pension. A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career.

The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their terms, then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message. Maybe it is time.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!!!!! If you agree with the above, pass it on.

Snopes.com says that only the first quote is really from Warren Buffett, the one about ending the deficit in 5 minutes. Go here. The rest is falsely attributed to Buffett. It's mostly a rehash of the "Congressional Reform Act of 2009." I agree with items 1-6. Not sure what #7 even means. It's quite amazing all of the garbage that floats around on the internet. Maybe I should go onto change.org and create a new petition. Or maybe you should.

November Stargazing

Looking forward to some stargazing in West Texas this month...

Stargazing Summary

Planets and stars team up to stage two pretty conjunctions this month, with the Moon passing by each duo. Mars and Regulus, which rise shortly after midnight, remain within a few degrees of each other all month, with Mars nearly doubling in brightness by month's end. Saturn and Spica, which are low in the southeast at first light, also snuggle close together throughout the month. In the meantime, Taurus climbs high across the sky, reaching its zenith around midnight late in the month. Orion and Gemini climb skyward earlier each evening, and by month's end are in good view by the middle of the evening. More stargazing information: http://stardate.org/nightsky

Radio Program Highlights

Hear StarDate every day on more than 300 radio stations nationwide.

Premium Audio: Listen to today's program today on-demand with a paid subscription to StarDate premium audio — http://stardate.org/store/premium-audio

November 1-6: A great show. One of the brightest comets of the last few centuries lit up Earth's night sky two centuries ago. We'll have details. We'll also talk about an attempt to get back in the game of planetary exploration.

November 7-13: Moon meanderings. The Moon passes by a brilliant planet this week, and they're on display for most of the night. And two other planets team up to put on their own display in the evening sky. Join us for this and more.

November 14-20: Moon, Mars, and meteors. The Moon passes a bright orange companion this week: the planet Mars. We'll have details. And we'll also talk about an autumn meteor shower. Join us for these, plus a spacecraft that's on the edge.

November 21-27: Mars battlewagon. The largest Mars rover yet will head for the Red Planet as early as this week. It's equipped with armloads of experiments, from a laser to zap the rocks to a chemical laboratory for analyzing them.

November 28-30: Rare birds. Two birds stroll across the southern horizon at this time of year — a crane and a phoenix. We'll have details, including the story of two of phoenix's stars that are locked in a tight dance. Join us for this and more.

November Program Schedule: http://stardate.org/radio/calendars
Find an Affiliate: http://stardate.org/radio/affiliates

This Month in StarDate Magazine

The editors of StarDate bring you ideas for astronomy- or space-themed holiday gifts in our November/December issue in our feature "Astro Gifts for Everyone." And astronomer and author Barbara Ryden of Ohio State University returns to StarDate to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the birth of Grote Reber, one of the pioneers of radio astronomy, in her feature "Tuning into the Radio Universe."

News from the Observatory

Texas-led Team Discovers Unusual Multi-Planet System with Kepler
A team of researchers led by Bill Cochran of The University of Texas at Austin has used NASA's Kepler spacecraft to discover an unusual multiple-planet system containing a super-Earth and two Neptune-sized planets orbiting in resonance with each other. They announced the find recently in Nantes, France at a joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Science and the European Planetary Science Conference. The research will be published in a special Kepler issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series this month.

Find out more: http://mcdonaldobservatory.org/news

The Hole Story

We've added a new Research section to the StarDate Black Holes Encyclopedia, and the first profile is online: the effort to confirm the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

Find out more: http://blackholes.stardate.org/research

Watch Award-Winning Videos on the HETDEX Channel

Our exciting project to study dark energy, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX), now has its own channel on YouTube. Watch as scientists from The University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M, and around the world discuss the challenges in studying this mysterious force whose discoverers were recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. And don't forget to watch our video "Dark Energy: Speeding up the Universe," that recently won two prestigious film awards of its own!

Watch now: http://www.youtube.com/hetdex

Earth is only 6,000 years old? Pull your heads out of the Bible and GROW UP!!