Highly recommended:
In Tallahassee, we’re doing a program on both of these asteroids on January 14th. We’re calling it FEARS: Where not everybody feels your pain… “What if manmade climate change is real and the social welfare state is doomed? (We might just need a beer.)” We’re having the conversation at a bar on a stage.
Here Joshua Brown, a New York investment advisor, writes compellingly about the heart of America’s fury after the 2008 meltdown (without the normal tribal 1/2 view) in his blog “The Reformed Broker” (and gives us another view on our rising inequality asteroid):
Not only do we not “hate the rich” as you and other em-bubbled plutocrats have postulated, in point of fact, we love them… We love the success stories in our midst and it is a distinctly American trait to believe that we can all follow in the footsteps of the elite, even though so few of us ever actually do.
So, no, we don’t hate the rich. What we hate are the predators.
What we hate are the people who we view as having found their success as a consequence of the damage their activities have done to our country. What we hate are those who take and give nothing back in the form of innovation, convenience, entertainment or scientific progress. We hate those who’ve exploited political relationships and stupidity to rake in even more of the nation’s wealth while simultaneously driving the potential for success further away from the grasp of everyone else…
America hates unjustified privilege, it hates an unfair playing field and crony capitalism without the threat of bankruptcy, it hates privatized gains and socialized losses, it hates rule changes that benefit the few at the expense of the many and it hates people who have been bailed out and don’t display even the slightest bit of remorse or humbleness in the presence of so much suffering in the aftermath.
Here’s a snip from an article from The Atlantic about why it’s hard for the political left to talk about the breakdown of family, featuring observations from our premiere Asteroids Club event dinner guest in Tallahassee, Kay Hymowitz. Learn more about the program by clicking here. (You can have an event like this in your hometown…) Also check out the entire Asteroids Club-themed dinner season we’re hosting HERE.
According to Kay, “it’s like stable marriage and community are the secret sauce of economic well-being that nobody on the left wants to admit to using.”
So if liberals are so worried about economic inequality, why not talk about stable marriages? “Liberals have been at the forefront of challenging all sorts of tradition as being oppressive,” Hymowitz said. “That included the sexual revolution, feminism, and, of course, the gay revolution. Because the left is so identified with those themes, it becomes very difficult to propose that the break-down of the family has not worked very well, particularly for those groups the left professes to be most concerned about”
E.J. Dionne agrees with Kay and turns it around on conservatives focused on family but not apparently seeing related liberal concerns: “My shorthand is yeah, if you care about social justice, you’ve got to care about families. But if you care about families, you’ve got to care about social justice.”
From The Atlantic:
The problem is not that people on the left don’t find family or values important. It’s more that language, history, and ideology create political hazards, rendering family issues almost impermissible in the public sphere. As Robert Jones, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, put it, avoiding family issues is a survival tactic in the face of deeply divided political camps. “If I’m a politician or organizer… on the left, it’s not so much a principled censorship, but a pragmatic avoidance of the issue to keep the conversation less mired.”
Read the entire article in The Atlantic HERE.
“The Air Force says it can no longer afford to scan the sky for extraterrestrial threats that could doom the planet, all because of the sequester cuts Washington forced on itself when it failed to rein in the exploding national deficit. Called the Air Force Space Surveillance System, it’s “critical” to defense, the Air Force has said. By October 1, they’ll have to pull the plug.”
Apparently the extraterrestrial threats include about 1,000 asteroids large enough to “potentially unleash global catastrophic devastation to the planet upon impact.”
Kind of a big deal, yes? From this bit of asteroid news you probably shouldn’t expect much of a reaction from our elected officials. Last spring, when one asteroid actually did hit earth and one closely missed us on the same day, Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) asked NASA chief Charles Bolden what NASA would do if a large asteroid was expected to collide with earth in three weeks.
“The answer to you is, ‘if it’s coming in three weeks, pray.’ The reason I can’t do anything in the next three weeks is because for decades we have put it off.”
So break out the space suits, America, and give Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck a heads up. Looks like we’re on our own again.