As the World Turns.

Almost three months after he died, James Brown was finally laid to rest in a crypt.

Rev. Al Sharpton conducted the ceremony.
_____

The Forbes list of billionaires shows just how insane our world has become:

Forbes magazine released its annual list of billionaires Thursday. There are now nearly one thousand billionaires worldwide—946 to be exact, according to the magazine’s calculations—and their combined wealth in the past year grew by 35 percent to $3.5 trillion.

The latter figure is larger than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of every nation in the world with the exception of the US, China, Japan and India. The combined GDP of all the countries in Africa, a continent of nearly one billion people, was some $2.3 trillion in 2005. More than a third of the African population lives on less than $1 a day. The combined GDP of South America’s largest trading bloc, Mercosur, whose full members are Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela, is $1.1 trillion.

The proposed US federal budget for 2007 amounts to $2.8 trillion. The sum devoted in that budget to Social Security, Medicare and education for a population of 300 million people is approximately one-third of the combined wealth of those 946 individuals. The European Union countries spend something more than half a trillion dollars annually on education. The Chinese government expended some $15 billion in 2005 on science and technology, education, health and culture for its population of more than one billion people.


This is simply insane. The world can't go on with a tiny number of filthy rich stealing from eveybody else.
_____

More and more married couples are doing what my parents did, and that's sleep in separate bedrooms.

There's nothing wrong with this. It is very difficult to share a bed with somebody else--hell's bells, it's hard with me sharing my bed with my Chihuahua! For couples, it has nothing to do with the lack of intimacy but the lack of sleep.

King-sized beds don't do much to alleviate the problem.
_____

Jeffrey Rosen examines how research into the brain will affect our legal system.
_____

Oregon edges toward paid parental leave.
_____

There is still no word of Vivi.

I suspect somebody found her and is keeping her.
_____

No comments:

Featured Post

The View from Grizzly Peak

Today I went on a group hike through the Medford Parks and Recreation Department to Grizzly Peak, which is located in the Cascade-Siskiyou M...