RelentlesslyOptimistic

The little engine

via www.soberinanightclub.com

Book signing

via www.soberinanightclub.com

Income Inequality is Bad for Society. Really Bad.

Research shows that a country's level of income inequality is linked to bad outcomes. Infant mortality, drug use, prison population, mental illness, high school drop outs, obesity, levels of distrust and homicide rates all increase proportionately to the level of income inequality.

From Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett‘s book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better: “Th[e] dissatisfaction [measured in this data is] a cost which the rich impose on the rest of society.”

[This is] a clear warning for those who might want to place low public expenditure and taxation at the top of their priorities. If you fail to avoid high inequality, you will need more prison and more police. You will have to deal with higher rates of mental illness, drug abuse and every other kind of problems. If keeping taxes and benefits down leads to wider income differences, the need to deal with ensuing social ills may  force you to raise public expenditure to cope.

via thesocietypages.org

"first make sure that you are not...surrounded by assholes

via afternoonsnoozebutton.com

Black Like Me, 50 Years Later

In 1959 John Howard Griffin (left in photo below) darkened his skin in order to pass as black, and then traveled through the deep South. Smithsonian Magazine looks at the book he wrote about his experience.

"Fifty years ago this month, Griffin published a slim volume about his travels as a “black man...Black Like Me, which told white Americans what they had long refused to believe, sold ten million copies and became a modern classic."

“If a white man became a Negro in the Deep South,” he wrote on the first page of Black Like Me, “what adjustments would he have to make?” Haunted by the idea, Griffin decided to cross the divide. “The only way I could see to bridge the gap between us,” he would write, “was to become a Negro.”

I read this book in 1968 while living in Hampton, Virginia and attending a segregated school. As a child of fairly progressive parents in a military family, living in integrated military housing, I'd glimpsed some of the contrasts, but this book opened my eyes to how diffficult whites could make life for blacks.

via www.smithsonianmag.com

"I don't even know where I'm running...or why"

A page from the new Dick & Jane Existential Reader

via worldofbarbee.tumblr.com

Simplistic solution to marriage problems: 40 Beads

 The woman who brought us "He's Just Not That Into You" has a new book suggesting that giving a husband 40 beads could save a marriage.

"The way it works is that the husband (and only the husband) gets 40 beads for a year, and any time he wants to sex his Mrs., he hands her a bead. She then has 24 hours to respond with sex."

"Yes, the answer to all marital problems is just ...creating an intra-marriage currency which makes her a functional prostitute to her husband"

The author says “It’s an easy way without having to communicate”

Because communication causes so many marital problems, I guess.

via afternoonsnoozebutton.com