On the face of it, this seems like a particularly silly story, unless you're the parent or friend of one of the dead girls:

Time travel TV series have come under fire since two schoolgirls in East China's Fujian province killed themselves on Thursday after leaving notes saying the suicides could help them travel back to ancient times.

The two girls, Xiao Mei and Xiao Hua (not their real names), were fifth-grade classmates at a primary school in Zhangpu county, Zhangzhou.

On Thursday afternoon, Xiao Hua realized she lost the remote control for a rolling door at her house. She was worried and told her friend Xiao Mei.

Meet Richard Florida (pronounced "Flo-rid-DUH," unlike the hip hop artist).

Even with the president’s approval rating showing signs of life and the Republicans busily bashing themselves over the head — “one is a practicing polygamist and he’s not even the Mormon,” retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently quipped about her party’s two frontrunners — America continues to track right, according to polling data released by the Gallup Organization last week.

(photo courtesy)

So, I'm led to understand that last night, one group of talentless millionaires defeated another group of even less-talented millionaires, thus earning hundreds of millions of dollars for a cartel of socialist-billionaires. Even deeper irony is that the entire nation stopped for four hours (or more) to watch this spectacle, which included "entertainment" by yet another passel of millionaires on a broadcast that featured hundreds of millions of dollars spent not on improving the country, but on trying to segregate your pocket, green from white.

By now, you've no doubt heard about Facebook's IPO (intial public offering, or in lay parlance, going public.)

How big is this thing going to be? Well, put it this way: way back in the dim dark past of 2005, an artist was commissioned to paint a mural for the company headquarters.

Since Facebook hadn't even really become a national phenomenon beyond college campuses yet, CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered the artist, local graffititian David Choe, the ludicrous option of stock options instead of cash. Two-tenths of one percent of the available shares.

Those options could be worth $200 million at execution, meaning the company could be valued as high as $100 billion dollars.

Today the nation celebrates the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with a day of service.

I can think of few more appropriate ways to honor a man who espoused non-violence and humility in the face of oppression and rage. Service to our community, service to our fellow men and women, even as small as buying a friend a sandwich for lunch or giving a quarter to the homeless guy who sleeps in the subway, sounds like small potatoes in the face of the service that Dr. King gave to this nation.

But it's a start. Obviously, the more you can give to your community, the more important your work can be.

The US Postal Service is in pretty drastic difficulty. Of course, the usual suspects are laying blame at the usual feet:

How did it come to this? The culprits include the internet, labor expenses, and, as with pretty much every problem our country faces now, Congress.

When you analyze the facts a little, as Weismann clearly has not, you begin to understand that it's the last that is responsible for the problems, in toto.

Dispossessed families, foreclosed from too-big homes, living in their next largest asset: the family car.

Never has unemployment been so high for so long. And as a result, more than 16 million kids are living in poverty - the most since 1962. It's worst where the construction industry collapsed. And one of those places is central Florida.

We went there eight months ago to meet families who'd become homeless for the first time in their lives. So many were living day-to-day that school buses changed their routes to pick up all the kids living in cheap motels. We called the story "Hard Times Generation."

When Teabaggers talk about the high price of public employees, I wonder if this is who they mean?

Ginny Townsend, 41, took a job in January as a nursing assistant in the state-run home for veterans here. Technically, she works for a private company that supplies some employees to the veterans home under a [Michigan] state contract. She makes $10 an hour, about half the wage of the public employees working at the facility.

I know that everybody has their Guy Fawkes masks at the ready, just bubbling with revolutionary zeal based on a comic book-style movie. That's cool, i guess, but it might be more instructive to remember a non-fictional event of the 5th that probably has more value for the nascent protest movement in the United States. On November 5, 1916, a boatload of IWW members arrived at the dock in Everett, WA to support a shingle workers' strike. The Wobblies didn't give the sheriff the leader he asked for, they declared themselves all to be leaders. So the mob on the dock opened fire.

Because i am that lazy.

For another week, Sean Paul is enjoying spectacular vistas, amazing wildlife and the kind of human interaction you can only get by going out and experiencing the world. (Lucky bastard, and thanks for the vicarious experience through photography) I arrived at the Agonist in ways i don't remember, but i stayed because this is one of those few sites with a diversity of opinion put forth by really intelligent, thoughtful people. So for the second half of SPK's trip, i'd like to tap into that and start a broad, and hopefully deep, conversation among Agonistas about work.

I see a lot of comments and rebuttals to Occupy Wall Street that boil down to this, no doubt spurred on by the Koch brothers and their minions:

I work three jobs. I own a house. I have a family to support. I am the 53%.

My question is this: why?

Almost everything we know about wages and prices tells us that the typical household has suffered a Lost Decade for market wages. Just as important, the price of necessities -- such as health care, a college education, a house, and energy to heat your home and run your car engine -- is growing faster than our incomes. [...]

I want to talk about expectations. I want to talk about Occupy Wall Street.

Hundreds of attorneys, law students and other legal minds are volunteering their skills to protect the rights of protesters in the Occupy movement, according to the National Lawyers Guild.

In New York alone, dozens of people have stepped forward to act as legal observers at marches in the past month. They don luminous green hats at rallies and document the names of those arrested in confrontations with the NYPD, and they also can be found in court.

OCTOBER 16: While in Portland, Maine to give a talk on race and
social justice at First Parish Portland Unitarian Universalist
Church, I visited on Sunday with Occupy Wall Street participants
(above) who have camped out at a downtown park. It was an unseasonably
warm day, their spirits were high, and my sense was that they are highly
organized (e.g., they have a media coordinator) and that they feel
very connected with Occupy Wall Street groups elsewhere.

(NYC PHOTOS AFTER THE JUMP)

This is why we can't have nice things: we can't even talk about them without our corporate overlords overruling us.

And has been for some time now. Read this for more information:

But what has been lost in the political debate over the Post Office is why it is losing this money. Major media coverage points to the rise of email or Internet services and the inefficiency of the post model as the major culprits. While these factors may cause some fiscal pain, almost all of the postal service’s losses over the last four years can be traced back to a single, artificial restriction forced onto the Post Office by the Republican-led Congress in 2006.

At the very end of that year, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA). Under PAEA, USPS was forced to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time span” — meaning that it had to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees it hasn’t even hired yet, something “that no other government or private corporation is required to do.”

As consumer advocate Ralph Nader noted, if PAEA was never enacted, USPS would actually be facing a $1.5 billion surplus today...

The 2006 PAEA was just the first major assault--there have been other, more minor ones that are making the post office insolvent, less reliable, and are putting the screws to the workers there. Make no mistake, the USPS is being demolished to make way for privatized delivery routes. They'll be sold off to well-connected cronies, who will then turn around and extract rent from what should be a public monopoly, leaving us all poorer for it.

Meanwhile, everyone just argues about how unprofitable the USPS is because of the internet, email, etc. Missing the point. It's unprofitable because a group of people in our government-financial complex have decided to make it that way and to focus the public discussion on how to change the post office to deal with the very unprofitable situation they've created.

Think about a nation whose government has abdicated all responsibility towards the people. The aristocracy, the wealthy, become more and more wealthier as the poor become poorer and more numerous. The nation is on the brink of bankruptcy, in large part because it has recently funded two unpopular and unnecessary military adventures against a people who are governed by a tyrannical regime, one they were paranoid would launch an attack at any moment against them.

Taxes on the wealthy were never lower than under the current government. So low, in fact, they were practically regressive, since the poorest 99% combined owned and earned less than the top 1%. To fund all this militarism, rather than raise taxes on their patrons, the government borrowed. Heavily. With no real way of repaying the money. Meanwhile, the wealth drained out of the national economy, along with the increasingly more dangerous climate conditions, created massive unemployment and more and more jobless and poor.

A paper was published in January 2006 titled "Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades". The authors, Aguiar and Hurst, explored how leisure time has changed from 1965 to 2003 by gender, education level, marital status, work status, and parental status. They defined leisure time as any time spent not engaged in market work (for-pay) and non-market work (household or other work activities). Time spent on child care is handled entirely separately and found to have not significantly changed over time.

One of the apparently counter-intuitive results of their study was that leisure time had increased overall across the population, but that it had increased the most for those with lower educational attainment--defined as a high school diploma/GED or less. Less educated men worked 14.3 hours/week less at their jobs in 2003 compared to 1965, while more educated men worked only 8.7 hours/week less. Women's situation is more complicated, as their working hours actually increased overall while the non-market work time decreased, but the same education/leisure gap exists for them as well.

I've seen these results brought up in arguments by conservatives or libertarians to support their position that those lower on the economic ladder are simply lazy or have chosen to have more free time rather than work to get ahead. This then is used as justification for attacking "entitlements" such as welfare. But this argument is bullshit, and I'm going to tell you why.

The Nation, By John Nichols, September 6

Joe Biden, a Democrat who does not "tolerate" or "have regard for" labor unions but actually believes in them, delivered the single most powerful speech by of the top Democrats who showed up for this week's Labor Day rallies, parades and picnics.

The vice president did it not just with rhetoric but with a genuine call to action for workers in Ohio, where he happened to be speaking, and across the country.

I'm going to make a concerted effort to get my 9/11 rants out of the way early this week. The tragedy still has too much emotion tied up in it for me to want to dwell until the last minute, when my maudlin streak will rear its ugly head.

You know what has me most upset heading into this ten year memorial?

What could have been.

I've written often over the past seven years...has it really only been seven years?...of my frustration of a nation on the precipice of a new century, a budget surplus and the hope of a brand new age of progress. Yes, we were in the middle of a recession, but it was a relatively mild one, a shake out of the fat in the dot-com boom. We've come back strong from those kinds of recessions before.

The French uberwealthy want more taxes.

See, there's something about a true revolution...not that America's was a slouch, but stick with this for a moment...where a people rise up against (here it comes) its own government to demand change.

The French Revolution was, in essence, the sea-change the American was not. The American Revolution was the landed gentry being tired of their responsibilities to a king 3,500 miles away who really paid them no mind. The French Revolution was the people's revolution, where a nation stood up against its own resident king and said "Enough!"

I assume that most participants on this medium (thx, spk!) are familiar with President Obama's goal of raising - and spending of course - $1 billion for the campaign already in progress.

There are, to my mind, numerous elements of such a goal and the various strategies designed to achieve it that are troubling. One such element is the state and readiness of the "givers" vis-a-vis the "givee". At this point in the nation's economic history, the pool of "givers" may appear larger than last cycle from an "addressable market" point of view, seeing that the nation's population has continued to grow, but the actual "share" of potential "givers" is likely to be proportionally smaller - and maybe even smaller in simple numeric terms - as a result of the economic malaise choking the country.

The riots in England don't appear to be racially-motivated or just young punks without jobs in a long hot summer...well, maybe a little of the latter:

The riots and fires consuming London are a story about senseless violence and crime. They are also a story about urban politics, race relations, education inequality, and British culture and society. But underneath all of that, they are part of an economic story that is universal.

For the last year, Great Britain has embraced austerity to a degree that would make some American conservatives blush. The purpose of shrinking government was to reduce debt. But the effect has been to kill the economy. With the UK tottering on the razor's edge of recession, consumer confidence is at a record low, unemployment is rising, and even the most optimistic economists predict one-percent expansion for the rest of the year.

Well, not for Walker, not yet, but many of his henchmen are facing recall elections today amidst overwhelming anger at their capitulation to Governor Walker's hare-brained attempt to de-unionize Wisconsin.

I mean, that's like asking the Steelworkers union to leave Pittsburgh. Wisconsin is a state that relies heavily, as most Northern states do, on its working class population.

Naturally, the backpedaling and "Who? Me?" cards have been in play:

On Thursday, Republican Senator Dale Schultz leveled a shocking allegation that Governor Walker had dry-gulched him into missing the vote on the budget bill that eliminated collective bargaining, where, Schultz claims, he had planned to offer a compromise amendment. Schultz, a moderate, avoided recall earlier this year, even though he faced an outraged constituency.

Ray Downs | New York | August 7

Christian Post - 45,000 Verizon workers went on strike today, arguing that the communications giant is trying to stick them with an unfair contract, including drastic cuts to medical benefits, despite showing record profits in recent years.

“It’s all about corporate greed destroying middle class families,” said Vinny Galvin, a trunk assigner for Verizon and a chief steward for Communication Workers of America (CWA), the striking union. Galvin was picketing along with several other union members wearing red t-shirts and holding signs, in front of Verizon headquarters in New York City on Sunday.

“Corporate America just wants to destroy the middle class,” he added.