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What I am reading now: “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” by Charles Murray
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Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
Coming Apart (you can get it at above Amazon link for $13.00) starts off just right. Murray argues that American history can be divided into before JFK was assassinated and after JFK. Interesting. He provides many arguments why that is the case and I have to agree with him. It was the visible dividing line for the cultural heating up of America and its economy and the beginning of the ultra rich in America that made black billionaires possible like Oprah.
I like the book because he does something that most books don’t do: he talks about the middle class (the white definition that would be rich for a black person) and what it means. I love talk about money and economy and wealth.
I started out life middle class and was never one of the hungry who had to go to an Ivy school, even though I could have if I wanted to. I married stupid and young. My ex husband thought like his friends that being on welfare as a young, single black male in Chicago was no big deal. In fact it seemed de rigeur for many.
My family had never been on welfare or used food stamps and I did not know what it was all about. He enrolled the family on welfare after we got married and I had my first two children thanks to the health care provided by the government. We were on AFDC as it was called them for a few years. After we divorced I immediately got a job. Years later, I was a college dropout, I returned to college, graduated and got a real job and a real career.
Yes, I make more money than ever and have everything I want and need including a big house that I share with a gray cat, and a new silver gray Ford Focus that’s pretty good on gas. It is possible for a single mother, former welfare and food stamp user to get a degree and live on their own.
Related articles
- Bestselling Author Charles Murray Has A Controversial Suggestion For Reducing Class Divisions (businessinsider.com)
- Charles Murray Examines the White Working Class in ‘Coming Apart’ (nytimes.com)
- Are We Coming Apart? (maverickphilosopher.typepad.com)
Rob Lowe’s New Book “Stories I only Tell My Friends”
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Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography
Many of the Jewish women who asked me about the Brat Pack were hoping that Rob Lowe, now44, was Jewish. Lowe was the most physically beautiful of all the Brat Pack actors--male or female. (Demi Moore came close--but she has reportedly had cosmetic surgery.) Lowe is often a Jewish name and if he were Jewish--well, I guess he would have been the hottest male Jewish movie star since Tony Curtis.
It was my sad duty to tell my readers that Lowe isn’t Jewish. He was born and raised an Episcopalian in Ohio. However, because of the reader interest in Lowe, I always kept an eye on Lowe’s career and I’ve come to admire his ability to maintain a fairly successful acting career over two decades, in spite of a major sex scandal in 1988.
Related articles
- Rob Lowe’s got his fingers on a Butterfingers movie (popwatch.ew.com)
- Rob Lowe Talks Sobriety With Piers Morgan (shoppingblog.com)
Maria Shriver: A Woman’s Nation (pdf) Changes Everything
A Woman’s Nationpdf file. This is not a book but a study and the complete study is at the link if you care to read it. It can also be found at American Progress.org link.
Palin not in demand on speech circuit
They tell her that her new book is selling but she is not, well, selling. The talk and the speech circuit. Remember that the one that pays big bucks for a speaker to sell himself in front of a big crowd? Yes, they command fees, just ask Bill Clinton. She ain’t getting none of that pie though.
In her speeches she screeches and reaches for intellectual air pockets but her presence has already sucked all the oxygen out of the room. She sounds like she is going down but not coming up. She has titled her memoir that she just finished “Going Rouge” I wonder where she got that title from?
Heloise
Jackie Graces the Oct 2009 Cover of Vanity Fair
Jackie O is fetching in yellow. She is also hoping to sell mags for Vanity Fair. The sale of magazines is sagging but the interest in Jackie hardly seems to be lagging.
ET reports tonight that the reason for the cover story was based on the bitter battle Jackie had with Manchester who wrote “Death of A President” in 1964 or so. I probably have that book around here somewhere. The deal is that the book went too far. It detailed more than Jackie thought was okay. It was published in 1967 and Jackie found it fascinating.
They Killed them at Chelmo
If you have been watching all the JFK and Teddy specials then you might have noticed that they recount how Jack was not only a speed reader but an avoricious one. I once wrote a poem in which I called myself a book. Books were my friend along with soft serve ice cream and they still are.
It is all about the book. Books are endangered because of the Internet and because of individual economies.
The Germans fooled the Jews with pretend generousity. They told them that they were going to work and to areas where they could live. They had to transport them there first. One of the first places of transport was to a place seldom heard of Chelmo. It was where there were gas vans set up waiting. That’s how it started. In the Years of Extermination the author names each chapter with a date.
There are no real descriptions of atrocities in terms of how they killed people they planned to kill. Germans planned not only to kill jews but also Gypsies and the mentally retarded.
This time in German history has a special meaning for me because as jack I spent time in Germany just when Hitler was getting started. Hitler is well known to the Masters. I have traced his lives back to the Middle Ages in France. He was pushing pograms back then as a monk, a Catholic monk no less. I have traced him to his present life. What does that mean? It means that the jews went mostly in cooperation with their destroyers. Yes, there were a few who resisted but that is only a small number. It means that it was woven into history even before it became history. Because history is about patterns. That is something that I watch closely.
Hitler blamed the wars on the jews and kept predicting that if there is one more war, meaning WWII that he was going to eliminate all the Jews in Europe. He started the war and then blamed the Jews for it! How convenient.
How does American history hold up to the scrutiny of the world and what do with those who have changed the face of this country. The jobs have been taken by many immigrants. The low paying jobs. But in Hitler’s German the Jews had taken mostly the middle class and upper class positions. They were very wealthy. The Jews had most of the money of Germany, the beautiful estates and homes and the huge and successful businesses. Jews are smart and hard working. They died for it. But they also died for the lack of assimilation into the culture.
Jews were teachers too. They killed the teachers right off. Then they went after the businesses next. What were they thinking? The Jews doubted their intuition. They doubted that the Germans meant to kill them off. They were wrong.
The lack of jobs and the poor economy of Europe was the backdrop for taking away what the Jews had and giving it to the regular Germans. It was a true case of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Everything else was a sideshow. But how do you take a persons goods and money and leave them without an outcry? The Germans had a solution for this it was the boxcar and the vans and finally the crematoriums and the showers that they built.
It was a burden for the German soldiers to kill all these people without nervous breakdowns. The early days were spent figuring out how to kill a lot of people without destroying mentally the people who were doing the killing. Sanitize it and it will go away.
Heloise
The Trough 