A couple of interesting court cases: Zombies won the right to demonstrate against consumerism--well, activists dressed as shopping zombies. They won a settlement against restraint by police, whose excuse was terrorism, what else.
At least here in CA, Sarah Palin's big payday for a speech at a state university got some attention (not much.) Now a court has decided the terms of her payment must be disclosed. Update: and here's the contract.
$75,000, pre-screened questions and a bendable straw.
The state government of CA is busily self-destructing and taking the state down with it, but there are occasional glimmers of life--like getting it together to be the first state to organize its health-insurance market under the new healthcare law. It'll all happen too late to help me--I'll have Medicare by then--but implementation of reforms is going to be as difficult as passing them. So the biggest state economy in the country going first is a big deal.
And here's a mere detail of news you probably missed, since it wasn't exactly headlined: the much-maligned Recovery Act resulted in millions of jobs in the second quarter of this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. As bad as things are, they would have been greatly worse without it. Update: a great story in Time Magazine on how the Recovery Act will transform the future.
Sanity made a brief appearance on the rec list at Daily Kos this week. But I wouldn't count on a recurrence.
Finally, the NY Times has been doing a series on "Your Brain on Computers," a series of research-derived cautionary tales, which might also be classified under my "all your eggs in one basket" refrain. For this article warns that among the effects of being constantly plugged in is the lack of downtime for information to establish itself in memory. It's just a constant stream of triviality. Which I guess returns to the previous theme--the Institution of Ignorance.
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