Sunday night stuff

Was across the street this afternoon talking to my role model for aging and helping keep his wine surplus under control. One good topic is always how badly things have deteriorated for working America.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French chronicler of early America, was once misquoted as having said: “America is the best country in the world to be poor.” That is no longer the case. Nowadays in America, you have a smaller chance of swapping your lower income bracket for a higher one than in almost any other developed economy – even Britain on some measures. To invert the classic Horatio Alger stories, in today’s America if you are born in rags, you are likelier to stay in rags than in almost any corner of old Europe.

Read the whole heartbreaker on the degeneration of American middle class here. It's from the Financial Times, a proper UK-published mag.
If I were young and frisky and wanted to see the world, I'd go off and teach English in faraway places. This, however, is an ad I wouldn't be responding to: Native speaking ESL teachers wanted immediately by Mongolia’s most prestigious ESL School. That ESL job site is fun to look at, notwithstanding.
Here's an interesting piece by Sen. Jim Webb, Saltine-Va., that ran on the WSJ editorial page.
And from a south-of-the border blog, Blog del Narco, these gory pix, photos of a Mexican massacre not too far from the busiest international land crossing in the US. This is an fascinating blog to browse, an aid to understanding just how terrible things are on the other side of the river.