Stop driving your SUV’s on Jupiter!

Jupiter’s Three Red Spots

For about 300 years Jupiter’s banded atmosphere has shown a remarkable feature to telescopic viewers, a large swirling storm system known as The Great Red Spot. In 2006, another red storm system appeared, actually seen to form as smaller whitish oval-shaped storms merged and then developed the curious reddish hue. Now, Jupiter has a third red spot, again produced from a smaller whitish storm.

Interesting.

Jupiter’s recent outbreak of red spots is likely related to large scale climate change as the gas giant planet is getting warmer near the equator.

What?!  Oh no!  Climate change is destroying the Universe!

Come again?

I came across this headline while browsing through digg.com this afternoon:

The Gap Between Rich and Poor is Still Growing in the U.S.

So, deciding to dig a little further into yet another ‘Doom and Gloom’ article, I clicked through and checked out the referenced article:

Poverty Has Returned to the Public Agenda

which included this little number blurb:

A cherished piece of the American Dream – the notion that individuals have the opportunity to rise beyond their parent’s economic status – is not standing up to scrutiny. A study by the Economic Mobility Project finds that 42 percent of children born to parents in the bottom fifth of income distribution remain in the bottom, and 39 percent born to parents in the top fifth remain at the top. Steps must be taken to strengthen our economy and expand opportunities for jobs, ownership and affordable housing.

So 42 percent of kids born poor stay poor and 39 percent of kids born rich stay rich. And this means that the Gap between rich and poor is growing? That’s an interesting way to interpret the numbers.

Lets put those numbers another way. 58 percent of kids born poor are not staying poor and 61 percent of kids born rich are not staying rich. To me, that seems to describe an income gap that is shrinking, not growing so the Digg headline is misleading (shocking).

Of course the point of this blurb in the story itselfs that a majority the rich kids are not becoming richer than their parents (A cherished piece of the American Dream – the notion that individuals have the opportunity to rise beyond their parent’s economic status – is not standing up to scrutiny). So am I reading this right? The rich aren’t getting richer… and thats now a bad thing? Haven’t they been beating the mantra ‘the rich get richer while the poor get poorer’ into our heads?

Well? Which way do you want it?

He didn’t ‘lose’ it

He just walked away from it.

The story about Jose Canseco’s foreclosure is making the rounds today.

Baseball star Canseco loses home to foreclosure

Former U.S. baseball star Jose Canseco said on Thursday he had lost his California mansion to foreclosure — one of the first celebrities to publicly admit being a statistic in the U.S. housing crisis.

I’m calling this article headline what it is: misleading, sensationalist bullshit.

Stating that someone ‘lost’ their home implies that they actually wanted to keep and and did what they could to make the payments. That’s not the case here. Canseco just walked away from his mortgage contract.

Canseco, …, told the celebrity TV show “Inside Edition” that it did not make financial sense to keep his 7,300 square-foot (678.2 sq-metro) home in the Los Angeles suburb of Encino.

Get that? it just ‘didn’t make financial sense’. Translation: I just don’t want to pay for it anymore.