Rodeo Roundup

I for­got to watch the State of the Union address last night. Grr. What did I miss?

Steal­ing a bunch of links from this MetaFil­ter thread on Alone in the Dark:
• The Filthy Crit­ic
• Defec­tive Yeti
• Rot­ten Toma­toes
• Uwe Boll

I’ve been trou­bled late­ly by thoughts that it seems “free­dom” in Amer­i­ca only real­ly means “the free mar­ket” or that the amount free­dom is weighed by the amount of avail­able goods and the abil­i­ty to buy them.

I’ve also real­ized that while I pos­sess a rather gen­er­al sort of abstract wis­dom, I’m real­ly not world­ly-wise. I don’t know which is more use­ful, but lack is nev­er use­ful so I’m going to try to become engaged instead of just some­times observ­ing the news. I feel like I’m prob­a­bly guilty of falling into the apa­thy-trap of Amer­i­can eth­no­cen­trism. I still have so much to learn. This will be good for me, but I don’t know where to start. Any ideas?