1/ Well the media hasn't been Republican-bashing for a while as all of the news has been Egypt, but now the cuts the Tea Party are driving John Boehner to put on the table are out in the open......
Paul Krugman looks at them and the title of the article is "Eating the Future".....good stuff.....
On Friday, House Republicans unveiled their proposal for immediate cuts in federal spending. Uncharacteristically, they failed to accompany the release with a catchy slogan. So I’d like to propose one: Eat the Future.
I’ll explain in a minute. First, let’s talk about the dilemma the G.O.P. faces.
Republican leaders like to claim that the midterms gave them a mandate for sharp cuts in government spending. Some of us believe that the elections were less about spending than they were about persistent high unemployment, but whatever. The key point to understand is that while many voters say that they want lower spending, press the issue a bit further and it turns out that they only want to cut spending on other people.
That’s the lesson from a new survey by the Pew Research Center, in which Americans were asked whether they favored higher or lower spending in a variety of areas. It turns out that they want more, not less, spending on most things, including education and Medicare. They’re evenly divided about spending on aid to the unemployed and — surprise — defense.
The only thing they clearly want to cut is foreign aid, which most Americans believe, wrongly, accounts for a large share of the federal budget.
2/ Wow - this is really interesting - the stock exchanges where almost all companies list their stock are increasingly being bypassed by private placements available only to the elite hedge funds and major banks - sound familiar?
If you are interested in economics and/or how the superrich corporate oligarchs suck up all of the new money, leaving the crumbs to the remaining 99% of the country, read this.....
.....the Dow broke the 12,000-point barrier for the first time since before the financial crisis.
These developments drew headlines because they seemed to exemplify significant trends in the American economy. But look at America’s stock exchanges more closely, and there’s less to them than meets the eye. In truth, the stock market is becoming increasingly irrelevant — a trend that threatens the core principles of American capitalism.
These days a healthy stock market doesn’t mean a healthy economy, as a glance at the high unemployment rate or the low labor-market participation rate will show. The Tea Party is right about one thing: What’s good for Wall Street isn’t necessarily good for Main Street. And the Germans aren’t buying the New York Stock Exchange for its commoditized, highly competitive and ultra-low-margin stock business, but rather for its lucrative derivatives operations.
..............................
What the market is not doing so well is its core public function: allocating capital efficiently. Apple, for instance, is hugely profitable and sits on an enormous pile of cash; it is thus very unlikely to use its highly rated stock to pay for any acquisitions. It hasn’t used the stock market to raise money since 1981, and there’s a good bet it never will again.
Meanwhile, the companies in which people most want to invest, technology stars like Facebook and Twitter, are managing to avoid the public markets entirely by raising hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars privately.You and I can’t buy into these companies; only very select institutions and well-connected individuals can. And companies prefer it that way.
A private company’s stock isn’t affected by the unpredictable waves of the stock market as a whole. Its chief executive can concentrate on running the company rather than answering endless questions from investors, analysts and the press.
3/ What an incredible performer Lady Gaga is.....click on the second video in this story to see her arrive on stage in an egg shell thing borne by some husky lads, then come out of the shell to sing her new hit song, and she's a great dancer.....larger than life....hope she can keep it up....2 minutes....
4/ Rupert Murdoch is an evil bastard, and if you think Fox News is bad watch this Australian documentary about Murdoch's British newspapers and their hacking into politicians, celebrities and even the Royal Families' cellphones to get scoops and gossip. The darker side of this is that News Intl. [Fox UK] is very powerful and has intimidated the British government and the police into burying the scandal, but some lawsuits have brought it to the surface and may prove very dangerous to Murdoch....lets hope so....
Anyway.....this is like a segment of "60 Minutes", Australian style, very good .....about 25 minutes.
One more point - because of the grip Fox has in the US you will not see anything on this scandal in our news here.....
Click on the "play video" icon halfway down....
And Tom Tomorrow has it right....the Conservabot.....
5/ Get ready folks - prices for everything are set to jump in the next few months because of the rise in commodity prices worldwide.....food and gas are just the start of the inflation to come.....
By the fall, people will most likely be paying more for each of them, as rising prices hit most consumer goods, say retailers, food companies and manufacturers of consumer products.
Cotton prices are near their highest level in more than a decade, after adjusting for inflation, and leather and polyester costs are jumping as well. Copper recently hit its highest level in about 40 years, and iron ore, used for steel, is fetching extremely high prices. Prices for corn, sugar, wheat, beef, pork and coffee are soaring. Labor overseas is becoming more expensive, meanwhile, and so are the utility bills to keep a factory running.
“There are cost pressures from virtually everywhere,” said Wesley R. Card, the chief executive of the Jones Group, whose brands include Nine West and Anne Klein. After trying to keep retail prices flat or even lower during the recession, Jones says prices for its brands will climb 15 to 20 percent by autumn.
6/ I didn't know Hosni Mubarek had left Egypt and was in the US, but here he is on SNL.....and he's grateful! Funny.....3 minutes
7/ The iron grip of the Catholic Church has been shaken by the disgusting pedophile scandals of their priests, but the worst affected country in the world has been Ireland. The Times Magazine has a fair and balanced [yes, really] piece on the background of the issue and the reaction of the Vatican, which is predictably to cover it all up....
Of the various crises the Catholic Church is facing around the world, the central one — wave after wave of accounts of systemic sexual abuse of children by priests and other church figures — has affected Ireland more strikingly than anywhere else. And no place has reacted so aggressively. The Irish responded to the publication in 2009 of two lengthy, damning reports — detailing thousands of cases of rape, sexual molestation and lurid beatings, spanning Ireland’s entire history as an independent country, and the efforts of church officials to protect the abusers rather than the victims — with anger, disgust, vocal assaults on priests in public and demands that the government and society disentangle themselves from the church.
This past December a fresh bout of fury was touched off by the publication of the investigation into perhaps the worst clergy sex offender: the Rev. Tony Walsh, who raped and molested children while serving as a priest in Dublin and who was shielded by the Vatican even after Irish Church officials wanted him defrocked. Yet another large-scale report will be released shortly. And a 1997 letter — in which the papal nuncio to Ireland told Irish bishops that the Vatican had “serious reservations” about a plan for mandatory reporting of clergy sex-abuse cases to the police — came to light last month, causing further anger.
8/ Brooke Alvarez of Onion News speaks directly to a serial killer who hasn't done enough to impress her, so she's ignoring him..........2 minutes....
9/ Sharing the pain of the housing crash - cities where homes were holding their value are now experiencing the crash like the rest of us, especially of course Florida.....awwww......poor Seattle.....
The rolling real estate crash that ravaged Florida and the Southwest is delivering a new wave of distress to communities once thought to be immune — economically diversified cities where the boom was relatively restrained.
In the last year, home prices in Seattle had a bigger decline than in Las Vegas. Minneapolis dropped more than Miami, and Atlanta fared worse than Phoenix.
The bubble markets, where builders, buyers and banks ran wild, began falling first, economists say, so they are close to the end of the cycle and in some cases on their way back up. Nearly everyone else still has another season of pain.
10/ There is something about period British drama that makes it special, and if you haven't seen "The Kings Speech" you need to.....we saw it last week and I have to say it was one of the best movies I have ever seen in my life.....in the top 5.....no special effects, just some fine acting coupled with a wonderful story.
But there was also an amazing TV series out in January that we DVR'd - four episodes of a mini-series called Downton Abbey on PBS....it too was one of the best TV series ever, a story of an English Lord, his house, his family and his servants set in 1913 just before WW1.....shades of a series from the 80's called "Upstairs, Downstairs", but way better. I know it sounds boring, but it isn't....you really get involved in the lives and characters in both the upper class family and the life below stairs....totally engrossing. Downton Abbey is out on DVD now, and I strongly recommend it, and make sure you get the longer UK version......
LOS ANGELES — Julian Fellowes knows how to make himself at home in English country estates, both upstairs and down.
The writer won an Academy Award for the Robert Altman-directed "Gosford Park" (2001), about murder and secrets among the gentry and servants at a stately home. His TV series "Downton Abbey," starring another magnificent mansion and its inhabitants, was a hit on British TV.
The early 1900s drama proved a draw for PBS on this side of the pond as well. Each of its four episodes averaged more than 6 million viewers in January to rank with other recent "Masterpiece" successes such as 2008's "Sense and Sensibility," according to Nielsen Co. ratings.
"Masterpiece" executive producer Rebecca Eaton called the drama, available to screen online at the PBS website, "a fantastic start to our 40th anniversary season."
The second season of "Downton Abbey" is scheduled to begin production in March and air on PBS in winter 2012. The imposing Highclere Castle in Berkshire, England, is the stand-in for Downton Abbey.
11/ Building codes were formulated so structures could weather a 100 year storm, but now these weather extremes are coming every 10 years.....making a lot of codes and indeed buildings obsolete....
And it was not just American infrastructure that appeared to be under the weather, so to speak. In Brisbane, Australia, January storms ripped apart a riverside boardwalk — turning a concrete section 150 yards long into a waterborne torpedo that threatened downstream bridges. The wall of a Hungarian reservoir holding toxic red sludge crumbled in October after weeks of downpours, sending the waste into nearby villages. The litany of extreme weather events has often left local officials scrambling to respond to each new crisis, looking — by turns pathetic and heroic — like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, trying to fend off nature’s monumental forces.
Global warming is most likely responsible, at least in part, for the rising frequency and severity of extreme weather events — like floods, storms and droughts — since warmer surface temperatures tend to produce more violent weather patterns, scientists say. And the damage these events have caused is a sign that the safety factors that engineers, architects and planners have previously built into structures are becoming inadequate for the changing climate.
Dikes, buildings and bridges are often built to withstand a “hundred-year storm” — an event so epic that there is a 1 percent chance it will happen in a given year. But what happens when 100-year storms are seen every 10 years, and 10-year storms become regular events? How many structures will reach their limits?
Engineers and insurers are already facing these questions.
12/ Video - Florence and the Machine with "Cosmic Love". The hottest redhead in the music business was in contention at the Grammys....what a voice....kind of a strange video though.....
13/ Like cruising? This story describes a trip on the Allure of the Seas, the world's largest cruise ship. The author describes the experience pretty well, but reading between the lines it doesn't sound like she had a really great time with her mother....which is the central point about a ship this large - unless a couple goes with a group, of friends, family or affinity group you won't have a great time because the ship is so big you won't meet people.
With that caveat, with friends you can have the best time..... amazing shows, excellent restaurants and experiences. Catch at least one parade if you go....fun.....and take extra money - you'll need it.
Disclosure - I'm a little biased because one of my last projects at RCCL was working on the design of the Oasis, the sister ship of this monster.....
Yet Royal Caribbean International’s Allure of the Seas, the world’s largest cruise ship, launched in December at a cost of about $1.4 billion, has taken the concept of land to a point where, on a seven-day western Caribbean voyage, from Dec. 19 to 26, with stops in Labadee, Haiti, and Costa Maya and Cozumel, Mexico, my Aunt Dorothy and I entirely forgot we were at sea.
Is that a good thing? For romantic sensibilities screaming for the sublime, the metaphysical pondering of the deep — no. For those longing to get lost in a strange, wondrous, digital world of lights and colors that is not unlike the high-pitched energy of Manhattan or any world city — yes.
Todays video - Golf movie....
Todays blonde joke
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Todays marital bliss joke
Note on Fridge
Found on the Refrigerator One Morning :
My Dear Wife,
You will surely understand that I have certain needs that you, being 57
years old, can no longer satisfy. I am very happy with you and I value
you as a good wife. Therefore, after reading this letter, I hope that you will not wrongly interpret the fact that I will be spending the evening with my 18 year old secretary at the Comfort Inn Hotel. Please don't be upset----I shall be home before midnight.
Found on the Refrigerator One Morning :
My Dear Wife,
You will surely understand that I have certain needs that you, being 57
years old, can no longer satisfy. I am very happy with you and I value
you as a good wife. Therefore, after reading this letter, I hope that you will not wrongly interpret the fact that I will be spending the evening with my 18 year old secretary at the Comfort Inn Hotel. Please don't be upset----I shall be home before midnight.
When the man came home late that night, he found the following letter on the
dining room table:
My Dear Husband,
I received your letter and thank you for your honesty
about my being 57 years old. I would like to take this opportunity to
remind you that you are also 57 years old. As you know, I am a math
teacher at our local college. I would like to inform you that while you
read this, I will be at the Hotel Fiesta with Michael, one of my
students, who is also the assistant tennis coach. He is young, virile,
and like your secretary, is 18 years old.
As a successful businessman who has an excellent knowledge of math, you
will understand that we are in the same situation, although with one small
difference - 18 goes into 57 a lot more times than 57 goes into 18.
Therefore, I will not be home until sometime tomorrow.
Todays Biblical joke
Subject: NOAH in 2010
In the year 2010 , the Lord came unto Noah and said:
Once again the earth has become wicked and over-populated, and I see the end
of all flesh before me.
Build another Ark and save 2 of every living thing
along with a few good humans.
He gave Noah the blueprints, saying:
You have 6 months to build the Ark before I will start
the unending rain for 40 days and 40 nights.
Six months later, the Lord looked down and saw Noah weeping in his yard -
but no Ark.
Noah! He roared, I'm about to start the rain! Where is the Ark?
Forgive me, Lord, begged Noah, 'but things have changed.
I needed a building permit.
I've been arguing with the inspector about the need for a sprinkler system.
My neighbors claim that I've violated the neighborhood zoning laws by
building the Ark in my yard, and exceeding the height limitations. We had to
go to the Development Appeal Board for a decision.
Then the Department of Transportation demanded a bond be posted for the
future costs of moving power lines and other overhead obstructions, to clear
the passage for the Ark 's move to the sea.
I told them that the sea would be coming to us, but they would hear nothing
of it.
Getting the wood was another problem. There's a ban on cutting local trees
in order to save the spotted owl.
I tried to convince the environmentalists that I needed the wood to save the
owls - but no go!
When I started gathering the animals, an animal rights group sued me. They
insisted that I was confining wild animals against their will. They argued
that accommodations were too restrictive, and that it is cruel and inhumane
to put so many animals in a confined space.
Then the EPA ruled that I couldn't build the Ark until they'd conducted an
environmental impact study on your proposed flood.
I'm still trying to resolve a complaint with the Human Rights Commission on
how many minorities I'm supposed to hire for my building crew.
Immigration is checking the status of most of the people who want to work.
The Trades Unions say I can't use my sons. They insist I have to hire only
Union workers with Ark-building experience.
To make matters worse, they seized all my assets, claiming I'm trying to
leave the country illegally with endangered species.
So, forgive me, Lord, but it would take at least 10 years for me to finish
this Ark.
Suddenly the skies cleared, the sun began to shine, and a double rainbow
stretched across the sky.
Noah looked up in wonder and asked, 'You mean you're not going to destroy
the world?'
'No,' said the Lord.
The government beat me to it."
In the year 2010 , the Lord came unto Noah and said:
Once again the earth has become wicked and over-populated, and I see the end
of all flesh before me.
Build another Ark and save 2 of every living thing
along with a few good humans.
He gave Noah the blueprints, saying:
You have 6 months to build the Ark before I will start
the unending rain for 40 days and 40 nights.
Six months later, the Lord looked down and saw Noah weeping in his yard -
but no Ark.
Noah! He roared, I'm about to start the rain! Where is the Ark?
Forgive me, Lord, begged Noah, 'but things have changed.
I needed a building permit.
I've been arguing with the inspector about the need for a sprinkler system.
My neighbors claim that I've violated the neighborhood zoning laws by
building the Ark in my yard, and exceeding the height limitations. We had to
go to the Development Appeal Board for a decision.
Then the Department of Transportation demanded a bond be posted for the
future costs of moving power lines and other overhead obstructions, to clear
the passage for the Ark 's move to the sea.
I told them that the sea would be coming to us, but they would hear nothing
of it.
Getting the wood was another problem. There's a ban on cutting local trees
in order to save the spotted owl.
I tried to convince the environmentalists that I needed the wood to save the
owls - but no go!
When I started gathering the animals, an animal rights group sued me. They
insisted that I was confining wild animals against their will. They argued
that accommodations were too restrictive, and that it is cruel and inhumane
to put so many animals in a confined space.
Then the EPA ruled that I couldn't build the Ark until they'd conducted an
environmental impact study on your proposed flood.
I'm still trying to resolve a complaint with the Human Rights Commission on
how many minorities I'm supposed to hire for my building crew.
Immigration is checking the status of most of the people who want to work.
The Trades Unions say I can't use my sons. They insist I have to hire only
Union workers with Ark-building experience.
To make matters worse, they seized all my assets, claiming I'm trying to
leave the country illegally with endangered species.
So, forgive me, Lord, but it would take at least 10 years for me to finish
this Ark.
Suddenly the skies cleared, the sun began to shine, and a double rainbow
stretched across the sky.
Noah looked up in wonder and asked, 'You mean you're not going to destroy
the world?'
'No,' said the Lord.
The government beat me to it."
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