1/ Fascinating premise from Charles Blow in the Times, which is there is a world war going on - for jobs.
The rest of the world is gaining speed.....and we're standing still........
And it’s not that most of these people don’t have jobs. It’s that they don’t have good jobs that pay enough to push them out of poverty. Three out of four of those below the poverty line work: half have full-time jobs, a quarter work part time. Only a quarter do not work at all.
This raises an important distinction — not only do we need to create more jobs, we need to increase the number of good jobs. And we can’t see that quest for good jobs as an internal skirmish between warring political ideologies. It’s an international war. At least that is the way Jim Clifton, chairman of Gallup, frames it in his fascinating — and frightening — new book, “The Coming Jobs War.”
According to Clifton, “the coming world war is an all-out global war for good jobs.”
(He defines a good job, also known as a formal job, as one with a “paycheck from an employer and steady work that averages 30-plus hours per week.”)
In the book he makes this striking statement, drawing from all of Gallup’s data: “The primary will of the world is no longer about peace or freedom or even democracy; it is not about having a family, and it is neither about God nor about owning a home or land. The will of the world is first and foremost to have a good job. Everything else comes after that.” The only problem is that there are not enough good jobs to go around.
Clifton explains that of the world’s five billion people over 15 years old, three billion said they worked or wanted to work, but there are only 1.2 billion full-time, formal jobs.
2/ Well it appears we have a genuine scandal affecting the White House making Fox News salivate and drool constantly - Jon Stewart explains it clearly and makes it funny as well....
It's the Solyndra bankruptcy and how they got their loan guarantees.....
When it comes to President Obama, just about every 24-hour news network is guilty of indulging in a scandal, but the most recent one regardingCalifornia-based solar company Solyndra has Jon Stewart telling all media, "That custom-tailored Obama scandal you ordered is finally here."
Stewart approached the story of Solyndra's collapseafter receiving over $500 million from the Obama administration to produce green energy by comparing it to previous scandals the media has eaten up, from Bill Ayers to birth certificates. But as he went through the scandal piece by piece, he couldn't deny the "weapons-grade political fodder" that is Solyndra's bankruptcy.
3/ Excellent column from Paul Krugman, and he evaluates the cheering that erupted in the Tea Party Republican debate with the shouts of "let him die" [about health care]. There's a fundamental moral principle at stake in the 2012 elections, which is "does the government have a major role in helping citizens at all?". The Republicans say "minimally".....so the question for voters is "is this the society you want to live in?"
But of course it won't be that real - it'll be muddied up with race, gays, abortions, Messicans and any other garbage the Koch Brothers can dream up to confuse the stupids....
But if the vote goes for President Perry, then they will reap what they have sewn....
Great column.....
I’m referring, as you might guess, to what happened during Monday’s G.O.P. presidential debate. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Representative Ron Paul what we should do if a 30-year-old man who chose not to purchase health insurance suddenly found himself in need of six months of intensive care. Mr. Paul replied, “That’s what freedom is all about — taking your own risks.” Mr. Blitzer pressed him again, asking whether “society should just let him die.”
And the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of “Yeah!”
The incident highlighted something that I don’t think most political commentators have fully absorbed: at this point, American politics is fundamentally about different moral visions.
4/ Matt Taibbi interviewed by David Schuster on the rogue trader at UBS in London that lost the bank $2 billion, yes billion! A little careless of them, but Taibbi gives us the real significance of this scandal that may drive the Europeans to put real rules in place for the giant banks in Britain and the Euro zone to stop them acting like casinos, and why we can't here.
It's a very good summary of the financial issues of our day, European and Wall Street, in three minutes....
5/ OK GO [a band] with "The Muppets Theme Song". Yes, the muppets!
A fun video......
I know, I know - The Muppets?
If you like dance or electronic music here is a track [no video] from Deadmau5 "Raise your Weapon" that is pretty good......crank it up!!
6/ Thomas Friedman with some commentary on how weird the Republican positions on climate change really are......
"I mean, here is the Texas governor rejecting the science of climate change while his own state is on fire"
But the truly alarming thing is Republicans are taking these anti-science positions because 50% of the country, brainwashed by the [paid for] climate deniers and Fox News, don't believe in global warming or climate change.
So you have politicians and intelligent people at the huge energy corporations taking the grossly irresponsible position of condemning the next generations to a planet that will be
.....different, just to keep their corporate profits and executive bonuses flowing.
Noone knows how bad it will get, but it'll be bad....
Every time I listen to Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota talk about how climate change is some fraud perpetrated by scientists trying to gin up money for research, I’m always reminded of one of my favorite movie lines that Jack Nicholson delivers to his needy neighbor who knocks on his door in the film “As Good As It Gets.” “Where do they teach you to talk like this?” asks Nicholson. “Sell crazy someplace else. We’re all stocked up here.”
Thanks Mr. Perry and Mrs. Bachmann, but we really are all stocked up on crazy right now. I mean, here is the Texas governor rejecting the science of climate change while his own state is on fire — after the worst droughts on record have propelled wildfires to devour an area the size of Connecticut. As a statement by the Texas Forest Service said last week: “No one on the face of this earth has ever fought fires in these extreme conditions.”
Remember the first rule of global warming. The way it unfolds is really “global weirding.” The weather gets weird: the hots get hotter; the wets wetter; and the dries get drier. This is not a hoax. This is high school physics, as Katharine Hayhoe, a climatologist in Texas, explained on Joe Romm’s invaluableClimateprogress.org
7/ Thought this was an interesting clip from Onion News - a small town held a gay pride parade for it's only gay resident....how nice, small town America at it's most inclusive.........
8/ Some of this old TV is really funny - here is Tim Conway on Johnny Carson as a jockey....three minutes of live comedy....
9/ The latest poverty figures are awful - almost 50 million Americans and 25% of our children are below the poverty level....but the group hit the most are women....and the hardest hit of all are single mothers and their children.
So when the abortion extremists campaign that every foetus is sacred, they conveniently forget the [mostly poor] women who can't get an abortion, and de facto forced to have babies who are then being condemned to a life of poverty.
Once the baby is born it's not the abortion loony's problem......get a job....
When the U.S. Census Bureau released the latest poverty statistics this week, the news was predictably bleak—or at least the news that people were given. But there was a little something the major media omitted from their coverage.
That minor detail? Half the population.
The larger half.
And when it comes to the latest economic data on women, the news is even worse than most people seem to realize. But you couldn’t learn that by readingThe New York Times or The Wall Street Journal,neither of which even mentioned women in their front-page stories about the rise in the poverty rate, which has soared to its highest level since 1993.
When it comes to discovering what that means for the majority of the American population, one had to look elsewhere. For the news the big guys didn’t see fit to print, we can thank the National Women’s Law Center, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that focuses on women’s economic security and legal rights.
When the NWLC crunched the latest numbers from the Census Bureau, the results showed that record numbers of women are living in poverty. And in news that should surprise no one, the findings reveal that millions of those women do not have health insurance.
What all those statistics add up to is that more than 17 million women were living in poverty last year, compared with 12.6 million men. As usual, things were worse for older women; twice as many women over 65 were living in poverty, compared with men.
And those numbers just represented the population-wide average. For Hispanic and black women, the poverty rate increased even faster and rose higher—to 25 percent for Hispanic women and to 25.6 percent for black women.
As usual, single mothers are having the hardest time of all. More than 40 percent of women who head families are now living in poverty. With more than half of poor children living in female-headed families in 2010, the child poverty rate jumped to 22 percent.
10/ Couldn't happen to a nicer company - the greedy bastards at Netflix that put their rates up 75% are bleeding customers.....good on ya America...
On Thursday, the company said that customers were canceling their subscriptions in greater numbers than it expected, about a million in total, causing a projected quarterly loss in customers for only the second time in its history. The company did not signal a shift in direction or a change its financial guidance for the quarter; still, its stock dropped almost 19 percent in heavy trading on Thursday, closing at $169.25 and worsening a season-long selling streak. In July, the stock peaked at $304.79.
The downward revision reflects the negative reaction to Netflix’s decision, announced in July and adopted this month, to separate its DVD-by-mail service from its faster-growing Internet streaming service. Before, DVD-by-mail was a $2 add-on for some streaming subscribers; now, each service now costs $8.
Like many customers, Steve LoGiudice, a health care analyst from Wooster, Ohio, re-evaluated his Netflix spending this summer when the change was announced. His 6- and 9-year-old children watch TV episodes through Netflix, so he kept the streaming service, but he stopped paying for DVDs by mail.
“If they didn’t radically change their cost structure,” Mr. LoGiudice said of Netflix, “we probably would have just kept paying the old rate without much thought or review.”
11/ Supercool video - 100 years of London style in 100 seconds.....excellent....love this clever stuff....
Very good indeed......
12/ There's plenty of fish in the sea....or are there? Scientists are worried that we're decimating the deep sea fish beds with bottom trawling.........
Unfortunately, Norse said, "It is economically rational for trawlers to seek out a concentration of deep-sea fish -- like an oasis in the desert -- and fish them down to a point where it is no longer economically viable and move on."
Trawling, a method of deep-sea fishing that involves scraping huge metal plates across the ocean floor, kills fish, sharks and coral that people do not eat. The unwanted dead are just thrown back into the sea, the study says.
"We're talking about the frigid black depths of the ocean where fishes are very slow to mature and can't recover quickly from fishing pressure. They didn't evolve in situations where giant trawlers scoop them up," Norse said.
Some species of deep-sea fish can live for more than a century and some corals can live for 4,000 years, according to a statement released by the Marine Conservation Institute. The poster child for slow-maturing deep-sea fish being wiped out by bottom trawling is the orange roughy. The fish takes 30 years to reach sexual maturity and can live to more than 125 years.
Norse said that to stop fishing for orange roughy would not reduce the world's food supply. "Orange roughy are only eaten by affluent people in places like Japan, Korea, the U.S. and Europe. We're not talking about feeding the poor here, we're talking about feeding the rich."
13/ Great - another guy movie just released - this one has a "B" review, but lads might override the "only fair" rating and go see it for the coolness, ultraviolence, car chases and general mayhem.....
Boys - send the life partner off to see a gooey one in the multiplex and settle in for some testoserone.....
.
A long time ago, as a young filmmaker besotted with the hard-boiled pleasures of classic Hollywood, Jean-Luc Godard claimed that all anyone needed to make a film was a girl and a gun. In his new movie, “Drive,” Nicolas Winding Refn, in thrall to a later Hollywood tradition, tests out a slightly different formula. In this case all you need is a guy and a car.
In the brilliant opening sequence the formula seems to work beautifully. The car is, of all things, a late-model silver Chevy Impala, the kind of generic, functional ride you might rent at the airport on a business trip. The guy is Ryan Gosling — his character has no known proper name, and is variously referred to as “the driver,” “the kid” and “him” — and to watch him steer through Los Angeles at night is to watch a virtuoso at work. Behind the wheel of a getaway car after an uninteresting, irrelevant and almost botched robbery, the driver glides past obstacles and shakes off pursuers, slowing down as often as he accelerates and maintaining a steady pulse rate even as the soundtrack winds up the tension to heart attack levels.
The virtuosity on display is also the director’s, of course, and that, for better and for worse, is pretty much the point of “Drive,” the coolest movie around and therefore the latest proof that cool is never cool enough.
Todays videos - two commercials for guys, Leafblower and Nailgun.....
Todays little Johnny joke
During one of her daily classes, a teacher trying to teach good manners,asked her students the following question:
Michael, if you were on a date having dinner with a nice young lady,how would you tell her that you have to go to the bathroom?'
Michael said: 'Just a minute I have to go pee.'
The teacher responded by saying:'That would be rude and impolite."
What about you Sherman, how would you say it?'
Sherman said:'I am sorry, but I really need to go to the bathroom.I'll be right back.'
'That's better, but it's still not very nice to say the word bathroom atthe dinner table.
And you, little Johnny, can you use your brain for once and show us yourgood manners?'
Johnny said:'I would say: Darling, may I please be excused for a moment? I have toshake hands with a very dear friend of mine, whom I hope to introduceyou to after dinner.'The teacher fainted.
Todays outdoorsman joke
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