If you have a chance, watch #2.....one of the most powerful videos I have ever seen.....
Thought for the day..........
Fox News
Very rich people, paying rich people
to tell middle class people
to blame poor people......
1/ Occupy Orlando
After watching some of the media reports of the "Occupy" movement, your scribe decided to visit the "Occupy Orlando" gathering on Saturday [8.30am!] at the Chamber of Commerce building downtown so I could improve my bongo drum technique and if I got lucky could stand downwind from the pot smokers and inhale deeply.
Instead what we found was an eclectic group of serious and committed young folk in their 20's and early 30's, with a sprinkling of older boomers like yours truly. The gathering was peaceful, some pretty good speeches from a wide range of people who had some excellent signs.
When we got there there were about 6/700 in attendance, and when we left it had to be over 1000 who then proceeded on a short march to City Hall.
The best speaker made three points - we need the Citizens United Supreme Court decision overturned, the Justice department must prosecute the criminal behaviour of Wall Street, and keep the internet free from corporate and/or government censorship.
The disconnect between what the media makes this movement out to be and what it really is, people waking up to the fact that we, the 99%, are being screwed by the oligarchs was blatantly obvious at this demo. Good ordinary people who have become aware.....
Some of the best signs.......
"We need more Jobs" with a drawing of the late Steve Jobs
"Wall St. slipped us a Mickey" with a drawing of mickey mouse
"The 99% can't afford to buy a politician"
"Are you still watching Faux News?"
"The call it class war when we fight back"
"I'm a public school teacher - I pay more taxes than GE"
2/ An excellent short video, with the hypocrisy of our government [yes, the Obama administration] on full display. The movie shows parts of speeches from Obama and Hillary Clinton on the liberation movements in Iran, Egypt and Libya, with clips from the New York demonstrations with the NYPD beating the shit out of the kids in our streets. Listen to the pious speeches, then think about the reality in New York.....
A movie that will make you think, and I personally found this incredibly moving.....chills down the spine time.....
Highly recommended.....
3/ The full text of the late George Carlin's best rant....he did this about four years ago, and boy was he right....
This is about half of it......excellent.....
It’s never gonna get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you got, because the owners of this country don’t want that, I'm talking about the real owners now, the REAL OWNERS, the big wealthy business interests that control things & make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians, Politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice, you have owners, they own you.
They own everything, they own all the important land, they own & control the corporations, they've long since bought & paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, the City Halls, they’ve got the judges in their back pockets, & they own all of the big media companies so they control just about all the information you get to hear.
4/ Mitt Romney sometimes doesn't make much sense.....especially after Bad Lip-Reading gets through with his speeches.....a funny two minutes....
5/ Matt Taibbi with five suggestions of how to bring our banks under control, and hit the bastards where it hurts.....
Great article.....
've been down to "Occupy Wall Street" twice now, and I love it. The protests building at Liberty Square and spreading over Lower Manhattan are a great thing, the logical answer to the Tea Party and a long-overdue middle finger to the financial elite. The protesters picked the right target and, through their refusal to disband after just one day, the right tactic, showing the public at large that the movement against Wall Street has stamina, resolve and growing popular appeal.But ... there's a but. And for me this is a deeply personal thing, because this issue of how to combat Wall Street corruption has consumed my life for years now, and it's hard for me not to see where Occupy Wall Street could be better and more dangerous. I'm guessing, for instance, that the banks were secretly thrilled in the early going of the protests, sure they'd won round one of the messaging war.
Why? Because after a decade of unparalleled thievery and corruption, with tens of millions entering the ranks of the hungry thanks to artificially inflated commodity prices, and millions more displaced from their homes by corruption in the mortgage markets, the headline from the first week of protests against the financial-services sector was an old cop macing a quartet of college girls.
That, to me, speaks volumes about the primary challenge of opposing the 50-headed hydra of Wall Street corruption, which is that it's extremely difficult to explain the crimes of the modern financial elite in a simple visual. The essence of this particular sort of oligarchic power is its complexity and day-to-day invisibility: Its worst crimes, from bribery and insider trading and market manipulation, to backroom dominance of government and the usurping of the regulatory structure from within, simply can't be seen by the public or put on TV. There just isn't going to be an iconic "Running Girl" photo with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup or Bank of America – just 62 million Americans with zero or negative net worth, scratching their heads and wondering where the hell all their money went and why their votes seem to count less and less each and every year.
6/ Has President Mr. Reasonable finally woken up? Tom Tomorrow with some thoughts.....
7/ The tragedy of a kidnapped teenager is compelling TV, and here two friends of the missing girl go on Onion News' Today Now to ask her to come back..... the victim sounds a little slutty though.....3 minutes......
8/ Interesting story about how few people are changing banks because with online banking and automatic bill pay it's a pain in the ass to do it - but that's what the evil banks are counting on - because it takes some work and time to do it people can't be bothered. Their customers are just lazy, so the banks will continue to exploit them.
People - if you have an an account at BOA, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase or Wells Fargo start the process of moving your account to a local bank or credit union.
I did it, and here's how - open the new accounts first, and put in a token amount so you get the account established and your new checkbooks, then set up your online banking vendors at the new bank one by one. Get used to the new procedures.....
Get a list of your direct bills, and contact them just after they bill the old account - most of this you can do online.
Then pick a weekend, and switch.
Keep some money in the old accounts in case you forget a vendor, give it a month then close down the evil bank ....
You'll feel better, really......
Customers frustrated by banks’ controversial new fees are finding out what industry insiders have known for years: it is not so easy to disentangle your life from your bank.
The Internet banking services that have been sold to customers as conveniences, like online bill paying, serve as powerful tethers that keep them from jumping to another institution.
Tedd Speck, a 49-year-old market researcher in Kent, Conn., was furious about Bank of America’s planned $5 monthly fee for debit card use.
But he is staying put after being overwhelmed by the inconvenience of moving dozens of online bill paying arrangements to another bank.
“I’m really annoyed,” he said, “but someone at Bank of America made that calculation and they made it right.”
Former bankers and market researchers say that it’s no accident. The steady expansion of online bill paying, they say, has emboldened Bank of America, as well as rivals like Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and SunTrust, to turn to new fees on customer accounts as other sources of revenue dry up. The fees have caused an uproar among consumers and drawn sharp criticism from politicians, including President Obama.
9/ Time for a DDD favourite - the most powerful video ever made on drunk driving, from Australia. This should be mandatory viewing for every teenager in the world....warning - graphic violence......
Great soundtrack - REM with "Everybody Hurts".....
10/ "Where Did Global Warming Go?" is the title of this article which notes the rest of the world takes climate change seriously, but not the US for reasons which include the energy companies financial backing of the anti groups, the fact it has become a political issue [Reps. vs Dems] and that this is the logical conclusion of the dumbing down of America. People are too stupid to see what is happening, and believe Fox News.
The bottom line is any action to curb our CO2 emissions is DOA in this Congress and probably the next....by which time even if the stupids do wake up it will be irreversible.....
IN 2008, both the Democratic and Republican candidates for president, Barack Obama and John McCain, warned about man-made global warming and supported legislation to curb emissions. After he was elected, President Obama promised “a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change,” and arrived cavalry-like at the 2009 United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen to broker a global pact.
But two years later, now that nearly every other nation accepts climate change as a pressing problem, America has turned agnostic on the issue.
In the crowded Republican presidential field, most seem to agree with Gov. Rick Perry of Texas that “the science is not settled” on man-made global warming, as he said in a debate last month. Alone among Republicans onstage that night, Jon M. Huntsman Jr. said that he trusted scientists’ view that the problem was real. At the moment, he has the backing of about 2 percent of likely Republican voters.
Though the evidence of climate change has, if anything, solidified, Mr. Obama now talks about “green jobs” mostly as a strategy for improving the economy, not the planet. He did not mention climate in his last State of the Union address.
11/ Andain with "Promises".....a video on a budget to be sure, with crashing waves, a mandolin and a guy turning a wheel but she's lovely and it's a wonderful song......
12/ Following on from #10 here's a story from the travel section, and some Caribbean resorts are having to close down because an invasive seaweed is piling up on their beaches. I know a lot of the places mentioned in this article, because cruise ships call there....scary stuff for these tourism dependent islands......
Nothing to do with climate change.....nope.....
AN invasion of seaweed that is extraordinary in volume and geographic scope has been besieging the eastern Caribbeansince June, sending resorts and government agencies fromAnguilla in the north to Tobago in the south scrambling to rid beaches of the smelly, brown, bug-attracting algae before the impending high season.
In Antigua, the $600-a-night St. James’s Club & Villas was forced to close for the month of September while it removed 10,000 tons of seaweed from its beaches. The weed, a floating species of algae known as Sargassum that inhabits the Sargasso Sea, had completely filled the bay on which the hotel sits and created piles as high as five feet tall on the usually pristine shore. In St. Maarten, swimmers were warned away from some beaches because of fears that they could get tangled in the seaweed and drown. In Barbados, the government installed an oil-containment boom across the mouth of a river on its northeast shore to keep the weed at bay. In Tobago, where for several months workers have been carting the stuff off beaches regularly and trucking it to the dump, the government has been encouraging farmers to use it as fertilizer.
“This is completely unprecedented,” said David Freestone, executive director of the Sargasso Sea Alliance in Washington, which has been fielding reports of unusual quantities of the seaweed washing ashore in places as far-flung as Sierra Leone in West Africa. While small amounts of Sargassum are normally found in the Caribbean from May to September when regional currents and winds transport the floating algae to the islands, such large accumulations across so many regions, he said, has “never happened in living memory.”
Theories as to why range from shifts in ocean currents to climate change to the gulf oil spill. But at least for now, “it’s a mystery,” Mr. Freestone said.
13/ Own an I-Phone? You will want to read this and drool over all of the new features of the new I-4s......
Learn about the four new cool things the phone does, and then the secret "Siri" thing.....sounds amazing.....
STATE OF THE ART
New iPhone Conceals Sheer Magic
By DAVID POGUE
Published: October 11, 2011
What’s in a name?
A lot, apparently. Apple’s newiPhone is called the iPhone 4S. But what people really wanted was the iPhone 5.
The rumors online had predicted the second coming — or, rather, the fifth coming. It would be wedge-shaped! It would be completely transparent! It would clean your basement, pick you up at the airport and eliminate unsightly blemishes!
Instead, what showed up was a new iPhone that looks just like the last one: black or white, glass front and back, silver metal band around the sides. And on paper, at least, the new phone does only four new things.
Todays video - how to reform Social Security......
Todays genie joke
A Canadian farmer, an Arab terrorist and an American biker
are all walking together one day.
They come across a lantern and a Genie pops out of it.
'I will give each of you one wish, which is three wishes in total', says the Genie.
'I will give each of you one wish, which is three wishes in total', says the Genie.
The Canadian says, 'I am a farmer and my son will also farm. I want the land to be forever fertile in Canada' POOF! With the blink of the Genie's eye, the land in Canada was forever fertile for farming.
The Arab terrorist was amazed, so he said, 'I want a wall around Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran so that no infidels, Americans or Canadians can come into our precious land.' POOF! Again, with the blink of the Genie's eye, there was a huge wall around those countries.
The biker says, 'I am very curious.
Please tell me more about this wall.'
Please tell me more about this wall.'
The Genie explains, 'Well, it's about 5,000 feet high, 500 feet thick and completely surrounds the countries. Nothing can get in or out; it's virtually impenetrable. '
The biker sits down on his Harley,
Cracks a beer,
Lights a cigar,
Smiles and says,
'Fill it with water.'
I pretty much vote this my favorite email joke of the year....
I pretty much vote this my favorite email joke of the year....
Todays blonde jokes
A Blonde's Year in Review:
January: Took new scarf back to store because it was too tight.
February: Fired from pharmacy job for failing to print labels. Helllloooo!!! Bottles won't fit in printer!
March: Got really excited.....finished jigsaw puzzle in 6 months..... Box said '2-4 years!'
April: Trapped on escalator for hours - Power went out!
May: Tried to make Kool-Aid - wrong instructions - 8 cups of water won't fit into those little packets!
June: Tried to go water skiing but couldn't find a lake with a slope.
July: Lost breast stroke swimming competition. Learned later that the other swimmers cheated, they used their arms!
August: Got locked out of my car in rain storm..... Car swamped because soft-top was open.
September: The capital of California is 'C'.....isn't it?
November: Baked turkey for 4 1/2 days. Instructions said 1 hour per pound and I weigh 108!
December: Couldn't call 911. 'Duh'.....there's no 'eleven' button on the phone!
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