This could well be the story of the future, but one difference from the movement in the 1890's and the 30's is the power of money and the media to influence the less savvy people in this country........but let's be positive for once, the great American public can't be fooled again, can they?
OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.
Thirty years ago, a newly elected Ronald Reagan made a fateful judgment: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Taxes for the rich were slashed, as were outlays on public services and investments as a share of national income. Only the military and a few big transfer programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid
Reagan’s was a fateful misdiagnosis. He completely overlooked the real issue — the rise of global competition in the information age — and fought a bogeyman, the government. Decades on, America pays the price of that misdiagnosis, with a nation singularly unprepared to face the global economic, energy and environmental challenges of our time.
2/ Paul Krugman with commentary on Mitt Romney's latest plan - privatize the VHA....."Vouchers for Veterans.
He wants to modify the only part of our health care system that actually works well because it's run by the government, and Republican ideology says everything the government does can be done better by privatizing it......
American health care is remarkably diverse. In terms of how care is paid for and delivered, many of us effectively live in Canada, some live in Switzerland, some live in Britain, and some live in the unregulated market of conservative dreams. One result of this diversity is that we have plenty of home-grown evidence about what works and what doesn’t.
Naturally, then, politicians — Republicans in particular — are determined to scrap what works and promote what doesn’t. And that brings me to Mitt Romney’s latest really bad idea, unveiled on Veterans Day: to partially privatize the Veterans Health Administration (V.H.A.).
What Mr. Romney and everyone else should know is that the V.H.A. is a huge policy success story, which offers important lessons for future health reform.
Many people still have an image of veterans’ health care based on the terrible state of the system two decades ago. Under the Clinton administration, however, the V.H.A. was overhauled, and achieved a remarkable combination of rising quality and successful cost control. Multiple surveys have found the V.H.A. providing better care than most Americans receive, even as the agency has held cost increases well below those facing Medicare and private insurers. Furthermore, the V.H.A. has led the way in cost-saving innovation, especially the use of electronic medical records.
3/ The strangest things on TV are often the local ads....in Orlando it's a runoff between Dan Newlin [former sheriff's detective!] and the Jason E. Davis spine clinic, but out there in Texas is a taxidermist who deserves the Autotune treatment.....an amusing 2 minutes.....
4/ One of the side effects of travel is that you see first hand how other countries handle their communications systems because you obviously need to look at your email and call home occasionally, and if you think the US is one of the world leaders in tech systems, think again. We're not, and it's because the giant corporations together with their "regulators" are making sure you get lousy and expensive service.......just another example how the oligarchy enriches itself....
The Telecom Scam: 5 Behemoths That Strangle Innovation and Ensure You Pay Too Much for Bad Service
America’s communications system is in crisis, hijacked by a handful of giant companies coddled by the agencies that are supposed to regulate them.
Unfortunately, where the U.S. was once a world leader in communications, it is now devolving into a secondrate telecom nation. In a December 2010 report, Europe’s Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ranked the U.S. 15th in “broadband” subscribers.
Making matters worse, Akamai, a leading technology service-provider company, ranks the U.S. 15th globally in average connection data rate speed, averaging only 5.3 megabytes per second (Mbps) in Q-1 2011. In comparison, Korea’s average data rate was nearly three times faster (14.4 Mbps), Hong Kong's nearly twice as fast (9.2 Mbps) and even Romania had an average rate of 6.6 Mbps.
Americans are getting inferior services at higher rates -- yet we are told (and believe!) that our communications system is the best in the world. Advances in smartphone operating systems and applications, most evident in Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Droid, dazzle the eye but hide the sins of the communications system’s underlying weaknesses.
Most disappointing, the U.S. Congress, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and state public utility commissions (PUCs) have been collaborating in this process. At the root of this crisis is the shared commitment, if not complicity, of government and regulatory agencies to protect existing corporate interests, restict meaningful competition and further industry consolidation.
An assessment of five key corporate players in the communications sector – a) two telecom companies (AT&T and Verizon), b) two cable companies (Comcast and Time Warner) and c) one Internet “applications” company (Google) – lays out the underlying control exercised by the trust over telecom services and the future of American progress.
5/ Rick Perry's memory meltdown in what seemed to be the 54th Republican debate gets the SNL cast in fine form....what are comedians going to do when the primary is over? Five minutes.....
6/ Matt Taibbi takes Mitt Romney's economic plans apart with gusto - apparently the likely Republican nominee wants to privatize Social Security and hand over stewardship of your retirement to the big banks......
Insightful as always......
David Brooks, the [gratuitous insult deleted], wrote this this morning entitled "Mitt Romney, the Serious One." In it, he explained how Romney’s recent decision to unveil a plan for reforming the entitlement system "demonstrates his awareness of the issues that need to define the 2012 presidential election."
Romney grasped the toughest issue – how to reform entitlements to avoid a fiscal catastrophe – and he sketched out a sophisticated way to address it.
So we had a giant financial crash in 2008 that necessitated a bailout costing a minimum of nearly $5 trillion and perhaps ultimately costing $10 trillion more, we have foreclosure crisis with more than million people a year losing their homes, and we have a burgeoning European debt disaster that threatens to devastate the global financial system – and the chief issue facing the country, according to Brooks and the Times, is reforming the entitlement system?
The column goes on to throw bouquets on Romney’s plan to semi-privatize Medicare and Social Security. Romney’s ideas are not as draconian as Paul Ryan's, but they do pave the way for Wall Street’s ultimate goal – full privatization of Social Security and Medicare.
7/ Now that flash mobs are sponsored by corporations [in this case Dubai Airport] and are highly professsional, are they less fun?
We report, you decide......
Ah flash mobs, how we love thee.
Last week at Dubai's International Airport, a flash mob broke out in what appears to be the duty-free area. A medley of songs were mashed up, as airport workers, travelers and bystanders started dancing to songs such as "Moves Like Jagger", "Disco Inferno" and "Proud Mary".
Some observers look thrilled to be standing there watching, while others look a little dubious.
Flash mobs have been gaining traction at airports around the world in the past few years. Last Christmas, an Air Canada-sponsored mob sang Christmas carols at Vancouver's International airport. In Beirut, a flash mob broke out at the duty-free terminal in March, while WORLD ORDER created an ode to Japan after March's tsunami.
How does this one in Dubai stack up? You be the judge.
8/ Most interesting piece of investigative reporting into a cruise ship crew member lost at sea from the Disney Wonder......., and how the Disney management are covering up the facts from the family and imposed a media blackout on the event.....
This story illustrates standard operating procedure for any bad thing that happens in the cruise industry....even though no crime was committed the first instinct is to cover everything up.....
Excellent article from the Guardian UK.....
Rebecca Coriam: lost at sea
When Rebecca Coriam vanished from the Disney Wonder in March, hers became one of the 171 mysterious cruise ship disappearances in the past decade. So what happened? Jon Ronson booked himself a cabin to find out…
The Port of Los Angeles, 23 October 2011. At the Goofy Pool on deck 9 of the Disney Wonder, the Adventures Away celebration party has begun. "Goodbye, stress!" the cruise director shouts. "Hello, vacation!" The ship's horn sounds out When You Wish Upon A Star, to indicate that we're about to set sail, to Mexico. It's a nice touch. The ship has just won the 2010 Condé Nast Traveller crew and service award.
I'm standing on deck 10, looking down at the dancing crowds of guests and crew. There are 2,455 passengers this week, and 1,000 employees. You can spot the Youth Activities team in their yellow tops and blue trousers. They look after the children in the Oceaneers' Club on deck 5.
There's no talk of it, but many people on board know something terrible occurred on this route – to Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas – earlier this year. At 5.45am on Tuesday 22 March, a CCTV camera captured a young woman on the phone in the crew quarters. Her name was Rebecca Coriam. She was 24, from Chester, and had recently graduated from a sports science degree at Exeter University. She'd been working in Youth Activities on board for nine months, and apparently loved it. But on the phone she was looking upset.
9/ "Moves Like Jagger" by Maroon 5, with Christina Aguilara......lively, fun, great clip from an old Mick interview, and some of the dancers really nail his moves.....good video.....
10/ There are still newspapers out there doing investigative reporting, and this article in the St Petersburg Times about the Church of Scientology is excellent. The tax exempt Church, headquartered in Clearwater, preys on it's employees and churchmembers ruthlessly. This story uses information from it's former sales force who spell out how Scientologists are exploited and used......
What a business racket......and it's all tax exempt......
Former Scientology insiders describe a world of closers, prospects, crushing quotas and coercion
Hy Levy lived in terror of what would happen if he didn't make his number, a weekly sales target of $200,000. The money was due every Thursday by 2 p.m.
No excuses.
Often when he failed, his bosses exiled him to the kitchen to scrub pots. Sometimes they made him eat only beans and rice for a week. They publicly humiliated him, calling him a loser, a saboteur. They got in his face, screaming, swearing. You soulless bastard!
He said they used profanity a lot where he worked: the Church of Scientology.
• • •
For 16 years Levy was a "registrar" selling Scientology counseling and training services at the church's worldwide spiritual headquarters in Clearwater. He toiled morning to night, part of a team driven by fear and religious conviction to bring the church millions of dollars each week by "closing" people — church terminology.
11/ Three very interesting movies out this weekend by three noted directors - remember, it's not just the stars that make great movies - the vision behind the film is the responsibility of the director......
Clint Eastwood directs "J. Edgar", starring Leonard DiCaprio....review is quite good......
Even with all the surprises that have characterized Clint Eastwood’s twilight film years, with their crepuscular tales of good and evil, the tenderness of the love story in “J. Edgar” comes as a shock. Anchored by a forceful, vulnerableLeonardo DiCaprio, who lays bare J. Edgar Hoover’s humanity, despite the odds and an impasto of old-coot movie makeup, this latest jolt from Mr. Eastwood is a look back at a man divided and of the ties that bind private bodies with public politics and policies. With sympathy — for the individual, not his deeds — it portrays a 20th-century titan who, with secrets and bullets, a will to power and the self-promotional skills of a true star, built a citadel of information in which he burrowed deep.
J. Edgar trailer....seems like a thinking persons movie.....
Lars Von Trier's latest movie is "Melancholia", with Kristen Dunst.....he's always controversial because of his "women as victim" themes.....
In “Melancholia,” an excursion from the sad to the sublime by way of the preposterous, the always controversial Danish director Lars von Trier offers his own, highly personal version of apocalypse: a celestial collision rendered in surprisingly lovely digital effects and accompanied by mighty blasts of Wagner. The film takes its title from a rogue planet that appears suddenly in the night sky and seems to be heading straight for Earth.
The word also, not coincidentally, names an emotional disorder described by Freud as “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment.”
The expectation of punishment is, of course, one reason people go to a Lars von Trier movie in the first place. Suffering — predominantly, though not exclusively, the suffering of women — is both his favorite subject and his preferred method. He is a crafty sadist, but also, for all his tricks and provocations, a sincere one.
Melancholia trailer.......great cast.......looks mysterious and "TreeofLifey", and if you saw that movie you know what I mean.....
The brilliant Werner Herzog debuts a documentary "Into the Abyss", a look at the aftermath of a double murder......
In Werner Herzog’s new documentary, “Into the Abyss,” sorrow spreads like an oil slick on water. The movie finds, in a relatively banal, thoroughly senseless American story of crime and punishment, enough darkness to make you wonder about the title. Is death, which unites murderers with their victims and executioners, and ultimately with everyone else, the abyss that Mr. Herzog wants us to contemplate? Or is he directing our attention toward a black hole that sits in the middle of life?
The paradox of this film is that it is both unremittingly bleak and rigorously humane. Mr. Herzog, interviewing killers, survivors, witnesses and officials in law enforcement and corrections, is polite even when asking uncomfortable questions, and the seriousness of his intentions allows humor and absurdity to bubble up amid all the pain. He never appears on camera, but his unmistakable voice — dry, precise, carrying the accent of his native Bavaria — ties together this tapestry of conflicting testimony, inchoate emotion and unredeemed ugliness.
In its alternation of talking-head interviews and archival video clips, “Into the Abyss” superficially resembles the kind of titillating, moralizing true-crime shockumentary that is a staple of off-hours cable television. But the grim ordinariness of the narrative makes its Dostoyevskian dimensions all the more arresting.
You can see some of Herzog's style from this trailer.....
Todays video - not actually a video but a local newscast on the radio....ABC News.....warning, a little raunchy, but guys will find it funny.......
Todays Confucius joke
Man who wants pretty nurse, must be patient.
Passionate kiss, like spider web, leads to undoing of fly.
Lady who goes camping must beware of evil intent.
Squirrel who runs up womans' leg will not find nuts.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Man who run in front of car gets tired, man who run behind car gets exhausted.
Man who eats many prunes get good run for money.
War does not determine who is right, it determines who is left.
Man who fight with wife all day get no piece at night.
It take many nails to build a crib, only one screw to fill it.
Man who drive like hell is bound to get there.
Man who stand on toilet is high on pot.
Man who live in glass house should change clothes in basement.
Man who fish in other man's well often catch crabs.
Finally CONFUCIUS DID SAY. . ..
"A lion will not cheat on his wife, but a Tiger Wood!"
Passionate kiss, like spider web, leads to undoing of fly.
Lady who goes camping must beware of evil intent.
Squirrel who runs up womans' leg will not find nuts.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Man who run in front of car gets tired, man who run behind car gets exhausted.
Man who eats many prunes get good run for money.
War does not determine who is right, it determines who is left.
Man who fight with wife all day get no piece at night.
It take many nails to build a crib, only one screw to fill it.
Man who drive like hell is bound to get there.
Man who stand on toilet is high on pot.
Man who live in glass house should change clothes in basement.
Man who fish in other man's well often catch crabs.
Finally CONFUCIUS DID SAY. . ..
"A lion will not cheat on his wife, but a Tiger Wood!"
Todays religious joke
Todays Florida joke |
Finally, a true map of Florida that explains this weird, but wonderful state.
Those of you who live in Florida will recognize it, and those who don't have been warned !!!
Those of you who live in Florida will recognize it, and those who don't have been warned !!!
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