1/ "America is Not The Greatest Country in the World"........still powerful after two viewings.......his timing is exceptionally good......
Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) hits the nail straight on the head in the opening minutes on HBO's new series 'The Newsroom'. He is asked by a college student a simple question during a campus debate. 'What makes America the greatest country in the world?'. Daniels initially goes the politically correct route then at the last minute goes with a honest, bold, straight forward answer that sums up a lot of the worlds problems that so many are afraid to accept because we all want to believe in our system and that it is our system that works. The evidence that is out there today is to the contrary and he discloses such information in his argument. We used to be the worlds best of the best and now we are just pretending. The first step to solving a problem is to admit there is one.
2/ A really, really funny ventriloquist routine, with a human dummy.....4 minutes.....yes, a rerun but still excellent.....
3/ A good article from AlJazeera on the enema coming from the Obama administration that is being disguised as something that will be good for you - cuts to social programs. The polling is clear - this spending is overwhelmingly popular with both conservatives and liberals.....
Intelligent story for anyone interested in politics......and look at the commentary when race and class are put into the mix....
There is a political party in the United States whose presidential candidate got over 60 million votes, and whose members - according to the General Social Survey - overwhelmingly think we're spending too little on Social Security, rather than spending too much, by a lopsided margin of 52-12. The party, of course, is the Republican Party.
There is as an ideological label claimed by over 100 million Americans, who collectively think we're spending too little on "improving and protecting the nation's health", rather than spending too much, by a 2-1 margin: 48-24. The labelled ideology, of course, is conservative.
Combine the two categories and the two spending questions, and you find that a 51.4 percent of conservative Republicans think we're spending too little on either Social Security, health care or both. Only 28.7 percent think we're spending too much, and just 7.3 percent think we're spending too much on both.
4/ Every now and then [OK every 6 months] it does us all good to experience this powerful anti-drunk driving video from Australia........set to REM's "Everybody Hurts".....
Warning - this is very painful to watch.....
5/ Long article from the Times about how the rising sea levels will affect our cities, including South Florida. The story states if we do everything we can to limit the rise in temperature to 2 Celsius, the seas will definitely rise five feet but they cannot say over what timeframe, but their conservative estimate is 2100. But if we do nothing and continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere [which seems likely] this date will accelerate.
Note that a rise of 5 feet means the City of Miami Beach is gone, lower Manhattan is under water etc etc......click on the Multimedia tab on the left in the article to see the maps.....
Interesting stuff.....I wonder how long banks will keep giving mortgages to flood prone cities, and who will back the insurance policies needed? You guessed it - the taxpayers.....
One thing from Hurricane Sandy - I object to federal funds being given to rich people so they can rebuild their homes on the barrier islands and beaches.....
THE oceans have risen and fallen throughout Earth’s history, following the planet’s natural temperature cycles. Twenty thousand years ago, what is now New York City was at the edge of a giant ice sheet, and the sea was roughly 400 feet lower. But as the last ice age thawed, the sea rose to where it is today.
Now we are in a new warming phase, and the oceans are rising again after thousands of years of stability. As scientists who study sea level change and storm surge, we fear that Hurricane Sandy gave only a modest preview of the dangers to come, as we continue to power our global economy by burning fuels that pollute the air with heat-trapping gases.
This past summer, a disconcerting new scientific study by the climate scientist Michiel Schaeffer and colleagues — published in the journal Nature Climate Change — suggested that no matter how quickly we cut this pollution, we are unlikely to keep the seas from climbing less than five feet.
More than six million Americans live on land less than five feet above the local high tide. (Searchable maps and analyses are available at SurgingSeas.org for every low-lying coastal community in the contiguous United States.) Worse, rising seas raise the launching pad for storm surge, the thick wall of water that the wind can drive ahead of a storm. In a world with oceans that are five feet higher, our calculations show that New York City would average one flood as high as Hurricane Sandy’s about every 15 years, even without accounting for the stronger storms and bigger surges that are likely to result from warming.
Floods reaching five feet above the current high tide line will become increasingly common along the nation’s coastlines well before the seas climb by five feet. Over the last century, the nearly eight-inch rise of the world’s seas has already doubled the chance of “once in a century” floods for many seaside communities.
6/ Sorry folks, but a commercial with zombies is definitely included in DDD......
It's Norwegian, been banned from primetime, doesn't make any sense at all but hell, it's got zombies! With golf clubs!
Totally weird.....Yeehah!
7/ Jon Stewart is back after the Thanksgiving break and this is a decent one......fiscal cliffitis.....7 minutes....
Congress is finding it very hard to come to any sort of reasonable compromise on the impending “fiscal cliff,” and tonight Jon Stewart laid into both sides for their unwillingness to seriously tackle the impending cuts and tax rate expirations that will trigger automatically by the December 31st deadline. Stewart hyped up the doom-and-gloom headlines over the cliff as a fiscal “cliffpocalypsemageddonacaust.
8/ Climate change is truly off the radar and the disaster of Hurricane Sandy didn't seem to make any difference to the attitudes of Americans.....but what if the oligarchs have made the incredibly cynical decision to just let the earth warm up? If you have enough money you will be able to protect yourself......
I'm not quite ready to believe the premise of this story, but unless the elites at least start to discuss the problem I may start.....
What if the leaders of the United States -- and by leaders I mean the generals in the Pentagon, the corporate executives of the country’s largest enterprises, and the top officials in government -- have secretly concluded that while world-wide climate change is indeed going to be catastrophic, the US, or more broadly speaking, North America, is fortuitously situated to come out on top in the resulting global struggle for survival?
I’m not by nature a conspiracy theorist, but this horrifying thought came to me yesterday as I batted away yet another round of ignorant rants from people who insist against all logic that climate change is a gigantic fraud being perpetrated, variously, by a conspiracy of the oil companies who allegedly want to benefit from carbon credit trading, the scientific community, which allegedly is collectively selling out and participating in some world-wide system of omerta in order to get grants, or the world socialist conspiracy, which of course, is trying to destroy capitalism), or all the above. (God, whenever I write anything on climate change these people hit me with flame-mail like mayflies spattering a car windshield in mating season!)
What prompted me to this dark speculation about an American conspiracy of inaction was the seemingly incomprehensible failure of the US -- in the face of overwhelming evidence that the Earth is heating up at an accelerating rate, and that we are in danger of soon reaching a point of no return where the process feeds itself -- to do anything to reduce either this country’s annual production of more atmospheric CO2, or to promote some broader international agreement to slow the production of greenhouse gases.
9/ "You're Doing It Wrong" collection of fails.....this is an amusing PG version of the TwisterNederland fails......comfortable for the ladies, i.e. noone gets seriously hurt! - 6 minutes.....
10/ Most interesting essay from a reporter who visited the American West during the severe heat and drought that was this summer from hell.....and the drought continues.
No special message, just good writing and descriptive reporting....brings the central and western states alive with human stories........
Will the West Survive?
This year, summer came on like a grudge, with record-breaking heat, inescapable drought, and the sense that the effects of climate change had arrived – and that life in America's mythic frontier might never be the same.
Something looked off when I landed at Denver International Airport this past August. It had been about four years since my last visit, and I couldn't immediately put my finger on what was up. I bought a coffee, glanced at the 'Denver Post,' and wandered out into the main terminal, with its silly bedouin design, the domed white ceiling looking as flimsy and tarplike as ever. It wasn't until I was outside, riding in the shuttle bus to my rental car, that it struck me what had changed: The Rocky Mountains had vanished.
"Oh, yeah," the shuttle-bus driver confirmed. "We haven't been able to see them from the airport for about a month." Colorado had been experiencing its hottest summer on record. In Denver, temperatures would hit 90 degrees or higher on 73 days, shattering the previous record of 61 days set in 2000. (The summer average over the past 30 years has been only 33 days.) Haze from the heat, along with lingering smoke from the wildfires that had been ravaging much of the West – including the 18,000-acre Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado Springs – had conspired to erase metropolitan Denver's spectacular horizon. If you squinted and the light was just right, you could make out faint outlines of the Rockies' Front Range, looking like a tentative art-school etching, begun and then inexplicably abandoned.
Record-breaking heat waves, a fire season run amok, sustained levels of drought unseen since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s: Throughout the summer of 2012, the weather came on like a grudge, as spiteful and relentless as an Old Testament plague. It was the hottest July ever in the United States, and the third-hottest summer in the history of the country. By September, 7 million acres had burned across the U.S.: 600,000 acres in Nevada; 144,000 in Idaho; 650,000 in Montana. The record for worst fire year in U.S. history had only just been set in 2006 (9.8 million acres burned), but it's likely that 2012 will surpass that number. In July, in Guthrie, Oklahoma, thermometers hit 114 degrees, breaking the previous record set in 1896. By August, 63 percent of the country was experiencing drought conditions, drying up wells across the Midwest. On a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, feral horses started dropping dead; horse-rescue organizations around the country couldn't handle the spike in business. Down in Texas, where the previous summer's drought had prompted an unprecedented cattle drive north – thinning the state's 5-million-head herd by 12 percent – an unusually mild winter (even by Texas standards) had allowed plague-carrying mosquitoes to survive and flourish, resulting in an outbreak of West Nile virus that killed at least 77 people.
11/ Music video - DDD favourite "Could You Believe" by ATB [Andre Tanneberger].....this breakout hit has a lot - great song, naughty lesbian girls, a German stalker and it's in crisp, clear 1080......
It's also interesting in that the video is completely disconnected from the lyrics.....it's like he [ATB] said "just make a cool video and we'll stick this great song with it".....however, works for me.....
12/ In case you missed it something big happened in the election - two states legalised marijuana, but there is an issue with conflicting laws - it may be legal in Colorado and Washington, but under federal law weed is still verboten.......
SEATTLE – In two weeks, adults in this state will no longer be arrested or incarcerated for something that nearly 30 million Americans did last year. For the first time since prohibition began 75 years ago, recreational marijuana use will be legal; the misery-inducing crusade to lock up thousands of ordinary people has at last been seen, by a majority of voters in this state and in Colorado, for what it is: a monumental failure.
That is, unless the Obama administration steps in with an injunction, as it has threatened to in the past, against common sense. For what stands between ending this absurd front in the dead-ender war on drugs and the status quo is the federal government. It could intervene, citing the supremacy of federal law that still classifies marijuana as a dangerous drug.
But it shouldn’t. Social revolutions in a democracy, especially ones that begin with voters, should not be lightly dismissed. Forget all the lame jokes about Cheetos and Cheech and Chong. In the two-and-a-half weeks since a pair of progressive Western states sent a message that arresting 853,000 people a year for marijuana offenses is an insult to a country built on individual freedom, a whiff of positive, even monumental change is in the air.
13/ You may have read about the completely bogus controversy around Susan Rice [generated by the Senator Dementia [John McCain and his pals at Fox News], who may be in line for Secretary of State to replace Hilary Clinton.....but did you know she is a rich woman with significant investments in Canadian oil companies, who may be called to rule on the Keystone Pipeline? Not quite in the Romney class of wealth, but doing very well thank you at $40 million......
Most of the attacks against Susan Rice, Obama’s supposed top pick for Secretary of State, have come from Republicans. But now the left — mainly groups opposed to developing Canadian tar sands — may have some reasons to question Rice.
According to a report from OnEarth Magazine, Rice has millions of dollars tied up in top Canadian energy companies — including TransCanada, the company pushing for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
The 1,700 mile Keystone XL pipeline would pipe carbon-intensive tar sands crude from Alberta to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. Because the pipeline crosses international borders, its approval falls under the jurisdiction of the State Department. That means Rice — or any other candidate tapped to head the State Department — would be responsible for approving or rejecting the project.
Here’s what the OnEarth investigation of Rice’s finances found:
Rice’s financial holdings could raise questions about her status as a neutral decision maker. The current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Rice owns stock valued between $300,000 and $600,000 in TransCanada, the company seeking a federal permit to transport tar sands crude 1,700 miles to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast, crossing fragile Midwest ecosystems and the largest freshwater aquifer in North America.
14/ Stephen Colbert with one of my favourite segments "The Word".....very clever, and of course the topic is Fox News....
Ladies, we have a problem.
According to "How To Choose A Husband" author Suzanne Venker's recent FoxNews.com article, "The War On Men,"all that progress the gender has made over the last 50 years is causing men to lose interest in marriage. Her solution? It's time for women to "surrender to their nature" and let men pick up the slack in the workplace, because how are men supposed to provide and care for you if you're too busy achieving your goals and seeking equal pay?
15/ Two movies you won't see in theaters but might be worth putting on your Netflix queue.......
"Chasing Ice" is a documentary by James Balog, photographing glaciers over a multi-year span to see how they are being affected by climate change.....beautiful photography......and a good review from the LA Times.....
A sharp mix of portrait doc, landscape film and pointed activism, "Chasing Ice" centers on environmental photographer James Balog and his committed efforts to document climate change.
Directed by Jeff Orlowski, the film follows Balog as he sets up cameras in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska and Montana to use time-lapse imagery to chronicle shrinking glaciers for his Extreme Ice Survey. The sheer scale of the glaciers, some as tall as skyscrapers and as big as Manhattan, is difficult to comprehend, as are the efforts of Balog and his team to access them.
That the natural formations Balog photographs are, as he puts it, "insanely, ridiculously beautiful" certainly doesn't hurt Orlowski's film, as the staggering, otherworldly images from the genuine ends of the earth are things most of us will never see up close.
Interesting trailer......
"Beware of Mr. Baker" - a documentary on the life of Ginger Baker, the larger than life member of the band "Cream", who some say is the best drummer of all time.....
Great trailer.....a complete madman, but an amazing drummer......
Todays video - the classic tipping scene from Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs", where Steve Buscemi's character is taken to task for his philosophy on gratuties.......
Warning - since this is a cinematic scene involving criminals, the language is very salty......
Todays Old Lady joke
An elderly lady was invited to an old friend's home for dinner one
evening.
evening.
She was impressed by the way her lady friend preceded every
request to her husband with endearing terms such as: Honey, My Love,
Darling, Sweetheart, etc. The couple had been married almost 70 years
and, clearly, they were still very much in love.
request to her husband with endearing terms such as: Honey, My Love,
Darling, Sweetheart, etc. The couple had been married almost 70 years
and, clearly, they were still very much in love.
While the husband was in the living room, her lady friend leaned over to her hostess to say,
'I think it's wonderful that, after all these years, you still call
your husband all those loving names.'
your husband all those loving names.'
The elderly lady hung her head, 'I have to tell you the truth,' she said, 'his name slipped my
mind about 10 years ago, and I'm scared to death to ask the cranky old
asshole what his name is.'*
mind about 10 years ago, and I'm scared to death to ask the cranky old
asshole what his name is.'*
Todays biker joke
A duded-up city rider walks into a seedy tavern in Sturgis, South Dakota.He sits at the bar and notices a grizzled old biker with his arms folded,
staring blankly at a full bowl of chili.After fifteen minutes of just sitting there staring at it, the newby
rider bravely asks the old biker, 'If you ain't gonna eat that, mind
if I do?'
The old veteran of a thousand rides slowly turns his head toward the
young pup and says, 'Nah, you go ahead.' ...
Eagerly, the guy wearing the shiny new leather fashions reaches over
and slides the bowl into his place and starts spooning it in with
delight. He gets nearly down to the bottom of the bowl and notices a
dead mouse in the chilli. The sight was very shocking and he
immediately barfed up the chili back into the bowl.
The old biker quietly says, 'Yep, that's as far as I got, too.'
Todays senior joke
|
No comments:
Post a Comment