1/ There is lot's of political noise around now, but Paul Krugman sorts through the chaff -
The President is not negotiating with himself again but is standing firm and waiting for some concrete proposals from the Republicans....and the fiscal cliff [more of a kerb] awaits.....
In the ongoing battle of the budget, President Obama has done something very cruel. Declaring that this time he won’t negotiate with himself, he has refused to lay out a proposal reflecting what he thinks Republicans want. Instead, he has demanded that Republicans themselves say, explicitly, what they want. And guess what: They can’t or won’t do it.
And there’s a reason for this reticence. The fact is that Republican posturing on the deficit has always been a con game, a play on the innumeracy of voters and reporters. Now Mr. Obama has demanded that the G.O.P. put up or shut up — and the response is an aggrieved mumble.
2/ If you have any doubt at all that we live in a country dominated by predators, i.e. your average large corporation, have a look at this "60 Minutes" investigation into Health Management [HMA] hospitals.....they have over 20 hospitals in Florida, mostly in smaller towns, and hundreds of clinics here. If you end up in one of their facilities and they want to put you into the system for "tests"....don't do it!
Hospitals: The cost of admission
December 2, 2012 4:42 PM
Steve Kroft investigates allegations from doctors that the hospital chain they worked for pressured them to admit patients regardless of their medical needs.
3/ Every year Fox News ties itself into knots with the alleged "War On Christmas".......so Jon Stewart in an excellent 7 minute segment makes them look even more ridiculous than usual......and part 2 he can't believe Bill O'Reilly's argument about Christianity......
.......helped Fox News get an early start on its war on the War on Christmas tonight. Though as Stewart sadly observed, Fox’s annual battle to save Christmas have “become a little predictable” to the point where all you need is a book of Mad Libs and a bunch of religious buzzwords to set them off into a Christmas feeding frenzy.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/
4/ The always insightful Frank Rich on the week's news, giving his take on the fiscal cliff and the state of the Republican Party........the smartest political writer we have.......
For anyone remotely interested in politics....
Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with assistant editor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: the phony fiscal cliff countdown, Mike Bloomberg's chutzpah, and the Fox News doghouse.
The fiscal cliff talks are (surprise, surprise) at an impasse. President Obama has now rejected the GOP's latest uncompromising compromise and insisted that he won't make a deal unless tax rates on the top 2 percent rise. How do you see this standoff playing out?The breathless and phony countdown to the fiscal cliff — What if they can’t agree? What if we fall off? Can America possibly survive? — is media hype, a desperate effort to drum up a drama to keep viewers and readers tuned in now that the election is over. It’s aRoad Runner cartoon, Beltway-edition. And it’s going to end with a whimper like the similarly apocalyptic, now long-forgotten Y2K scare of the turn of the millennium. Everyone knows the Republicans are going to fold — the Republicans know they are going to fold — and the only question to be resolved is when and on what terms. They have zero leverage.
5/ Queen Elizabeth is celebrating 60 years on the Throne of Britain, and this montage of pictures goes through her life in three minutes......she was a very pretty young woman, and has aged very well.....the cumulative effect of the slow fades gets a little creepy though.....
Protecting yourself as a consumer
6/ Two very interesting stories about how the companies we all have to deal with are maximising their profits at our expense.....unless you know what they are up to......
The Haggler in the Times had a story two months ago about Staples, where they run specials but you can't buy them unless you also buy their service plan.....this is a follow-up....
But it's not just Staples - I went into Radio Shack for a wireless router [$38] and the clerk tried his best to get me to take out their service plan for about $5 a year for five years.....for a $38 router.....if you don't buy the plan you can't return the item they said over and over.....
IT’S been an eventful few months for Natasja Shah, a manager at a Staples store whom readers metin this space in September.
You may recall that she described the pressure that sales associates at Staples, the office supply chain, are under to sell warranties and accessories, particularly on computers. For motivation, close tabs are kept on the amount of extras and service plans sold for each and every computer. The goal is to sell an average of $200 worth of add-ons per machine, and a sales rep who can’t achieve that goal, Ms. Shah said, is at risk of termination.
This explained why customers reported some strange, seemingly anti-capitalist behavior at Staples stores: employees refusing to sell computers to customers who decline service plans. It’s a brushoff that Ms. Shah said was known among employees as “walking the customer,” because consumers are essentially shooed out the door empty-handed.
7/ When you go online to buy something the prices aren't fixed - they can fluctuate hourly or even faster.......
A good story about Amazon and how you need to stay alert......
The day before Thanksgiving, Amazon
Then the holiday pricing shuffle began.
Amazon dropped its price on the game, Dance Central 3, to $24.99 on Thanksgiving Day, matching Best Buy’s “doorbuster” special, and went to $15 once Walmart stores offered the game at that lower price. Amazon then brought the price up, down, down again, up and up again — in all, seven price changes in seven days.
The unluckiest buyer paid more than triple the price that the luckiest buyer paid.
Retail price wars online have entered a new era of speed and precision, creating a confusing landscape for shoppers in which prices leap and plummet on short notice. In the old days, merchants sent employees into competitors’ stores to check on pricing, and days later “sale” signs reflected new markdowns. Now, sophisticated computer programs accomplish the same goal online within hours, and even minutes.
8/ "Shadows" by Lindsey Stirling.... unusual jazz violinist video, with a talented and pretty young musician competing with her shadow.......imaginative and unique.....
9/ A very good story on climate change from Dr. James Hansen, Director of NASA who speaks for almost all scientists worldwide who are extremely concerned about the future of our planet.....
All of the unusual weather we have been experiencing worldwide is caused by the temperature rise of 0.8 degrees C. over the last 30 years. With the changes in CO2 levels we have caused even if we implement every energy savings imaginable, the temperature over the next 50 years [or sooner] will still go up to a warming of 2 degrees C. What kind of extreme weather will we get? Noone knows, but it will get much worse than that because no government in the world is doing anything about global warming.....they are all cowed by the fossil fuel industries.....
Will our short attention span be the end of us? Just a month after the second "storm of a century" in two years, the media moves on to the latest scandal with barely a retrospective glance at the implications of the extreme climate anomalies we have seen.
Hurricane Sandy was not just a storm. It was a stark illustration of the power that climate change can deliver – today – to our doorsteps.
Ask the homeowners along the New Jersey and New York shores still homeless. Ask the local governments struggling weeks later to turn on power to their cold, darkened towns and cities. Ask the entire north-east coast, reeling from a catastrophe whose cost is estimated at $50bn and rising. (I am not brave enough to ask those who've lost husbands or wives, children or grandparents).
I bring up these facts sadly, as one who has urged us to heed the scientific evidence on climate change for the past 25 years. The science is clear: climate change is here, now.
Superstorm Sandy is not the first storm, and certainly won't be the last. Still, it is hard for us as individual human beings to connect the dots. That's where observation, data and scientific analysis help us see.
No credible scientist disputes that we have warmed our climate by almost 1.5C over land areas in the past century, most of that in the past 30 years.
10/ The British have an ironic sense of humour, as this one minute commercial from one of their government agencies shows......if you deny climate change you might go to prison.....
I'll be looking for this video to be posted on a right wing website of proof that the UN is coming! To take away our guns! Or something......
11/ And speaking of the UN the Republicans voted down a UN treaty that spelled our how to treat people with disabilities......we have had these rules in place for 20 years, but the UN label freaks out the Republican base.....
Jon Stewart explains it all in a 3 minute segment.....
For the second day in a row, Jon Stewart hammered at Republicans over irrational partisanship. On Tuesday, he took down Boehner and company's indecent fiscal cliff proposal, and on Wednesday "The Daily Show" host took senate Republicans to task for voting against a United Nations treaty modeled after our own Americans With Disabilities Act.
"It's official. Republicans hate the United Nations more than they like helping people in wheelchairs."
12/ This is a 30 second commercial from Exxon - and they hate your kids......
13/ Long article about how fracking could be affecting our food supply because of the contaminated water used in the fracking process. Cattle and other animals drink the water, and become sick and if they survive become part of the food supply....
Think about it - every gas well needs 700,000 gallons of water daily, more than the Niagara Bottling Company takes out of our aquifer every day. Yes - the US is becoming energy independent, but nothing's for free - we are putting our water resources and food supply at risk but there is minimal discussion about the consequences of continued drilling. The lobbyists for the fossil fuel industries see to that......
Good story, a little wordy but important.....
In a Brooklyn winery on a sultry July evening, an elegant crowd sips rosé and nibbles trout plucked from the gin-clear streams of upstate New York. The diners are here, with their checkbooks, to support a group called Chefs for the Marcellus, which works to protect the foodshed upon which hundreds of regional farm-to-fork restaurants depend. The foodshed is coincident with the Marcellus Shale, a geologic formation that arcs northeast from West Virginia through Pennsylvania and into New York State. As everyone invited here knows, the region is both agriculturally and energy rich, with vast quantities of natural gas sequestered deep below its fertile fields and forests.
In Pennsylvania, the oil and gas industry is already on a tear—drilling thousands of feet into ancient seabeds, then repeatedly fracturing (or “fracking”) these wells with millions of gallons of highly pressurized, chemically laced water, which shatters the surrounding shale and releases fossil fuels. New York, meanwhile, is on its own natural-resource tear, with hundreds of newly opened breweries, wineries, organic dairies and pastured livestock operations—all of them capitalizing on the metropolitan area’s hunger to localize its diet.
But there’s growing evidence that these two impulses, toward energy and food independence, may be at odds with each other.
Tonight’s guests have heard about residential drinking wells tainted by fracking fluids in Pennsylvania, Wyoming and Colorado. They’ve read about lingering rashes, nosebleeds and respiratory trauma in oil-patch communities, which are mostly rural, undeveloped, and lacking in political influence and economic prospects. The trout nibblers in the winery sympathize with the suffering of those communities. But their main concern tonight is a more insidious matter: the potential for drilling and fracking operations to contaminate our food. The early evidence from heavily fracked regions, especially from ranchers, is not reassuring.
14/ If you get to London this year this could be the restaurant you want to book - "Dinner By Heston" sounds like an amazing culinary experience. It is run by Heston Blumenthal who has a food show on British TV.....
This is a review of a meal at Hestons by a very gifted blogger who makes you feel you are actually there, experiencing the incredible food and the backstory of the restaurant. Note the article is written by my son John....
Excellent writing.......
This last week I have swum in both the deep and the shallow end of Heston Blumenthal’s pool. Lucky me, it was my birthday, and someone was kind enough to take me to Dinner by Heston, his restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Knightsbridge, London. I also saw two and a half episodes of Heston’s Fantastical Food, his new ‘vehicle’ for Channel 4. It seemed like a good idea to talk about them together.
The restaurant itself is as modish and moneyed as you’d expect from a five star hotel sitting literally in the shadow of One Hyde Park, the most expensive property development in the UK. You enter through a bar filled with the sort of Prada-bedecked people I’d personally emigrate to avoid, but the restaurant itself, warm and beautifully lit, is bray-free. Dark wood and blown glass. We don’t get to overlook the fabled kitchen like some tables, but I’d take our spot again with its night view of the park. The concept behind Dinner by Heston is taking archaic British dishes, each one lovingly cookbook-dated on the menu, and celebrating and updating the ideas with pernickity attention to detail. As Matthew Fort said in a rave review in the Guardian, “Dinner reclaims and reinvents our own cooking heritage, reinvigorating the tired and ordinary orthodoxies of traditional British cooking.”
Unfortunately, the tired and ordinary orthodoxies of TV don’t come in for the same treatment. The high-concept elevator pitch behind H.F.F. is this: “Heston makes giant food.” That’s it. It’s window-dressed with his usual tropes of nostalgia, childhood flavours, and magical imagination, plus a parade of Roald Dalhl-ian silliness. But none of these quite support the premise or justify the means. “I’m going to expensively make an enormous thing, enlisting local people and food technologists up and down the land, and entertain the people doing so.” The giant fry up, the giant ice cream, the giant pot of tea. The ‘why’ is never really gotten to. And that’s the problem. There is no reason for this programme to exist. There is no good reason for the scale of the stunts – the glib explanations given aren’t even remotely convincing. The justifications – basically, that it will fire the imaginations of children – aren’t really borne out by the footage.
Back to Dinner. We skip the signature ‘meat fruit‘, a classic bit of Blumenthal legerdemain, and I go for Roast Marrowbone (c.1720) with snails, parsley, anchovy, mace & pickled vegetables, while my companion has the Rice & Flesh (c.1390) with saffron, calf tail and a red wine reduction. The marrow and snails are a little oily and samey for me but the Rice & Flesh is extraordinary; like a British risotto rippling with meaty unctuousness. Not remotely French, let alone Italian. We move on to the mains, and both decide to go for the Battalia Pye (c.1660), a barrel hoop crust filled with sweetbreads, lamb tongue, devilled kidneys and little pigeon legs, plus a little boat of the richest, densest lamb gravy ever devised by man. This is a potent celebration of meaty English flavours. You feel greedier with every mouthful. This is a pie, that most utterly Anglo-Saxon container. A pie filled with offal – which could similarly describe the sort of four-for-a-pound jobs you can get from Iceland – and yet it screams with flavour and texture and technique. It’s gloriously nostalgic and robust, and yet refined to perfection. It’s entirely Heston.
Todays video - from the Graham Norton show.....the funniest fart scene ever......he's so bad......
Todays romantic joke
The waitress, taking another order at a table a few steps away, suddenly noticed the man slowly sliding down his chair and under the table, but the woman acted unconcerned. The waitress watched as the man slid all the way down his chair and out of sight under the table. Still, the woman appeared calm and unruffled, apparently unaware her dining companion had disappeared. The waitress, thinking this was a bit too risqué behaviour that might offend other diners, went over to the table and tactfully, began by saying to the woman "Pardon me, ma’am, but I think your husband just slid under the table." The woman calmly looked up at her and said, "No, he didn't. He just walked in the door." |
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Todays British joke
A devout Arab Muslim entered a black cab in London. He curtly asked the cabbie to turn off the radio because as decreed by his religious teaching, he must not listen to music because in the time of the prophet there was no music, especially Western music which is the music of the infidel.
The cab driver politely switched off the radio, stopped the cab and opened the door.
The Arab asked him, "What are you doing?
"The cabbie answered, "In the time of the prophet there were no taxis, so fxxk off and wait for a camel!"
Todays Grandfather joke
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