1/ An excellent column from Charles Blow in the Times, discussing some of the beliefs held by Republicans. One of the stats is that 58% of GOP supporters believe the earth is about 10,000 years old.....
Think about this.....58% of all of your neighbors who had Romney signs in their yard could be creationists.....if your bank officer is a Republican who believes in Adam and Eve riding dinosaurs, can you trust his financial advice? If one of the 58% tells you he liked a movie, should you see it or avoid it?
Think about it? We live in Florida, with a Republican Governor, House and Senate, and up to 58% of our "leaders" may believe in creationism or even if they don't, they cannot say they don't for fear of offending their base.....think we have a decent government?
Finally, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida — a Tea Party darling and possible 2016 presidential candidate — admits that dinosaurs and humans didn’t co-exist.
Last month, when GQ asked Rubio “how old do you think the Earth is?” he stammered through an answer.
“I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says. I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians.” He continued, “Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.”
This week, in an interview with Politico, he attempted to mop up that mess.
He said, “There is no scientific debate on the age of the Earth. I mean, it’s established pretty definitively. It’s at least 4.5 billion years old.”
But then he hedged: “I just think in America we should have the freedom to teach our children whatever it is we believe. And that means teaching them science. They have to know the science, but also parents have the right to teach them the theology and to reconcile those two things.”
Why the hedge? Because he is in a party of creationists. According to a June Gallup report, most Republicans (58 percent) believed that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. Most Democrats and independents did not agree.
2/ Fascinating article from Matt Taibbi on the Tea Party, Jim DeMint's resignation from the Senate and how the conservatives in the Republican party are totally disillusioned.....
If you are at all interested in politics, this is for you......Taibbi postulates one of the ways the conservative movement could go over the next few years.....
The fiscal cliff story is a hard one to care about – it feels like a continuation of the presidential election season, in which red and blue pundits screamed at each other and traded insults while the country moved inexorably toward a moment of profound non-catharsis. That story was a bummer and this one is, too. If karma has a stake in this narrative, both Democrats and Republicans should brace for the worst-case scenario, for when it comes to politics within the Beltway, it's beginning to feel like nobody deserves to lose more than Everybody.
But while it's hard to stay focused on the fiscal cliff, the resignation of leading Tea Party pol Jim DeMint is (to me anyway) a more compelling development. Obviously, one story led to the other. The Tea Party is about purity, and DeMint doesn't want to sully himself with the congress's probably-inevitable decision to raise taxes to avoid this budget collapse. So his highly-symbolic resignation is his wing of the party's Picking-Up-The-Ball-And-Going-
3/ "Nighttime - daytime".......the BBC makes some excellent programs, and this is a very funny take on animal documentaries with talking animals.....4 minutes.....
4/ Golf and magicians.....doesn't get much better than this.......
European Tour players with amazing golf shots, and some incredible magic tricks.....3 minutes.....
5/ What has Rick Santorum been up to? You could credibly say he was the runner up to be the Republican nominee for President.....
It turns out he hates the disabled and the UN, so he led the assault on the International treaty giving global rights the disabled have had in this country for 20 years......just more lunacy on the extreme right......
Lately, you’ve probably been asking: “What ever happened to Rick Santorum? The guy who ran for president in the sweater vest? The one who compared homosexuality to bestiality and did 50 push-ups every morning?” It’s certainly been on my mind.
Santorum is still in there swinging. Lately, he’s been on a crusade against a dangerous attempt by the United Nations to help disabled people around the world. This week, he won! The Senate refused to ratify a U.N. treaty on the subject. The vote, which fell five short of the necessary two-thirds majority, came right after 89-year-old Bob Dole, the former Republican leader and disabled war veteran, was wheeled into the chamber to urge passage.
“We did it,” Santorum tweeted in triumph.
Well, it doesn’t get any better than that.
The rejected treaty, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, is based on the Americans with Disabilities Act, the landmark law Dole co-sponsored. So, as Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts kept pointing out during the debate, this is a treaty to make the rest of the world behave more like the United States. But Santorum was upset about a section on children with disabilities that said: “The best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.”
“This is a direct assault on us and our family!” he said at a press conference in Washington.
O.K.
The hard right has a thing about the United Nations. You may remember that the senator-elect from Texas, Ted Cruz, once railed that a 20-year-old nonbinding United Nations plan for sustainable development posed a clear and present threat to American golf courses.
6/ "Lights" by Ellie Goulding....a sleeper success with 28 million hits on this video......simple, lots of special lighting effects, and the song is pretty good......dance dance dance.....
7/ An excellent Colbert, and it's interesting because it's a little dark in humour......he get's close to meaning it!.....He is discussing the Senate and their votes to reject the Disabilities act sponsored by the UN.....5 pretty good minutes.....
Colbert didn't pull any punches on Wednesday in his satirical takedown of the Senate's failure to pass the U.N. disability treaty. The host zeroed in on the most surreal aspect of the vote: the presence of a clearly-ailing Bob Dole, who appeared on the Senate floor in support of the treaty only to have members of his own party sink it right in front of him.
The irony wasn't lost on Colbert, who explained that thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Senate is outfitted with accessibility measures that allowed the wheelchair-bound Dole 'to see his dying wish crushed in person.'
8/ Why did the Republicans lose the election? Tom Tomorrow might have some ideas.....
Click on the comic to enlarge it.....
9/ Guys - time for our International collection of November fails from TwisterNederland - 14 minutes of pain, drunks, idiot youth and just unlucky chaps.....lots of hospital visits in this one....
10/ I did not know this - although CO2 is the main problem contributing to global warming there are other chemicals as dangerous or even worse, and the President has the authority to act to regulate these.......black carbon, methane, ozones and HFC's.....
If he acts it could cut down emissions about 40%.....but will he? This is a major test to see if he is serious about climate change......
WE all know (or should know) by now that the carbon dioxide we produce when we burn fossil fuels and cut down forests is the planet’s single largest contributor to global warming. It persists in the atmosphere for centuries. Reducing these emissions by as much as half by 2050 is essential to avoid disastrous consequences by the end of this century, and we must begin immediately.
But this is a herculean undertaking, both technically and politically, as the lack of progress at United Nations climate talks here this week attests. And even if we are able to do this over the next 40 years, we would not slow the rate of warming enough by midcentury to moderate consequences like rising sea levels, the release of methane and carbon dioxide from melting arctic permafrost, and a rise in extreme weather.
There is, however, a short-term strategy. We can slow this warming quickly by cutting emissions of four other climate pollutants: black carbon, a component of soot; methane, the main component of natural gas; lower-level ozone, a main ingredient of urban smog; and hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are used as coolants. They account for as much as 40 percent of current warming.
Unlike carbon dioxide, these pollutants are short-lived in the atmosphere. If we stop emitting them, they will disappear in a matter of weeks to a few decades. We have technologies to do this, and, in many cases, laws and institutions to support these cuts. Moreover, President Obama has the executive authority to move ahead aggressively on these pollutants, as he did last year in ordering substantial reductions in auto and truck emissions. By doing so, he may persuade other countries to follow.
11/ Some holiday photobombs for you - these are Christmas snaps with unexpected people or creatures in the background......amusing.....
12/ Time to check in with the Heartland to see how the drought is going.....yup, still there and getting worse.....
Don't see much of this in the mainstream media, do we.......and by the way get ready for MUCH more expensive food......
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Even as the summer swelter has given way to frost, nearly two-thirds of the country remains in a drought, with forest fires still burning, winter crops choking in parched soil and barges nearly scraping the mucky bottoms of sunken rivers.
More than 62 percent of the continental United States is experiencing moderate to exceptional drought, according to the weekly Drought Monitorreport released on Thursday, compared with just over 29 percent at this time last year.
Save for patches of California, Montana and Wyoming, the drought is expected to persist in most of the dry regions west of the Mississippi River over the next three months, according to the Seasonal Drought Outlook released Thursday by the National Weather Service.
“It’s not looking very promising right now,” said David Miskus, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate prediction center.
This is typically the driest time of the year, Mr. Miskus said, so precipitation will have to be far above normal levels to put a dent in regions that have been rain starved since the spring.
With the Great Plains — from southern South Dakota to the Texas Panhandle — enduring the most desiccated conditions, the agricultural sector is bracing for the hardest blow. Most of the Plains and the Mississippi River Valley had less than a quarter-inch of rain over the past week, according to the Drought Monitor.
The drought expanded across parts of Southeast Texas through central Louisiana in areas that had precipitation shortfalls of 8 to 14 inches over the past three months, the report said.
Just over a quarter of the nation’s wheat crop, planted mostly in September and October, was in poor or very poor condition, according to a report released last week by the United States Department of Agriculture. Those are the worst conditions since the department began keeping records in 1986, said Brad Rippey, a meteorologist with the department.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/
13/ Something else you don't hear about - in Louisiana there is a massive sinkhole caused by oil and gas companies pumping gazillions of gallons, to the point the resulting pressure ruptured a huge salt cavern deep in the earth.....imagine an 8 acre sinkhole with all kinds of toxic chemicals in it!
For residents in Assumption Parish, the boiling, gas-belching bayou, with its expanding toxic sinkhole and quaking earth is no longer a mystery; but there is little comfort in knowing the source of the little-known event that has forced them out of their homes.
Located about 45 miles south of Baton Rouge, Assumption Parish carries all the charms and curses of southern Louisiana. Networks of bayous, dotted with trees heavy with Spanish moss, connect with the Mississippi River as it slowly ambles toward the Gulf of Mexico. Fishermen and farmers make their homes there, and so does the oil and gas industry, which has woven its own network of wells, pipelines and processing facilities across the lowland landscape.
The first sign of the oncoming disaster was the mysterious appearance of bubbles in the bayous in the spring of 2012. For months the residents of a rural community in Assumption Parish wondered why the waters seemed to be boiling in certain spots as they navigated the bayous in their fishing boats.
Then came the earthquakes. The quakes were relatively small, but some residents reported that their houses shifted in position, and the tremors shook a community already desperate for answers. State officials launched an investigation into the earthquakes and bubbling bayous in response to public outcry, but the officials figured the bubbles were caused by a single source of natural gas, such as a pipeline leak. They were wrong.
On a summer night in early August, the earth below the Bayou Corne, located near a small residential community in Assumption, simply opened up and gave way. Several acres of swamp forest were swallowed up and replaced with a gaping sinkhole that filled itself with water, underground brines, oil and natural gas from deep below the surface. Since then, the massive sinkhole at Bayou Corne has grown to 8 acres in size.
14/ Occasionally radio stations get funny calls, as this tape from a show in Minnesota shows.......3 minutes of building incredulity from the hosts....
15/ Enjoy your eggs for breakfast? Ever wonder where they come from, and what's in them? You probably don't, especially if you read this story from the Times.....
We only ever eat organics, and were delighted to find a breakfast place in Ft. Lauderdale that serves organic eggs....wish more restaurants would. It would be great marketing......
Supermarket eggs gleam with apparent cleanliness, and nothing might seem more wholesome than breaking one of them into a frying pan.
Think again. The Humane Society of the United States plans to release on Thursday the results of an undercover investigation intoKreider Farms, a major factory farm that produces 4.5 million eggs each day for supermarkets like ShopRite.
I’ve reviewed footage and photos taken by the investigator, who says he worked for Kreider between January and March of this year. In an interview, he portrayed an operation that has little concern for cleanliness or the welfare of hens.
“It’s physically hard to breathe because of the ammonia” rising from manure pits below older barns, said the investigator, who would not allow his name to be used because that would prevent him from taking another undercover job in agriculture. He said that when workers needed to enter an older barn, they would first open doors and rev up exhaust fans, and then rush in to do their chores before the fumes became overwhelming.
Mice sometimes ran down egg conveyer belts, barns were thick with flies and manure in three barns tested positive for salmonella, he said. (Actually, salmonella isn’t as rare as you might think, turning up in 3 percent of egg factory farms tested by the Food and Drug Administration last year.)
In some cases, 11 hens were jammed into a cage about 2 feet by 2 feet. The Humane Society says that that is even more cramped than the egg industry’s own voluntary standards — which have been widely criticized as inadequate.
An automatic feeding cart that runs between the cages sometimes decapitates hens as they’re eating, the investigator said. Corpses are pulled out if they’re easy to see, but sometimes remain for weeks in the cages, piling up until they have rotted into the wiring, he added.
Other hens have their heads stuck in the wire and are usually left to die, the investigator said.
16/ Movie review - "Killing Them Softly" with Brad Pitt.....based on a novel by George V. Higgins who was one of the best crime writers in the 70's and 80's........
This review from Entertainment Weekly is excellent, but some other critics gave it a "B"...... even so if you like gritty movies, this is for you.....
Killing Them Softly is a lurid and nasty little nihilistic hitman noir, with an ingenuity that sneaks up on you. It's the first movie directed by Andrew Dominik since The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford(2007), and once again he has cast Brad Pitt as a low-key, gimlet-eyed sociopath — and once again, the screen vibrates. The tough guys Pitt has played all possess a brawny physical fearlessness, yet they draw their power from Pitt's intelligence, his quicksilver-cool awareness. In Killing Them Softly, he's menacingly good as Jackie Cogan, a Mob enforcer who is called in to clean up the mess that follows an underworld card-game robbery committed by two real bottom-feeders: Frankie (Scoot McNairy), who's just nervous enough to sense that he's in over his head, and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn), a disheveled Australian junkie who can't see past his next fix. The two look like they should be easy enough to deal with, but first Jackie must figure out whether Trattman (Ray Liotta), who runs the poker night, secretly set up the heist himself. Then he's got to smoke out anyone else involved.
On paper, there isn't much to the plot, which Dominik based on the 1974 George V. Higgins novel Cogan's Trade. The real drama lies in how these outrageously loquacious lowlifes keep sizing each other up: the back-and-forth scuzziness, the obscenity dancing on the knife-edge of violence. This, of course, is Scorsese Land, Tarantino Land, Mamet Land, and David Chase Land, so you've got to be damn good to play that game.
"Killing Them Softly" trailer......
Todays video - the opening scene from "28 Weeks Later", one of the scariest movies ever made and definitely the best zombie film.......a family takes refuge in a farmhouse.....and who says zombies have to be slow?
Warning.....really unsettling.....really, really unsettling.....
Todays Chinese jokeThe Air Canada plane leaves Pearson Airport under the control of a Jewish
captain; his co-pilot is Chinese.
It's the first time they've flown together and an awkward silence between
the two seems to indicate a mutual dislike.
Once they reach cruising altitude, the Jewish captain activates the
auto-pilot, leans back in his seat, and mutters,
'I don't like Chinese..'
'No rike Chinese?' asks the co-pilot, 'why not?'
'You people bombed Pearl Harbor , that's why!'
'No, no', the co-pilot protests, 'Chinese not bomb Peahl Hahbah!
That Japanese, not Chinese.'
'Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese....doesn't matter, you're all alike!'
There's a few minutes of silence.
'I no rike Jews!' the co-pilot suddenly announces.
'Oh yeah, why not?' asks the captain.
'Jews sink Titanic!' says the co-pilot.
'What? You're insane! Jews didn't sink the Titanic!' exclaims the captain,
'It was an iceberg!'
Iceberg, Goldberg, Greenberg, Rosenberg , ..no mattah...all fukin same.
Todays Italian joke
A young New York woman was so depressed that she decided to end her life by throwing herself into the ocean, but just before she could throw herself from the docks, a handsome young man stopped her.
"You have so much to live for," said the man. "I'm a sailor, and we are off to Italy tomorrow. I can stow you away on my ship. I'll take care of you, bring you food every day, and keep you happy."
With nothing to lose, combined with the fact that she had always wanted to go to Italy, the woman accepted. That night the sailor brought her aboard and hid her in a small but comfortable compartment in the hold. From then on, every night he would bring her three sandwiches, a bottle of red wine, and make love to her until dawn. Three weeks later she was discovered by the captain during a routine inspection.
"What are you doing here?" asked the captain.
"I have an arrangement with one of the sailors," she replied. "He brings me food and I get a free trip to Italy ."
"I see," the captain says.
Her conscience got the best of her and she added, "Plus, he's screwing me."
"He certainly is," replied the captain.
"This is the Staten Island Ferry."
"You have so much to live for," said the man. "I'm a sailor, and we are off to Italy tomorrow. I can stow you away on my ship. I'll take care of you, bring you food every day, and keep you happy."
With nothing to lose, combined with the fact that she had always wanted to go to Italy, the woman accepted. That night the sailor brought her aboard and hid her in a small but comfortable compartment in the hold. From then on, every night he would bring her three sandwiches, a bottle of red wine, and make love to her until dawn. Three weeks later she was discovered by the captain during a routine inspection.
"What are you doing here?" asked the captain.
"I have an arrangement with one of the sailors," she replied. "He brings me food and I get a free trip to Italy ."
"I see," the captain says.
Her conscience got the best of her and she added, "Plus, he's screwing me."
"He certainly is," replied the captain.
"This is the Staten Island Ferry."
Todays exciting joke
He was in ecstasy, with a huge smile on his face, as his wife moved
forwards, then backwards, forward, then backwards again ....... back
She could feel the sweat on her forehead and between her breasts, and
trickling down the small of her back, she was getting near to the end.
Her heart was pounding ... her face was flushed ... then she moaned,
softly at first, then began to groan louder.
Finally, totally exhausted, she let out an almighty scream and
shouted,
and forth ..... back and forth ..... in and out ..... in and out.
She could feel the sweat on her forehead and between her breasts, and
trickling down the small of her back, she was getting near to the end.
Her heart was pounding ... her face was flushed ... then she moaned,
softly at first, then began to groan louder.
Finally, totally exhausted, she let out an almighty scream and
shouted,
"OK, OK! I can't park the f**ing car! You do it, you smug bastard!
Todays bonus joke
After being married for thirty years, a wife asked her husband to describe her.
He looked at her for a while, then said, "You're an alphabet wife ..... A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K."
She asks ... "What the hell does that mean?"
He said, "Adorable, Beautiful, Cute, Delightful, Elegant, Foxy, Gorgeous and Hot".
She smiled happily and said, "Oh, that's so lovely, but what about I, J, K?"
He said, "I'm Just Kidding!"
The swelling in his eye is going down and the doctor is fairly optimistic about saving his testicles.
She asks ... "What the hell does that mean?"
He said, "Adorable, Beautiful, Cute, Delightful, Elegant, Foxy, Gorgeous and Hot".
She smiled happily and said, "Oh, that's so lovely, but what about I, J, K?"
He said, "I'm Just Kidding!"
The swelling in his eye is going down and the doctor is fairly optimistic about saving his testicles.
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