1/ Interesting - I read the story about Mary Jo White being appointed to head the SEC in the New York Times, and having finished the story thought she might take a tougher line with the banks being a former prosecutor.....good appointment Mr. President, you are finally getting tougher on Wall Street.....
Here is a sample of the Times assessment of her......
The choice of Mary Jo White as the next S.E.C. chairwoman will not elicit the same comparisons. Rather, it may be analogous to bringing a bazooka to a knife fight.
As a former United States attorney in Manhattan, Ms. White has a strong law enforcement background. Her appointment likely means that the S.E.C.’s close working relationship with the Justice Department will continue. In addition, her former office in Manhattan has taken the lead in a number of insider trading prosecutions, so that issue is likely to remain a focus.
Then I read this from Matt Taibbi, our best financial commentator in the media, and it's the same old, same old.....
The Obama Administration has no intention whatever of cracking down on the big financial oligarchs - quite the opposite, it's business as usual.....read the article to the end for the kicker - even though she was a prosecutor, once you turn, there's no going back.
This is such a corrupt country.....
I was shocked when I heard that Mary Jo White, a former U.S. Attorney and a partner for the white-shoe Wall Street defense firm Debevoise and Plimpton, had been named the new head of the SEC.
I thought to myself: Couldn't they have found someone who wasn't a key figure in one of the most notorious scandals to hit the SEC in the past two decades? And couldn't they have found someone who isn't a perfect symbol of the revolving-door culture under which regulators go soft on suspected Wall Street criminals, knowing they have million-dollar jobs waiting for them at hotshot defense firms as long as they play nice with the banks while still in office?
I'll leave it to others to chronicle the other highlights and lowlights of Mary Jo White's career, and focus only on the one incident I know very well: her role in the squelching of then-SEC investigator Gary Aguirre's investigation into an insider trading incident involving future Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack. While representing Morgan Stanley at Debevoise and Plimpton, White played a key role in this inexcusable episode.
As I explained a few years ago in my story, "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?": The attorney Aguirre joined the SEC in 2004, and two days into his job was asked to look into reports of suspicious trading activity involving a hedge fund called Pequot Capital, and specifically its megastar trader, Art Samberg. Samberg had made suspiciously prescient trades ahead of the acquisition of a firm called Heller Financial by General Electric, pocketing about $18 million in a period of weeks by buying up Heller shares before the merger, among other things.
http://www.rollingstone.com/
2/ Rachel Maddow with a great 16 minute segment on how states were thinking about changing their rules on how to allocate their electoral college votes to elect the President, but the publicity in the last week has put enough pressure on them to stop this for now.....even in Florida.....except for one - Michigan, our new rogue state.....
There is also an amusing look at Florida, the state where all kinds of crazy things happen......
And I remember Rachel's demand that the mainstream media get on this story........she is becoming one of the most influential journalists in the country......
3/ In Rachel's story above she has a few seconds of the "Crazy BadAss Honey Badger video", so in case you haven't seen it for a while here it is in all it's glory - three minutes of the nastiest animal in the world......funny narration by Randall......
4/ To follow on from the first story, the excellent PBS show "Frontline" had an episode investigating why noone from Wall Street has gone to jail for the blatant fraud that brought the world to it's knees.....
PBS's Frontline program on Tuesday night broadcast a new one-hour report on one of the greatest and most shameful failings of the Obama administration: the lack of even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis: a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering. What this program particularly demonstrated was that the Obama justice department, in particular the Chief of its Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, never even tried to hold the high-level criminals accountable.
What Obama justice officials did instead is exactly what they did in the face of high-level Bush era crimes of torture and warrantless eavesdropping: namely, acted to protect the most powerful factions in the society in the face of overwhelming evidence of serious criminality. Indeed, financial elites were not only vested with immunity for their fraud, but thrived as a result of it, even as ordinary Americans continue to suffer the effects of that crisis.
Worst of all, Obama justice officials both shielded and feted these Wall Street oligarchs (who, just by the way, overwhelmingly supported Obama's 2008 presidential campaign) as they simultaneously prosecuted and imprisoned powerless Americans for far more trivial transgressions. As Harvard law professor Larry Lessig put it two weeks ago when expressing anger over the DOJ's persecution of Aaron Swartz: "we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House." (Indeed, as "The Untouchables" put it: while no senior Wall Street executives have been prosecuted, "many small mortgage brokers, loan appraisers and even home buyers" have been).
And if you have an hour that you can tear yourself away from "American Idol" or "Hoarders", here is the Frontline on Wall Street......learn the reality of how deep the corruption goes......
5/ An excellent Bill Maher four minute show closer, and he is addressing the men of America - yes you, you wanker. He wonders why you are a dickless armchair warrior.......
Prove him wrong, but hear him out first.......most amusing........
Bill Maher closed out his show by declaring that America needs to stop saying it’s the home of the brave and start acting like it. He cited the nation’s huge defense budget and compared the United States to a paranoid crazy man who keeps spending money on alarms and guns and cameras but doesn’t have enough left over to take care of his house or send his kids to college. Maher asked, “would you call him brave?” before comparing the nation’ emphasis on defense to American manhood.
Maher bemoaned how the United States now seems to be full of “dickless armchair warriors,” starting with Manti Te’o. He joked that despite Te’o's numerous head injuries, he still answeredKatie Couric‘s questions better than Sarah Palin. But Maher mostly saw Te’o as a symbol of American manhood, that this big football player never had sex with his “girlfriend” and they instead played out an entire “relationship” online.
6/ A palindrome video
A palindrome reads the same backwards as forward.
This video reads the exact opposite backwards as forward.Not only does it read the opposite, the meaning is the exact opposite..
This is a 2 minute video and it is brilliant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch_This was submitted by a 20-year old to an AARP contest "U@50. It won second place.......
7/ Fascinating discussion of the current state of the Republican party, and where they go from here......if you are interested in politics, this is a must read......
In the long term it doesn't look good for the Conservative coalition of interested groups, but they can do plenty of damage on the way down......for example despite what the President said nothing, nothing will be done about climate change for the next two years because of Republican opposition.....
If the Republican Party were a profit-seeking corporation, the current management would be tossed.
A post-election study conducted Dec. 12 by Resurgent Republic, a conservative think tank, concluded that the market for right-wing ideologues is just not there anymore:
Republicans have run out of persuadable white voters. For the fifth time in the past six presidential elections, Republicans lost the popular vote. Trying to win a national election by gaining a larger and larger share of a smaller and smaller portion of the electorate is a losing political proposition.
Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, released findings on Jan. 16 from a Democracy Corp survey that echoed that conclusion:
The Republican Party brand has steeply eroded since Election Day. Half of all voters (51 percent) now give the Party a negative rating and a third rate the party very negatively (under 25 on our 100-point scale).
Even more threatening to conservatives, according to Greenberg, “Strong majorities of voters view the Republican Party’s positions on critical economic and social issues as extreme.”
If you’re a Republican, the evidence on the party’s near-term prospects is pretty grim:
8/ Bill Maher had a lively panel discussion about the joke factory [Senate] Bengazi hearings last week - forward this eight minute clip to the 4.30 mark and watch from there. Rand Paul asked Secretary Clinton a question about something he heard on Glenn Beck's TV show, and Maher is all over it.....
9/ Scientists have been looking to the past for clues for how the rising waters of the oceans will affect us.......and it's not good news......
The rise in temperatures will result in more extreme weather and a serious rise in sea levels within a few decades.....so be careful where you live. Choose a state or place that won't get affected by a huge tidal surge, make sure your house has great drainage, and wind-proof it......
But no matter what the climatologists find, even if the human race will become extinct in a few hundred years, in the words of George Carlin "nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care"......
BREDASDORP, South Africa — A scruffy crew of scientists barreled down a dirt road, their two-car caravan kicking up dust. After searching all day for ancient beaches miles inland from the modern shoreline, they were about to give up.
Suddenly, the lead car screeched to a halt. Paul J. Hearty, a geologist from North Carolina, leapt out and seized a white object on the side of the road: a fossilized seashell. He beamed. In minutes, the team had collected dozens more.
Using satellite gear, they determined they were seven miles inland and 64 feet above South Africa’s modern coastline.
For the leader of the team, Maureen E. Raymo of Columbia University, the find was an important clue as she tries to determine just how high the oceans might rise in a warmer world.
The question has taken on new urgency in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which caused coastal flooding that scientists say was almost certainly worsened by the modest rise of sea level over the past century. That kind of storm tide, the experts say, could become routine along American coastlines by late in this century if the ocean rises as fast as they expect.
In previous research, scientists have determined that when the earth warms by only a couple of degrees Fahrenheit, enough polar ice melts, over time, to raise the global sea level by about 25 to 30 feet. But in the coming century, the earth is expected to warm more than that, perhaps four or five degrees, because of human emissions of greenhouse gases.
Experts say the emissions that may make a huge increase of sea level inevitable are expected to occur in just the next few decades. They fear that because the world’s coasts are so densely settled, the rising oceans will lead to a humanitarian crisis lasting many hundreds of years.
Scientists say it has been difficult to get people to understand or focus on the importance, for future generations, of today’s decisions about greenhouse gases. Their evidence that the gases represent a problem is based not just on computerized forecastsof the future, as is commonly believed, but on what they describe as a growing body of evidence about what occurred in the past.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/
10/ This is titled "David Copperfield's greatest illusion"......and I know someone out there knows how he does it, but it ain't me.......about 8 minutes......
11/ We live with chemicals in our everyday lives and mostly ignore the effects, but Nicolas Kristof points out a chemical you have never heard of may be making you fat.....
The solution to this is simple, but would require action by Congress.....so don't hold your breath......
ONE of the puzzles of the modern world is why we humans are growing so tubby. Maybe these two mice offer a clue.
They’re genetically the same, raised in the same lab and given the same food and chance to exercise. Yet the bottom one is svelte, while the other looks like, well, an American.
The only difference is that the top one was exposed at birth to just one part per billion of an endocrine-disrupting chemical. The brief exposure programmed the mouse to put on fat, and although there were no significant differences in caloric intake or expenditure, it continued to put on flab long after the chemical was gone.
That experiment is one of a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific studies suggesting that one factor in the industrialized world’s obesity epidemic (along with Twinkies, soda and television) may be endocrine-disrupting chemicals. These chemicals are largely unregulated — they are in food, couches, machine receipts and shampoos — and a raft of new studies suggest that they can lead to the formation of more and larger fat cells.
Before I describe some of this research, a more basic issue: Why should an op-ed columnist write about scholarship published in scientific journals? Don’t pundits have better things to fret about, like the feuding between Democrats and Republicans?
One answer is that obesity is an important national problem, partly responsible for soaring health care costs. Yet the chemical lobby, just like the tobacco industry before it, has impeded serious regulation and is even trying to block research.
A second is that journalists historically have done a poor job covering public health issues — we were slow on the dangers of tobacco and painfully delinquent in calling attention to the perils of lead — but these are central to our national well-being. Our lives are threatened less by the Taliban in Afghanistan than by unregulated contaminants at home.
12/ The Pet Shop Boys with "Absolutely Fabulous"........this video is mostly clips from the wonderful British sitcom AbFab with Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley......one of the funniest shows ever......
I see they are going to make an AbFab movie soon.......
13/ Wow - a most interesting article about how repeated hammering at women about breast cancer has resulted in many women having mastectomies as a precaution, even in many cases where there is no danger......
In the 1970s, women’s health advocates were highly suspicious of mastectomies. They argued that surgeons — in those days, pretty much an all-male club — were far too quick to remove a breast after a diagnosis of cancer, with disfiguring results.
But today, the pendulum has swung the other way. A new generation of women want doctors to take a more aggressive approach, and more and more are asking that even healthy breasts be removed to ward off cancer before it can strike.
Researchers estimate that as many as 15 percent of women withbreast cancer — 30,000 a year — opt to have both breasts removed, up from less than 3 percent in the late 1990s. Notably, it appears that the vast majority of these women have never received genetic testing or counseling and are basing the decision on exaggerated fears about their risk of recurrence.
In addition, doctors say an increasing number of women who have never had a cancer diagnosis are demanding mastectomies based on genetic risk. (Cancer databases don’t track these women, so their numbers are unknown.)
“We are confronting almost an epidemic of prophylacticmastectomy,” said Dr. Isabelle Bedrosian, a surgical oncologist at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “I think the medical community has taken notice. We don’t have data that say oncologically this is a necessity, so why are women making this choice?”
14/ This movie seems interesting - "Parker" starring Jason Statham and Jennifer Lopez.....a solid and exciting 'B" movie.....
“Parker” is an action movie, which means that it should be judged, first if not foremost, by the effectiveness of the scenes of fighting, chasing and shooting that are strung together like baubles on a thin, tough filament of plot. The first such set piece — a heist at the Ohio State Fair undertaken by five guys dressed as clowns, a firefighter and a priest — provides a master class in how to balance chaos and coherence.
I don’t want to spoil any surprises, so I’ll describe another sequence somewhat abstractly, or rather concretely, with reference to the improbable weaponry deployed by two gentlemen walloping the bejeezus out of each other in a Palm Beach condo for reasons that need not detain us here. In addition to a couple of knives there are, according to my notes, a flat-screen television, a cowboy boot, a shower curtain and the lid of a toilet tank. The inventiveness of this bloody ballet is impressive. Even more so was the reaction of the audience members at the screening I attended, who cheered and whooped as the dance reached its lethal conclusion.
This was not a crowd of popcorn-crazed teenagers, mind you, but a room full of well-dressed, middle-aged Manhattanites at, ahem, the Museum of Modern Art. That they could be thrilled (as was I) by the impact of bodies on floors and porcelain on heads is testament to the skill of the director, Taylor Hackford, a veteran Hollywood prestige monger (“Ray,” “An Officer and a Gentleman”) bringing honor to the first syllable of his last name.
I mean that as a compliment; it takes one to know one. And sometimes — especially in the epically dreary cinematic month of January — the pleasures of craft can be more satisfying than the challenges of art. “Parker,” adapted by John J. McLaughlin (“Hitchcock” and “Black Swan,” speaking of prestige) from a novel written by Donald E. Westlake under the name Richard Stark, is not a great movie. There are other films inspired by the Parker character, notably John Boorman’s “Point Blank,” that reach that level, though Mr. Hackford’s is the first to be allowed to use Parker’s name. But “Parker” is nonetheless great fun.
Great trailer......lots of action.......
Todays video - Time for "Mrs. Brown's Bikini Wax", a very funny skit from British TV........
Todays medical joke
During my physical, my doctor asked me about my daily activity level,
and so I described a typical day this way:
"Well, yesterday afternoon, I waded along the edge of a lake,
"Well, yesterday afternoon, I waded along the edge of a lake,
drank eight beers, escaped from wild dogs in the heavy brush,
marched up and down several rocky hills, stood in a patch of poison ivy,
crawled out of quicksand, jumped away from an aggressive rattlesnake
and took four "leaks" behind big trees."
Inspired by the story, the doctor said, "You must be one hell of an outdoors man!"
"No," I replied, "I'm just a shitty golfer."
Inspired by the story, the doctor said, "You must be one hell of an outdoors man!"
"No," I replied, "I'm just a shitty golfer."
Todays elder joke.....
Todays wine jokes
