Make sure you watch #11.....a wow......
1/ Excellent article in Rolling Stone about the opportunities for the President to take the lead on climate change and a great discussion of the politics involved......
A thoughtful story on what is likely to happen on global warming in the next two years......and it won't surprise you to hear "not much"......
Obama's Climate Challenge
As America wakes up to the dangers ahead, the president has a historic opportunity to take bold action on global warming
Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change. After promising in 2008 that his presidency would be "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal," President Obama went silent on the most crucial issue of our time. He failed to talk openly with Americans about the risks of continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, failed to put political muscle behind legislation to cap carbon pollution, failed to meaningfully engage in international climate negotiations, failed to use the power of his office to end the fake "debate" about the reality of global warming and failed to prepare Americans – and the world – for life on a rapidly warming planet. It was as if the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced became a political inconvenience for the president once he was elected.
Now Obama gets another shot at it. "The politics of global warming are changing fast," says Kevin Knobloch, the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Thanks to a year of extreme weather and Hurricane Sandy, a large majority of Americans – nearly 90 percent – favor action on global warming, even if there are economic costs. The U.S. economy is on the road to recovery and no longer offers an excuse for inaction. Big Coal, traditionally the loudest voice against climate action, has been weakened by a glut of cheap natural gas and the economic viability of solar and wind power. China has new political leadership that appears open to discussing a global agreement to cut carbon. And Obama himself has nothing left to lose. "The president has a big opportunity here," says former Vice President Al Gore. "This is a moment when he can expand the ideas of what's possible."
Obama's record on climate issues is not all bad...
http://www.rollingstone.com/
2/ Yeay - Bill Maher is back for a new season.....here is his segment on guns.....not his best for funny lines, but a thoughtful and biting four minutes on gun nuts and their misplaced priorities.......
Bill Maher dressed down the gun lobby on his first "Real Time" of 2013, but not in the way you might have expected. Addressing gun huggers everywhere, Maher explained, "It's not your second amendment rights that are under attack, it's all the other ones."
According to Maher, invasion of privacy is the norm in our new "quasi-police state", and it happened while a significant chunk of the population was at home guarding their guns and the rest of us simply weren't caring (everyone except Jodie Foster, obviously).
"The only thing that still has bipartisan support in Washington is not giving a shit about privacy."
3/ Thomas Friedman with a most interesting column on what he would like the President to say tomorrow, and in the State of the Union address.....
He suggests Obama tells us the truth about the jobs that aren't coming back......and has some strategies for the Republicans as well.....
If election campaigns are supposed to be an exercise in coming to grips with our biggest problems, then the one we just went through was a dismal failure. Our only real solution — a strategy to reignite consistent growth so we can narrow our income gaps and lift the middle class — never got a serious airing. Instead, each side was focused on how to secure a bigger slice of a shrinking pie for its own base. This lousy campaign produced the worst of all outcomes: President Obama won on a platform that had little to do with our core problems and is only a small part of the solution — raising taxes on the wealthy — so he has little incentive to rethink his strategy. And the Republicans did not lose badly enough — they held the House — to have to fully rethink their strategy. It does not bode well.
In his book “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth,” the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman argues that periods of economic growth have been essential to American political progress; periods of economic prosperity were periods of greater social, political and religious harmony and tolerance. On Sunday, The Times’s Annie Lowrey wrote a piece quoting Friedman who wondered aloud whether we’re not now entering a reverse cycle, “in which our absence of growth is delivering political paralysis, and the political paralysis preserves the absence of growth.”
I think he’s right and that the only way to break out of this deadly cycle is with extraordinary leadership. Republicans and Democrats would have to govern in just the opposite way they ran their campaigns — by offering bold plans that not only challenge the other’s base but their own and thereby mobilizes the center, a big majority, behind their agenda, to break the deadlock. If either party does that, not only will it win the day but the country will win as well.
What would that look like? If the Republican Party had a brain it would give up on its debt-ceiling gambit and announce instead that it wants to open negotiations immediately with President Obama on the basis of his own deficit commission, the Simpson-Bowles plan. That would at least make the G.O.P. a serious opposition party again — with a platform that might actually appeal outside its base and challenge the president in a healthy way. But the G.O.P. would have to embrace the tax reforms and spending cuts in Simpson-Bowles first. Fat chance. And that’s a pity.
As for Obama, if he really wants to lead, he will have to finally trust the American people with the truth. I’d love to see him use his Jan. 21 Inaugural Address and his Feb. 12 State of the Union Message as a one-two punch to do just that — offer a detailed, honest diagnosis and then a detailed, honest prescription.
4/ Want to be the sharpest guy at the boat ramp? Get one of these bad boys......looks like it's on Lake Mead near Las Vegas.....
If you have a boat and fancy yourself as cool, watch this and slink away, you loser.....two minutes......
5/ Lance Armstrong was on Oprah to "confess" that he took steroids like every other Tour de France winner, but apart from that I don't know much about him. Gail Collins's column last week was on Armstrong, and after reading it I don't want to know......the water use is a real tell........
He sounds like a real scumbag......
Right now you’re probably asking yourself: What can the Lance Armstrong scandal teach us as a nation?
It had better teach us something or we’ll have wasted one heck of a lot of time talking about this guy. And the lesson should not involve the future of cycling. Now that Lance Armstrong is disgraced, people, how many of you ever plan to think about the sport of cycling again? Can I see a show of hands? I thought so.
As the whole universe knows, Armstrong is a superfamous American athlete who developed testicular cancer, went through arduous therapy and then returned to the racing circuit as the head of the United States Postal Service Pro Cycling Team, winning the Tour de France seven straight times.
And then the authorities stripped away his medals for serial doping. Which Armstrong denied, virtually on an hourly basis, with a vengeance that made “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” sound like a confession.
The denial stage is scheduled to come to an end Thursday in an Oprah interview. After which we will discuss whether Armstrong can be forgiven.
We can certainly grant him absolution as a human being, but he appears to be in the market for forgiveness as a celebrity. And, really, once you get past the now-demolished race record, there’s not much point to Lance Armstrong, Famous Person. He has no other talents. He isn’t particularly lovable. He was once cited for using 330,000 gallons of water at his Texas home in a month when his neighbors were being asked to conserve by cutting back on their car-washing. He left his wife, got engaged to the singer Sheryl Crow. He said he broke up with Sheryl Crow because of her “biological clock.” The New York Post had him dating one of the Olsen twins.
6/ Jon Stewart with two segments [six minutes and four minutes] on the NRA and what they have done to the ATF.....Jon in a serious, reporter-like mood........still funny, but making some points you won't believe.......
As expected the, NRA wasn't particularly pleased with President Obama's gun control proposals. And why not? As Jon Stewart outlined on Wednesday night's "Daily Show", the organization has enjoyed massive influence on gun laws and their enforcement for quite a while.
If you've been asking yourself why the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms hasn't been more effective in controlling the massive amounts of illegal guns in this country, you're not alone. Watch part one above of Jon's look at the limitations that are "completely castrating" the ATF and part two below. Get ready to have your head spin.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
7/ Still have the naive view that we are a nation of laws....and fairness? And not one of the most corrupt countries in the world?
Read this disgusting story - the "fiscal cliff" bill had a gift to Amgen, the huge drug company, courtesy of Senators and the White House that will make them billions in the next two years by exempting them from complying with Medicare regulations......
WASHINGTON — Just two weeks after pleading guilty in a major federal fraud case, Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology firm, scored a largely unnoticed coup on Capitol Hill: Lawmakers inserted a paragraph into the “fiscal cliff” bill that did not mention the company by name but strongly favored one of its drugs.
The language buried in Section 632 of the law delays a set ofMedicare price restraints on a class of drugs that includes Sensipar, a lucrative Amgen pill used by kidney dialysis patients.
The provision gives Amgen an additional two years to sell Sensipar without government controls. The news was so welcome that the company’s chief executive quickly relayed it to investment analysts. But it is projected to cost Medicare up to $500 million over that period.
Amgen, which has a small army of 74 lobbyists in the capital, was the only company to argue aggressively for the delay, according to several Congressional aides of both parties.
Supporters of the delay, primarily leaders of the Senate Finance Committee who have long benefited from Amgen’s political largess, said it was necessary to allow regulators to prepare properly for the pricing change.
But critics, including several Congressional aides who were stunned to find the measure in the final bill, pointed out that Amgen had already won a previous two-year delay, and they depicted a second one as an unnecessary giveaway.
“That is why we are in the trouble we are in,” saidDennis J. Cotter, a health policy researcher who studies the cost and efficacy of dialysis drugs. “Everybody is carving out their own turf and getting it protected, and we pass the bill on to the taxpayer.”
The provision’s inclusion in the legislation to avert the tax increases and spending cuts that made up the so-called fiscal cliff shows the enduring power of special interests in Washington, even as Congress faces a critical test of its ability to balance the budget.
Amgen has deep financial and political ties to lawmakers like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, and Senators Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, who hold heavy sway over Medicare payment policy as the leaders of the Finance Committee.
It also has worked hard to build close ties with the Obama administration, with its lobbyists showing up more than a dozen times since 2009 on logs of visits to the White House, although a company official said Saturday that it had not appealed to the administration during the debate over the fiscal legislation.
8/ 2012 - the year climate change became real for Americans.......good [if a little distracting because of the camera techniques] seven minute video of last year's extreme weather, with interviews with scientists and researchers......
2012 was a big year. Not due to politics or media, but because 201 is the year climate change got real for Americans. What we had feared might be true is infact coming true. Peter Sinclair takes a look back at 2012 and the waking up of the American people to the horrors of climate change.
9/ This is what happens when British mums listen to rap.......actually I think it's an ad for the Fiat 500, but it's quite amusing and if you're a mum, you'll get it.....three minutes......
10/ Want to put on more than a few pounds a year? Drink Coke, and if you are all virtuous and say "I drink Diet Coke", think of all the toxic chemicals in that swill......
This is an ad that's going on TV during American Idol.......2 minutes of "we're a good corporation".....sickening....
And this is why they're doing it.....they are getting scared.....
The Coca-Cola Company began a new television ad campaign Monday aimed at getting on the healthy side of the national debate over obesity — a novel step for a company built on sugary soft drinks.
“We’d like people to come together on something that concerns all of us, obesity,” beganthe two-minute ad, which is scheduled to run during prime-time cable news shows. “The long-term health of our families and our country is at stake, and as the nation’s leading beverage company, we can play an important role.”
The ad goes on to promote steps Coke has taken, like putting calorie counts on “the front” of its cans and other packaging and increasing the number of its brands sold in smaller cans, to help consumers make healthier choices.
“There’s a really important conversation going on out there about obesity, and we want to be a part of it because our consumer is telling us they want us to be a part of it,” said Stuart Kronauge, general manager for sparkling beverages at Coca-Cola North America.
This ad is aimed at policy makers, but a second ad, to be broadcast Wednesday during the first episode of the new season for “American Idol,” will focus on consumers, emphasizing the calories in a can of soda and offering ideas about how to work them off, like walking the dog for 25 minutes, doing a victory dance or even laughing.
The ads establish a link between the company and its products and obesity, which could be risky. “We thought about that, but we’ve learned that consumers love more information from us — and we really believe Coke has the power to connect people in a way that can help solve issues,” Ms. Kronauge said.
It is the first time the company has gone on the offensive to tackle widespread criticism that sugary sodas are one of the biggest contributors to the obesity epidemic, and the ads drew criticism even before they were shown.
“This is not about changing the products but about confusing the public,” said Michele R. Simon, a public health lawyer who writes frequently about the food and beverage business and its role in public health issues on her blog, Appetite for Profit. “They are downplaying the serious health effects of drinking too much soda and making it sound like balancing soda consumption with exercise is the only issue, when there are plenty of other reasons not to consume too much of these kinds of products.”
11/ Amazing video - four minutes of mountain bike racing down city streets and alleys in Taxco, Mexico.....if this doesn't get your adrenalin going nothing will.....a WOW!
12/ It just goes on and on.....not sure if this is true, but knowing the food industry nothing would surprise me......I love calamari marinara but this story makes one think about ever ordering it again......revolting story.....
Note the show that has outed this deception is "This American Life", a serious radio show on NPR stations.....
'Imitation Calamari' Investigated By 'This American Life,' Suggested To Have Dubious, Pork-Based Origin
Plenty of foods come surrounded by urban legends. Hot dogs and genetically-modified organisms, for instance, come with a cadre of rumors -- some true, some patently false. But if a recent segment on "This American Life" is to be believed, it may be time to add calamari to the list.
The popular radio show's Jan. 11 episode focuses on doppelgangers -- people and things that appear extremely similar on the surface but are actually totally different.
Among the doppelgangers? Calamari's modest cousin, "imitation calamari."
Though it has a shape and texture similar to the real thing, its component parts are decidedly different. While calamari comes from squid, the replica is supposedly made of hog rectum, otherwise known as "bung."
The irony is not lost on Ben Calhoun, one of the show's producers, and ring-leader of the segment, who notes:
In restaurants everywhere, right this second, people are squeezing lemon wedges over crispy, golden, rings, dipping the rings into marinara sauce, and they're eating hog rectum. Now they're chewing -- satisfied and deeply clueless. It's payback for our blissful ignorance about where our food comes from and how it gets to us.
13/ Love this one.....Paramore with "Careful", a mixture of film and live but gives a great feeling for the band......and they are a hell of a good rock group......
14/ Very interesting story on our medical system and their compulsion to "treat, treat, treat" even hopeless cancers that have metastised......at a huge cost and endless suffering for patients.....
I believe this article, because it was written by a nurse.......you can be strong and resist the system......
In late October 2010, Amy Berman, a registered nurse and a senior program officer at the John A. Hartford Foundation in New York City, received a diagnosis of Stage 4 inflammatory breast cancer. This Stage 4 cancer is always metastatic, meaning it has spread to other parts of the body. There is zero probability of a cure, though five-year survival rates vary for individuals.
Knowing this hard diagnosis, Amy was clear from the beginning that she wanted a “good quality of life for as long as possible,” and she found an oncologist who supported that choice. But she also wanted to confer with a known expert on her specific type of breast cancer and, with the encouragement of her doctor, traveled to get a second opinion.
She found one, but pretty quickly, Amy knew she did not want this doctor directing her care. He asked her nothing about what she wanted from treatment. He recommended chemotherapy, mastectomy, more chemotherapy and radiation — a regimen that he uses for “all my patients.”
Amy did not want to be one of “all my patients.” She wanted to be herself, and her strong feeling was that such aggressive care would not allow her remaining time on earth to be well spent. As is typical of many cancer patients, she would rotate among treatment rooms, hospitals and radiation oncology centers, most likely enduring chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, postoperative pain, extreme fatigue, hair loss and radiation burns — with no guarantee that any of this physical suffering would extend her life, much less ensure her quality of life. She declined the treatment.
15/ The review for "Broken City" with Mark Wahlberg was decent, rating it a solid "B" movie. Arnold Schwartzenegger"s "Last Stand" is stumbling at the box office [because it's really bad}, but have a look at this one......
"Mama", directed by Guillermo del Toro the master of horror.......
Guillermo del Toro, the reigning godfather of motion-picture horror, is the modern-day Val Lewton, the legendary producer of atmospheric chillers like “The Curse of the Cat People.” If you’re a movie fan, you know that horror doesn’t get much better than this, and when it comes to contemporary offerings it rarely gets more enjoyable than“Mama.” Instead of delivering buckets of guts and gore, this ghost story offers a strong sense of time and place, along with the kind of niceties that don’t often figure into horror flicks, notably pictorial beauty, an atmosphere throbbing with dread and actors so good that you don’t want anyone to take an ax to them.
The story opens with a camera sliding up to a car parked at an angle, with the driver’s door open and the radio blaring in front of a suburban house. Catastrophic economic news has led to a panic, with one executive, Jeffrey (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), running amok. Since the fetching Mr. Coster-Waldau plays the blond bad boy Jaime Lannister on HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” you may expect the worst. The director Andy Muschietti — who shares script credit with his sister, Barbara (who’s also one of the producers), and a third writer, Neil Cross — whittles the story down to its freaky primal nub. One minute, Jeffrey is holding a gun and contemplating the unthinkable with his two young daughters; the next, the girls are five years older and singing a lullaby straight out of “Hellraiser.”
The Muschiettis open the movie with “once upon a time,” tipping that “Mama” is a modern fairy tale of sorts. After the girls went missing with their father, their uncle, Lucas (also Mr. Coster-Waldau), initiated a search. Two of his trackers find them in a derelict midcentury-modern home deep in the woods. (Dad remains M.I.A.) It’s a setting that suggests an abandoned Don Draper weekend getaway, save for the two critters scuttling across the floors and atop a fridge, where one hovers over the other like a bird with a chick. Filthy, with matted hair and skinny spider legs, these are the little lost girls, Victoria (Megan Charpentier), and her younger sister, Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse), wild children seemingly headed toward an unhappily ever after.
Good grief - one of the spookiest trailers ever....."Mama".....looks like a must see.....
Todays video - a cute commercial for the chemical drink Mountain Dew.......
Todays granny joke
One night, an 87-year-old woman came home from Bingo to find her 92-year-old husband in bed with another woman.. She became violent and ended up pushing him off the balcony of their 20th floor apartment, killing him instantly. Brought before the court, on the charge of murder, she was asked if she had anything to say in her own defences.
'Your Honour,' she began coolly, 'I figured that at 92, if he could screw, he could fly.'
Todays collection of puns
When chemists die, they barium.
Jokes about German sausage are the wurst.
I know a guy who's addicted to brake fluid. He says he can stop any time.
How does Moses make his tea? Hebrews it.
I stayed up all night to see where the sun went. Then it dawned on me.
I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. I just can't put it down.
I did a theatrical performance about puns. It was a play on words.
They told me I had type-A blood, but it was a Type-O.
PMS jokes aren't funny; period.
Why were the Indians here first? They had reservations.
We're going on a class trip to the Coca-Cola factory. I hope there's no pop quiz.
I didn't like my beard at first. Then it grew on me.
Did you hear about the cross-eyed teacher who lost her job because she couldn't control her pupils?
When you get a bladder infection urine trouble.
Broken pencils are pointless.
I tried to catch some fog, but I mist.
What do you call a dinosaur with an extensive vocabulary? A thesaurus.
England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.
I used to be a banker, but then I lost interest.
I dropped out of communism class because of lousy Marx.
All the toilets in New York's police stations have been stolen. The police have nothing to go on
.
I got a job at a bakery because I kneaded dough.
I got a job at a bakery because I kneaded dough.
Haunted French pancakes give me the crêpes.
Velcro – what a rip off!
A cartoonist was found dead in his home. Details are sketchy.
Venison for dinner again? Oh deer!
Todays redneck joke
"Anybody home?" she asked.
"Yep," came a kid's voice through the door.
"Yep," came a kid's voice through the door.
"Is your father there?" asked the social worker.
"Pa? Nope, he left afore Ma came in," said the kid.
"Well, is your mother there?" persisted the social worker.
"Ma? Nope, she left just afore I got here," said the kid.
"But," protested the social worker, (thinking that surely she will need to intervene in this situation) "are you never together as a family?"
"But," protested the social worker, (thinking that surely she will need to intervene in this situation) "are you never together as a family?"
"Sure, but not here," said the kid through the door. "This is the outhouse!"
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