1/ Excellent, excellent article from Bill McKibben on how the students in Universities across the country are urging their colleges to divest themselves from investments in fossil fuel companies....and it's working. If anything is going to happen on climate change that will at least slow the roasting of our planet it has to be the kids that wake up and demand action from our broken political system.......
Hopefully and please, please let this be the start of something.....
y
February 22, 2013 3:40 PM ET
It's obvious how this should end. You've got the richest industry on earth, fossil fuel, up against some college kids, some professors, a few environmentalists, a few brave scientists.
And it's worse than that. The college students want their universities to divest from fossil fuel – to sell off their stock in Exxon and Shell and the rest in an effort to combat global warming. But those universities, and their boards, have deep ties to the one percent: combined, their endowments are worth $400 billion, and at Harvard, say, the five folks who run the portfolio make as much money as the entire faculty combined.
Oh, and remember – this is supposed to be an apathetic college generation. The veteran leader Ralph Nader, in a speech in Boston last year, said kids today were more passive than any he'd seen in 45 years. "Nothing changes if you don't have fire in your belly," he said. "You are a generation without even embers in your belly."
But here's my bet: the kids are going to win, and when they do, it's going to matter. In fact, with Washington blocked, campuses are suddenly a front line in the climate fight – a place to stand up to a status quo that is wrecking the planet. The campaign to demand divestment from fossil fuel stock emerged from nowhere in late fall to suddenly become the largest student movement in decades. Already it's drawing widespread media attention; already churches and city governments are joining students in the fight. It's where the action all of a sudden is.
2/ And are you a conservative that doesn't believe in climate change? Here's a challenge for you - why don't you put your money where your mouth is and move to Arizona or New Mexico if you think global warming isn't real.....
For any readers who live in the Western US - get ready for water rationing.......
DENVER — After enduring last summer’s destructive drought, farmers, ranchers and officials across the parched Western states had hoped that plentiful winter snows would replenish the ground and refill their rivers, breaking the grip of one of the worst dry spells in American history. No such luck.
Lakes are half full and mountain snows are thin, omens of another summer of drought and wildfire. Complicating matters, many of the worst-hit states have even less water on hand than a year ago, raising the specter of shortages and rationing that could inflict another year of losses on struggling farms.
Reservoir levels have fallen sharply in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. The soil is drier than normal. And while a few recent snowstorms have cheered skiers, the snowpack is so thin in parts of Colorado that the government has declared an “extreme drought” around the ski havens of Vail and Aspen.
“We’re worse off than we were a year ago,” said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center.
This week’s blizzard brought a measure of relief to the Plains when it dumped more than a foot of snow. But it did not change the basic calculus for forecasters and officials in the drought-scarred West. Ranchers are straining to find hay — it is scarce and expensive — to feed cattle. And farmers are fretting about whether they will have enough water to irrigate their fields.
“It’s approaching a critical situation,” said Mike Hungenberg, who grows carrots and cabbage on a 3,000-acre farm in Northern Colorado. There is so little water available this year, he said, that he may scale back his planting by a third, and sow less thirsty crops, like beans.
“A year ago we went into the spring season with most of the reservoirs full,” Mr. Hungenberg said. “This year, you’re going in with basically everything empty.”
National and state forecasters — some of whom now end phone calls by saying, “Pray for snow” — do have some hope. An especially wet springtime could still spare the Western plains and mountains and prime the soil for planting. But forecasts are murky: They predict warmer weather and less precipitation across the West over the next three months but say the Midwest could see more rain than usual.
Water experts get more nervous with each passing day.
“We’re running out of time,” said Andy Pineda of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District. “We only have a month or two, and we are so far behind it’s going to take storms of epic amounts just to get us back to what we would think of as normal.”
Parts of Montana, the Pacific Northwest and Utah have benefited from a snowy winter. But across Colorado, the snowpack was just 72 percent of average as of Feb. 1, which means less water to dampen hillsides and mountains vulnerable to fire, less water for farms to use on early season crops, and less to fill lakes and reservoirs that ultimately trickle down into millions of toilets, taps and swimming pools across the state.
Heavy rains and snow have recently brought some hope to the parched states of Iowa, Minnesota and Missouri, where the drought is easing. But 55.8 percent of the United States remains locked in drought, according to the government’s latest assessments. And states like Nebraska and Oklahoma are facing precipitation deficits of as much as 16 inches.
3/ A rare event - a pride of dolphins beach but are saved by some alert fellows who tow them back into the ocean.....3 minutes.....
Why do dolphins do this? See the WikiAnswers below......
4/ The Tea Party people who have taken over the Republican party were funded and encouraged by the Koch Brothers and tobacco lobbyists......
Are you surprised by this? Not really, but the tobacco connection is interesting.....
Study Confirms Tea Party Was Created by Big Tobacco and Billionaire Koch Brothers
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A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of theTea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.
Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry's role in driving climate disruption.
The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party's anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke.
Published in the peer-reviewed academic journal, Tobacco Control, the study titled, 'To quarterback behind the scenes, third party efforts': the tobacco industry and the Tea Party, is not just an historical account of activities in a bygone era. As senior author, Stanton Glantz, a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) professor of medicine, writes:
"Nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party have longstanding ties to tobacco companies, and continue to advocate on behalf of the tobacco industry's anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda."
The two main organizations identified in the UCSF Quarterback study are Americans for Prosperity andFreedomworks.
5/ This is a funny song from Golf Brooks called "Brain Farts"......interesting, it builds and builds in humour.......
A good three minutes......got me laughing out loud......
6/ Ooooohhhh.......someone needs a course in anger management......30 seconds of fury......
7/ Four very edgy ads for some female products......love the title......
This Is Why Women's Hygiene Companies Shouldn't Let Teen Boys Run Their Marketing Teams
Playtex Products (not to be confused with the entirely separate Playtex bra company) decided to run an edgy ad campaign (if you define middle-school lady-part jokes to be "edgy") for "Fresh + Sexy wipes", a private parts washcloth. I haven't confirmed who wrote the ads, but the only rational explanation is that some vice president there thought that letting his teenage son who loves porn and has no understanding of women should be given free reign over a campaign for feminine hygiene products. Cheap puns are easy, but tolerable. Shaming women about their sex organs... not so much.
8/ Absolutely fascinating story on how the era of WalMart is over, and the big box stores are on a downward spiral. As someone who has never shopped in WalMart, and never will, I hope this is true because these bastards have crippled this country......
But read on - we report, you decide......
The Era Of Giant Chain Stores Is Over — And They've Ruined America
The meetings were often raucous and wrathful and almost all the time the pro forces won — for the excellent reason that they were funded and organized by the chain stores themselves (in an early demonstration of the new axioms that money-is-speech and corporations are people, too!).
The chain stores won not only because they flung money around — sometimes directly into the wallets of public officials — but because a sizeable chunk of every local population longed for the dazzling new mode of commerce. "We Want Bargain Shopping" was their rallying cry.
The unintended consequence of their victories through the 1970s and beyond was the total destruction of local economic networks, that is, Main Streets and downtowns, in effect destroying many of their own livelihoods. Wasn't that a bargain, though?
Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, WalMart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola. In most of the country there is no other place to buy goods (and no other place to get a paycheck, scant and demeaning as it may be). America made itself hostage to bargain shopping and then committed suicide. Here we find another axiom of human affairs at work: People get what they deserve, not what they expect. Life is tragic.
The older generations responsible for all that may be done for, but the momentum has now turned in the opposite direction. Though the public hasn't groked it yet, WalMart and its kindred malignant organisms have entered their own yeast-overgrowth death spiral. In a now permanently contracting economy the big box model fails spectacularly. Every element of economic reality is now poised to squash them
9/ This one minute film is titled "Born To Create Drama", and will give you chills........excellent little British video entered for the Young Director award....
10/ We are probably going to lose Saturday postal deliveries sometime this year, but as this excellent article says it's not the Post Office's fault - it's the incompetent hacks and scum in Congress's doing......
Congress — not email — destroyed the Postal Service
The oft-maligned U.S. mail is actually quite well-run. Politicians steered it into the ditch
BY JOHN TIERNEY
U. S. Post Office letter carrier Tim Bell delivers the mail during a snow storm in Havertown, Pa. (Credit: AP Photo/Jacqueline Larma)
You know that feeling of pleasure you get when you see someone stand up to a bullying, incompetent boss? It’s viscerally satisfying, isn’t it?
That’s the way I felt this morning when I heard Postmaster General Patrick Donahueannounce that the U.S. Postal Service intended to move forward with a plan to stop Saturday delivery of mail, effective sometime in August. In doing so, Donahue stuck his thumb in the eye of the U.S. Congress, the mail agency’s ultimate boss. Bravo, Mr. Donahue.
You may think I have incorrectly identified the incompetent party here. After all, it’s a deeply ingrained part of Americans’ worldview that our postal service is the epitome of inefficiency and bad management, the perfect example of a bungling, poorly run government bureaucracy. That view gets reinforced from all kinds of sources – jaded journalists, editorial cartoonists given more to clichés than to cleverness, free-market economists, and others.
And it’s certainly true that the Postal Service faces serious problems. Mail volume is falling. The organization’s annual deficits are rising. The postal system is slowly circling the drain. If you pay any attention to postal issues, you’re familiar with some of the proximate causes of these problems: Email is eroding first-class mail volume; Congress forces the Postal Service to prefund retirement benefits for employees it hasn’t even hired yet; etc.
But the deeper source of the Postal Services woes is the U.S. Congress, not some imagined incompetence on the part of its managers and executives. In fact, the Postal Service is quite well managed and operates as efficiently and effectively as we have any right to expect,given the constraints we have imposed on it. And the main constraint is political: We have allowed the U.S. Congress to control the agency, and for decades – centuries, really – Congress has dictated that the Postal Service operate in ways that are politically useful for members of Congress even though they make no economic sense. In the process, our elected representatives have steered the agency into a ditch.
11/ My my my - I'm sure this will offend some of you, but what the hell[?].....an SNL skit of a new movie "DJesus Uncrossed", about Jesus, directed by Quentin Tarantino........
"HE has risen from the grave, and HE is pissed".......2 minutes.....
Note - lots of ultraviolence and gore........
For anyone who worries that "Saturday Night Live" doesn't take enough risks, we will kindly point you in the direction of "Djesus Uncrossed," which puts Jesus Christ in a Quentin Tarantino-directed, ultra-violent revenge flick akin to "Django Unchained."
The "SNL" parody is sure to offend many Christians, who may be put off by the first "SNL" of the Lent season depicting the Son of God as opting to not sit at the right hand of the Father after rising from the dead, and instead kicking the asses of those who crucified him.
12/ If the Republican Party seriously thinks the weenie Marco Rubio is s serious contender for the Presidency, they are seriously deluded.....the always wonderful Carl Hiaasen with an open letter to Marco.......
Carl Hiaasen: Rubio and the GOP’s thirst for leadership
BY CARL HIAASEN
CHIAASEN@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Secret Valentine’s Day memo to Sen. Marco Rubio from the Strategy Office of the Republican National Committee:
Dear Marco,
One simple word sums up your unorthodox rebuttal to the President’s State of the Union Address: Genius.
Pausing in the midst of a speech that nobody would otherwise remember, lunging off-camera for a bottle of water and then slurping it like a demented hummingbird . . .
Time magazine was right. You are the savior of the Republican Party.
Was the whole country laughing at you? Possibly. OK, yeah.
But was it the most unpresidential thing you could have done? No! You could have walked out with your fly unzipped (whoa, don’t get any ideas!).
Truth be told, all of us here at the RNC started freaking out when we saw you stop and take that sip.
What’s that goofball doing? we wondered. Does he think it’s a rehearsal? Doesn’t he know he’s on live TV in front of, like, 50 million voters?
But once we stopped throwing our coffee cups and kicking our garbage cans, we calmed down and thought about what you’d done.
13/ And SNL's Seth Meyers talks to Marco Rubio about his "water moment".....a funny three minutes.....
Sen. Marco Rubio's response to President Obama's State of the Union address made headlines for pretty much one reason: An ill-timed drink of water. On this week's Weekend Update, "SNL" allowed Rubio (played here by Taran Killam) to explain the backstory behind the infamous sip, and showed him falling into the same thirst traps in trying to recover from the gaffe.
14/ I know some of us enjoy a decent traditional horror movie, one without mad slashers or chainsaws......
In theaters now is one for you - "Dark Skies" starring Keri Russell - a good review in the Times.....
You would have good reason to bring some skepticism to the horror thriller “Dark Skies,” beginning with its generic title. There’s also its familiar premise: a suburban family must confront a mysterious, malignant presence terrorizing its house. And there’s the fact that the film’s writer and director, Scott Stewart, previously directed “Legion” and “Priest,
“Dark Skies” certainly parades textbook genre trappings: children with unseen “friends”; vertiginous, paranoia-inducing tracking shots; feathered fauna hitting windows; walls covered in newspaper clippings of unexplained phenomena; limp bodies bent backward with eyes rolled, heads pointed skyward in a stance of demonic possession. There’s even surveillance footage in the by-now-shopworn“Paranormal Activity” tradition. But those elements are employed with consummate dexterity.
There are other ingredients: the weariness on the face of the mother, Lacy Barrett (a very good Keri Russell), as she labors to sell the family’s house in an era of foreclosures; the defeat in the eyes of her husband, Daniel (Josh Hamilton), as he struggles to find employment; the creeping influence of (nongraphic) pornography on their teenage son, Jesse (Dakota Goyo), understatedly effective through hair that almost covers his eyes; the fearful talk of an ascendant India and China at a barbecue.
At night, the youngest member of the family, Sam (Kadan Rockett), appears to be communicating with “the Sandman,” a nocturnal visitor who leaves weltlike marks on Sam. But all isn’t grim: a solitary evening bike ride home for Jesse after his first innocent teenage kiss — an unexpected but not incongruous sequence infused with exhilarated delirium — soars.
An expert on extraterrestrial abduction (J. K. Simmons, masterfully lending credibility) largely explains the visitations. Nevertheless, on the Fourth of July, the Barretts — to “America the Beautiful” — must revisit their torments anew.
One of the better trailers I have seen.....genuinely chilling.....
Todays video - three magic tricks from a British artist......the first you can figure out how he does it, but the other two? Yeesh.....
Todays collection of clever puns.....
·I changed my iPod name to Titanic. It's syncing now.
·I tried to catch some fog. I mist.
·When chemists die, they barium.
·Jokes about German sausage are the wurst.
·A soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.
·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.
·This girl said she recognized me from the vegetarian club, but I'd never met herbivore.
·I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. I 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.
·A dyslexic man walks into a bra .
·PMS jokes aren't funny, period.
·Why were the Indians here first? They had reservations.
·Class trip to the Coca-Cola factory-- I hope there's no pop quiz.
·The Energizer bunny arrested and charged with battery.
·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.
·What does a clock do when it's hungry? It goes back four seconds.
·I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me!
·Broken pencils are pointless.
·What do you call a dinosaur with a 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. Police have nothing to go on.·I got a job at a bakery because I kneaded dough.
·Haunted French pancakes give me the crepes.
·Velcro - what a rip off!
·Cartoonist found dead in home. Details are sketchy.
·Venison for dinner? Oh deer!
·Earthquake in Washington obviously government's fault.
·I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure.
Todays guy joke
My Neighbor from Across the Street
She's singleI often watch her from my window.
Man was I surprised when she walked across the street and up my driveway.
She knocked on my door...
I nearly tripped in rushing to open it.
She stood there, looked at me and said, "I just finished work and I feel so horny! I have this strong urge to have a good time, get drunk, and make love all night long!
Are you busy tonight"?
Are you busy tonight"?
I immediately replied, "Tonight I'm free and I have no plans"!!!
Then she said, "Good! In that case, could you watch my dog"?
MAN... IT'S NO FUN GETTING OLD!!!
Todays Vaseline joke
A man doing market research for the Vaseline Company knocked at the door and was greeted by a young woman with three small children running around at her feet.
“I’m doing some research for Vaseline. Have you ever used the product?”
She said, “Yes. My husband and I use it all the time.”
“If you don’t mind my asking,” he said, “what do you use it for?”
“We use it for sex,” she said.
The researcher was a little taken aback. “Usually people lie to me and say they use it on a child’s bicycle chain or to help with a gate hinge. But, in fact, I know that most people do use it for sex. I admire you for your honesty. Since you’ve been so frank so far, can you tell me exactly HOW you use it for sex?”
The woman said, “I don’t mind telling you at all. My husband and I put it on the doorknob and it keeps the kids out.”
What were you thinking......
