1/ Excellent article from Bill McKibben on how the climate change movement, although seemingly powerless against the unlimited resources of the fossil fuel corporations, is gathering steam. There may be some hope out there and it's driven by the young......
All I can say to everyone under 60 reading this you had better wish them luck, because unless they succeed you are in for some bad times..........
April 11, 2013 8:00 AM ET
It got so hot in Australia in January that the weather service had to add two new colors to its charts. A few weeks later, at the other end of the planet, new data from the CryoSat-2 satellite showed 80 percent of Arctic sea ice has disappeared. We're not breaking records anymore; we're breaking the planet. In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They'll just ask, "So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?"
Here's the good news: We'll at least be able to say we fought.
After decades of scant organized response to climate change, a powerful movement is quickly emerging around the country and around the world, building on the work of scattered front-line organizers who've been fighting the fossil-fuel industry for decades. It has no great charismatic leader and no central organization; it battles on a thousand fronts. But taken together, it's now big enough to matter, and it's growing fast.
Americans got to see some of this movement spread out across the Mall in Washington, D.C., on a bitter-cold day in February. Press accounts put the crowd upward of 40,000 – by far the largest climate rally in the country's history. They were there to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, which would run down from Canada's tar sands, south to the Gulf of Mexico, a fight thatTime magazine recently referred to as the Selma and the Stonewall of the environmental movement.
2/ Wow. Unless you are a parent you have no idea what Big Food is dong to our kids, and this TED talk spells out how insidious marketing of junk food to children is making entire generations unhealthy.
It's a fascinating 14 minutes, and a real eyeopener on how these household names are burrowing into children's minds.......
Watch The Video That Coca-Cola And McDonald's Hope You Never See
Anna Lappe is an author and activist. Her TEDx talk will open your eyes about what the food industry gets away with.
3/ Time for the March fails from TwisterNederland.....mayhem, pain, dumb kids, drunks and just plain bad luck.....12 minutes of grimacing at the possible hospital visits.....
4/ Absolutely fascinating story about the anger that infects right wing politics today, and how the Republican extremists can't help themselves - they're angry. But why?
Read and find out.....and it's not that complex.......love the title!
We all know a few of these people........
"Fifty years after the atom bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are gleaming, thriving metropolises. After 50 years of failed government promises in Detroit, the money has dried up, welfare has run out and the city is headed for fire sale. With cities and states across the USA not far behind and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, Detroit is no longer just a punch line. It is a warning of the future to come for millions of Americans."‒ Charles Hurt
This is a story about the politics of anger. The quote above forms the last paragraph of a review of Charlie LeDuff's gut-wrenching book, Detroit, An American Autopsy. It's a powerful book that speaks volumes not only about Detroit but also about most big cities in America today – cities where petty crime, gang violence, drug addiction, prostitution, poverty, vandalism, vagrancy, filth, abandoned buildings, arson, and despair have been on the rise for decades. Remarkably, LeDuff's chronicle of Detroit's descent avoids partisan rancor. His is a story of a city suffering from a chronic condition that has taken an ugly turn and become terminal. And, yes, he's angry; very angry.
There's a lot of anger in America, Europe and the Middle East and, come to think of it, everywhere. Anger like everything else has gone global. We recognize it when we see it – in others, that is – but it's here, too, it's on the rise, and it explains as least as much about politics in contemporary America as such other deadly sins as greed and power lust. In fact, it's probably more central as a motivating force behind our dysfunctional politics than either.
Take Charlie LeDuff, for example. LeDuff's anger is visceral. He makes no attempt to hide it – and no apologies. He's angry with leaders who don't lead and politicians who make promises they don't even try to keep. He spares no one and directs his anger at both of our major political parties. And, of course, he's right to do so.
But unlike LeDuff, our politicians and partisan voters are angry. That's especially true of the new breed of Republicans in Congress. Republicans have always been partisan, but then so have Democrats. It's only natural. But something has changed. Partisanship is now a synonym for paralysis in Washington.
Why? Is the Tea Party the cause? Merely a symptom? Or is it something else altogether? Here's Harvard's Theda Skocpol, the eminent political sociologist, talking about what makes the Tea Party rank-and-file tick: “At the popular level, where there are genuine activists who have really gone out there and protested and organized into hundreds of groups...they’ve played a huge role in shaping the presidential debates and the presidential agenda.”
5/ Riveting video on how Eskimos go under the Arctic ice to hunt for food when the tides are out.....and they only have a few minutes......
Great doc from the BBC....3 minutes......
6/ What the hell has happened to Canada? It used to be the sane example we could hold up as a kindler, gentler America.....but then they elected a right wing government based in Alberta, home of the Canadian petro-state mining the nastiest oil source on the planet and destroying huge sections of Alberta in the process......
IF President Obama blocks the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all, he’ll do Canada a favor.
Canada’s tar sands formations, landlocked in northern Alberta, are a giant reserve of carbon-saturated energy — a mixture of sand, clay and a viscous low-grade petroleum called bitumen. Pipelines are the best way to get this resource to market, but existing pipelines to the United States are almost full. So tar sands companies, and the Alberta and Canadian governments, are desperately searching for export routes via new pipelines.
Canadians don’t universally support construction of the pipeline. A poll by Nanos Research in February 2012 found that nearly 42 percent of Canadians were opposed. Many of us, in fact, want to see the tar sands industry wound down and eventually stopped, even though it pumps tens of billions of dollars annually into our economy.
The most obvious reason is that tar sands production is one of the world’s most environmentally damaging activities. It wrecks vast areas of boreal forest through surface mining and subsurface production. It sucks up huge quantities of water from local rivers, turns it into toxic waste and dumps the contaminated water into tailing ponds that now cover nearly 70 square miles.
Also, bitumen is junk energy. A joule, or unit of energy, invested in extracting and processing bitumen returns only four to six joules in the form of crude oil. In contrast, conventional oil production in North America returns about 15 joules. Because almost all of the input energy in tar sands production comes from fossil fuels, the process generates significantly more carbon dioxide than conventional oil production.
There is a less obvious but no less important reason many Canadians want the industry stopped: it is relentlessly twisting our society into something we don’t like. Canada is beginning to exhibit the economic and political characteristics of a petro-state.
Countries with huge reserves of valuable natural resources often suffer from economic imbalances and boom-bust cycles. They also tend to have low-innovation economies, because lucrative resource extraction makes them fat and happy, at least when resource prices are high.
7/ A serious Bill Maher.....of course there are jokes, but these is an edge to his remarks on the military-industrial complex.....five minutes......
8/ It just keeps getting worse for the millenials [18 to 34] - job prospects are dim, many are in debt and they are losing hope.....rightly.....
And it's not good news for the Democrats......
The Sinking American Electorate: Young And In Peril
Millennials – the largest, best educated, and most diverse generation in our nation’s history – have one question for Democrats seeking election in 2014: Do your values really reflect ours?
Democrats have reason to worry about what the answer would be from the 80 million people between the ages of 18 and 29 who make up the largest segment the “rising American electorate.” Economically, the only thing rising for America’s youth are unemployment rates, debt, and inequality. Their judgment about not only who is responsible, but also who is fighting for their economic future, will be key to determining the outcome of the 2014 midterm elections.
9/ A decent Jon Stewart on how the Senate refused to ratify a treaty to stop trading weapons with terrorists and drug lords......yes, you read it right.
An amusing five minutes but also a pathetic glimpse into the workings of our dysfunctional politics.....
10/ Instinctively you know it's a good thing to talk to babies, just so they can hear the sound of your voice and forming words. Well, it's true. Families who talk to their infants have better results than poor families who use TV as a babysitter.
Note - this applies to grandparents too - yap away at the little beasties - it's all good......
By the time a poor child is 1 year old, she has most likely already fallen behind middle-class children in her ability to talk, understand and learn. The gap between poor children and wealthier ones widens each year, and by high school it has become a chasm. American attempts to close this gap in schools have largely failed, and a consensus is starting to build that these attempts must start long before school — before preschool, perhaps even before birth.
There is no consensus, however, about what form these attempts should take, because there is no consensus about the problem itself. What is it about poverty that limits a child’s ability to learn? Researchers have answered the question in different ways: Is it exposure to lead? Character issues like a lack of self-control or failure to think of future consequences? The effects of high levels of stress hormones? The lack of a culture of reading?
Another idea, however, is creeping into the policy debate: that the key to early learning is talking — specifically, a child’s exposure to language spoken by parents and caretakers from birth to age 3, the more the better. It turns out, evidence is showing, that the much-ridiculed stream of parent-to-child baby talk — Feel Teddy’s nose! It’s so soft! Cars make noise — look, there’s a yellow one! Baby feels hungry? Now Mommy is opening the refrigerator! — is very, very important. (So put those smartphones away!)
The idea has been successfully put into practice a few times on a small scale, but it is about to get its first large-scale test, in Providence, R.I., which last month won the $5 million grand prize in Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge, beating 300 other cities for best new idea. In Providence, only one in three children enter school ready for kindergarten reading. The city already has a network of successful programs in which nurses, mentors, therapists and social workers regularly visit pregnant women, new parents and children in their homes, providing medical attention and advice, therapy, counseling and other services. Now Providence will train these home visitors to add a new service: creating family conversation.
11/ Nadia Ali and Arty with "This Must Be The One", a great song and a clever video about dating and missed opportunities. It's clever because they use a split screen to tell a story......quite cool......and very French....
12/ We are at the point where we have some very good books on how to eat to protect yourself against Big Ag, and in this column by Mark Bittman he mentions some books for you to read.
The one that sounds very good is "Pandora's Lunchbox", a look at how the food industry poisons us......
Last year, it seemed, every book about food that crossed my desk — other than those about cooking, of course — seemed to have one of two titles: “How I Moved to Brooklyn and Became a Roof-Gardening Butcher” or “The Gluten-Free Diet Saved My Life, and It Can Save Yours.”
This year is different; the books are variations on the title “How Big Food Is Trying to Kill You.” We have “Salt Sugar Fat,” my Times colleague Michael Moss’s epic description of the manipulation of processed food to make it even more palatable and addictive tomorrow than it was yesterday, and how the industry is well aware of how destructive of public health this manipulation truly is. We have the excellent “Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America” by Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food and Water Watch, which details the takeover of our food system by that same crew of corporate cynics.
And we have the cleverly titled “Pandora’s Lunchbox,” by Melanie Warner, a freelance (and former Times) reporter, which is so much fun that you might forget how depressing it all is. This is in part thanks to Warner’s measured, almost dry but deceptively alluring reportorial style, but it’s also because the extent to which food is manipulated – and therefore, consumers as well — is downright absurd . There are more Holy Cow! moments here than even someone who thinks he or she knows what’s going on in food production could predict.
13/ Matilda is 94 years old, and enters a foxtrot dance competition.......silly you say? Watch her dance.....wow.....four minutes.....
14/ Good story from the Guardian on how climate change will end up starving hundreds of millions of people around the world. It's really interesting because it specifies by continent how a 2 degree C rise in temperature will affect agriculture......
But since the countries most affected are in Africa and SE Asia, cue George Carlin - "nobody seem to notice, nobody seems to care"......
Climate change: how a warming world is a threat to our food supplies
When the Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire on 17 December 2010, it was in protest at heavy-handed treatment and harassment in the province where he lived. But a host of new studiessuggest that a major factor in the subsequent uprisings, which became known as the Arab spring, was food insecurity.
Drought, rocketing bread prices, food and water shortages have all blighted parts of the Middle East. Analysts at the Centre for American Progress in Washington say a combination of food shortages and other environmental factors exacerbated the already tense politics of the region. As the Observer reports today, an as-yet unpublished US government study indicates that the world needs to prepare for much more of the same, as food prices spiral and longstanding agricultural practices are disrupted by climate change.
Todays video - a classic Johnny Carson skit from 1982.......a politician volunteers to take a lie detector test......
Todays guy joke
My wife said "Fix that gutter downspout TODAY!" So I invited the boys over. One brought his welding machine, one brought a pipe cutter the others brought beer.
Took us about 4 hours, mostly for the beer, but we got the downspout fixed.
Took us about 4 hours, mostly for the beer, but we got the downspout fixed.
Wife is still speechless... (I am certain for not much longer ...) 
Todays Canadian joke
This Toronto guy kills a deer and takes it home to cook for dinner.
Both he and da wife decide that they won't tell the kids what kind of
meat it is, but will give them a clue and let them guess.
The kids were eager to know what the meat was on their plates, so they
begged their dad for a clue.
The dad said, "Well, it's what mummy calls me sometimes, eh."
The little girl screams to her brother, "Don't eat it!
It's an asshole!
Todays generational joke
|
Bonus - todays redneck joke
A redneck with a bucket full of live fish, was approached recently by a game warden in Texas as he started to drive his boat away from a lake.
The game warden asked the man, "May I see your fishing license please?"
"Naw, sir," replied the redneck. "I don't need none of them there papers. These here are my pet fish."
"Pet fish!?!?"
"Yep. Once a week, I bring these here fish o'mine down to the lake and let 'em swim 'round for a while. Then when I whistle, they swim right back into my net and I take 'em home."
"What a line of baloney....you're under arrest."
The redneck said, "It's the truth, Mr. Gov'ment man. I'll show ya!
We do this all the time!!"
We do this all the time!!"
"WE do, now, do WE?" smirked the warden. "PROVE it!"
The redneck released the fish into the lake and stood and waited. After a few minutes, the warden said,
"Well?"
"Well, WHUT?" said the redneck.
The warden asked, "When are you going to call em back?"
"Call who back?"
"The FISH," replied the warden!
"Whut fish?" asked the redneck.
MORAL OF THE STORY:
We may not be as smart as some city slickers, but we ain't as dumb as some government employees.
MORAL OF THE STORY:
We may not be as smart as some city slickers, but we ain't as dumb as some government employees.
No comments:
Post a Comment