Thought this was relevant, and some damn good questions......from Robert Reich.....
An Impertinent Question
THURSDAY, JULY 11, 2013
Permit me an impertinent question (or three).
Suppose a small group of extremely wealthy people sought to systematically destroy the U.S. government by (1) finding and bankrolling new candidates pledged to shrinking and dismembering it; (2) intimidating or bribing many current senators and representatives to block all proposed legislation, prevent the appointment of presidential nominees, eliminate funds to implement and enforce laws, and threaten to default on the nation’s debt; (3) taking over state governments in order to redistrict, gerrymander, require voter IDs, purge voter rolls, and otherwise suppress the votes of the majority in federal elections; (4) running a vast PR campaign designed to convince the American public of certain big lies, such as climate change is a hoax, and (5) buying up the media so the public cannot know the truth.
Would you call this treason?
If not, what would you call it?
And what would you do about it?
1/ The weekly news commentary from the always insightful Frank Rich........
- 7/10/13 at 12:29 PM
- 17Comments
Frank Rich on the National Circus: Obama Looks Lost in Egypt for a Reason
- By Frank Rich
Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: Obama remains on the sidelines in Egypt, Eliot Spitzer makes a surprising comeback, and Rick Perry steps aside — for now.
President Obama has been criticized by both the left and the right for inaction amid the continuing upheaval in Egypt. His predecessor, of course, will forever be remembered for his active (and largely disastrous) intervention in the Middle East. Has Obama overlearned the lessons of the Bush administration? Or is his hands-off approach (Libya excepted) the most sensible way to pursue foreign policy in the post–Arab Spring era?
If there is a sensible, one-size-fits-all approach to foreign policy in the Middle East in 2013, no one in either party or the White House or the punditry has proposed it. It’s easy to criticize Obama for sending mixed signals, and in Egypt that included the embarrassing spectacle of the White House’s Hamlet-like vacillation as both the Mubarak and Morsi regimes crumbled. But the administration can only be faulted for “inaction” if you have a clear definition of what “action” might be.
If there is a sensible, one-size-fits-all approach to foreign policy in the Middle East in 2013, no one in either party or the White House or the punditry has proposed it. It’s easy to criticize Obama for sending mixed signals, and in Egypt that included the embarrassing spectacle of the White House’s Hamlet-like vacillation as both the Mubarak and Morsi regimes crumbled. But the administration can only be faulted for “inaction” if you have a clear definition of what “action” might be.
2/ Remember the IRS "Scandal" that the Republicans milked for weeks? Aided and abetted by our corporate media?
Here is a most interesting analysis of this "scandal de jour", and how it happened.....
Almost everything "reported" about the big Obama scandal was wrong, and no one has been held to account (UPDATED)
BY ALEX SEITZ-WALD
TOPICS: IRS SCANDAL, MEDIA CRITICISM, MSNBC, CHRIS MATTHEWS, ANDREA MITCHELL, BOB WOODWARD, MEDIA, ROBERT GIBBS, JOE SCARBOROUGH, EDITOR'S PICKS, MEDIA NEWS, POLITICS NEWS
Bob Woodward, Chuck Todd (Credit: Reuters/Alex Gallardo/Fred Prouser)
The first few days of the IRS scandal that would consume Washington for weeks went like this: Conservatives were indignant, the media was outraged, the president had to respond, his allies turned on him … and only then, the Treasury Department’s inspector general released the actual report that had sparked the whole controversy — in that order. It’s a fitting microcosm of the entire saga, which has gone from legacy-tarnishing catastrophe to historical footnote in the intervening six weeks, and a textbook example of how the scandal narrative can dominate Washington and cable news even when there is no actual scandal.
While the initial reports about the IRS targeting looked pretty bad, suggesting that agents singled out tax-exempt applications for Tea Party and conservative groups for extra scrutiny, the media badly bungled the controversy when supposedly sober journalists like Bob Woodward and Chuck Todd jumped to conclusions and assumed the worst from day one. Instead of doing more reporting to discover the true nature and context of the IRS targeting, or at least waiting for their colleagues to do some, the supposedly liberal mainstream press let their eagerness to show they could be just as tough on a Democratic White House as a Republican one get ahead of the facts. We expect politicians to stretch reality to fit a narrative, but the press should be better.
3/ You go girl!
A young woman from Texas, articulate and passionate, takes Texas legislators on before she is dragged out of a Senate hearing by Police.
This has gone viral....an excellent two minutes.....
4/ And continuing with Rick Perry's state [or one pretty close], here is the Borat clip where he sings "Throw The Jew Down The Well" to a room full of Westerners, and they all sing along........boy are they stupid.......three minutes of dumb rednecks......
5/ We know Congress is dysfunctional, but what we really don't realise is that this has real consequences with what they are NOT dealing with.....
WASHINGTON — Despite finger-pointing news conferences and radio addresses by both parties on Capitol Hill, Congresslet interest rates double last week on federally subsidizedstudent loans. Eleven days earlier, a coalition of Democrats and conservative Republicans in the House scuttled the latest attempt at a farm bill, dooming for now disaster assistance for livestock producers still affected by last year’s drought.
Congress returns on Monday with a major overhaul of immigrationpending in the House, the farm bill lying in a heap and new fiscal deadlines looming when the government runs out of spending authority on Sept. 30 and reaches its borrowing limit shortly thereafter. The Postal Service, meanwhile, continues to lose millions of dollars every day as a measure to rescue the agency founders in the House.
There is no guarantee that any of these issues will be dealt with.
Even in some of the worst years of partisan gridlock, a deadline has meant something to Congress — until 2013. Drop-dead dates have come and gone this year, causing real-world consequences. On Jan. 1, tax rates went up not only for affluent families, but also for virtually all workers when lawmakers looked the other way and let a payroll tax cut expire. On March 1, after leaders from both parties declared that automatic, across-the-board spending cuts would never happen, they happened anyway because of inaction.
“One hundred percent of Congress opposed it, and we’re doing it,” said Representative Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont. “That’s a sign of a dysfunctional institution.”
At this time in 2011, Congress had passed 23 laws on the way toward the lowest total since those numbers began being tracked in 1948. This year, 15 have been passed so far.
Legislation favored by the left, like new gun-safety measures, has started in the Senate and has often foundered before it reached the House. Bills pushed by conservatives to restrict abortion and relax regulations to encourage oil and gas production have passed the House but have gone nowhere in the Senate.
Legislation that has reached President Obama’s desk this year has often been small bore and ceremonial, like the authorization of a commemorative coin bill.
“Congress has always had this habit of going to the brink and then passing something, but in the last months, something has changed,” said Justin Draeger, the president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, which has been pressing for compromise on student loans. “Recent examples of Congressional inaction have left us pessimistic. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s not looking good.”
6/ For all of you dog lovers, this French commercial will press your buttons.....it made Mary run for a tissue, and I must confess to a bout of coughing after I watched it......one minute......Mary where's the damn Kleenex.....
7/ Big banks screwing their customers seems to be a global phenomenon.....the Spanish have their own banking scandal, where banks sold dubious investments to retirees, but the "guaranteed" investments were in the Spanish property market....which is actually worse than Florida's....
MADRID — For Gonzalo López, 77, it has been a lifetime of scrimping on a factory worker’s salary, trying to save enough to make sure his brain-damaged son would be cared for even after he was gone.
Samuel Aranda for The New York Times
A recent protest at a Bankia office in Madrid. Many bank customers found that the “preferred” instruments they were offered wiped out most of their savings.
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He and his wife put aside $87,000. But four years ago, as the economic crisis took hold here, a bank official called Mr. López at home to suggest he move his money into a new “product” that would give him a 7 percent return.
“I asked, ‘Is this safe?’ ” Mr. López said. “I trusted him. He knew the money was for my son.”
Today, Mr. López is one of about 300,000 Spaniards who, in the midst of a brutal recession, have seen their life savings virtually wiped out in what critics call a deceptive and possibly fraudulent sales campaign by banks that were threatened by the implosion of Spain’s property market. Many, like Mr. López, are older and lack formal education, and were easily misled when bank officials hit on the idea of raising capital and cleaning debts off their books by getting people with savings accounts to invest in their banks instead.
For many of these savers, the first hint of trouble — and understanding that they had bought into risky investments — was when some of these banks essentially failed about two years ago. Overnight, they were unable to withdraw their money.
Soon, they came to understand that they had purchased complex financial products, originally designed for sophisticated investors. They had become creditors, and not at the head of the line, either.
The plight of these small-time savers — who invested $40,000 on average but have lost a collective $10.3 billion — has captured headlines and left the country torn about what should be done for them. Some say no matter how unsophisticated they were, they should have known better, especially when they were offered such a relatively high interest rate. They signed pages of documents saying they understood.
But others accuse Spain’s savings banks of fraud, by taking advantage of their most vulnerable customers when they already knew they were in trouble and facing possible bankruptcy. Spain’s construction boom collapsed in 2008, and according to a recent government report, the peak sales of these hybrid financial instruments occurred the next year.
Miguel Duran, a lawyer who is representing about 1,800 investors, including Mr. López, said almost all his clients had been called at home and told to ignore the pages of forms they were signing because the contents were only formalities.
He said even the name of the preferred shares they had been sold, called “preferentes” in Spanish, was deceiving. He said most of the clients believed they were getting a good rate because they, as longtime clients of the banks, were preferred customers.
8/ So what do some of the Spanish do?
The young ones run with the bulls, or get run over......6 minutes of mayhem, angry bulls tossing and goring......
9/ Most interesting story about the future of the planet, and a part of what is coming down the road........
The article deals with two issues of the many that are likely to happen - water shortages and food scarcity........both interconnected and both global issues......
I really would not want to be living in a third world country.....
Lester Brown
Peak oil has generated headlines in recent years, but the real threat to our future is peak water. There are substitutes for oil, but not for water. We can produce food without oil, but not without water.
We drink on average four liters of water per day, in one form or another, but the food we eat each day requires 2,000 liters of water to produce, or 500 times as much. Getting enough water to drink is relatively easy, but finding enough to produce the ever-growing quantities of grain the world consumes is another matter.
Grain consumed directly supplies nearly half of our calories. That consumed indirectly as meat, milk and eggs supplies a large part of the remainder. Today, roughly 40 percent of the world grain harvest comes from irrigated land. It thus comes as no surprise that irrigation expansion has played a central role in tripling the world grain harvest over the last six decades.
During the last half of the twentieth century, the world’s irrigated area expanded from close to 250 million acres (100 million hectares) in 1950 to roughly 700 million in 2000. This near tripling of world irrigation within 50 years was historically unique. But since then the growth in irrigation has come to a near standstill, expanding only 10 percent between 2000 and 2010.
In looking at water and our future, we face many questions and few answers. Could the world be facing peak water? Or has it already peaked?
Farmers get their irrigation water either from rivers or from underground aquifers. Historically, beginning with the Sumerians some 6,000 years ago, irrigation water came from building dams across rivers, creating reservoirs that then enabled them to divert the water onto the land through a network of gravity-fed canals. This method of irrigation prevailed until the second half of the twentieth century, where with few sites remaining for building dams, the prospects for expanding surface irrigation faded. Farmers then turned to drilling wells to tap underground water resources.
In doing so, they learned that there are two types of aquifers: those that are replenishable through rainfall, which are in the majority, and those that consist of water laid down eons ago, and thus do not recharge. The latter, known as fossil aquifers, include two strategically important ones, the deep aquifer under the North China Plain and the Ogallala aquifer under the U.S. Great Plains.
10/ Alanis Morrissette was huge in the 90's, and her albums were best sellers, but the star rises and sets.......but here's a reminder of why she was popular...."Ironic", a video shot in an old junker.......with her multiple personalities on view.....
11/ If there is an article that could elicit some sympathy for the oil behemoth BP it's this one.....they are being tortured, legally, in Louisiana by the good ole' boys......
Couldn't happen to a nicer oligarch.......
You can actually pinpoint the moment when the oil company BP began to get hosed in Louisiana: March 2012.
Related
Talking Business: Justice for Spill Victims, Like It or Not(November 20, 2010)
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By then, BP had paid out around $6.3 billion to some 220,000 people and businesses in the Gulf Coast region for damages suffered as a result of the 2010 oil spill. The money was distributed by Kenneth Feinberg, who had parceled out the 9/11 fund, and subsequently managed other victim compensation schemes.
In return for the payouts, however, Feinberg had insisted that the victims sign documents agreeing not to sue BP — a main goal for the company, which was hoping to avoid the kind of drawn-out litigation that went on after the 1989 Exxon-Valdez spill. He had also insisted that the claims be for real, documented harm. Believe it or not, Feinberg spent more time turning down bogus claims than he did approving payments to victims.
It almost goes without saying that the Louisiana plaintiffs’ bar found such a scheme offensive. No litigation, after all, meant no lawyers’ fees. Plus, the idea that you could have this giant company, so ripe for the plucking ... and then not pluck?
So a group of lawyers — known as the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee — persuaded their clients to skip the Feinberg process and sue BP. And in March 2012, BP settled with those lawyers. As a condition for settling, the plaintiffs’ lawyers insisted that Feinberg be replaced by Patrick Juneau, a good-ol’-boy plaintiffs’ lawyer himself. BP also agreed to expand the potential universe of claimants, knowing full well that this would likely mean that people whose economic losses had no connection to the spill would receive “compensation.” It estimated that the settlement would cost it an additional $7.8 billion.
On Monday, however, before a federal appeals court in New Orleans, BP finally said “enough.” Over the ensuing months, the company had come to realize that Juneau’s interpretation of such concepts as “revenue” and “earnings” was, er, unique. So unique, in fact, that businesses that not only weren’t affected by the BP disaster but hadn’t even suffered losses were getting millions of dollars. Some had seen increased profits during the oil spill — and still got money. Lawyers started trolling for new clients, trumpeting the fact that claims didn’t have to have any connection to the disaster. Suddenly, BP was facing the prospect of paying tens of billions of additional dollars to people who had no justifiable claim on the money.
When BP, which is based in London, complained to Judge Carl Barbier, who is overseeing all of the BP litigation in New Orleans, it got nowhere. Do I need to mention that Barbier is himself a former Louisiana plaintiffs’ lawyer? In fact, he was once the president of Louisiana Trial Lawyers Association. How cozy is that?
12/ I am in France so am not following the Zimmerman trial, which I am sure is getting the OJ treatment in the Florida media, but it was good to read this analysis by Carl Hiaasen of how the prosecution overreached, as they usually do, in charging the asshole with 2nd degree murder.......
The prosecutors are NOT the good guys any more.......
IN MY OPINION
State aimed too high in Zimmerman prosecution
BY CARL HIAASEN
CHIAASEN@MIAMIHERALD.COM
The prosecutors of George Zimmerman are taking a drubbing in the media, as well as in the courtroom.
Some of the criticism is well-deserved. Lawyers for the state sat there as passively as the spectators while their own witnesses defanged the case. The words “Objection, your honor!”seldom rang out as Zimmerman’s attorney, Mark O’ Mara, roamed far and wide during cross-examination.
Based on the trajectory of last week’s testimony, it’s almost inconceivable that Zimmerman will be convicted of second-degree murder – a charge that should never have been filed in the first place.
The facts in the killing of Trayvon Martin pointed to manslaughter from the beginning, and even then prosecutors would have had their hands full. They might yet persuade the jury to find Zimmerman guilty of that lesser charge, but it will require a deft change of strategy.
What happened in Sanford on the night of February 26, 2012, was destined to become politically combustible because of the circumstances — an unarmed black teenager shot dead by a neighborhood crime-watch patroller who’d decided that the youth was “up to no good” and began to follow him.
Martin was committing no crime. He was returning from a store to a townhouse where he was staying. The pursuit by Zimmerman was foolhardy and disastrous.
Still, police and local prosecutors initially chose not to press charges because they felt Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense was credible.
It was the tape of his first phone call to police, when a dispatcher advised him not to pursue Martin, that outraged so many people. Zimmerman can be heard noting Martin’s race and using an expletive referring to “punks.”
A special prosecutor, Angela Corey, was brought in to review the case. Six weeks later Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder. Whether or not this was a reaction to public pressure is speculative.
In any event, the murder charge was an overreach that raised expectations while reducing the chances for a conviction.
Typically in Florida, a second-degree murder case must have the elements of ill will or spite, a state of mind more easily proven in a fatal bar fight than a chance encounter. Zimmerman had never met Martin, so prosecutors were left to use Zimmerman’s words on the police call as evidence of a general antipathy, if not toward blacks then towards a class of what he perceived as neighborhood “punks.”
13/ A beautiful underwater video of marine life in Fiji........enjoy this now, pretty soon these reefs will be gone......four minutes......
14/ A scary article about how the routine overdosing of animals with antibiotics is producing superbugs that can give humans nasty diseases.......but you knew this already, didn't you.......
This is this week's George Carlin award - "Nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care"......
A heartbreaking story of a woman working on a hog farm that gave her husband MRSA is in a link at the bottom of the article, #3 of the addendums.....
The story of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in farm animals is not a simple one. But here’s the pitch version: Yet another study has reinforced the idea that keeping animals in confinement and feeding them antibiotics prophylactically breeds varieties of bacteria that cause disease in humans, disease that may not readily be treated by antibiotics. Since some of these bacteria can be fatal, that’s a scary combination.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are bad enough, but now there are more kinds; they’re better at warding off attack by antibiotics; and they can be transferred to humans by increasingly varied methods. The situation is demonstrably dire.
Two of the examples highlighted in a Food and Drug Administration report are that about 10 percent of all chicken breasts sold at retail are contaminated with a form of salmonella that’s resistant to at least one antibiotic, and nearly half of all chicken that’s sold is contaminated with antibiotic-resistant campylobacter. Some of the antibiotics in question are used to treat sick people but are also used daily in raising livestock. And it seems that these livestock, especially ones raised by contemporary industrial means, are a breeding ground for making these and other bacteria more resistant [1] .
Some of this resistance comes from overuse in humans, but there’s increasing evidence that resistance is being bred in animals that are a) raised in confinement and b) given antibiotics routinely. We want to know, of course, whether these bacteria move from animals to humans. Of particular concern is one called MRSA ST398, or “livestock-associated MRSA.” MRSA [2] is shorthand for Methicillin (a type of antibiotic)-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.
Some of this resistance comes from overuse in humans, but there’s increasing evidence that resistance is being bred in animals that are a) raised in confinement and b) given antibiotics routinely. We want to know, of course, whether these bacteria move from animals to humans. Of particular concern is one called MRSA ST398, or “livestock-associated MRSA.” MRSA [2] is shorthand for Methicillin (a type of antibiotic)-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.
MRSA is serious [3] . Maryn McKenna [4] , a journalist who specializes in these matters and the author of “Superbug,”says that “MRSA is an underappreciated epidemic in the U.S. — over all, that organism causes more than 18,000 deaths and more than 365,000 hospitalizations a year — although we don’t know how much of that epidemic ‘livestock-associated MRSA’ is responsible for.”
The latest study concerning antibiotic resistance was published last week in the journal PLoS One. It looked at livestock workers in North Carolina (the nation’s second biggest hog-producing state, after Iowa), including those in what the study’s authors called “industrial” livestock production and those on farms where the animals were raised without antibiotics and grown on pasture. In this study, the S. aureus bacteria with genetic markers most closely linked to livestock were found in far greater numbers in workers on the industrial farms.
15/ SNL had some great moments - this is the Pantene commercial with Kate McKinnon and Sofia Vergera.....three minutes.......
16/ If you are at all interested in Politics, this would be a book for you........Mark Leibovich's "This Town"......
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is (Duh!) Washington
‘This Town,’ by Mark Leibovich
By DAVID M. SHRIBMAN
Published: July 7, 2013
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Of all the irritating things about Washington — the phoniness, the showy cars, the utter inability of a metropolitan area of 6.9 million people to produce a single decent slice of pizza or a passable submarine sandwich with oil and not mayonnaise — none is more infuriating than the local insider habit of referring to the place as “this town,” as in “He’s the most important power broker in this town” or, more likely (and worse), “The way to get ahead in this town is to seem not to be trying to get ahead.”
THIS TOWN
Two Parties and a Funeral — Plus Plenty of Valet Parking! — in America’s Gilded Capital
By Mark Leibovich
386 pages. Blue Rider Press. $27.95.
So when Mark Leibovich sketches a portrait of the nation’s capital — a phrase used only by people who don’t live there — and calls it “This Town,” you know he’s got a sharp ear, and a sharp eye to accompany it. You also know that he’s got the sharp knives out.
Here it is, Washington in all its splendid, sordid glory: the pols, the pundits, the Porsches. Plus the hangers-on, the strivers, the image makers and the sellouts, all comprising what Mr. Leibovich calls “a political herd that never dies or gets older, only jowlier, richer and more heavily made-up.”
He’s an insider, Mr. Leibovich is, first a reporter at The Washington Post, now the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, yet he seems to wear those special glasses that allow you to X-ray the outside and see what’s really going on. An unusual parlor trick that, particularly in light of the A-list insiders jammed into his acknowledgments, not a single one of whom could have pulled off this book, even though half of them will e-mail me and say they could. (Memo to all of you: Don’t.)
He opens with an account of the 2008 funeral of the NBC Washington bureau chief and “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert, and as a quarter-century resident now in happy exile, I suppose I should stick to form and mention, hideously, that we — Tim and I — came to Washington at the same time and were friends, although mostly because I had a wife from Buffalo, and he delighted in teasing her about her bowling. The people at this funeral (and as I recall, this was an invitation-only rite) adhered to what Mr. Leibovich calls “the distinctive code of posture at the fancy-pants funeral: head bowed, conspicuously biting his lips, squinting extra hard for the full telegenic grief effect.”
The book is already generating buzz over Mr. Leibovich’s account of White House efforts to shape a profile in The New York Times of the first friend Valerie Jarrett and the administration’s apparent push to encourage Capitol reporters to disparage the conservative stalwart Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California.
Start to finish, this is a brilliant portrait — pointillist, you might say, or modern realist. So brilliant that once it lands on a front table at the Politics & Prose Bookstore on upper Connecticut Avenue, Mr. Leibovich will never be able to have lunch in This Town again, not that there is a respectable nonexpense-account lunch to be had in those precincts.
That said, this is a different Washington from the one I departed from a decade ago (Pittsburgh: what a relief!) and surely a different one from the era when, among the Washington royalty, only Alsop (and not Reston, Broder, Kraft, Evans or Novak) required a first name, and only because there were two of them (Stewart and Joseph).
The partisanship is worse, in part because the parties are different, with no liberal wing to the Republicans and hardly a conservative wing to the Democrats. And the rhetoric is mean, in part because it is less elegant
Todays video - time for some ultraviolence.....the "Say Hello To My Little Friend" scene from "Scarface"......
Todays handicapped joke
Todays ambiguous jokes
1. ONE TEQUILA, TWO TEQUILA, THREE TEQUILA...... FLOOR.
2. ATHEISM IS A NON-PROPHET ORGANIZATION.
3. IF MAN EVOLVED FROM MONKEYS AND APES, WHY DO WE STILL HAVE MONKEYS AND APES?
4. THE MAIN REASON THAT SANTA IS SO JOLLY IS BECAUSE HE KNOWS WHERE ALL THE BAD GIRLS LIVE.
5. I WENT TO A BOOKSTORE AND ASKED THE SALESWOMAN, "WHERE'S THE SELF- HELP SECTION?" SHE SAID IF SHE TOLD ME, IT WOULD DEFEAT THE PURPOSE.
6. WHAT IF THERE WERE NO HYPOTHETICAL QUESTIONS?
7. IF A DEAF CHILD SIGNS SWEAR WORDS, DOES HIS MOTHER WASH HIS HANDS WITH SOAP?
8. IF SOMEONE WITH MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES THREATENS TO KILL HIMSELF, IS IT CONSIDERED A HOSTAGE SITUATION?
9. IS THERE ANOTHER WORD FOR SYNONYM?
10. WHERE DO FOREST RANGERS GO TO "GET AWAY FROM IT ALL?"
11. WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU SEE AN ENDANGERED ANIMAL EATING AN ENDANGERED PLANT?
12. IF A PARSLEY FARMER IS SUED, CAN THEY GARNISH HIS WAGES?
13. WOULD A FLY WITHOUT WINGS BE CALLED A WALK?
14. WHY DO THEY LOCK GAS STATION TOILETS? ARE THEY AFRAID SOMEONE WILL BREAK-IN AND CLEAN THEM?
15. IF A TURTLE DOESN'T HAVE A SHELL, IS HE HOMELESS OR NAKED?
16. CAN VEGETARIANS EAT ANIMAL CRACKERS?
17. IF THE POLICE ARREST A MUTE, DO THEY TELL HIM HE HAS THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT?
18. WHY DO THEY PUT BRAILLE ON THE DRIVE-THROUGH BANK MACHINES?
19. HOW DO THEY GET DEER TO CROSS THE ROAD ONLY AT THOSE YELLOW ROAD SIGNS?
20. WHAT WAS THE BEST THING BEFORE SLICED BREAD?
21. ONE NICE THING ABOUT EGOTISTS: THEY DON'T TALK ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE.
22. DOES THE LITTLE MERMAID WEAR AN ALGEBRA?
(This one took me a minute)
(This one took me a minute)
23. DO INFANTS ENJOY INFANCY AS MUCH AS ADULTS ENJOY ADULTERY?
24. HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO HAVE A CIVIL WAR?
25. IF ONE SYNCHRONIZED SWIMMER DROWNS, DO THE REST DROWN TOO?
26. IF YOU ATE BOTH PASTA AND ANTIPASTO, WOULD YOU STILL BE HUNGRY?
27. IF YOU TRY TO FAIL, AND SUCCEED, WHICH HAVE YOU DONE?
28. WHOSE CRUEL IDEA WAS IT FOR THE WORD 'LISP' TO HAVE 'S' IN IT?
29. WHY ARE HEMORRHOIDS CALLED "HEMORRHOIDS" INSTEAD OF "ASSTEROIDS"?
30. WHY IS IT CALLED TOURIST SEASON IF WE CAN'T SHOOT AT THEM?
31. WHY IS THERE AN EXPIRATION DATE ON SOUR CREAM?
32. IF YOU SPIN AN ORIENTAL MAN IN A CIRCLE THREE TIMES, DOES HE BECOME DISORIENTED?
33. CAN AN ATHEIST GET INSURANCE AGAINST ACTS OF GOD?
34. WHY DO SHOPS HAVE SIGNS, 'GUIDE DOGS ONLY', THE DOGS CAN'T READ AND THEIR OWNERS ARE BLIND?
Todays nice philosophical story
Is Your Jar Full?When things in your life seem almost to much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar......and the beer.
A Professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.
So the Professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.
The Professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with an unanimous "Yes."
The Professor then produced two cans of beer from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.
"Now," said the Professor, as the laughter subsided, "I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life.
The golf balls are the important things - your family, your children, your health, your friends, your favourite passions - things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.
The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, your car. The sand is everything else - the small stuff."
"If you put the sand into the jar first", he continued, "there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are
critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the house, and fix the disposal. Take care of the golf balls first, the things that really matter. Set your priorities.
The rest is just sand."
When he had finished, there was a profound silence. Then one of the students raised her hand and with a puzzled expression, inquired what the beer represented.
The Professor smiled. "I'm glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of beers."
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