Quote of the Day:
"When you are dead, you don't know that you are dead. It is difficult only for the others.
It is the same when you are stupid"......
1/ Syria, Syria, Syria.....yap yap yap...... you're probably sick of this country even though you know absolutely nothing about it or it's politics.
So this is for you - read this from the Washington Post, and I guarantee you will know more about the Syrian issue than the average Congressman.
Actually that isn't too high a bar, is it.......
9 questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask
The United States and allies are preparing for a possibly imminent series of limited military strikes against Syria, the first direct U.S. intervention in the two-year civil war, in retaliation for President Bashar al-Assad’s suspected use of chemical weapons against civilians.
If you found the above sentence kind of confusing, or aren’t exactly sure why Syria is fighting a civil war, or even where Syria is located, then this is the article for you. What’s happening in Syria is really important, but it can also be confusing and difficult to follow even for those of us glued to it.
Here, then, are the most basic answers to your most basic questions. First, a disclaimer: Syria and its history are really complicated; this is not an exhaustive or definitive account of that entire story, just some background, written so that anyone can understand it.
2/ A delicious TV moment - it's not often I like what John McCain says, but in this one minute clip he evicerates the hosts of Fox and Friends - watch their faces......
3/ And speaking of Fox News, if you watch the channel this is the garbage you see all the time.....well maybe not so extreme, but luckily we have Stephen Colbert to explain it all for us.....four minutes, very good......
Stephen Colbert went after Fox News' Eric Bolling for suggesting that the country would be better off if prisoners killed themselves instead of spending taxpayers' dollars.
The Fox News host recently processed news that Ariel Castro, the man convicted of kidnapping and holding three women hostage in Ohio for a decade, hanged himself in prison. Bolling said that the prison system saved an estimated $780,000 — what it would have cost to house Castro through his life sentence.
"That's a good point," Colbert said on Thursday. "Justice is expensive. Imagine how much we could have saved if we never caught him."
4/ We saw "The Butler" last weekend, and I can't remember a movie that grabs you emotionally and viscerally like it. As this compelling column from Leonard Pitts says we have lost touch with our history, and how brutal American society was to our black citizens.
"The Butler", as well as being an enthralling piece of cinema, is also a reminder of some of the nastier events of the last 60 years, but it's also a story of a family, warts and all.
Forest Whitaker is excellent, and Oprah is surprisingly good as his wife....
Well worth seeing......
MY OPINION
‘The Butler’ tells story of hard truths
BY LEONARD PITTS JR.
LPITTS@MIAMIHERALD.COM
This isn’t your average summer movie crowd.
It’s not just that they are largely African American, skin in all the shades of buttermilk, caramel and creamless coffee that we call “black.” It’s not just that they are largely old, with raincloud hair and been-there eyes, some leaning on canes for support.
No, the thing you really notice is that they come with grandkids trailing behind them as a kite string does a kite, young people born of the digital age who’ve been told they will spend this afternoon watching a movie with Nana and Pop-Pop. What’s more, it will be a movie in which no one pines for a hunky vampire or spouts quips while shooting bad guys.
No, they have come to see Lee Daniels’ The Butler, the fictionalized story of a White House servant whose tenure stretches from Eisenhower to Reagan. Watching them take their seats, you get the sense that, while these grandparents may have come for Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker, what they have really come for, what they have brought their grandchildren to see, is The Truth. As in The Truth of How Things Were, and how that shades and shapes How Things Are.
That Truth has had a hard time of it in this country. It lives in books, yes, but given that so many of us regard reading as punishment and chore, that’s like saying it lives on Mars. Nor has Hollywood ever had much interest in telling that Truth and on the rare occasions it does, it pretties it up with so many Disneyesque evasions, dulls its hard edges with so much buttery compromise, that it hardly looks like itself.
5/ I'm excited - I have just got hold of an exclusive video of the Senior Olympic syncronized swimming team from "The Villages".......look at their moves, such precision and grace......
An impressive four minutes........
6/ A fascinating essay on the Washington bubble's view of America's role in the world. This story is almost scholarly in it's ideas, and is a little long but well worth digesting.
But if you don't have time to read it I have included the end of the essay, and summarises the central idea quite well. A challenging read......
Today, almost 12 years after 9/11, the U.S. position in the world seems even more singular. Militarily speaking, the Global War on Terror continues, however namelessly, in the Obama era in places as distant as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The U.S. military remains heavily deployed in the Greater Middle East, though it has pulled out of Iraq and is drawing down in Afghanistan. In recent years, U.S. power has, in an exceedingly public manner, been “pivoting” to Asia, where the building of new bases, as well as the deployment of new troops and weaponry, to “contain” that imagined future superpower China has been proceeding apace.
At the same time, the U.S. military has been ever-so-quietly pivoting to Africa where, as TomDispatch’s Nick Turse reports, its presence is spreading continent-wide. American military bases still dot the planet in remarkable profusion, numbering perhaps 1,000 at a moment when no other nation on Earth has more than a handful outside its territory.
The reach of Washington’s surveillance and intelligence networks is unique in the history of the planet. The ability of its drone air fleet to assassinate enemies almost anywhere is unparalleled. Europe and Japan remain so deeply integrated into the American global system as to be essentially a part of its power-projection capabilities.
This should be the dream formula for a world dominator and yet no one can look at Planet Earth today and not see that the single superpower, while capable of creating instability and chaos, is limited indeed in its ability to control developments. Its president can't even form a "coalition of the willing" to launch a limited series of missile attacks on the military facilities of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. From Latin America to the Greater Middle East, the American system is visibly weakening, while at home, inequality and poverty are on the rise, infrastructure crumbles, and national politics is in a state of permanent “gridlock.”
Such a world should be fantastical enough for the wildest sort of dystopian fiction, for perhaps a novel titled 2014. What, after all, are we to make of a planet with a single superpower that lacks genuine enemies of any significance and that, to all appearances, has nonetheless been fighting a permanent global war with... well, itself -- and appears to be losing?
7/ An amusing 90 second video of the crew of the original "Star Trek" observing Miley Cyrus twerking.
Although I saw the original 8 minute performance at the MTV Awards by this scrawny, pathetic little stoner I can't bring myself to post it.....It's just too awful.
But this is a good substitute......
8/ I hate Larry Summers for his role in enabling the Wall Street crisis, and his corruption in stepping from his government post straight to Citibank, But in this very interesting story we learn many other reasons to loathe this bastard......
It takes a special kind of magic to bring together groups as diverse as progressive Democrats, Californians, conservative Republicans, feminists, a number of prominent economists, and a large chunk of the global investment community.
Lawrence Summers has that kind of magic.
These groups oppose the choice of Summers to lead the Federal Reserve, a move the White House has been pushing all summer. Resistance among progressives has been broad and deep, as reflected in this petition against the Summers nomination. Their opposition was unsurprising given Summers’ pivotal role in disastrous Wall Street deregulation, and his history of personal enrichment from the same banks he empowered as Treasury Secretary.
But the independent left is not the only hotbed of anti-Summers opinion. Key Democrats on Capitol Hill, including Senators Jeff Merkley, Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren, haveexpressed their opposition as well.
It’s probably fair to say that most feminists also oppose Summers. It’s not just that the person most people assumed would get the nod is a woman, Fed vice-chair Janet Yellen, and the Administration appears to be sidestepping her. Summers’ problems with the women’s movement date back to 2005 when, as Harvard University President, hesuggested that there may be fewer women scientists because of “innate differences” in “aptitude” – presumably meaning skills such as mathematics and analytical reasoning
9/ A few minutes of amusement.......especially if you are older.........
10/ The wonderful George Carlin on the environment and "being green"......a conservative friend sent this to me thinking I wouldn't like it.
Au contraire, mon ami - I agree with everything he says and certainly appreciate the humour and the serious message behind it.
An amusing and thought-provoking seven minutes......
11/ So here's the question - why aren't the Democrats campaigning to raise the minimum wage? As this article says it would be electoral gold, popular with Democrats and even a majority of Republican voters, but hated by the corporate oligarchy.....
Sometimes I think the "D" party just wants to lose elections, and another part of my fevered brain says "sellout"....
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an issue that was hugely popular with the public, fit perfectly into the progressive agenda, appealed to the white working class, and split the Republican Party right in half? Sounds to be good to be true, right? Actually, it’s hiding in plain sight: raising the minimum wage.
Start with overall public opinion. The public’s views on many policy issues can be very complicated; there are nuances to the nuances, so to speak. The polling on the minimum wage, however, is about as unnuanced as it comes. People just think it’s the right thing to do and decades of attempts by conservatives to convince the public otherwise have been an abject failure. Take, for instance, this Pew Research poll from early 2013. By a thumping 71-26 margin, the public said it favored increasing the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.00 an hour.
Moreover, there was astonishingly strong support across demographic groups. Blacks and Hispanics supported the proposal by 91-8 and 83-14, respectively, and whites felt similarly by a not-as-large-but-still-strong 64-33 margin. Those with family incomes below $30,000 supported raising the minimum wage by 79-20, but so did those with incomes above $75,000, who were also on board by a high (65-32) margin:
12/ Music video
One of the edgiest videos ever - Calvin Harris with "Thinking About You". This has a woman in a thong walking around a mansion in a tracking shot, what appears to be Somali pirates capturing a sailboat full of sunbathing models, a young lad beaten up, then attacking another guy, a mile high club moment, lesbians tongue diving and shots of elegant people drinking in luxurious settings and falling into pools......
A little incomprehensible but visually hypnotic.......and if you like EDM the song is excellent.......
13/ Are you in one of these groups?
Children, women, students, the elderly, wage earners, sick and disabled, minorities, the homeless.
If you are - congratulations! You're a "dumped on American"......
We live in a society that allows one man to make $15 million a day while a low-income mother gets $4.50 a day for food, and much of Congress wants to cut the $4.50.
Are political and corporate leaders even remotely aware of the conditions of society beneath the wealthiest 10% or so?
The following are some of the victims of an economic system that has forgotten the majority of its people.
Children
One out of every five American children now lives in poverty, and for black children it's nearly one out of TWO. Almost half of food stamp recipients are children.
UNICEF places us near the bottom of the developed world in the inequality of children's well-being, and the OECD found that we have more child poverty than all but 3 of 30 developed countries. It's rather embarrassing to view the charts.
Students
Over the last 12 years, according to a New York Times report, the United States has gone from having the highest share of employed 25- to 34-year-olds among large, wealthy economies to having among the lowest. The number of college grads working for minimum wage has doubled in just five years.
Higher education was cut by nearly $17 billion in the years leading up to 2012-13. Through those same years large corporations wereavoiding about $14 billion annually in taxes. To make up the difference, students face tuition costs that have risen almost ten times faster than median family income, leading them into their low-wage post-college positions with an average of $26,000 in student loan debt.
The Elderly
14/ Fascinating four minute mini-doc about the Hubble telescope and astronomy, and how they have discovered galaxies where none were visible before......science made really interesting.......
15/ Health care costs....time to try something different.....
The Cure for the $1,000 Toothbrush
By TINA ROSENBERG
Tim Lahan
Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.
Here is a basic fact of health care in the United States: Doctors and hospitals know what they charge, but patients don’t know what they pay. As in any market, when one side has no information, that side loses: price secrecy is a major reason medical bills are so high. In my previous column, I wrote about the effect of this lack of transparency on the bills patients pay out of pocket.
We know about these bills, which hit us directly. What most people don’t know, because the costs are hidden, is that the same imbalance exists with insurance. The employers and employees who buy health coverage have delegated vigilance over health care costs to insurers — but insurers, for the most part, have gone AWOL.
Consider the story of Texas811, a company with about 200 employees based in Dallas. (They mark utility lines so people don’t damage them when they dig.)
In January 2010, the company was enrolled in a Blue Cross P.P.O., or preferred provider organization. That month, Blue Cross told Texas811 that it was planning to raise the company’s premiums by 75 percent. That was extreme. But health insurance premiums are rising three times as fast as wages, doubling since 2002. “We freaked out,” said Lee Marrs, the company’s president. They negotiated. Blue Cross agreed to lower the increase to 68 percent. “At that point it was go out of business, drop health coverage, or try something new,” Marrs said.
They tried something new.
Todays video - "Hell Is Coming To Breakfast", from "The Outlaw Josey Wales" with Clint Eastwood......
Todays psychic joke
A father put his 3 year old daughter to bed, told her a story and listened to her prayers
which ended by saying, "God bless Mummy, God bless Daddy, God bless Grandma
and goodbye Grandpa."
The father asked, 'Why did you say goodbye Grandpa?'
The little girl said, "I don't know Daddy, it just seemed like the right
thing to do."
The next day Grandpa died.The father thought it was a strange coincidence.
A few months later the father put the girl to bed and listened to her
prayers which went like this, "God bless Mummy, God bless Daddy
The father asked, 'Why did you say goodbye Grandpa?'
The little girl said, "I don't know Daddy, it just seemed like the right
thing to do."
The next day Grandpa died.The father thought it was a strange coincidence.
A few months later the father put the girl to bed and listened to her
prayers which went like this, "God bless Mummy, God bless Daddy
and goodbye Grandma."
The next day the grandmother died.
Thought the father; "This kid is in contact with the other side."
Several weeks later when the girl was going to bed the Dad heard her say,
"God bless Mummy and goodbye Daddy."
He practically went into shock. He couldn't sleep all night and got up at
the crack of dawn to go to his office.
The next day the grandmother died.
Thought the father; "This kid is in contact with the other side."
Several weeks later when the girl was going to bed the Dad heard her say,
"God bless Mummy and goodbye Daddy."
He practically went into shock. He couldn't sleep all night and got up at
the crack of dawn to go to his office.
He was nervous as a cat all day, had lunch and watched the clock.
He figured if he could get by until midnight he would be okay.
He felt safe in the office, so instead of going home at the end of the day
he stayed there, drinking coffee, looking at his watch and jumping at every
sound.
Finally midnight arrived; he breathed a sigh of relief and went home.
When he got home his wife said, "I've never seen you work so late. What's
the matter?"
He said, "I don't want to talk about it, I've just spent the worst day of my
life."
She said, "You think you had a bad day; you'll never believe what happened
to me. This morning my golf pro dropped dead in the middle of my lesson!"
He figured if he could get by until midnight he would be okay.
He felt safe in the office, so instead of going home at the end of the day
he stayed there, drinking coffee, looking at his watch and jumping at every
sound.
Finally midnight arrived; he breathed a sigh of relief and went home.
When he got home his wife said, "I've never seen you work so late. What's
the matter?"
He said, "I don't want to talk about it, I've just spent the worst day of my
life."
She said, "You think you had a bad day; you'll never believe what happened
to me. This morning my golf pro dropped dead in the middle of my lesson!"
Todays senior joke
I took my dad to the mall the other day to buy some new shoes (he is 76).
We decided to grab a bite at the food court.
I noticed he was watching a teenager sitting next to him.
The teenager had spiked hair in all different colors - green, red, purple, orange, and blue.
My dad kept staring at her.
The teenager kept looking and would find my dad staring every time.
When the teenager had had enough, she sarcastically asked:
"What's the matter old man, never done anything wild in your life?"
Knowing my Dad, I quickly swallowed my food so that I wouldn't
choke on his response; I knew it'd be good!
In classic style he responded without batting an eyelid ....
"Got stoned once and had sex with a parrot.
I was just wondering if you might be my kid."
Todays relationships joke
"The Black Bra" (as told by a woman)
I had lunch with 2 of my unmarried friends.
One is engaged, one is a mistress, and I have been married for 20+ years.
We were chatting about our relationships and decided
to amaze our men by greeting them at the door wearing a black bra,
stiletto heels and a mask over our eyes. We agreed to meet in a few
days to exchange notes.
Here's how it all went.
Engaged friend:
One is engaged, one is a mistress, and I have been married for 20+ years.
We were chatting about our relationships and decided
to amaze our men by greeting them at the door wearing a black bra,
stiletto heels and a mask over our eyes. We agreed to meet in a few
days to exchange notes.
Here's how it all went.
Engaged friend:
The other night when my boyfriend came over he found me with a black leather
bodice, tall stilettos and a mask. He saw me and said, 'You are the woman
of my dreams...I love you.' Then we made passionate love all night long.
The mistress:
bodice, tall stilettos and a mask. He saw me and said, 'You are the woman
of my dreams...I love you.' Then we made passionate love all night long.
The mistress:
Me too! The other night I met my lover at his office and I was wearing a raincoat,
under it only the black bra, heels and mask over my eyes. When I opened
the raincoat he didn't say a word, but he started to tremble and we had
wild sex all night.
Then I had to share my story:
When my husband came home I was wearing the black bra, black stockings, stilettos
and a mask over my eyes. When he came in the door and saw me he said:
(You are going
to love this...)
"What's
for dinner, Zorro?"
under it only the black bra, heels and mask over my eyes. When I opened
the raincoat he didn't say a word, but he started to tremble and we had
wild sex all night.
Then I had to share my story:
When my husband came home I was wearing the black bra, black stockings, stilettos
and a mask over my eyes. When he came in the door and saw me he said:
(You are going
to love this...)
"What's
for dinner, Zorro?"
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