Happy holidays to all of you.......and this final DDD of 2013 has some excellent articles - hope you can get to them, but start with #1 - a 3 minute video......
1/ I love science, and respect scientists.....so this three minute video from David Suzuki really resonated with me, because he explains a complex issue simply and clearly so everyone [even Tea Party Republicans] can get it. It's growth and overpopulation.......
Having watched this clip, think about this........
The world population is 7 billion as of 2012, and projected to be 8.3 billion by 2030 [UN figures]. How are we going to feed everyone, with climate change affecting our food production patterns with droughts, floods and storms? The oceans are dying from the rise in temperatures, and we have overfished to the point of no return. Big problem.
Every country wants economic growth....all you ever hear on the news is rates of growth of GDP, jobs added etc. All countries are driven to grow, to use up more resources and the middle classes of India, China and Brazil want more - they watch American shows on TV, and want our lifestyle. The bacteria are becoming plumper......
There are also cultural issues - the most influential religion in the world is anti-contraception [Catholic], and they are matched by the politically powerful right wing Christians in the US, who have stopped any American efforts to help African countries control their populations. These forces want more breeding, which means more bodies to feed and more converts to 'the faith", i.e. more revenue.
Between the absolute fact that climate changes will warm the planet by a minimum of 3 to 3.5C, which will produce chaos, and we cannot stop the drive for economic growth which is pillaging our resources, humanity is on track to go over a cliff pretty soon......I may not see it, but I'm pretty sure our grandkids will.
In the meantime, enjoy the holidays.....
2/ The ultimate Christmas house display.....45000 lights and a multi-track program for the two minute sequence, set to Amazing Grace.......imagine if one of your neighbors down the street did this! A nightmare.....
3/ What makes everything work in our society is trust, but peoples' faith in our institutions is slipping.......
A most interesting essay by Joseph Stiglitz that is deeply concerning because if there is no trust, there's chaos.....
In No One We Trust
By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ
America today, we are sometimes made to feel that it is naïve to be preoccupied with trust. Our songs advise against it, our TV shows tell stories showing its futility, and incessant reports of financial scandal remind us we’d be fools to give it to our bankers.
That last point may be true, but that doesn’t mean we should stop striving for a bit more trust in our society and our economy. Trust is what makes contracts, plans and everyday transactions possible; it facilitates the democratic process, from voting to law creation, and is necessary for social stability. It is essential for our lives. It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round.
We do not measure trust in our national income accounts, but investments in trust are no less important than those in human capital or machines.
Unfortunately, however, trust is becoming yet another casualty of our country’s staggering inequality: As the gap between Americans widens, the bonds that hold society together weaken. So, too, as more and more people lose faith in a system that seems inexorably stacked against them, and the 1 percent ascend to ever more distant heights, this vital element of our institutions and our way of life is eroding.
4/ John Oliver is getting his own show on HBO, so Jon Stewart did a special segment to say goodbye and wish him well.....by sandbagging Oliver, setting him up for a normal guest spot but going off script and showing some of the best segments Oliver has done over the years.....this is a wonderful clip, and quite emotional for both of them with John Oliver in tears......
A great seven minutes.....
Thursday's "Daily Show" opened with what appeared to be a segment on British tabloids spying on the Royals, but it was all a clever ruse, setting up John Oliver for an emotional send-off on his last night as the show's Senior British Correspondent.
Oliver is leaving "The Daily Show" to host his own weekly series on HBO, but after seven years, Stewart couldn't let him go without taking a look back at some of the highlights.
The charade apparently worked, because Oliver was clearly caught off guard:
5/ Some of the untold stories about our prison system are the ones where the health care and food services for prisoners are given to private contractors, who then use their political clout to cut costs to the point of pain for the prisoners.....after all, who really gives a rats ass for the scum behind bars. They deserve it, right? Smoking that weed and getting 10 years......
This story from an emotional Chris Pierce is about Aramark, which runs food service at a lot of prisons.....cheaply. I remember Aramark ran the company cafeteria at Royal Caribbean and had some decent food for a reasonable price, but if the employees complained, there would be trouble. Prisoners? Forgetabbbbaout it....
Food Behind Bars Isn’t Fit for Your Dog
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SHAREPosted on Dec 22, 2013
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| AP/Matt Rourke |
Aramark World Headquarters in Philadelphia in 2006.
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By Chris Hedges
Shares in the Philadelphia-based Aramark Holdings Corp., which contracts through Aramark Correctional Services to provide the food to 600 correctional institutions across the United States, went public Thursday. The corporation, acquired in 2007 for $8.3 billion by investors that included Goldman Sachs, raised $725 million last week from the sale of the stock. It is one more sign that the business of locking up poor people in corporate America is booming.
Aramark, whose website says it provides 1 million meals a day to prisoners, does what corporations are doing throughout the society: It lavishes campaign donations on pliable politicians, who in turn hand out state and federal contracts to political contributors, as well as write laws and regulations to benefit their corporate sponsors at the expense of the poor. Aramark fires unionized workers inside prisons and jails and replaces them with underpaid, nonunionized employees. And it makes sure the food is low enough in both quality and portion to produce huge profits.
Aramark, often contracted to provide food to prisoners at about a dollar a meal, is one of numerous corporations, from phone companies to construction firms, that have found our grotesque system of mass incarceration to be very profitable. The bodies of the poor, when they are not captive, are worth little to corporations. But bodies behind bars can each generate $40,000 to $50,000 a year for corporate coffers. More than 2.2 million men and women are in prisons and jails in the U.S.
6/ Absolutely the last and final word on the "Duck Dynasty" controversy from an angry Southerner, who calls out the bearded dickweed for being a complete phony......quite an amusing five minute rant, with graphics and pictures.....
Note - some very salty language.......
In this extremely funny and NSFW rant, my new pal Dusty truly cuts to the chase on this entire "Duck Dynasty/Free-the-Hate Speech" embroiglio in a way that no one else has before.
- First he points out the obvious that A&E has every right to hire, suspend and FIRE anyone they feel like, particularly if they think that person has damaged their corporate brand.
- Dusty then points out some other obvious things, such as the fact that Phil Robertson IS RICH, and although Jesus really didn't say anything definitive about Gays (although did mention people being "born Eunichs" whatever that means) He DiD. Talk. About. The. RICH!
7/ If you wonder why trust is eroding in our society consider this "affluenza" case of a drunk teenager who killed four pedestrians, paralyzed a 16 year old, injured 8 others and essentially got off with "treatment"......think the rich can't buy our court system?
Granted it did happen in Texas which is ground zero for rich assholes and corruption, and because the people he killed were driving a 1999 Mercury Mountaineer, and the kid he crippled had a latin name, i.e. lower class, there wasn't any outrage locally. The rich are a protected species in Texas.
Read the Times story....
DALLAS — THE case of Ethan Couch — the drunk 16-year-old who mowed down four bystanders in a Fort Worth suburb with his “super duty” F-350 pickup truck, but got off with 10 years’ probation after his defense team’s psychologist blamed “affluenza,” or a state of immense, amoral privilege, for the crime — has become something of a national outrage
But here in North Texas, the reaction hasn’t been quite so vehement. Most of the vitriol has come from elsewhere: a somber and scandalized Anderson Cooper, excoriating the psychologist who testified for the defense; and Nancy Grace, the helmet-haired high priestess of outrage, demanding on “The View” that the juvenile judge who handed down the sentence “be thrown off the bench”; the petition to that effect on Change.org, which has garnered 20,000 signatures.
Granted, in the aftermath of the sentencing, politicians like Greg Abbott, the state attorney general, a Republican, and Wendy Davis, the Democratic state senator best known for her 11-hour filibuster against abortion restrictions, have wrung their hands. (Both are running for governor.) Local prosecutors are talking about new assault charges that might yield a three-year sentence for Mr. Couch (instead of the 20 years he faced for manslaughter), but success is unlikely.
On the ground, the sentiment is quieter, almost resigned. There’s been no rush to condemnation by civic leaders. No one is rioting on the Metroplex’s sidewalkless streets against Ethan Couch or the judge, Jean Hudson Boyd, who essentially let him go. (As part of his probation, Mr. Couch will be sent to a California treatment facility that offers equine therapy, cooking classes and martial-arts lessons, and his father, a wealthy sheet-metal executive, will foot the $450,000-a-year bill.)
“None among those who say she was wrong have sat in her chair for 26 years,” The Fort Worth Star-Telegram proclaimed, in the judge’s defense. “In this case, she’s earned our trust.”
The disparity between the televised outrage over what was perhaps the cleverest legal argument since the “Twinkie defense” and the relative local indifference to the role of wealth in insulating the guilty from justice illuminates how much of North Texas itself has been constructed for the purpose of insulating wealth from any unpleasant reality. Why should criminal justice be any different?
“Affluenza,” at least as invoked by the defense psychologist, G. Dick Miller, is not a recognized disorder, a legitimate exculpatory condition akin to post-traumatic stress, or even insanity itself. But if not a disorder, it is not a fiction. Few would dispute that millions of affluent — typically white — Americans choose to live in communities whose primary raison d’être is to afford their residents a pampered escape, a chance to withdraw from the barbarians at the gate and from every external reality imaginable.
8/ A clever and subtle three minute film about what Christmas would be like if men's and women's roles were reversed.....Mary rolled her eyes at this one, which I suppose meant it was spot on.....
Most amusing.....and I loved the opening.....
9/ Rolling Stone with a major investigative report into the factory farming industry - "In The Belly Of The Beast". The report focuses on the Humane Society and their attempts to expose the horrible conditions in factory farms and slaughterhouses through undercover work.
This article is sickening, and please don't read it if you are at all sensitive, but it really shows how "Big Ag" works, through cruel practices and their drive for cost efficiency. There are also heartbreaking videos taken by undercover workers showing awful things being done to these poor creatures.
Big Ag's defense is to do with story #1 - with our growing demand for meat how can gumment regulate the meat industry? We have to feed the world! Read this, and you decide if getting meat for your Big Mac is worth the evil being done to these defenceless animals. There is some pressure for change - "good" retailers like Costco won't buy birthing caged pork for example, but they are few and far between and dwarfed by WalMart, where ALL of their meat is evil.
A most disturbing story.....
Sarah – let’s call her that for this story, though it’s neither the name her parents gave her nor the one she currently uses undercover – is a tall, fair woman in her midtwenties who’s pretty in a stock, anonymous way, as if she’d purposely scrubbed her face and frame of distinguishing characteristics. Like anyone who’s spent much time working farms, she’s functionally built through the thighs and trunk, herding pregnant hogs who weigh triple what she does into chutes to birth their litters and hefting buckets of dead piglets down quarter-mile alleys to where they’re later processed. It’s backbreaking labor, nine-hour days in stifling barns in Wyoming, and no training could prepare her for the sensory assault of 10,000 pigs in close quarters: the stench of their shit, piled three feet high in the slanted trenches below; the blood on sows’ snouts cut by cages so tight they can’t turn around or lie sideways; the racking cries of broken-legged pigs, hauled into alleys by dead-eyed workers and left there to die of exposure. It’s the worst job she or anyone else has had, but Sarah isn’t grousing about the conditions. She’s too busy waging war on the hogs’ behalf.
We’re sitting across the couch from a second undercover, a former military serviceman we’ll call Juan, in the open-plan parlor of an A-frame cottage just north of the Vermont-New York border. The house belongs to their boss, Mary Beth Sweetland, who is the investigative director for the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and who has brought them here, first, to tell their stories, then to investigate a nearby calf auction site. Sweetland trains and runs the dozen or so people engaged in the parlous business of infiltrating farms and documenting the abuse done to livestock herds by the country’s agri-giants, as well as slaughterhouses and livestock auctions. Given the scale of the business – each year, an estimated 9 billion broiler chickens, 113 million pigs, 33 million cows and 250 million turkeys are raised for our consumption in dark, filthy, pestilent barns – it’s unfair to call this a guerrilla operation, for fear of offending outgunned guerrillas. But what Juan and Sarah do with their hidden cams and body mics is deliver knockdown blows to the Big Meat cabal, showing videos of the animals’ living conditions to packed rooms of reporters and film crews. In many cases, these findings trigger arrests and/or shutdowns of processing plants, though the real heat put to the offending firms is the demand for change from their scandalized clients – fast-food giants and big-box retailers. “We’ve had a major impact in the five or six years we’ve been doing these operations,” says Sarah.
10/ Wow. WOW. You have never heard "Stairway To Heaven" like this before. There was a tribute to Led Zeppelin and others in Vancouver attended by President Obama, so there were a lot of distinguished guests, but the feature was a version of the classic song with full orchestra, choir and vocalised by Nancy Wilson of "Heart".
Sung by someone with a wonderful voice, like Wilson, it's actually a beautiful song......
There have been some mighty horrible renditions of Led Zeppelin‘s Stairway To Heaven, but when Nancy and Ann Wilson of Heart performed the song in front of the three remaining members of the legendary British rock band at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony on Dec. 2, it made Robert Plant cry tears of joy.
(The band was being honoured by President Barack Obama alongside David Letterman and Dustin Hoffman.)
Watch it and understand why. When the choir kicks in and Ann Wilson wails Plant’s famous “And as we wind on down the road…” you might shed a tear or two yourself.
11/ This commercial for Glock is bannered on a Conservative website - "annoy a Liberal - forward them this commercial"..... I found it to be sexy, stupidly simplistic but overall just plain weird.
What do you think? Would this commercial message get you to go out and buy a Glock?
If you are a thief and try to break into someone else’s home you better make sure they are not packing heat. Try a Liberal’s house, you may have better luck.
Glock’s pro-gun commercial is sure to offend a Liberal, and make all Conservatives laugh out loud.
Watch what happens when this would be burglar tries to mess with the wrong girl!
12/ I love these compilation videos - these are the 100 best lines from action movies in under 9 minutes.......lots of Arnold's and Clint's best lines, but also some other great classics including a few "James Bondisms"........
Note - some salty language and ultraviolence......
13/ There have been some disappointments recently with the Obama Administration, the NSA spying on us and the rollout of the ACA, but the biggest failure has been the President's lack of action on climate change. Yes he has taken some measures [car mpg standards, new coal power standards], but these are far outweighed by the blanket approvals of whatever the oil, gas and coal exporting industry wanted.
These steps are important – and they also illustrate the kind of fights the Obama administration has been willing to take on: ones where the other side is weak. The increased mileage standards came at a moment when D.C. owned Detroit – they were essentially a condition of the auto bailouts. And the battle against new coal-fired power plants was really fought and won by environmentalists.
Bill McKibben with an excellent article in Rolling Stone on how difficult it will be to get any meaningful action on climate change done in time to prevent catastrophe, because if this Democratic President who promised action on the environment has been easily sidetracked by the energy oligarchy, what chance is there for action in time to save anything at all?
I think you know the answer......
Illustration by Victor Juhasz
December 17, 2013 9:00 AM ET
Our hope was that we could inspire him to keep those promises. Even then, there were plenty of cynics who said Obama and his insiders were too closely tied to the fossil-fuel industry to take climate change seriously. But in the two years since, it's looked more and more like they were right – that in our hope for action we were willing ourselves to overlook the black-and-white proof of how he really feels.
If you want to understand how people will remember the Obama climate legacy, a few facts tell the tale: By the time Obama leaves office, the U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia as the planet's biggest oil producer and Russia as the world's biggest producer of oil and gas combined. In the same years, even as we've begun to burn less coal at home, our coal exports have climbed to record highs. We are, despite slight declines in our domestic emissions, a global-warming machine: At the moment when physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon brakes, America is revving the engine.
You could argue that private industry, not the White House, has driven that boom, and in part you'd be right. But that's not what Obama himself would say. Here's Obama speaking in Cushing, Oklahoma, last year, in a speech that historians will quote many generations hence. It is to energy what Mitt Romney's secretly taped talk about the 47 percent was to inequality. Except that Obama was out in public, boasting for all the world to hear:
"Over the last three years, I've directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We're opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We've quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We've added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth, and then some. . . . In fact, the problem . . . is that we're actually producing so much oil and gas . . . that we don't have enough pipeline capacity to transport all of it where it needs to go."
Actually, of course, "the problem" is that climate change is spiraling out of control. Under Obama we've had the warmest year in American history – 2012 – featuring a summer so hot that corn couldn't grow across much of the richest farmland on the planet. We've seen the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and the largest wind field ever measured, both from Hurricane Sandy. We've watched the Arctic melt, losing three quarters of its summer sea ice. We've seen some of the largest fires ever recorded in the mountains of California, Colorado and New Mexico. And not just here, of course – his term has seen unprecedented drought and flood around the world. The typhoon that just hit the Philippines, according to some meteorologists, had higher wind speeds at landfall than any we've ever seen. When the world looks back at the Obama years half a century from now, one doubts they'll remember the health care website; one imagines they'll study how the most powerful government on Earth reacted to the sudden, clear onset of climate change.
14/ This is a good way to prank phone callers.... it's called "cell phone crashing".....2 amusing minutes, where a guy swoops in on peoples phone conversations in an airport.....
15/ So many apps, so little time to research them.....but these are some useful travel apps......
Apps to Smooth Your Journey
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
Published: December 4, 2013 31 Comments
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Many travel apps, while great in principle, are too complicated, wonky or simply not helpful enough to earn a spot on your smartphone home screen. Some, however, can make travel easier. And who doesn’t want that during the frantic holiday season? Besides, now that smartphones can be used during takeoff and landing, there’s no time like the present to turn yours into a personal travel assistant. So whether this season’s travels take you up in the air or on the road, here are a few of my favorite apps to make the journey smoother.
Jayme McGow
FREE WI-FI FINDER. You’re touring an unfamiliar city and in need of Wi-Fi — make that free Wi-Fi. With the tap of a button, this app (also free) uses your smartphone’s GPS to find nearby public Wi-Fi hot spots, be it at a coffee shop, hotel or city park. You can filter the results, which pop up on a map (or in list form if you prefer) by “venue type,” such as bar, hotel or library. Tap one of the locations on the map (or list) and you’ll be shown the address and directions to the hot spot. Free Wi-Fi Finder, which also allows you to search for a particular Wi-Fi spot, works in more than 100 countries, including the United States, Japan and Italy, and allows you to star favorites so you can easily find them again.
HEYWIRE. When traveling internationally, certain apps can save you money by enabling you to send text messages and photos without the usual phone company texting fees. WhatsApp is among the most popular, but another player, HeyWire, has some fun time-sucking features, like the ability to place digital stickers on the photos you’ve taken (who doesn’t want to slap a propeller cap on their travel companion?). A “meme” button allows you to add bold, all-caps text to your photos. You can also post photos to Twitter or Facebook through the app. Texts between you and anyone else with HeyWire are free anywhere in the world. If the person you’re texting doesn’t have the app, international texting is still free to any smartphone in the United States and Canada and most phones in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America. Everywhere else, regular text fees would apply. Keep in mind that wherever you are, you still need a data connection, like 3G or Wi-Fi, to send texts. (The app itself is free for the first year and 99 cents a year thereafter.)
Todays video - the debut of the Hansen Brothers in the best ice hockey movie ever made, "Slap Shot" with Paul Newman.....
Todays engineer jokes
Understanding Engineers #1Two engineering students were biking across a university campus when one said, "Where did you get such a great bike?"The second engineer replied, "Well, I was walking along yesterday, minding my own business, when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike, threw it to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, "Take what you want."The first engineer nodded approvingly and said, "Good choice: The clothes probably wouldn't have fit you anyway."Understanding Engineers #2To the optimist, the glass is half-full.To the pessimist, the glass is half-empty.To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.Understanding Engineers #3A priest, a doctor, and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers.The engineer fumed, "What's with those guys? We must have been waiting for fifteen minutes!"The doctor chimed in, "I don't know, but I've never seen such inept golf!"The priest said, "Here comes the greens-keeper. Let's have a word with him."He said, "Hello George, what's wrong with that group ahead of us?They're rather slow, aren't they?"The greens-keeper replied, "Oh, yes.That's a group of blind firemen.They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year, so we always let them play for free anytime!."The group fell silent for a moment.The priest said, "That's so sad.I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight."The doctor said, "Good idea.I'm going to contact my ophthalmologist colleague and see if there's anything she can do for them."The engineer said, "Why can't they play at night?"Understanding Engineers #4What is the difference between mechanical engineers and civil engineers?Mechanical engineers build weapons.Civil engineers build targets.Understanding Engineers #5The graduate with a science degree asks, "Why does it work?"The graduate with an engineering degree asks, "How does it work?"The graduate with an accounting degree asks, "How much will it cost?"The graduate with a business degree asks, "Do you want fries with that?"Understanding Engineers #7Normal people believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.Understanding Engineers #8An engineer was crossing a road one day, when a frog called out to him and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess."He bent over, picked up the frog, and put it in his pocket.The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn back into a beautiful princess and stay with you for one week."The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket.The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you for one week and do anything you want."Again, the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket.Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter?I've told you I'm a beautiful princess and that I'll stay with you for one week and do anything you want.Why won't you kiss me?"The engineer said, "Look, I'm an engineer.I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog - now that's cool."Two engineers #9Two engineering students were standing at the base of a flagpole on campus looking at its top.A faculty member walked by and asked what they were doing."We're supposed to find the height of this flagpole," said one student, "but we don't have a ladder."The professor took a wrench from her purse, loosened a couple of bolts, and laid the pole down on the ground.Then she took a tape measure from her pocketbook, took a measurement, announced, "Twenty one feet,six inches," and walked away.One student shook his head and laughed, "A lot of good that does us.We ask for the height and she gives us the length!"
Todays cowboy joke
Todays Christmas joke
When four of Santa's elves got sick, the trainee elves did not produce toys
as fast as the regular ones, and Santa began to feel the Pre-Christmas
pressure.
Then Mrs. Claus told Santa her Mother was coming to visit, which stressed
Santa even more.
When he went to harness the reindeer, he found that three of them were about
to give birth and two others had jumped the fence and were out, Heaven knows
where.
Then when he began to load the sleigh, one of the floorboards cracked, the
toy bag fell to the ground and all the toys were scattered.
Frustrated, Santa went in the house for a cup of apple cider and a shot of
rum. When he went to the cupboard, he discovered the elves had drunk all the
cider and hidden the liquor. In his frustration, he accidentally dropped the
cider jug, and it broke into hundreds of little glass pieces all over the
kitchen floor. He went to get the broom and found the mice had eaten all the
straw off the end of the broom.
Just then the doorbell rang, and an irritated Santa marched to the door,
yanked it open, and there stood a little angel with a great big Christmas
tree. The angel said very cheerfully, 'Merry Christmas, Santa. Isn't this a
lovely day? I have a beautiful Christmas tree for you. Where would you like
me to stick it? And so began the tradition of the little angel on top of the
Christmas tree.
Not a lot of people know this.
