If you are a boomer, read #10 and feel guilty!
For everyone else, watch #1.......scary stuff....
1/ If any of the worst case scenarios in this report on Fukushima come true we had better be ready with our "red pill", because all life in the Northern Hemisphere will be affected.......
I really hate finding these reports but in case this does happen at least you won't be surprised.....and after you watch this you will notice news reports touting nuclear power as the answer to climate change because they are CO2 free, and shudder. Tokyo Electric was reported to have started the process mentioned in the latter half of the film this week, removing the rods with a crane....
Undoubtedly one of the most alarming videos I have ever watched, again because of the matter of fact tone and the science behind what is happening in Japan, and that you aren't being told any of these possibilities by the corporate media or any government, Japanese or western.
10 scary minutes.....
Forget radioactive tuna and all of the other things we’re hearing about. This is a crisis that we will all soon begin seeing the effects of, and none of the mainstream news organizations are even whispering about it.
At 1:00, some of the secrets start to come out, and I could feel my heart sink. At 2:45, I began to realize that many of us will get sick, and not have a clue why. At 4:10, I saw the accident waiting to happen. And what Dr. Caldicott says at 9:00 made me gasp out loud.
2/ Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is getting a lot of mockery for the plan to deliver packages by drone......so Stephen Colbert examines this wacky idea with predictable results.....four amusing minutes.....
Stephen Colbert had a message for Amazon founder and "billionaire Busytown worm" Jeff Bezos last night: Forget about delivery drones, and listen up to this crazy new idea instead.
After looking at Bezos' video unveiling the drones on "60 Minutes," which he expects to (quite literally) launch within five years, Colbert had a few issues with the logistics that he could fix.
"There's the drone picking up the package and flying out of the warehouse," he described. "Navigating through the parts of America with no trees, phone lines or buildings, then landing on your doorstep while the semi-autonomous blade-wielding octocopter leaves."
All to deliver to a user's house in 30 minutes? "I want my stuff now, and I know how to get it!" Colbert insisted.
3/ Interesting story about Asheville, NC and how they revitalised the downtown to make it one of the liveliest small cities in the country......but the real backstory is the economics of Walmartization vs investing in the infrastructure of older cities......
Great article.......
Wal-Mart: An economic cancer on our cities
In Asheville, N.C., a dense downtown generated jobs and tax revenue and restored the city's soul
Downtown Asheville, North Carolina (Credit: SeanPavonePh
Excerpted from "Happy City"
Most of us agree that development that provides employment and tax revenue is good for cities. Some even argue that the need for jobs outweighs aesthetic, lifestyle, or climate concerns—in fact, this argument comes up any time Walmart proposes a new megastore near a small town. But a clear-eyed look at the spatial economics of land, jobs, and tax regimes should cause anyone to reject the anything-and-anywhere-goes development model. To explain, let me offer the story of an obsessive number cruncher who found his own urban laboratory quite by chance.
Joseph Minicozzi, a young architect raised in upstate New York, was on a cross-country motorcycle ride in 2001 when he got sidetracked in the Appalachian Mountains. He met a beautiful woman in a North Carolina roadside bar and was smitten by both that woman and the languid beauty of the Blue Ridge region. Now they share a bungalow with two dogs in the mountain town of Asheville.
Asheville is, in many ways, a typical midsize American city, which is to say that its downtown was virtually abandoned in the second half of the twentieth century. Dozens of elegant old structures were boarded up or encased in aluminum siding as highways and liberal development policies sucked people and commercial life into dispersal. The process continued until 1991, when Julian Price, the heir to a family insurance and broadcasting fortune, decided to pour everything he had into nursing that old downtown back to life. His company, Public Interest Projects, bought and renovated old buildings, leased street-front space out to small businesses, and rented or sold the lofts above to a new wave of residential pioneers. They coached, coddled, and sometimes bankrolled entrepreneurs who began to enliven the streets. First came a vegetarian restaurant, then a bookstore, a furniture store, and the now-legendary nightclub, the Orange Peel.
4/ Financial reporting in the lamestream media, including the three 24/7 Financial channels, ignored the Blackstone CDS story so The Daily Show sent Samantha Bee to find out why.
This is a fine piece of investigative journalism masquerading as a six minute humour segment.....
Actually it's both, and it says a lot about our corporate media that Matt Taibbi and a comedy show do more in depth reporting on the excesses of Wall Street than the "responsible" business news......with the bonus that it's funny.
And the Miley Cyrus bit is hilarious.....
Wednesday's "Daily Show" spent most of its airtime examining malfeasance on Wall Street -- and, as usual, did a better job giving airtime to scandals than much of the mainstream media.
Jon Stewart brought out a story broken by Bloomberg Business Week, in which the private equity firm Blackstone bought a credit default swap that would allow them to collect money from a Spanish gambling company called Codere if Codere missed a loan payment. Then, Blackstone paid Codere $100 million to pay that loan late, allowing them to collect the money trigged by the credit event they had just bought.
"The Daily Show" couldn't believe that such a shady dealing was not only legal, but received virtually no attention from the media. So they sent Samantha Bee to investigate.
Watch as she visits The New York Times, BuzzFeed and NY1 anchor Pat Kiernan to hear why the story wouldn't work for those respective news outlets. With no other options, she's eventually forced to broadcast the story the only way we know how to get attention in the 21st century: Using kittens and Miley Cyrus.
5/ Not sure where they are showing this anti-union ad, but it's so blatantly stupid it's funny.......one pathetic minute, brought to you by Walmart.......
Now comes this interesting "ad" that hides behind the group name "Worker Center Watch." And, according to The Nation, the website in the ad ... wait for it ... is owned by the former head lobbyist for Walmart itself, Joseph Kefauver. So, like the ad says, don't worry about people trying to improve their lot in life. Just go buy stuff to feel better.
6/ Time for the November fails from TwisterNederland, with Russian accidents, assorted overambitious kids, drunks doing dumb stuff and other accidents, some very painful......10 minutes of complete mayhem......
One for the lads......
7/ This is one of the billionaires hell bent on polluting this country in the name of big oil - Harold Hamm, who you have probably never heard of but who is the face behind the fracking industry in the Midwest. Just to read his comments on anything environmental makes you realise how tough the fight is to stop CO2 from doing us all in.....
OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. — In the history of oil, this fall is a tipping point, the moment America gurgles past Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s petroleum king.
The man most responsible is Harold Hamm, 67, a drawling, blue-eyed billionaire, a sharecropper’s son who grew to be the richest energy mogul in America. He was the first to profitably “frack” North Dakota oil wells, leading a revolution in the way the nation coaxes energy from the earth and draining momentum from the search for cleaner fuel sources. His company, Continental Resources, has quintupled in value in a matter of years, emerging as a swaggering promoter of eco-friendly, effectively infinite oil — along with all the supposed good that flows from it.
Now Hamm seems ready to fight anyone who says otherwise. “Anti-frackers are disingenuous,” he said. “They bow to the religion of environmentalism.”
In a series of interviews with NBC News, the self-described nature-lover crowed about “the great renaissance of oil” he helped create and ridiculed those who blame oil companies for warming the climate or poisoning the earth.
“Some of the extremists are calling it carbon pollution,” he joked between appreciative bites of cheeseburger. “I mean, all of us breathe out carbon dioxide. Are we going to quit breathing?”
'This is a new era'You’ll find no better guide to the new world of energy than Hamm. He fell in love with oil as a gas-pumping teenager, borrowed money to become a wildcatter in his 20s, and spent the next four decades finding treasure where others failed or never tried.
Last month, when U.S. Department of Energy data projected that America had become the globe’s new fuel pump and fuse box, Texas remained the biggest producer of crude oil. North Dakota, however, showed the fastest growth, approaching a million barrels of oil a day, up from 10,000 barrels a day in 2003 — and powering the largest five-year petroleum increase in U.S. history.
8/ An excellent Jon Stewart on his favourite topic - the blatant stupidity of Fox News. Two good segments.....the first [6 minutes] on Fox's "War On Christmas", then a three minute clip of Fox stirring up anti-Muslim hatred.....
Stewart on great form ......
It's never officially the Christmas season until Jon Stewart kicks off his annual debunking of "War on Christmas" panic.
This year, he was handed a few of the usual targets: Sarah Palin and Bill O'Reilly. Palin has a book out this year ensuring that Christmas is properly honored, so Stewart really has his work cut out for him. Between their misunderstanding of what menorahs are used for and the pagan origins of Santa Claus, the War on Christmas is off to a great start.
Above, check out Stewart's takedown of Palin, O'Reilly and their problems with perhaps the biggest critic of capitalism, and thereby Christmas: Pope Francis. Below, watch him react to Fox News' take on the "war," and how Sharia Law at a YMCA is going to undo the years of Christmas progress.
9/ Although this is really amazing, you have to wonder who these guys were that took the time to set up 25,000 dominoes just to knock them down for a four minute video......
But it's worth it - truly a hypnotic experience........
Two domino setup enthusiasts spent three months in two continents setting up a screen-linked sequence of domino tricks. Watch as they knock down approximately 25,000 tiles. In a way, this is the joy of art at its purest – the joy is in the process and a flawless execution that lasts only minutes.
10/ The title of this story is catchy......but the message is consistent with the article two weeks ago that focused on the impossibility of climate change solutions being implemented in our capitalistic society, i.e. any efforts to cut CO2 will impact business, and all corporations will resist, making it pretty certain we are going to wreck the planet.
This fascinating story again spells out exactly what will happen to the climate, why this scientific certainty is not only not taken seriously, it is denied by a substantial portion of the population. Look at the section in bold below....
And why are boomers responsible? Read on, but it's to do with the redistribution of wealth and power.....and the timing of the nasty stuff coming.....
Thanks for killing the planet, boomers!
The world as we know it is ending, and the indifference by Americans, politicians and mainstream press is maddening
TIM DONOVAN
The clouds of a thunderstorm roll over neighborhoods heavily damaged in a tornado in Moore, Okla., May 23, 2013. (Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson)
The strongest hurricane in modern history devastated the Philippines last month, killing tens of thousands and displacing hundreds of thousands more. But you’d hardly know it in places like New York City, where a (mostly) mild autumn trudged on, and few people seemed to have the energy to get upset about another catastrophic natural disaster on the other side of the world. Meanwhile, plenty of people across the Hudson are still struggling to recover from Sandy’s devastation.
After two years living under the baking Las Vegas sun, I recently returned to New York. Wearing hats, coats and scarves is something of a novelty, and the streets haven’t been bathed in a brown sludge that may or may not have actually been snow at some early phase in its life cycle; driving, horizontal sleet has yet to soak my pants up to my knees. So perhaps it’s no surprise I’ve happily romanticized this beautiful city since returning — and yet, the joy and excitement that I’ve experienced exists under a shroud of existential angst, a filter that coats everything in the surreal notion that all these happy memories are passing, subject to what the great Czech author Milan Kundera famously termed “the unbearable lightness of being.” It really may be the end of the world as we know it, and I really don’t feel fine.
If you’re already in your mid-50s or later, and you’re lucky enough not to reside in any areas that are traditionally prone to hurricanes or flooding, you’ll miss the worst of our imminent destruction. But for those of us who are younger residents of this fragile orb, who hope to live long, healthy, happy lives — well, tough shit.
Unfortunately, the world as we know it is ending, and no one can reasonably hope to avoid the constellation of catastrophic, ecological and social disasters that are all but certain to manifest, exacerbating one another’s horrific, deadly consequences. And yet our politicians can’t be bothered to care, a substantial portion of Americans aren’t convinced that it’s even happening (despite overwhelming, unimpeachable evidence to the contrary), and the enormity of the issue is downplayed basically everywhere outside the bounds of the largely-ghettoized “environmental/green reporting,” uniformly marginalized and dismissed by the mainstream press.
11/ Excellent column from Joe Nocera on our voting system, and how to fix it......look at his first suggestion.......
Fixing the System
274 CommentsBy JOE NOCERA
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It’s Election Day. Virginians are electing a new governor, New Yorkers are choosing a new mayor, and all over the country, dozens of local races are being decided. Because this is an off-year election, in which there are no federal races, voter turnout is going to be abysmal. We all know that.
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In Australia, people who don’t vote are fined. In America, people can go to jail for skipping jury duty, but there’s no penalty for not voting. I’m not advocating either fines or jail — not today, anyway — but I’ve got five reforms in mind that could both invigorate the electorate and encourage more responsive, and less extreme, political candidates. Here they are, in no particular order:
Move elections to the weekend. Do you know why elections fall on a Tuesday in early November? I didn’t either. According to a group called Why Tuesday?, it goes back to the 1840s, when “farmers needed a day to get to the county seat, a day to vote, and a day to get back, without interfering with the three days of worship.” Today, of course, casting your ballot on a Tuesday is an impediment: lines in urban areas are long, people have to get to work, etc. It is especially difficult for blue-collar workers — a k a Democratic voters — who don’t have the same wiggle room as white-collar employees.
Chris Rock — yes, Chris Rock — has been quoted as saying that this is the reason Election Day remains on Tuesday. “They don’t want you to vote,” he said in 2008. “If they did, they wouldn’t have it on a Tuesday.” Even if you aren’t conspiratorially minded, you have to admit that moving elections to the weekend makes a ridiculous amount of sense.
Term limits for the Supreme Court. Somewhat to my surprise, most of the experts I spoke to were against Congressional term limits. Norman Ornstein, the resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, believes that the unintended consequences of term limits would outweigh the benefits. (He cited, among other things, the likelihood that “they come to office thinking about their next job.”)
12/ This is an acapella group - Pentatonix with a tribute to Daft Punk.
Note every sound you hear in this video is made by a human, and it often sounds like an orchestra is in there somewhere. A most unusual musical film, split screen, crazy contact lenses, and a beautiful version of some of Daft Punk's hits. Very cool, very clever indeed.....
13/ Luckily our right wing relatives are not hard core Christians, but even so these hints for dealing with your family over the holidays are good advice......and don't forget Christmas is coming in three weeks!
10 Ways to Deal With Right-Wing Christian Relatives Over the Holidays
How non-believers and liberal Christians can appeal to basic human kindness to repair strained relations with right-wing Christian family.
November 27, 2013 |
Holidays are stressful enough, but if you’re a non-believer—or even a liberal Christian—with right-wing Christian relatives, things can be even harder. There are so many landmines to navigate: Attempts to convert you; arguments about politics; offensive “jokes” that are really unvarnished bigotry; absurd claims and beliefs that threaten to cause you eyestrain from all the rolling.
1. Remember that you have leverage. Dan Savage is always recommending to newly out gay people to remember that they have leverage when dealing with recalcitrant or even angry parents: Their presence. Liberals and atheists can learn from this. If your family really is overbearing with attempts to convert you or incessant hollering about their right-wing beliefs, simply tell them to cut it out or you will cut out your visits. Try to avoid picking a fight or being dramatic about it. State your expectation that they keep the Christian right nonsense to a minimum around you, and if they can’t keep up their end of the bargain, refuse to see them until they realize that the price of having you around is that they learn to talk about something other than religion and politics.
Todays video - Jay Thomas tells his wonderful Lone Ranger story on the Letterman.......a true yarn spinner......most amusing.....
Todays teacher jokes
ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT ...
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Todays Jewish senior joke
Jacob, age 92, and Rebecca, age 89, living in Miami, are all excited about their decision to get married. They go for a stroll to discuss the wedding, and on the way they pass a drugstore.. Jacob suggests they go in.
Jacob addresses the man behind the counter:
"Are you the owner?"
The pharmacist answers, "Yes."
Jacob: "We're about to get married. Do you sell heart medication?"
Pharmacist: "Of course, we do."
Jacob: "How about medicine for circulation?"
Pharmacist: "All kinds."
Jacob: "Medicine for rheumatism?"
Pharmacist: "Definitely."
Jacob: "How about suppositories?"
Pharmacist: "You bet!"
Jacob: "Medicine for memory problems, arthritis and Alzheimer's?"
Pharmacist: "Yes, a large variety. The
works."
Jacob: "What about vitamins, sleeping pills, Geritol, antidotes for Parkinson's disease?"
Pharmacist: "Absolutely."
Jacob: "Everything for heartburn and indigestion?"
Pharmacist: "We sure do."
Jacob: "You sell wheelchairs and walkers and canes?"
Pharmacist: "All speeds and sizes."
Jacob: "Adult diapers?"
Pharmacist: "Sure."
Jacob: "We'd like to use this store as our Bridal Registry."
Jacob addresses the man behind the counter:
"Are you the owner?"
The pharmacist answers, "Yes."
Jacob: "We're about to get married. Do you sell heart medication?"
Pharmacist: "Of course, we do."
Jacob: "How about medicine for circulation?"
Pharmacist: "All kinds."
Jacob: "Medicine for rheumatism?"
Pharmacist: "Definitely."
Jacob: "How about suppositories?"
Pharmacist: "You bet!"
Jacob: "Medicine for memory problems, arthritis and Alzheimer's?"
Pharmacist: "Yes, a large variety. The
works."
Jacob: "What about vitamins, sleeping pills, Geritol, antidotes for Parkinson's disease?"
Pharmacist: "Absolutely."
Jacob: "Everything for heartburn and indigestion?"
Pharmacist: "We sure do."
Jacob: "You sell wheelchairs and walkers and canes?"
Pharmacist: "All speeds and sizes."
Jacob: "Adult diapers?"
Pharmacist: "Sure."
Jacob: "We'd like to use this store as our Bridal Registry."
Todays cowboy Joke
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