1/ One of the American realities we are trying to make you aware of is the fact we are living in an oligarchy, but the thing that vexes me is that I don't fully understand why the super rich are waging such a vindictive and bitter war on the poor and middle class. What do they want, and what is the endgame?
In this brilliant two minute video the economist Robert Reich explains it clearly, and we are already at least halfway down this road.....
An Economist With 2 Minutes And A Marker Explains The Greedy, Selfish Things Some Rich People Do
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
2/ An excellent Rolling Stone article discussing raising minimum wage, how the Democrats have a winning issue at last if they will only use it, and how Republicans are taking huge risks by opposing any benefits to the working poor. A good political story.....
Illustration by Victor Juhasz
Nearly five years into the recovery from the Great Recession, the American economy remains fundamentally broken. Inequality is getting worse: Ninety-five percent of income gains since 2009 have gone to the top one percent of earners. Private employers have added more than 8 million jobs, but nearly two-thirds are low-wage positions. The American worker's share of the national income is as low as it's been in the six decades since World War II. But even as most Americans struggle just to tread water, corporate profits have soared to record highs.
Worse: The bottom rung of the economy is growing crowded; 3.8 million Americans – the equivalent population of the city of Los Angeles – now labor at or below the minimum wage. And that wage itself has lost more than 12 percent of its value since it was last hiked to $7.25 in 2007, due to inflation. In a more prosperous era, the stereotype of a minimum-wage worker was a teenager flipping burgers, earning a little beer money on the side. But in the new American economy, dominated by low-wage service jobs, fewer than one in four minimum-wage workers are teens. More than half are 25 or older. "The demographics have shifted," says Rep. George Miller, ranking Democrat on the House labor committee. "These are now important wage earners in their families."
As a matter of public policy, the solution is obvious. There are few government interventions that can match the elegance of a higher minimum wage. It boosts the fortunes of the working poor and the economy at large, with minimal trade-offs. Raising the minimum wage does little or nothing to dampen job growth. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that an increase to $10.10 would trim payrolls by less than one-third of one percent, even as it lifts nearly 1 million Americans out of poverty.
3/ A wonderful Jon Stewart, taking on the idiots at Fox News who seem to against poor people eating seafood.......two parts, four minutes each.....one of his better ones.....
Jon Stewart went after Fox News Tuesday night for nitpicking about what food stamps should be used on and the quality of the food they should have, including, for some reason, a particular focus (and possible obsession) with poor people eating seafood.
Stewart mocked Fox sharing all sorts of claims about food stamp abuse by suggesting they change their slogan to “we read the chain mails your grandma gets in her inbox out loud like they were true.” He noticed how Fox News rolls its eyes at everything poor people buy with food stamps, including seafood. It got so weirdly specific about seafood that Stewart cried, “What’s with the fucking fish?!”
But at least Fox News believes teaching a man to fish is a great life lesson, so in theory “they don’t mind poor peple eating seafood, as long as poor people catch the seafood themselves.” Except that someone used food stamps to buy bait to go fishing and Fox groaned.
So Stewart could only conclude, “They really do not want lower-income individuals eating any seafood!
4/ A story in the Times with some complex nuances, but a concrete reminder on how we are splitting into two societies - the superrich and the parasites who service them, and the working poor. The article is about London and how it has become a haven for the global wealthy, but particularly the Russian oligarchy who have corrupted the British ruling class with their vast fortunes.
It also partially explains Vladimir Putin's contempt for the European elites and his arrogance in the Ukraine, because his perception is that everyone can be bought....and based on this article, he's right.
This isn't directly applicable to the US, but give it time.......
A fascinating story......
LONDON — The city has changed. The buses are still dirty, the people are still passive-aggressive, but something about London has changed. You can see signs of it everywhere. The townhouses in the capital’s poshest districts are empty; they have been sold to Russian oligarchs and Qatari princes.
England’s establishment is not what it was; the old imperial elite has become crude and mercenary. On Monday, a British civil servant was photographed arriving in Downing Street for a national security council meeting carrying an open document in his hand. We could read for ourselves lines from a confidential report on how Prime Minister David Cameron’s government should respond to the Crimea crisis. It recommended that Britain should “not support, for now, trade sanctions,” nor should it “close London’s financial center to Russians.”
The White House has imposed visa restrictions on some Russian officials, and President Obama has issued an executive order enabling further sanctions.
But Britain has already undermined any unified action by putting bankers’ profits first.
This is what it boils down to: Britain is ready to betray the United States to protect the City of London’s hold on dirty Russian money. And forget about Ukraine.
Britain thinks of itself as a trading nation, open for business, but it no longer has a “mission.” Any moralizing remnant of the British Empire is gone; it has turned back to the pirate England of Sir Walter Raleigh.
Britain’s ruling class has decayed not just to the point where Mr. Cameron is considered a man of exceptional talent, but to where its first priority is protecting its percentage on Russian money — even as Russian armored personnel carriers rumble around the streets of Sevastopol. But the establishment understands that in the 21st century what matters are banks, not tanks.
5/ Interesting video - it morphs the 50 most beautiful women of this century from one image to the next......you may have your own opinion but the older stars really look good......
Four minutes of beauty......
6/ You could say DDD is often full of stories that make you want to drink heavily, so every now and then....a nice one......have a look at these photos, and remember for every horrible asshole you meet there are 50 nice people.....unfortunately you tend to remember the assholes.....
Here are 30 pictures that have been going viral on the internet, and they all have one awesome thing in common: they will restore your faith and hope in humanity and this world of ours.
With so many terrible stories in the news lately, we hope this list of acts of kindness puts a huge smile on your face. Check them out.
7/ Did you see this story in the mainstream media, about the protests outside the White House about the Keystone Pipeline? Probably not, but it happened last weekend.....
Good news - young people are waking up......and also Ed Schultz the MSNBC host who was for the pipeline has publicly changed his mind, and now is strongly against it because of the possibility of irreversible harm to the Ogallala Aquifer.....
This is XL Dissent: a massive surge of protest against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and a powerful show of solidarity with all communities who are fighting the fossil fuel industry and confronting the impacts of the climate crisis.
Photo: Kristina Banks
"An entire movement has thrown itself into in this Keystone fight, from local frontline groups to big national green organizations," 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben wrote in an email. "But this weekend shows the power and bravery of some of the most crucial elements: young people, and activists who understand the centrality of environmental justice."
8/ The beautiful Katy Perry's new video "Unconditionally"......worth watching for the incredible production, featuring La Perry in $20,000 dresses, what looks like a Russian Czar's palace bedroom, special FX of old cars disintegrating on her body and a cast of nubile dancers in ball gowns and uniforms.....the song is blah, but the video is unusually film-like.....note - 76 million hits....
9/ One can tell Paul Krugman cannot stand Paul Ryan, the economic leader of the Republican Party, for his deliberate mangling of the facts and his disdain for poor people.....
In this column he debunks Ryans' latest plan the "help" the working poor.....help them over the cliff, more like it.....
Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. So when you see something like the current scramble by Republicans to declare their deep concern for America’s poor, it’s a good sign, indicating a positive change in social norms. Goodbye, sneering at the 47 percent; hello, fake compassion.
And the big new poverty report from the House Budget Committee, led by Representative Paul Ryan, offers additional reasons for optimism. Mr. Ryan used to rely on “scholarship” from places like the Heritage Foundation. Remember when Heritage declared that the Ryan budget would reduce unemployment to a ludicrous 2.8 percent, then tried to cover its tracks? This time, however, Mr. Ryan is citing a lot of actual social science research.
Unfortunately, the research he cites doesn’t actually support his assertions. Even more important, his whole premise about why poverty persists is demonstrably wrong.
To understand where the new report is coming from, it helps to recall something Mr. Ryan said two years ago: “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.” There are actually two assertions here. First, antipoverty programs breed complacency; that is, they discourage work. Second, complacency — the failure of the poor to work as much as they should — is what perpetuates poverty.
10/ An amusing French comedy routine, featuring two naked guys with towels.....sounds goofy, but it's also clever.....four minutes.....and sorry ladies but they manage to keep the naughty bits hidden, but it's close!
11/ A long but fascinating article on climate change, written by an Indian-American who recently spent three months back in India.......and he explains what is happening culturally in the subcontinent with a billion-plus people to feed, and why the upward drive to better lives for it's people is making the prospect of getting any global action on CO2 emissions so difficult.....
It's a good read on a number of levels.....a personal story, some good detail on a country we hear very little about and a window into the global corporate drive to create more business, by changing the way of life of poor countries like India.
It's hard to be optimistic when you find out what's really happening......
The two countries I know best are India and the US. I spent the first 22 years of my life in the former, and the following 24 in the latter, where I continue to live. Recently I returned home, after spending three months in India. The combination of what I saw there in plain view, and what I see here in America, may shed some light on—why we have arrived at the climate impasse.
Soon I’ll get to—what is climate impasse, but first, here is what got me motivated to write this piece, before even I could recover from the jet lag.
As soon as I sat down in the shuttle van outside the Seattle airport, the discussion with fellow passengers turned to the severe snowstorm in the East Coast that killed at least 18 people. That day, all of us had contributed to global warming, in varying amount, through the burning of jet fuel, and then gasoline. It was February 13.
Scientists were quick to point out that the rapid warming of the Arctic will continue to cause longer and harsher winter over North America and northern Europe. The Arctic is warming at a rate of two to three times more than the rest of the planet. This has reduced the temperature differential between the cold Arctic air and the warm air from the south, causing the Arctic jet stream to weaken, and “meander, like a river heading off course.”
That the Arctic is warming rapidly is not news anymore, nor is the melting of the Arctic sea ice, or Greenland ice sheets, or even the subsea methane release from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.
But have you heard about—Fires in February, in the far North?
..............................
In summary then, it seems to me that the biggest beneficiaries of India’s ‘roads everywhere’ are—Big Oil, Big Mineral, Big Auto, Big Ag, and the ‘leisure class’; but certainly not India’s poor, unless you consider the crumbs that they too will get from all these. The biggest looser, however, is life on Earth. The ecological impacts, including contribution to global warming, from all aspects of India’s ‘roads everywhere’ is incomprehensible.
I’d be called a Luddite (or much worse things in various Indian languages), if I now invoke Gandhi. Nevertheless, in 1928 Mahatma Gandhi wrote in Young India, an English–language weekly paper that he edited between 1918 and 1932 (when he was arrested and the paper folded): “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West. … If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.” India is making Gandhi’s nightmare come to reality. What is most disturbing, however, is that there is a complete silence in the Indian press about the ecological consequences of this massive materials consumption.
http://www.nationofchange.org/
12/ A fast moving dance scene Supercut, set to the Bee Gees "You Should Be Dancing", five minutes and see how many movies you remember.....
Nothing beats a good dance scene. And now you can experience 246 of the best ones all at once.
In their most recent YouTube video, supercutonline put together a captivating and hilarious mash up of some of the most famous dance scenes in movie history.
Featuring everything from "Dogma" to "Mean Girls" to "Grindhouse," the compilation is laid down to Bee Gee's "You Should Be Dancing," and -- frankly -- it makes us feel like we should be dancing.
13/ Marissa Alexander is now facing 60 years for firing a warning shot into the ceiling to scare her abusive boyfriend......
A poor black woman getting nailed by the Florida justice system again. Think a white person would be charged with this crime?
And the prosecutor, Angela Corey, is the same one who some people think deliberately blew the George Zimmerman case, and couldn't get a murder conviction in the Michael Dunn trial so she goes after a poor black female......this is back to the Sheriff McCall days.....
Marissa Alexander (Credit: AP/Lincoln B. Alexander)
Marissa Alexander could face up to 60 years in prison when her case is retried in July, theFlorida Times-Union reports. Florida state prosecutor Angela Corey announced she intends to triple Alexander’s sentence if she is able to convict her for a second time.
Alexander was initially sentenced to 20 years — three separate 20-year sentences that Alexander was ordered to serve concurrently – for firing what the defense argues was a warning shot in the direction of Rico Gray, her estranged husband, during an alleged domestic violence incident. No one was injured as a result of the single shot, which was fired into a wall. Gray has a documented history of violent abuse against Alexander, and admitted in court that he had previously threatened her life.
After sustained pressure from Alexander’s legal team and a national network of activists, the conviction was overturned, and Alexander now awaits a new trial. As the Times-Union notes, Alexander’s conviction was thrown out after the 1st District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee “ruled that Daniel made a mistake in shifting the burden to Alexander to prove she was acting in self-defense.” The defendant’s burden is only to raise a “reasonable doubt” concerning self-defense, according to Judge James H. Daniel.
Corey has said that if Alexander is convicted in July on the three counts of aggravated assault, she will request that Alexander serve the three 20-year sentences consecutively rather than concurrently.
“It’s unimaginable that a woman acting in self-defense, who injured no one, can be given what amounts to a life sentence,” Free Marissa Now spokeswoman Helen Gilbert said in a statement on the proposed sentence. “This must send chills down the spine of every woman and everyone who cares about women and every woman in an abusive relationship.”
14/ The Marissa story fits with this hilarious skit from the Daily Show, where Jessica Williams finds racism everywhere, starting with racist dogs.....both clever and amusing......she is turning out to be one of their best correspondents......four funny minutes.....
Watch 'The Daily Show' Hilariously Debunk the Myth That Racism Is OverImage Credit: The Daily Show
The news: Everyone knows that racism ended the moment Barack Obama moved into the White House. Whoever thinks otherwise should check their facts: "We have black senators, too!" after all — well, at least a few.
But for some inexplicable reason, The Daily Show won't let the issue rest. Jon Stewart and co. continued their onslaught against perpetual ignorance on Tuesday with an eye-opening segment on the so-called "end of racism." Jessica Williams begins her investigation with a look at "racist dogs" — yes, you read that correctly. And that's just the beginning.
15/ Oh lordy.......bet he shops at WalMart......
Another day, another crazy Florida story. A Tampa man was arrested Wednesday after neighbors realized with horror that he was in his yard trying to have sex with his dog. Yep, Benard Marsonekignored his neighbor’s loud cries to stop as he… well, tried to engage in sexual activity with a pit bull.
Neighbors eventually called the police, who showed up on the scene. Some of these neighbors were yelling at Marsonek to stop, according to cope, but he just ignored them. The police showed up when he was back inside the house and interrogated him.
Marsonek was not just arrested on charges of aggravated animal cruelty, police found a firearm on the premises and also charged him with “being a felon in possession of a firearm.” Eight pit bulls on the premises were also taken into custody.
16/ Finally - a decent movie!
"The Grand Budapest Hotel", directed by Wes Anderson is out this weekend, and it's one for you cinephiles......wonderful cast, and a great review......
It’s a tough choice, but if I had to pick the most Wes Anderson moment in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” it would be the part when inmates escape from a prison using tiny sledgehammers and pickaxes that have been smuggled past the guards inside fancy frosted pastries. This may, come to think of it, be the most Wes Anderson thing ever, the very quintessence of his impish, ingenious and oddly practical imagination. So much care has been lavished on the conceit and its execution that you can only smile in admiration, even if you are also rolling your eyes a little.
“The Grand Budapest Hotel,” Mr. Anderson’s eighth feature, will delight his fans, but even those inclined to grumble that it’s just more of the same patented whimsy might want to look again. As a sometime grumbler and longtime fan, I found myself not only charmed and touched but also moved to a new level of respect.
There is no doubt that Mr. Anderson possesses a distinctive sensibility and a consistent visual style, and that instead of striking out in new directions, he tends to embroider and elaborate on familiar themes and pictorial habits. You will see many of them here: static, densely packed, fussily composed frames; traveling shots in which the camera glides alongside the characters like a low-flying bird; action sequences that refuse the usual digital hocus-pocus in favor of the older, artisanal magic of stop-motion animation, matte paintings and rear projection. You will also meet eccentric characters possessed by a kind of madcap melancholy, soulful and silly in equal measure. Some of them are played by actors you have seen elsewhere in the Anderson oeuvre, including Bob Balaban, Tilda Swinton and of course (albeit briefly) Owen Wilson and Bill Murray.
Trailer looks amazing......
Todays video - a Canadian look at fracking...., with innuendos.....
Todays groaner.......
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Todays horribly sexist joke
I was telling a girl in a local bar about my ability to guess what day a woman was born just by feeling her boobs.
"Really" she said, "Go on then...try."
After about thirty seconds of fondling she began to lose patience and said, "Come on, what day was I born?"
I said, "Yesterday."
Todays Chinese philosopher joke
The Great Lao-Tseu said -
It is only when you see a mosquito landing on your testicles that yourealize there is always a way to solve problems without using violence.......
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