1/ The news from the Ukraine we are getting in the US media is driven by "official" Washington, and a media desire for a villain [Putin].....on the assumption we the American public like things simple.
But the truth is more complex, as this article points out. There is a pretty good case for Crimea to be part of Russia, and the Ukrainian revolt against their government has produced a nasty result.....neo-Nazis in the new government that has just taken power.....
Crimea’s Case for Leaving Ukraine
March 9, 2014
2/ If any of our alert readers can figure this puzzle out please let me know, and I will send out the answer next week.
I must confess, I'm baffled.....three minutes.....
3/ It's not often you read something and go "duh, that explains it!". We all know there are a lot of obese people in the US, but also the average height in men has gone from 5'9" to at least 5'11 or thereabouts in the last fourty years or so.....why?
According to this story from the Times, it could be antibiotics.....especially if you eat junk food, which is the cheapest meats which are full of drugs.
This is one of those epiphany articles......
IF you walk into a farm-supply store today, you’re likely to find a bag of antibiotic powder that claims to boost the growth of poultry and livestock. That’s because decades of agricultural research has shown that antibiotics seem to flip a switch in young animals’ bodies, helping them pack on pounds. Manufacturers brag about the miraculous effects of feeding antibiotics to chicks and nursing calves. Dusty agricultural journals attest to the ways in which the drugs can act like a kind of superfood to produce cheap meat.
But what if that meat is us? Recently, a group of medical investigators have begun to wonder whether antibiotics might cause the same growth promotion in humans. New evidence shows that America’s obesity epidemic may be connected to our high consumption of these drugs. But before we get to those findings, it’s helpful to start at the beginning, in 1948, when the wonder drugs were new — and big was beautiful.
That year, a biochemist named Thomas H. Jukes marveled at a pinch of golden powder in a vial. It was a new antibiotic named Aureomycin, and Mr. Jukes and his colleagues at Lederle Laboratories suspected that it would become a blockbuster, lifesaving drug. But they hoped to find other ways to profit from the powder as well. At the time, Lederle scientists had been searching for a food additive for farm animals, and Mr. Jukes believed that Aureomycin could be it. After raising chicks on Aureomycin-laced food and on ordinary mash, he found that the antibiotics did boost the chicks’ growth; some of them grew to weigh twice as much as the ones in the control group.
Mr. Jukes wanted more Aureomycin, but his bosses cut him off because the drug was in such high demand to treat human illnesses. So he hit on a novel solution. He picked through the laboratory’s dump to recover the slurry left over after the manufacture of the drug. He and his colleagues used those leftovers to carry on their experiments, now on pigs, sheep and cows. All of the animals gained weight. Trash, it turned out, could be transformed into meat.
You may be wondering whether it occurred to anyone back then that the powders would have the same effect on the human body. In fact, a number of scientists believed that antibiotics could stimulate growth in children. From our contemporary perspective, here’s where the story gets really strange: All this growth was regarded as a good thing. It was an era that celebrated monster-size animals, fat babies and big men. In 1955, a crowd gathered in a hotel ballroom to watch as feed salesmen climbed onto a scale; the men were competing to see who could gain the most weight in four months, in imitation of the cattle and hogs that ate their antibiotic-laced food. Pfizer sponsored the competition.
4/ The Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi with a look at America's healthcare system, "the best in the world". He talks to a Fox News Business Analyst, who gives responses you cannot believe....."if you're poor, stop being poor!"
This six minute clip goes beyond the normal Fox right wing attitudes....six minutes of humour with a few facts as well......
After watching Aasif Mandvi's segment on Thursday's "Daily Show," two things are clear: 1) America has the greatest healthcare system in the world (if 37th place is considered the greatest), and 2) some people shouldn't do interviews with "Daily Show" correspondents.
Case in point, "Fox Business" commentator and NYSE Euronext Managing Director Todd Wilemon has a couple of jaw-dropping moments in this interview about "third world" healthcare conditions in Knoxville, Tennessee, not the least of which is his statement right at the end: "If you're poor, stop being poor."
Watch the clip above, and keep an eye out for one of the more awkward pauses in "Daily Show" history.
5/ Here are those bad boys at Rolling Stone knocking the greatest country on earth again......if it was up to me I'd corrall them all, lock them in a room and make them listen to Sarah Palin speeches till they came to their senses.......
Six Ways America Is Like a Third-World Country
Our society lags behind the rest of the developed world in education, health care,
violence and more
The U.S. imprisons a higer percentage of our population than countries like Russia, China and Iran.
Michael Criswell/Getty Images
1. Criminal Justice
We all know the U.S. criminal justice system is flawed, but few are likely aware of just how bad it is compared to the rest of the world. The International Center for Prison Studies estimates that America imprisons 716 people per 100,000 citizens (of any age). That's significantlyworse than Russia (484 prisoners per 100,000 citizens), China (121) and Iran (284). The only country that incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than we do is North Korea. The U.S. is also the only developed country that executes prisoners – and our death penalty has a serious race problem: 42 percent of those on death row are black, compared to less than 15 percent of the overall population.
6/ Jay Pharaoh does a pretty good President Obama, and here he is opening SNL last week, worrying about Putin so he brought in Liam Neeson to help....three decent minutes.....
In the cold open for this week’s Saturday Night Live, Jay Pharaoh’s Barack Obama admitted that he was having difficulties convincing Vladimir Putin to stop invading the Ukraine. (“He spent the other half of the conversation pretending to sneeze while saying ‘Iraq,’” he explained.) So he brought in the best negotiator in the business:Liam Neeson, spoofing his role in the movieTaken.
“Mr. Putin, Vladimir: I’ve never met you. I don’t have experience in international diplomacy, but what I do have is a very specific set of skills,” Neeson growled. “Skills that would make me a nightmare for you. By which I mean I’m an actor in Hollywood with a lot of connections.”
And so he and Obama presented their project, “written in a language [Putin] could understand”: a video where Obama engaged in the shirtless, animal-wrestling, motorbike-riding machismo that so defines Putin
7/ I have had some criticism for calling the Southern "red" states the stupid states, but have a look at these nine colour coded maps.....you could say you would have to be stupid to live there, or it could be all of the intelligent people from the South who made it through university have moved to either coast....
Look, there are lots of things to love about the South. It's clean and quiet. There's delicious food, good people and often amazing weather. But that's exactly why it makes us so sad to think about all the ways in which the region is struggling today.
First off, poverty rates are a lot higher in the South.
In fact, as many as one in four Southern kids lives in poverty, compared to the national average of one in five.
In the map above, red shading indicates a poverty rates between 17.9 and 22.8 percent. Orange indicates 15.9 to 17.8 percent; light orange, 12.2-15.8 percent; pale yellow, 9 to 12.1 percent. As you can see, there's a lot of high-poverty red in the South.
8/ And speaking of President Obama, here's the real one on "Between Two Ferns" with Zach Galaflanakis.....the premise of this web series is Zach grills celebrities with completely inane and inappropriate questions and gets [sometimes] surprising reactions.
The President gave as good as he got in this interview, and snuck in a commercial for the Affordable Care Act.......a strange, amusing and hypnotic six minutes which has since gone viral.....
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama joined comedian Zach Galifianakis on his Funny or Die web-based interview program, Between Two Ferns. The sketch immediately became contentious when Galifianakis launched into a series of critiques of Obama’s presidency to which the president was unable to respond.
The sketch cracked wise about Galifianakis’ weight, the presidential turkey pardons, gay marriage, drone strikes, and, ultimately, a few words from the president selling Obamacare.
9/ If you have been watching "The Walking Dead" [hint- it's got zombies!] you will appreciate this five minute clip from Bad Lip-Reading of totally inappropriate dialogue put into the characters mouths.....by the way - if you haven't watched the show, you may not get this at all....
The final minute with The Governor singing Broadway is amazingly strange .....hmmm - and I didn't know zombies could talk.....
10/ Cruising afficionados - these four fascinating pictures get the size of the modern day monsters in proportion - Captain Richard James of the Queen Mary 2 stands on the bulbous bow extension.....a wow......
REX USA/James D. Morgan / Rex
11/ The story of a pregnant woman who drove her minivan with three kids in it into the ocean is a sad commentary on what it's like to be poor in this country.....an act of madness which of course was followed by a charge of attempted murder.....
Black, poor, abusive husband, lived in a Southern state [South Carolina], three kids and pregnant with a fourth, [from her family] a little unstable and her husband had just beaten her up......drives to relatives in Daytona Beach and makes a pathetic and very public attempt to kill herself and her kids. So do we as a society try to help this obviously mentally disturbed person, under the kind of pressure that would crack the strongest of us? Treat her for her mental issues?
Of course not....she will be tried and sentenced to what has become our mental hospital system.....prison.
This is what this society does to the mentally ill - as an example very occasionally we will hear about a mother harming or even killing a newborn [infanticide], with a trial and sentencing of the mother to many years in jail.....but infanticide isn't a crime in Europe because it's caused by post partum depression, which in extreme cases can drive mothers of new babies to acts of madness. In Europe it's treated as a tragedy, not a crime.
I'm not saying this Ebony Wilkerson isn't to blame, just that she should get help, not 15 years in jail....but this is Florida, and we need to set an example in case teenagers start doing it too.....
ORLANDO, March 8 (Reuters) - A judge set bail at $1.2 million on Saturday for a pregnant woman facing attempted murder charges for driving a minivan carrying her three young children into the surf off a Florida beach, according to jail records.
Ebony Wilkerson, 32, has been charged with three counts of first-degree attempted murder and three counts of child abuse in the incident, which occurred on Tuesday at Daytona Beach.
A tourist's video captured lifeguards and bystanders rushing to help pull the children, ages 3, 9 and 10, out of the van as it was being buffeted by waves in the Atlantic Ocean.
The children had lowered the windows to scream for help, and the oldest child could be seen trying to wrest control of the steering wheel from her mother, investigators said.
Ebony Wilkerson, 32, has been charged with three counts of first-degree attempted murder and three counts of child abuse in the incident, which occurred on Tuesday at Daytona Beach.
A tourist's video captured lifeguards and bystanders rushing to help pull the children, ages 3, 9 and 10, out of the van as it was being buffeted by waves in the Atlantic Ocean.
The children had lowered the windows to scream for help, and the oldest child could be seen trying to wrest control of the steering wheel from her mother, investigators said.
12/ One of Stephen Colbert's segments is "Tip Of The Hat, Wag Of The Finger" and in this one he applauds the size of the governments cojones......amusing, four minutes.....
The U.S. government is suing Sprint for overcharging on its wiretap program. Yep, you read that right.
As Stephen Colbert pointed out on Tuesday during Tip Of The Hat/Wag Of The Finger, "that takes balls."
Watch Colbert give a thumbs up to the DOJ's giant low-hangers, and Wall Street for deciding that S.A.T. scores still matter when you're 40.
13/ Angela Corey - you may remember this vicious, evil bitch's name as the prosecutor going after Merissa Alexander for firing a warning shot at her abusive husband and getting 20 years. Then when she got a new trial, Corey upped the possible sentence to 60 years....
Corey also [allegedly] deliberately blew the George Zimmerman case, and couldn't get a conviction of murder for Michael Dunn after he fired into a car of black teenagers, killing one.
A spiteful, vindictive and powerful law officer who shouldn't be in her position.....
Angela Corey, by all accounts, is no Atticus Finch. She is “one hell of a trial lawyer,” says a Florida defense attorney who has known her for three decades — but the woman who has risen to national prominence as the “tough as nails” state attorney who prosecuted George Zimmerman is known for scorching the earth. And some of her prosecutorial conduct has been, well, troubling at best.
Corey, a Jacksonville native, took a degree in marketing from Florida State University before pursuing her J.D. at the University of Florida. She became a Florida prosecutor in 1981 and tried everything from homicides to juvenile cases in the ensuing 26 years. In 2008, Corey was elected state attorney for Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit, taking over from Harry Shorstein — the five-term state attorney who had fired her from his office a year earlier, citing “long-term issues” regarding her supervisory performance.
When Corey came in, she cleaned house. Corey fired half of the office’s investigators, two-fifths of its victim advocates, a quarter of its 35 paralegals, and 48 other support staff — more than one-fifth of the office. Then she sent a letter to Florida’s senators demanding that they oppose Shorstein’s pending nomination as a U.S. attorney. “I told them he should not hold a position of authority in his community again, because of his penchant for using the grand jury for personal vendettas,” she wrote.
Corey knows about personal vendettas. They seem to be her specialty.
14/ One of the most subversive songs of the 70's that went right over the heads of most adults at the time was "Lola", by Ray Davies and the Kinks.....here they are live on a British pop show.....listen to the lyrics again......
15/ Leading on from #13 is how Corey, the State Prosecutor for the fourth circuit in Central Florida is the leader in the State for putting [mainly] black men on Death Row.
Since taking office in 2009, Corey has had the chance to speak to a lot of people trying to get their loved ones’ killers sentenced to death. She has put more people on Death Row than any other prosecutor in Florida.
Corey’s office has sent 21 people to Death Row, and 18 of them are still there with the other three getting off Death Row on appeal. No other current prosecutor in the state has put more than seven people on Death Row since the start of 2009.
Supporters of Corey say it’s an example of how tough she is on crime in an area that has the highest per-capita murder rate in the state.
But critics say the high amount of death cases coming from the 4th Judicial Circuit, which covers Duval, Clay and Nassau counties, puts the area outside the mainstream when it comes to how the death penalty is being used.
Both sides concede that Corey is the reason the death penalty rate is so high.
“Deciding whether to seek the death penalty and then deciding whether to take a plea are the two most important decisions in a death-penalty case,” said Stephen Bright, president and senior counsel for the Southern Center for Human Rights. “And both of those decisions are made by the prosecutor.”
16/ Publix - in many ways a "good" supermarket, with great service and decent selection of organics and fresh produce......
So how do we explain Publix's refusal to give the tomato pickers an extra one penny a pound that will lift them out of extreme poverty. Even WalMart have agreed to pay it.....
I don't get it, but it might be the management of Publix are all based in Lakeland and there may be some bigotry involved.....just sayin'......
I copied this link to Scott Maxwell's article and posted it on Publix's Facebook page.....you might want to do the same...
I love Publix.
The helpful workers. The BOGO bins. The deli subs and bakery pies.
But one thing I don't love about the Lakeland-based grocery chain is its refusal to ensure that tomato pickers get decent wages and working conditions.
We're talking one measly extra penny a pound.
Walmart pays the extra penny. So does McDonald's. As does Whole Foods, Burger King, Chipotle and many others.
Publix, however, refuses.
Consequently, shopping at Publix isn't quite the pleasure it used to be.
After all, there's nothing pleasurable about contributing to a modern-day version of indentured servitude — where workers make $12,000 a year or less in shoddy work conditions.
See, the dirty little secret of what happens in Florida's fields — which produce 90 percent of America's winter tomatoes — has been exposed in recent years.
Prosecutors have targeted the most blatant atrocities (including farm owners convicted for beating workers who threatened to leave). But complaints continue about everything from a lack of breaks for water and shade to reports of sexual harassment and safety concerns.
Todays video - a compilation of someone's idea of the 15 funniest commercials in the world.....not bad, and most are new......
Todays intulleckjul jokes......
Todays Catholic joke
Four Catholic men and a Catholic woman were having coffee in St. Peter's Square.
The first Catholic man tells his friends,
"My son is a priest. When he walks into a room, everyone calls him 'Father'."
The second Catholic man chirps,
"My son is a Bishop. When he walks into a room people call him 'Your Grace'."
The third Catholic gent says,
"My son is a Cardinal. When he enters a room everyone bows their head and says 'Your Eminence'."
The fourth Catholic man says very proudly,
"My son is the Pope. When he walks into a room people call him 'Your Holiness'."
Since the lone Catholic woman was sipping her coffee in silence, the four men give her a subtle, "Well....?"
She proudly replies, "I have a daughter, SLIM, TALL, 38D BREASTS 24" WAIST and 36" HIPS. When she walks into a room, people say,
"Jesus Christ!".
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Todays Illinois joke [or Ohio, or Wisconsin etc.]
Aug. 12 - Moved into our new home in Illinois. It is so beautiful here. The hills and river valleys are so picturesque. I have a beautiful old oak... tree in my front yard. Can hardly wait to see the change in the seasons. This is truly God's Country.
Oct. 14 - Illinois is such a gorgeous place to live, one of the real special places on Earth. The leaves are turning a multitude of different colors. I love all of the shades of reds, oranges and yellows, they are so bright. I want to walk through all of the beautiful hills and spot some white tail deer. They are so graceful, certainly they must be the most peaceful creatures on Earth. This must be paradise.
Nov. 11 - Deer season opens this week. I can't imagine why anyone would want to shoot these elegant animals. They are the very symbol of peace and tranquility here in Illinois. I hope it snows soon. I love it here!
Dec. 2 - It snowed last night. I woke to the usual wonderful sight:
everything covered in a beautiful blanket of white. The oak tree is magnificent. It looks like a postcard. We went out and swept the snow from the steps and driveway. The air is so crisp, clean and refreshing. We had a snowball fight. I won, and the snowplow came down the street. He must have gotten too close to the driveway because we had to go out and shovel the end of the driveway again. What a beautiful place. Nature in harmony. I love it here!
Dec. 12 - More snow last night. I love it! The plow did his cute little trick again. What a rascal. A winter wonderland. I love it here!
Dec. 19 - More snow - couldn't get out of the driveway to get to work in time. I'm exhausted from all of the shoveling. And that snowplow!
Dec. 21 - More of that white shit coming down. I've got blisters on my hands and a kink in my back. I think that the snowplow driver waits around the corner until I'm done shoveling the driveway. Asshole.
Dec. 25 - White Christmas? More freakin' snow. If I ever get my hands on the sonofabitch who drives that snowplow, I swear I'll castrate him. And why don't they use more salt on these roads to melt this crap??
Dec. 28 - It hasn't stopped snowing since Christmas. I have been inside since then, except of course when that SOB "Snowplow Harry" comes by. Can't go anywhere, cars are buried up to the windows. Weather man says to expect another 10 inches. Do you have any idea how many shovelfuls 10 inches is??
Jan. 1 - Happy New Year? The way it's coming down it won't melt until the 4th of July! The snowplow got stuck down the road and the shithead actually had the balls to come and ask to borrow a shovel! I told him I'd broken 6 already this season.
Jan. 4 - Finally got out of the house. We went to the store to get some food and a goddamn deer ran out in front of my car and I hit the bastard.
It did $3,000 in damage to the car. Those beasts ought to be killed. The hunters should have a longer season if you ask me.
Jan. 27 - Warmed up a little and rained today. The rain turned the snow into ice and the weight of it broke the main limb of the oak tree in the front yard and it went through the roof. I should have cut that old piece of shit into fireplace wood when I had the chance.
May 10 - Took my car to the local garage. Would you believe the whole underside of the car is rusted away from all of that damn salt they dump on the road? Car looks like a bashed up, heap of rusted cow shit.
May 23 - Sold the car, the house, and moved to Florida. I can't imagine why anyone in their freakin' mind would ever want to live in the God forsaken State of Illinois.
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