1/ A most interesting and thoughtful article from Chris Hayes comparing the uphill battle to stop the energy companies from heating up the planet to the struggle to end slavery in the South - freeing the slaves meant the South had to give up an enormous amount of assets [slaves], and action on CO2 means energy corporations need to leave trillions of dollars of oil, gas and coal in the ground. It took a long, vicious and painful civil war to end slavery, and there's no easy road ahead for getting Exxon Mobil or Saudi Arabia to voluntarily relinquish their business model.
But there's hope.....a very good story......
Before the cannons fired at Fort Sumter, the Confederates announced their rebellion with lofty rhetoric about “violations of the Constitution of the United States” and “encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States.” But the brute, bloody fact beneath those words was money. So much goddamn money.
The leaders of slave power were fighting a movement of dispossession. The abolitionists told them that the property they owned must be forfeited, that all the wealth stored in the limbs and wombs of their property would be taken from them. Zeroed out. Imagine a modern-day political movement that contended that mutual funds and 401(k)s, stocks and college savings accounts were evil institutions that must be eliminated completely, more or less overnight. This was the fear that approximately 400,000 Southern slaveholders faced on the eve of the Civil War.
Today, we rightly recoil at the thought of tabulating slaves as property. It was precisely this ontological question—property or persons?—that the war was fought over. But suspend that moral revulsion for a moment and look at the numbers: Just how much money were the South’s slaves worth then? A commonly cited figure is $75 billion, which comes from multiplying the average sale price of slaves in 1860 by the number of slaves and then using the Consumer Price Index to adjust for inflation. But as economists Samuel H. Williamson and Louis P. Cain argue, using CPI-adjusted prices over such a long period doesn’t really tell us much: “In the 19th century,” they note, “there were no national surveys to figure out what the average consumer bought.” In fact, the first such survey, in Massachusetts, wasn’t conducted until 1875.
2/ Timothy Egan, a columnist in the Times, is an optimist. Here he argues that although the Koch Brothers are throwing a lot of money at their cherished right wing causes, the force of inevitability will overcome whatever they do.
I kind of agree with him, but they can cause a lot of pain and suffering along the way, and it won't be easy fighting the tide of money.....
For a time, the press lord William Randolph Hearst did everything in his vast powers to keep the film “Citizen Kane” from finding an audience. He intimidated theater owners, refused to let ads run in his newspapers, and even pressured studio sycophants to destroy the negative.
At first, the titan of San Simeon had his way: the film faded from view after a splashy initial release. But over the years, “Citizen Kane” came to be recognized for the masterpiece it is, and now regularly tops lists as the greatest film ever made.
The modern equivalent of Hearst is the Koch Brothers, David and Charles — known without affection as the Kochtopus. On certain days, depending on the stock market, their combined worth is more than any single American’s, somewhere around $80 billion.
They have used a big part of this fortune to attack the indisputable science on climate change, to buy junk scholars, to promote harmful legislation at the state level, to go after clean, renewable energy like solar, and to try to kill the greatest expansion of health care in decades. Money can’t buy love, but it certainly can cause a lot of havoc.
Yet, while these billionaire industrialists may win in the short term — the Republican Party, their toady, is likely to pick up seats in the House and may take control of the Senate as well — in the larger fight against progress and modernity the Kochs have already lost. Clean energy is here to stay, and no sane political party would try to take away the health care of eight million fellow Americans.
Check that — they’ll try in both instances.
3/ Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the star of "Veep" on HBO, and she teams up with the actual VP Joe Biden in a funny five minute film that was shown at the White House Correspondents Dinner.....
Very clever, with insider jokes and zingers.....
Vice President Joe Biden teamed up with fake Vice President Selina Meyer (Veep‘s Julia Louis-Dreyfus) for a hilarious buddy comedy video in which Biden basically emulates the Onion parody of himself.
Biden and Meyer go for a little joy ride in Biden’s yellow car. They sneak into the White House to eat ice cream (much to the disapproval ofMichelle Obama), mess with every newspaper they possibly can, and get tattoos alongsideNancy Pelosi.
There’s a little dig in there against House of Cards, and a cameo by John Boehner watching something you would not expect Boehner to be watching.
4/ Mark Bittman is the food guy for the Times, and here he argues that progressive food activists trying to improve the diet of the American public are going after the wrong goals - forget "organic", forget "GMO's", just try to wean people off packaged food and start cooking their own meals with fresh vegetables and meats.
He's right - we foodies get carried away, and don't realise how horrible the average American diet is and how small steps will make a huge difference.....
A very good article that hits home......
The ever-increasing number of people working to improve the growing, processing, transporting, marketing, distributing and eating of food must think through our messages more thoroughly and get them across more clearly. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I can say that a couple of buzzwords represent issues that are far more nuanced than we often make them appear. These are “organic” and “G.M.O.'s” (genetically modified organisms).
I think we — forward-thinking media, progressives in general, activist farmers, think-tank types, nonprofiteers, everyone who’s battling to create a better food system — often send the wrong message on both of these. If we understand and explain them better it’ll be more difficult for us to be discredited (or, worse, dismissed out of hand), and we’ll have more success moving intelligent comments on these important issues into the mainstream.
Let’s start with “organic.” The struggle to raise more food in more sustainable ways is as important as any, including the fight to slow climate change. (They’re related, of course.) But more sustainable does not mean “pure,” and organic often generates unreasonable expectations. Many experts are now using the term “agro-ecological,” which has the disadvantage of being unusable in casual conversation — why not just say, “We want to make crop production better?” Because we can improve industrial agriculture more quickly and easily than we can convert the whole system to “organic,” which is never going to happen. Unless, of course, we run out of cheap fossil fuel and have to stop moving chemicals and food around the globe willy-nilly.
Furthermore, there’s a very real difference between eating better and growing better. I can eat better starting right now, and it has nothing — zero — to do with shopping at Whole Foods or eating organically. It has to do with eating less junk, hyperprocessed food and industrially raised animal products. The word “organic” need not cross my lips.
5/ Amy Schumer is a funny lady, and here she is on a three minute clip with Jimmy Fallon playing "Truth or Truth"......quite amusing......
Comedian Amy Schumer’s name has been thrown around a lot lately as a possible late night replacement. The host of Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer won’t be getting Stephen Colbert’s old time slot (that went to The Daily Showcorrespondent Larry Wilmore), but Craig Fergusons is still available on CBS.
Last night, Schumer got to show off her late night chops on The Tonight Show and at one point during a game of “Truth or Truth” truly shockedJimmy Fallon with her answer to his question: “Teeth. What do you think of them?”
6/ Yet another study on statins, and how women don't need this horrible drug as often as it is prescribed. For those of you that take it without a family history of heart issues, just to bring your cholesterol down, please take a look at "Statin Nation", a great documentary on how the drug companies have pushed statins to solve in some cases a non-existent problem.
Don't look to your doctor for impartial advice either - they were brainwashed in medical school about statins, and also receive cash bonuses from the drug companies the more they prescribe this stuff.
Shannon FreshwaterMedical guidelines issued late last year may double the number of Americans who are told to take these cholesterol-lowering drugs. But the recommendations don’t distinguish patients by gender, and a small, increasingly vocal group of cardiologists believe that’s a mistake.
Should so many women be taking statins?
Far too many healthy women are taking statins, they say, though some research indicates the drugs will do them little good and may be more likely to cause serious side effects in women.
“If you’re going to tell a healthy person to take a medicine every day for the rest of their life, you should have really good data that it’s going to make them better off,” said Dr.Rita Redberg, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and the editor of JAMA Internal Medicine. Lowering cholesterol should not be not an end in itself, she added, and cholesterol may not play the same role in heart disease in women as in men. “You can have high cholesterol and still be really healthy and have a low risk of heart disease,” she said.
Although women represent slightly more than half of the population, they have been vastly underrepresented in clinical trials of statins. As a result, evidence on the benefits and risks for women is limited.
Women tend to develop heart disease about 10 years later in life on average than men; women’s risk begins to equal that of men when they reach their mid-70s.
Studies have found that healthy women who took statins to prevent cardiovascular disease did experience fewer episodes of chest pain and had fewer treatments like stents and bypass surgery. But statins didn’t prevent healthy women from having their first heart attacks and didn’t save lives.
7/ As you might have surmised I have a fairly high tolerance for strangeness in videos, but the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest this year was a first - a transgender singer from Austria.......watch Conchita Wurst sing "Rise Like A Phoenix", and she won the contest. This is the most watched European TV show, seen all over Europe including the openly homophobic Russia. Wonder how they took it?
She has a beautiful voice, but I have to admit it was a little disturbing.....I think it is the beard........
Yesterday Conchita Wurst, from Austria, was named the winner of Eurovision Song Contest. The competition spans the entire continent, and has been broadcasted since 1956 making it one of the longest running TV programs. Each participating country has a contestant, and winners are chosen by a mixture of judging panel and viewer votes. Past winners include ABBA and Celine Dion. The competition is held in the home country of the previous year’s winner. This year it was held in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Wurst, who performs in drag, is known for her brunette locks, dazzling outfits and manicured beard. She also has a stunning and powerful voice.
8/ Tom Tomorrow with his take on the awful Sean Hannity......looks pretty true to me.........click on the cartoon to enlarge it.....
9/ I've been proud of Harry Reid recently, taking on the Koch Brothers in his speeches in the Senate.....but there's just one little problem.....and Jon Stewart nails it......two parts, three minutes and four minutes [with Jason Jones]......good one.....
Jon Stewart mockingly praised Harry Reid‘s brave crusade against the Koch brothers Tuesday night before calling him out as a rank hypocrite for not similarly condemning Sheldon Adelson, whose money just happens to benefit Reid politically.
Stewart ridiculed Reid’s articulate way of describing climate change as “the stuff up there,” before expressing mock shock that this “crusader for good, money-free politics” is no more than a hypocrite who only thinks money in politics is corrupt when the people involved aren’t politically connected to them.
Jason Jones came on to explain why Reid, however, is not a hypocrite: “corruption is a billionaire who spends money on shit that you like!”
JJ- no, because Adelson helps Reid politically, it’s only corrupt if Harry Reid doesn’t benefit from it, “corruption is a billionaire who spends money on shit that you like!” And the U.S. totally isn’t an oligarchy, because “an oligarchy is a country run by billionaires who aren’t American!”
10/ Marco Rubio made a major blunder last year by being in favour of immigration reform, which is anathema to the Republican base, and he backed away from that and has been trying to prove he is a "true" conservative ever since. Which explains this astonishing statement from a Florida Senator from the state that will be the most affected by climate change - he's a climate denier.......
Actually all Republican Florida politicians, Rubio, Governor Deathwarmedover, the conservatives in the Florida House and Senate all deny climate change exists. The official policy for Florida is that there is no such thing, which is beyond painful. Floriduh......
WASHINGTON -- Of all the states that stand to suffer from climate change, Florida is facing potentially the bleakest consequences. A New York Times reportnoted last week that global warming was already having an effect on everyday life, like leading to flooding on streets that never used to flood.
Meanwhile, a National Climate Assessment has named Miami as the city most vulnerable to damage from rising sea levels. While a Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact paper warned that water in the area could rise by as much as two feet by the year 2060.
On Sunday, one of the state's U.S. senators, Marco Rubio (R), was pressed about the general subject of climate change, and despite the warnings outlined above, he argued that there was nothing lawmakers could or should do to reverse the climate trends (whose origins he also questioned).
"I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it," Rubio said, according to excerpts released by ABC "This Week," "and I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy."
11/ John Oliver has his own show on HBO, and after a bit of a rocky start seems to have found his feet. Have a look at this four minute segment with Bill Nye, about climate change skeptics.....a classic, and excellent!
In addition to the raunchiest faux-news segment in human history (eat your heart out, Jon Stewart), tonight’s edition of HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver swiped hard at public polling data showing one in four Americans skeptical of anthropogenic climate change.
“Who gives a shit?” Oliver said of that particular Gallup poll’s findings. “You don’t need people’s opinion on a fact. You might as well have a poll asking: ‘Which number is bigger, 15 or 5?’ or ‘Do owls exist?’ or ‘Are there hats?’”
“The debate on climate change ought not to be whether or not it exists,” he continued. “It is what we should do about. There is a mountain of research on this topic.”
“The only accurate way to report that one out of four Americans are skeptical of global warming is to say, ‘A poll finds that one in four Americans are wrong about something,’” he added. “Because a survey of thousands of scientific papers either took a position on climate change found that 97 percent endorsed the positions that humans are causing global warming.”
And yet the public continually expresses skepticism of the science, Oliver said, perhaps assisted by cable news’ insistence on depicting a one-on-one debate between a “skeptic” (or “some dude”) and a global warming “believer,” most typically Bill Nye the Science Guy.
“If there has to be a debate about the reality of climate change — and there doesn’t — then there is only one mathematically fair way to do it,” he said before turning to Bill Nye himself for a more “accurate” version of how the climate change debate should occur.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/
12/ The excellent Carl Hiassen has found the first draft of a speech from Governor Voldemort on climate change......
Rejected first draft of Gov. Rick Scott’s position on climate change).
My fellow Floridians, as you’ve all probably heard, a new National Climate Assessment report says that Florida is seriously threatened by rising sea levels, mass flooding, salt-contaminated water supplies and increasingly severe weather events — all supposedly caused by climate change.
Let me assure you there’s absolutely no reason for worry. I still don’t believe climate change is real, and you shouldn’t, either.
Don’t be impressed just because 240 “experts” contributed to this melodramatic report. The tea party has experts, too, and they assure me it’s all hogwash.
Even if the atmosphere is warming (and, whoa, I’m not saying it is!), I still haven’t seen a speck of solid evidence that it has anything do with man spewing millions of tons of gaseous pollutants into the sky.
Is the planet a hotter place than it was 200 years ago? Yes, but only by a couple of degrees. Did most of the temperature rise occur since 1970? Yes, but don’t blame coal-burning plants or auto emissions.
Maybe the sun is getting closer to the Earth. Ever think of that? Or the Earth is moving closer to the sun? Let’s get some brainiacs to investigate that possibility!
As long as I’m the governor, Florida isn’t going to punish any industries by imposing so-called “clean air” regulations that limit carbon emissions.
In fact, soon after I took office we repealed the state’s Climate Protection Act and eliminated the Energy and Climate Commission that was created under my predecessor, the Obama-hugging turncoat Charlie Crist.
I also ordered the Department of Environmental Protection to halt all initiatives dealing with renewable energy and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, no one at DEP is even allowed to whisper the phrase “climate change” any more.
13/ A clever series of slides, some of which you need to look closely at.....I like the "clean the bathroom" one, and the "break the seal" one.....wryly amusing......
14/ The ceaseless corruption of Florida is so depressing - an oil company was given permits to drill for oil in the Everglades. IN THE EVERGLADES! Not only did they drill for oil, they started hydraulic fracking using vast amounts of water and toxic chemicals. When they were told to stop, they ignored the instruction and kept on going.
Will anything happen to these bastards? Of course not......business as usual in Rick Scott's Florida, the Everglades is just another area to exploit no matter what the damage......
Duck family crossing the road in the Big Cypress National Preserve, Florida.
CREDIT: FLICKR/MATTHEW PAULSON
Fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, is both a fractious term and a fractious process. Stakeholders across the country ranging from environmentalists to landowners have voiced repeated concerns of the impact of fracking on local health, water supplies and even earthquake frequency. At the same time, what exactly is involved in the fracking process is often shrouded in mystery as companies are resistant to releasing the exact chemical composition of the mix they inject into the ground along with water and sand to open fissures in the rock and draw out oil or natural gas.
In Florida, the Everglades are on the front lines of this debate as companies become anxious to get at any fossil fuels surrounding this ecological wonder. In an effort to keep the process going, one oil and gas company has even gone as far as denying that what they’re doing actually amounts to fracking.
In December and January, Dan A. Hughes Co. of Beeville, Texas undertook, for the first time in the state, an “enhanced extraction procedure” during exploratory drilling, which according to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is consistent with the EPA’s description of hydraulic fracturing. Furthermore, the company did so without a permit and in defiance of a cease-and-desist order to stop the practice.
“The company denies that the new practice amounts to fracking because it uses an acidic solution instead of the usual fracking chemicals and a ‘modest volume’ of water and sand,” reported the Orlando Sentinel.
What Hughes Co. is doing is an old process that involves pumping an acid solution down a well to dissolve rock formations and allow more oil to flow up the well. The technique called “acid well stimulation” or “acid fracking” uses large volumes of hydrochloric or hydrofluoric acid to dissolve rock, not fracture it — hence the argument that it’s not really fracking. The process of acid fracking near the Everglades was still of equal concern to the state’s DEP, but Hughes Co. continued to move forward even though it was told not to.
15/ I want to see this movie - it's called "Fed Up", and it's produced by Katie Couric.......the truth about how our food industry is making people obese.......
Read the last line of the excerpt below......conspiracies anyone? Big Food allied with the medical industry and Big Pharma to make you obese, and therefore sick.....
Excellent trailer below......
If you are interested in learning the latest on fighting what’s called the obesity epidemic, you may want to avoid the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website. There, in a section about balancing calories (“Healthy Weight — it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle!”), amid tips on reducing and exercising, you can read that “a calorie is a calorie regardless of its source.” The page also features a graphic of a scale with the words “calories in” and “calories out,” as if all calories were equal. The American Beverage Association, as it happens, pretty much says the same thing on its website: “Quite simply, overweight and obesity are a result of an imbalance between calories consumed and calories burned.”
Recent research, by contrast, indicates that calories in fruit are not the same as those in soda, a conclusion that is part of the big picture in “Fed Up,” a very good advocacy documentary directed by Stephanie Soechtig and narrated by Katie Couric. (Ms. Couric is also an executive producer.) A whirlwind of talking heads, found footage, scary statistics and cartoonish graphics, the movie is a fast, coolly incensed investigation into why people are getting fatter. It also includes some touching video self-portraits by some young people who belong to the almost 17 percent of children and adolescents, 2 to 19, who are considered obese. The kids in the movie are charming and heartbreaking, but the documentary doesn’t need their pain to make its points, and their participation can feel borderline exploitative.
The rest of it is just fine. With Ms. Couric as its guide, “Fed Up” introduces you to a mystery, namely the puzzle of rising obesity rates. From there, it moves into investigative mode, which is where it becomes more complex and transparently political, as the filmmakers explore who’s killing our health. The villains it nails include entities described in the movie as Big Sugar and such, which are sharply cut down to size by the likes of Robert H. Lustig, a neuroendocrinologist, author
Trailer for "Fed Up"......worth watching......
Todays video - An award-winning Australian short film [mainly] for guys, and lads if this ever happens to you I hope you don't have to go to this doctor. A guy drinks too much, and has an uncomfortable feeling in the morning.....
Todays relationship joke
Husband’s Text Message by cellphone:
Honey, car hit me when I was out of office.
Honey, car hit me when I was out of office.
Paula brought me to Hospital.
They're doing tests and X-rays.
Blow to my head very strong, fortunately did not cause serious injury;
They're doing tests and X-rays.
Blow to my head very strong, fortunately did not cause serious injury;
have three broken ribs, compound fracture in left leg and they may have to amputate right foot.
Wife’s Response:
“Who’s Paula?”
Wife’s Response:
“Who’s Paula?”
Todays pointy headed intellectual jokes/puns/wordplay...... I got about 2/3 of these!
Todays senior joke
To help save the economy, the Government will announce next month that the Immigration Department will start deporting seniors (instead of illegals) in order to lower Social Security and Medicare costs.
Older people are easier to catch and will not remember how to get back home.
I started to cry when I thought of you.
Then it dawned on me ........ I'll see you on the bus!
No comments:
Post a Comment