Fairly climate change heavy this week, but there were a lot of stories on the subject and not much else in the news.....no apologies, they're all different angles of the same issue.
1/ Paul Krugman looks at the future in a column titled "Crazy Climate Economics", which will be once the right wing finally admit CC is real they'll be whining about the crippling costs of doing anything about it. This is the next ploy from the Koch Brothers......
Everywhere you look these days, you see Marxism on the rise. Well, O.K., maybe you don’t — but conservatives do. If you so much as mention income inequality, you’ll be denounced as the second coming of Joseph Stalin; Rick Santorum has declared that any use of the word “class” is “Marxism talk.” In the right’s eyes, sinister motives lurk everywhere — for example, George Will says the only reason progressives favor trains is their goal of “diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.”
So it goes without saying that Obamacare, based on ideas originally developed at the Heritage Foundation, is a Marxist scheme — why, requiring that people purchase insurance is practically the same as sending them to gulags.
And just wait until the Environmental Protection Agency announces rules intended to slow the pace of climate change.
Until now, the right’s climate craziness has mainly been focused on attacking the science. And it has been quite a spectacle: At this point almost all card-carrying conservatives endorse the view that climate change is a gigantic hoax, that thousands of research papers showing a warming planet — 97 percent of the literature — are the product of a vast international conspiracy. But as the Obama administration moves toward actually doing something based on that science, crazy climate economics will come into its own.
2/ Not sure if you heard this, but Fox Corp [Rupert Murdoch] has just bought Harlequin books. Bill Maher in a very funny four minute segment imagines how the soft porn will be modified to be more "fair and balanced"......a good one.....
This week Rupert Murdoch acquired Harlequin, the publishing outfit known for those incredibly steamy softcore porn, housewife-fetish books. Well, now that Murdoch owns it, Bill Mahersuspected the books might take a rightward turn, and read an excerpt of what sounded a lot like some conservative fetish porn.
Maher read the mock book as a Fox News wet dream, with everything from the title to the asides filled with conservative clichés. One line describes “a passion that burned like an underprotected embassy in Libya,” while the male character is a “widower whose wife had died in the War on Christmas.”
And the pillow talk was just as cheesy, with lines like “drill, baby, drill!” and “Shh, don’t speak. Until you learn to speak English.”
3/ It's official - Canada has surpassed the US in median income, and the middle class of Canada has a better life than us here in Merica, and a lot of European countries are catching up fast.
Yup - we're well on the way to the oligarchic wet dream......a country with a sliver of fabulously wealthy elites, the comfortable rich who serve them and the rest of us living like peasants, scared, hungry and grateful for the crumbs they throw us.
It was in 1931 that the historian James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “the American dream.”
The American dream is not just a yearning for affluence, Adams said, but also for the chance to overcome barriers and social class, to become the best that we can be. Adams acknowledged that the United States didn’t fully live up to that ideal, but he argued that America came closer than anywhere else.
Adams was right at the time, and for decades. When my father, an eastern European refugee, reached France after World War II, he was determined to continue to the United States because it was less class bound, more meritocratic and offered more opportunity.
Yet today the American dream has derailed, partly because of growing inequality. Or maybe the American dream has just swapped citizenship, for now it is more likely to be found in Canada or Europe — and a central issue in this year’s political campaigns should be how to repatriate it.
A report last month in The Times by David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy noted that the American middle class is no longer the richest in the world, with Canada apparently pulling ahead in median after-tax income. Other countries in Europe are poised to overtake us as well.
In fact, the discrepancy is arguably even greater. Canadians receive essentially free health care, while Americans pay for part of their health care costs with after-tax dollars. Meanwhile, the American worker toils, on average, 4.6 percent more hours than a Canadian worker, 21 percent more hours than a French worker and an astonishing 28 percent more hours than a German worker, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Canadians and Europeans also live longer, on average, than Americans do. Their children are less likely to die than ours.American women are twice as likely to die as a result of pregnancy or childbirth as Canadian women. And, while our universities are still the best in the world, children in other industrialized countries, on average, get a better education than ours. Most sobering of all: A recent O.E.C.D. report found that for people aged 16 to 24, Americans ranked last among rich countries in numeracy and technological proficiency.
4/ Don't know if you have ever watched "The Soup", but Joel McHale is the master of sarcasm and as it looks like he's going to get one of the late night spots. Here's a good [and relevant] clip from the show, to do with some celebs in an elevator.....
No, Joel McHale is not yet the official replacement for Craig Ferguson on CBS’ Late Late Show. But last night on The Soup, McHale showed he has what it takes when it comes to mocking cable news anchors.
“The incident in which Solange Knowles was caught on tape attacking Jay Z in an elevator is clearly the biggest thing involving a black woman in the world right now,” McHale said. “I mean, it would take 271 black women getting kidnapped by a terrorist group to be more important.”
From there, McHale showed a supercut of the “whitest people ever” telling the exact same joke about fight, starting with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren and ending with CNN’s Don Lemon. But one anchor who made it into the montage had to set the record straight, telling McHale, “It was original when I said it, Joel.”
5/ What the hell has happened to Canada? The kindler, gentler country to the north has turned into a petro-state, steamrolling over any remaining environmental constraints and polluting away like mad.
It might have something to do with the Conservative regime of Steven Harper and the boys from the tar sands province, Alberta......
START with the term “tar sands.” In Canada only fervent opponents of oil development in northern Alberta dare to use those words; the preferred phrase is the more reassuring “oil sands.” Never mind that the “oil” in the world’s third largest petroleum reserve is in fact bitumen, a substance with the consistency of peanut butter, so viscous that another fossil fuel must be used to dilute it enough to make it flow.
Never mind, too, that the process that turns bitumen into consumable oil is very dirty, even by the oil industry’s standards. But say “tar sands” in Canada, and you’ll risk being labeled unpatriotic, radical, subversive.
Performing language makeovers is perhaps the most innocuous indication of the Canadian government’s headlong embrace of the oil industry’s wishes. Soon after becoming prime minister in 2006, Stephen Harper declared Canada “an emerging energy superpower,” and nearly everything he’s done since has buttressed this ambition. Forget the idea of Canada as dull, responsible and environmentally minded: That is so 20th century. Now it’s a desperado, placing all its chips on a world-be-damned, climate-altering tar sands bet.
Documents obtained by research institutions and environmental groups through freedom-of-information requests show a government bent on extracting as much tar sands oil as possible, as quickly as possible. From 2008 to 2012, oil industry representatives registered 2,733 communications with government officials, a number dwarfing those of other industries. The oil industry used these communications to recommend changes in legislation to facilitate tar sands and pipeline development. In the vast majority of instances, the government followed through.
In the United States, the tar sands debate focuses on Keystone XL, the 1,200-mile pipeline that would link Alberta oil to the Gulf of Mexico. What is often overlooked is that Keystone XL is only one of 13 pipelines completed or proposed by the Harper government — they would extend for 10,000 miles, not just to the gulf, but to both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans.
After winning an outright parliamentary majority in 2011, Mr. Harper’s Conservative Party passed an omnibus bill that revoked or weakened 70 environmental laws, including protections for rivers and fisheries.
6/ Stephen Colbert in character sparring with Senator Elizabeth Warren.....Colbert tries to give her a hard time, but she is having none of it.......
Go Liz!......an interesting six minutes......
It’s been more than four years since Elizabeth Warren first appeared on The Colbert Report and in the intervening time, her profile has risen remarkably. On Monday night, Warren andStephen Colbert faced off over the ideas on inequality she puts forward in her new book, A Fighting Chance
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“You are welcome for the ‘Colbert Bump,’” the host said at the top of the interview, taking credit for Warren’s ascension to the Senate. In explaining her own story, Warren told Colbert about how she was able from humble beginnings, but that American dream became much more difficult sometime after Ronald Reagan became president.
When Warren accused the big Wall Street banks of “cheating people” on credit cards and mortgages, Colbert shot back, “What do mean ‘cheating people?’ You sign up for a credit card, you use the credit card, then you have to pay your bills. Is that too complicated for Harvard?” Later, he accused Warren of supporting “freeloaders” who don’t pay their bills. “It’s just more socialism!” he said.
“You’re right that there’s been a lot of freeloading, but the freeloading has been by the biggest financial institutions who got bailed out by the American taxpayers,” Warren said to cheers from Colbert’s crowd.
Later, when Warren lamented the fact that no one on Wall Street has gone to prison for deceiving the American people, Colbert explained to her that “you can’t put handcuffs on the invisible hand of the market,” adding, “What you call breaking the law, I call pushing the envelope.”
Grabbing Colbert’s hand, Warren said, “You can put handcuffs on people who push the envelope. When they break the law, they deserve to have handcuffs.”
7/ Well it's happening......the West Antarctic ice sheet is starting to melt, it's unstoppable and will result in the sea levels rising at least 3 meters [10 feet] from this ice sheet alone. This means our world as we know it will drastically change, but the good news is the full melt will take about 200 years so suck it up, great grandkids......
But we aren't off the hook......in 65 years [the lifetime of your young children] the sea level will be up one meter, which will make a large part of South Florida uninhabitable. Glad I'm living in Mount Dora, elevation 160 feet!
The news: A new joint study from NASA and the University of California, Irvine, has shown that the total collapse of large parts of the Western Antarctic ice sheet has begun and now appears totally unstoppable, indicating that a catastrophic 10-foot rise in global sea levels over the next few centuries may be inevitable. Calculations show the Thwaites Glacier — a receding chunk of ice supporting the rest of the much larger West Antarctic ice shelf — will be gone within a few hundred years, and after it, the whole region.
"This is really happening," NASA polar ice expert and researcher Thomas P. Wagner told theNew York Times. "There's nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow."
8/ A wonderful Colbert segment of "The Word" on the same subject - climate change. One of his better ones, with excellent zingers and a clip of Marco Rubio as well in the five minutes......Stephen is so clever!
Stephen Colbert has officially decided to take theMarco Rubio approach to climate change. Following news that scientists believe major ice sheet melting in Antarctica is “unstoppable,” the host summed up his solution in two words: “Fxxk it.”
“Folks, global warming is bad,” Colbert admitted. “I have always believed that I have always said that. But doing anything about it is, and I don’t want to get too technical here, hard.” Since he’s not crazy about making any personal sacrifices to begin with, Colbert was happy to have a great excuse to just give up.
“Unstoppable melting, it’s out of our hands now. I mean what a relief,” he continued. “I didn’t think it would happen, but we finally ran the clock out on the possibility of my personal sacrifice making a difference.”
“I believe this failure to find a solution could be the solution to all our other failures,” Colbert said, before describing how his “fuck it” principle could easily be applied to difficult issues like education and campaign finance reform.
9/ Marc Caputo from the Miami Herald with an excellent story published in the Guardian.
Hmmmm......it's a good summary of climate change and how the rising seas will affect the world's most vulnerable city, but the significance of this is that this article wasn't in the Miami Herald, it was in a British newspaper. I looked through his bylines for the Herald, and he's one of their senior political reporters, but I guess this story was a little close to home for the Miami elites, who have a vested interest in suppressing any stories about climate change to keep the confidence up and real estate moving. The South Florida bubble......
The people of Miami know about climate change. We're living it.
Politicians who refuse to acknowledge global warming should visit Florida where climate change is all too real
A Miami skateboarder is propelled by the winds from hurricane Wilma in 2005. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters
Clear skies above but water below, a woman on a moped navigates a flooded street corner on Miami Beach, an all-too-familiar sign for residents of this iconic peninsula where the ocean seems more likely than ever to swamp Ocean Drive one day.
If there's an image that starkly illustrates the threats of climate change, it's this photograph, which was included in the recent National Climate Assessment released by the White House. It is noteworthy because the flood is from exceptionally high spring tides – not heavy rains. Tidal flooding like that is relatively new. And scary. "People in Miami Beach are living climate change," said David Nolan, a meteorology and physical oceanography professor at the University of Miami. "They're on the frontline."
The people of Miami Beach didn't need the National Climate Assessment to tell them low-lying south Florida is "exceptionally vulnerable to sea level rise". The city is already spending $206m to overhaul its drainage system.
The day after the White House released its climate change report, Miami-Dade County's commission passed a 6 May resolution that calls on planners to account for sea level rise. Local officials across the four counties of south Florida are making similar moves. Almost anyone who lives in south Florida has a nagging fear about climate change. It's both abstract and, at times, very real.
I grew up with Nolan in one of the most vulnerable places in South Florida: Key West.
10/ Australians don't mince words - here is a satirical ad for the largest coal mining company in Australia, and what their executives are really thinking about their business and the environment......
But here's a sobering thought - senior executives at energy corporations know exactly what their business model will do to the planet [i.e.cook it], but they plough ahead anyway. I read somewhere to get to the top levels of a large corporation you need to be a sociopath, or at least have the same characteristics of minimal empathy or remorse, and this truly fits that model. You know exactly what you are doing because you have the best experts in the field working for you, but you ignore all their warnings and make sure the corporate culture is purged of anyone with misgivings about what you are doing.
It's the only thing that fits - most energy companies are run by sociopaths.
Digest that, and then watch this three minute video...... note - salty language......
11/ A really interesting music video, almost like a four minute movie featuring a boy at a school running because the gub'ment thinks he has supernatural powers. The song is "Titanium" by David Guetta, and it's quite a catchy EDM song.....but the video is cool....almost needs a sequel.
12/ Remember the major report released by the White House last week on how climate change is affecting the US right now? Here is a report on how the media covered that story. Interesting that if you want to get actual news, Al Jazeera is the network that gives it to you. The real significance of this story is that 45-50% of the country has no clue, none about serious issues facing us because they are getting their news from Fox.
On Tuesday, the federal government released the National Climate Assessment (NCA), the definitive account of climate change’s already-occurring impacts on the U.S., and of how those impacts will only be felt more acutely as time goes on.
So, how did the cable news networks cover it?
CREDIT: ANDREW BREINER
Al Jazeera America was the clear leader in coverage. Besides reporting directly on the assessment and its contents, AJAM had reporters in San Francisco and South Florida to cover the impacts of sea level rise on coastal communities, one in the West looking at drastically low snowpack and drought, and featured NCA authors, climate scientists, and others explaining the assessment’s findings in-depth. AJAM’s 8pm News hosted by John Seigenthaler devoted over half of its hour-long running time to the climate assessment and its implications, more than Fox News spent over the course of the day.
And at the same time Seigenthaler was telling his audience, “the threat is no longer distant; it’s affecting Americans right now,” Fox News was taking a different approach. “The White House releases a dire report on climate change,” Laura Ingraham announced as guest-host of the O’Reilly Factor, “Is it trying to distract its critics from Benghazi and other problems?”
13/ Some amusing animal encounters on the PGA Tour......about three minutes......
Love the caddie with a rake shooing off a gator, and the seagull picking up the golf ball.....
14/ Mark Bittman from the Times with a glowing commentary on "Fed Up", the new movie produced by Katie Couric. He also focuses on the main culprit in our diet that's killing us all....sugar. You may be saying "heard this all before", but if you value your health, hear it again.
This won't be a shock to regular readers of DDD, but between the gub'ment, Big Ag, Big Pharma and the Medical complex they don't want you to be healthy. If you're healthy, you're not profitable......j
Just get this in your head - they want you to be sick, so you need to look after your own health and it starts with your diet.....
OK - rant over....go see this movie!
“Fed Up” is probably the most important movie to be made since “An Inconvenient Truth,” to which it’s related in a couple of ways.
One of its producers is Laurie David, who also produced “An Inconvenient Truth.” Climate change, diet and agriculture are inexorably intertwined; we can’t tackle climate change without changing industrial agriculture, and we can’t change industrial agriculture without tackling diet.
Like “An Inconvenient Truth,” too, “Fed Up” can be seen as propaganda. (As can “Farmland,” the beautifully shot movie that looks and feels like a Chevy commercial and seems to take as its underlying premise that most Americans mistrust, even hate, farmers. It’s more than a little defensive.)
“Fed Up” says: “Here is a problem, a problem that vested interests have no interest in solving, and a problem that must be dealt with if we’re interested in our survival. It’s something worth fighting about.”
The problem at hand, of course, is the standard American diet, especially in its current iteration, which took shape in the early 1980s after the commencement of the official “eat food lower in fat” recommendations. Those recommendations led to a 25 percent increase in the per-capita supply (and indeed consumption) of calories.
Many of those calories were from sugar, on which “Fed Up” focuses (oversimplifying matters a bit, as far as I can tell, but we can live with that), and the high consumption of which contributes or leads to obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and worse. The vested interests profiting from this situation are Big Food and its allies, who will, it seems, go to any lengths to maintain the status quo — even at the cost of our collective public and financial health. (It’s expensive to treat these chronic diseases, and we’re all footing that bill.)
At some point I have to get to the disclaimers, so here goes: Laurie David is a friend of mine. I’m also acquainted with Katie Couric, the film’s narrator, and half or more of the experts interviewed in the course of the movie. Even worse, I’m one of the interviewees. (A minor one; and at least I’m not an investor.)
I know these people in part because we agree on many if not most of the causes of the current food and health crisis, as well as on the directions we should take. There is little new in “Fed Up” for regular readers of this column, or to those who’ve read a selection of work by Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan, Gary Taubes, Rob Lustig, Michele Simon, Mark Hyman, David Ludwig, David Kessler or any other member of what we might call the professional sane eating brigade.
What matters, what’s exciting, is that “Fed Up” might reach some of the majority of Americans who’ve never heard of any of us but who adore Katie Couric, the former “Today” show co-host and one of the most recognizable women in the country.
The film has three components: a narration of bare facts and not-so-innocent questions by Couric, such as, “Is there a link between our ever expanding waistlines … and dietary guidelines?” and, “What if every can of soda came with a warning label from the surgeon general?” (I said it was propaganda; it’s really a call to action.) There is a series of interviews with talking heads, which bring out the heavy-hitting facts about the dangers of the overconsumption of sugar and other hyperprocessed food. These, in turn, are interwoven with the stories of a few obese teenagers and their struggles to lose weight.
Here's the trailer again......excellent.....
15/ Don't know if we are going to see this in the cinema, but this review says "Godzilla" is at a higher level than your normal disaster movie. It says it's the best action-monster movie since "Jaws"......
It’s a relief to encounter a big popcorn-spectacle movie that people are actually excited about – as opposed to, say, the “Captain America” and “Amazing Spider-Man” sequels, where the public attitude was more like polite compliance with a mandatory directive. Those movies came with built-in excuses, like our friendly president’s national-security state, or like the fact that it’s the middle of May and those of us in the eastern two-thirds of the country are still dealing with PTSD from that horrible winter, and here we are two weeks into “summer movie” season. We can’t do anything about it! It’s the way things are! Better make the best of it! Those people in Hollywood (and Washington, and Manhattan) totally mean well! They just want us to have fun and feel safe and not hurt our brains!
No such excuses are needed for Gareth Edwards’ exhilarating “Godzilla,” which arrives as more than a relief. It’s a bracing tonic for the bored palate of the mainstream moviegoer, and one of the most intriguing big-budget breakthrough films since Steven Spielberg made “Jaws.” (Edwards’ only previous feature is the 2010 low-budget indie “Monsters.”) This is a movie of tremendous visual daring, magnificent special-effects work and surprising moral gravity. Its magic lies in the big things – like, the really big things, which take their time showing up but are totally worth it – and the small ones. Those include David Strathairn’s delicate supporting performance as a U.S. Navy admiral tasked with nuking a trio of giant monsters, bringing a note of seriousness and sobriety to what would be a meathead warmonger role in any other movie. When a Japanese scientist shows Strathairn his father’s pocket watch, stopped dead at 8:15 on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, the admiral is genuinely shaken.
Very good trailer for "Godzilla"......he's biiiiigg!
Todays video - a compressed version of an episode of "Police Squad", a show from the early 80's starring the master of deadpan Leslie Nielsen. The show was made by Abrams, Zucker and Zucker who went on to make one of the funniest movies ever "Airplane".
When you watch this, catch the little bits like the backgrounds, constant zingers....it's very amusing.
Todays backwards joke
I want to live my next life backwards: You start out dead and get
that out of the way.
that out of the way.
Then you wake up in a nursing home feeling better every day.
Then you get kicked out for being too healthy.
Enjoy your retirement and collect your pension.
Then when you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day.
You work 40 years until you're too young to work.
You get ready for High School: drink alcohol, party, and you're generally promiscuous.
Then you go to primary school, you become a kid, you play, and you have no
responsibilities.
responsibilities.
Then you become a baby, and then...
You spend your last 9 months floating peacefully in Spa-like conditions - Central
heating, room service on tap, and then...
heating, room service on tap, and then...
You finish off as an orgasm.
I rest my case.
Todays collection of amusing British shop names
Todays retiree joke
Today my wife said. "Honey, fix that gutter downspout!"
Well, as you all know, I'm retired. I invited some of my buddies over.
One brought his welder.
Took us about 4 hours, and 30 beers, but we got the downspout fixed
and my welder buddy gave it an artistic flair.
Wife is speechless ... I personally cannot wait for it to rain again.
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