What a couple of weeks! But the moving is all done.......so we're back to current events, which don't seem to have changed at all.....oh well......
1/ The always insightful Frank Rich with his take on the disgusting Congress we are saddled with and how Americans have completely lost respect for the House and Senate, the implications of the Republicans failure to pass anything on immigration, and what to do this summer which includes a plug for John Oliver!
Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: a poll showing that Americans blame Washington leaders for their lingering economic anxieties, what the new border-security bill means for Republicans, and what to do when political news gets you down.
A new Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll shows an America so discontented with the state of the nation and its leaders that you can’t help but notice some echoes with the disconsolate Watergate summer of 1974, when Nixon resigned the presidency, 40 years ago this month. Are any of the similarities real?This poll is bleak indeed. The percentage of American adults who doubt their children will have better lives than they do is at an all-time high (76). Nearly four fifths of those polled are discontented with the American political system. With the exception of the military and “high-tech industry,” every other institution, from the Supreme Court to public schools, has lost the confidence of a majority of the public. Obama’s approval rating is 40 percent; Congressional Republicans are at 19 percent; and Congress as a whole is at 14 percent. There is no good news for anyone in the entire survey with the possible exception of Apple.
Perhaps because Rick Perlstein’s new history of American dyspepsia from 1973 to 1976, The Invisible Bridge, is so freshly in my head, it’s hard not to notice similarities to the funk of that era: Vast economic uncertainty; the absence of leadership and governance in a polarized Washington; continued revelations of CIA crimes, from torture to illegal surveillance; the citizenry’s disillusionment with unpopular, failed wars. This week’s Afghanistan tragedy — the killing of the two-star Army general Harold J. Greene, the highest-ranking American casualty abroad since Vietnam — will only further sour an American public that wants us out of there yesterday. It was apparently not a Taliban attack but an inside job within the Afghan army that America has sacrificed so much to train. You begin to wonder if an escape-by-helicopter scenario like our ignominious departure from Saigon in 1975 is not in store.
2/ John Oliver has become the comedian with substance, taking on serious subjects but in a very amusing way. In this 11 minute segment he looks at America's nuclear arsenal and how it is guarded, and it's not pretty. And when you watch this, look at the computer system - still using large floppy discs! OMG.....
An excellent and funny bit of reporting......
The latest on the increasingly long list of difficult topics out of which John Oliver has somehow managed to wring comedy is the security — or lack thereof — of America’s massive nuclear arsenal. The centerpiece of this week’s Last Week Tonight was a solid 15 minutes of disturbing details on the many near-catastrophes over the last several decades in which this country nearly wiped itself off the map by accident.
Oliver began by demonstrating that Americans of the 1950s lived in constant fear of a nuclear attack from Russia, before arguing that today’s Americans should be just as fearful of something horrible happening without interference from another country. He noted that the U.S. currently has 4,804 nuclear warheads to secure and keep track of: “More than enough, not just to destroy Earth, but to provide 4th of July fireworks for Martians.”
From there, Oliver went down the list of all the problems that have plagued the system set up to protect the weapons we do have, from the use of floppy disks to transmit launch codes, to doors that need to be propped open with crowbars, to the general tasked with overseeing the the weapons who was fired for getting too drunk for the Russians. Or, as Oliver summed it up:
“Within the last 12 months we were in a situation where in the event of us launching a nuclear strike, the president’s command would theoretically have gone through a man gambling with fake poker chips, who would’ve then tried to call a drunk guy wrestling with a Russian George Harrison, who would’ve then needed to send someone with a bag full of burritos to wake up an officer and tell him to go grab an LP-sized floppy disk and begin the solemn process of ending the world as we know it.”
Oliver then recounted some of America’s closest calls, including the so-called “Goldsboro incident” of 1961, in which “you dropped an armed nuclear bomb on your own country and it is frankly amazing that you don’t talk about that more often.” As recently as 2007, six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles were left on tarmac unguarded for 36 hours.
But all of this being said, America is not making any major efforts to reduce the country’s nuclear arsenal, which Oliver compared to a T-Rex’s arms: “They’re essentially useless and you are plenty scary enough without them.”
“When you have 4,800 of something you don’t need, you are a fucking hoarder at that point!” he exclaimed.
3/ This column from Paul Krugman about "inversion" and lots of other media pressure made Walgreens change it's mind and keep it's corporate HQ in the US.....but there are many other large companies that have done this reverse tax scam, and gotten away with it.
In recent decisions, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has made clear its view that corporations are people, with all the attendant rights. They are entitled to free speech, which in their case means spending lots of money to bend the political process to their ends. They are entitled to religious beliefs, including those that mean denying benefits to their workers. Up next, the right to bear arms?
There is, however, one big difference between corporate persons and the likes of you and me: On current trends, we’re heading toward a world in which only the human people pay taxes.
We’re not quite there yet: The federal government still gets a tenth of its revenue from corporate profits taxation. But it used to get a lot more — a third of revenue came from profits taxes in the early 1950s, a quarter or more well into the 1960s. Part of the declinesince then reflects a fall in the tax rate, but mainly it reflects ever-more-aggressive corporate tax avoidance — avoidance that politicians have done little to prevent.
Which brings us to the tax-avoidance strategy du jour: “inversion.” This refers to a legal maneuver in which a company declares that its U.S. operations are owned by its foreign subsidiary, not the other way around, and uses this role reversal to shift reported profits out of American jurisdiction to someplace with a lower tax rate.
4/ You have to respect great marketing and this three minute clip from TD Bank of Canada is a wonderful ad for them......todays NICE video......
TD Canada wanted to say thank you to their customers this year in a way they felt was “unique and distinctive.”
“We thought we’d really kick it up a notch,” said Chris Stamper, SVP corporate marketing at TD Canada Trust.
And that they did.
The bank posted a video online showing them morph an ATM machine into what they called an “automatic thanking machine,” stunning pre-selected customers by dispensing a unique gift to each of them.
But the bank wasn’t finished yet. The video has undoubtedly gone mega-viral because of what happens in the second half. That’s when the bank kicked it up several notches and delivered an additional, heartfelt gift to each of the customers.
5/ This is a great Bill Maher "New Rules", because he spells out what it means to be living in a world of monopolies.....shitty service, and no choices. A good segment, maybe one of his more serious ones but with some great zingers.
Bill Maher ended his show Friday night with a monologue railing against big business and America’s crappy customer service industry. Maher’s driving point for the bit was that infamously ridiculous Comcast customer service call, observing, “I don’t think your customer service experience is supposed to feel like a car ride with a four-year-old.”
Maher then went on a tear against how customer service has turned into an “annoying you out of your money” business, as well as corporate culture itself. Maher even got in a joke about Rupert Murdoch potentially putting him out of a job at HBO and replacing him with “Paste-Eating Time with Steve Doocy.”
Maher concluded that “big business is the new big government” now, but conservatives continue to have a very idealized view of the free market. Maher had to ask why. He said it’s nice in theory, but in reality, you buy cable from the only cable company in the area and then Rumplestiltskin comes to your house and sodomizes you.
6/ Guy video of the week - the best fail collections are these from TwisterNederland, mostly European and a lot with go-pro cameras and dashcams. This one has a lot of hospital visits in it by the look of the accidents, and a couple of boats totalled.....15 minutes of mayhem, pain and drunks.....ahoooogghah!
7/ Chicken - America's staple food - no wonder we are so unhealthy. Mary and I realised a while ago that if you eat chicken out, you are getting the equivalent of a WalMart bird, so unless it's organic we don't eat chicken in restaurants.....except in Europe.
These chicken factories are disgusting.......and about to get worse because the chicken producers are going to be self-regulating, and will no longer be inspected by the gub'ment.....
And Jules thought pigs were filtyh animals. Photograph: Alamy
If you buy your chicken from the supermarket, here are a few things about its life that might make you less eager to eat it. As a chick, your chicken's beak was cut off so that it wouldn't attack other chickens in the overcrowded cage in which it was raised. Your chicken was fed so much grain so quickly – supplemented with antibiotics – that, by the time it was ready for slaughter at the age of five weeks, its breasts were swollen and disproportionately large, rendering it unable to walk. Once your chicken was slaughtered, it was tossed into a chlorinated bath or doused with other industrial-grade chemicals so that your chicken would reach you "clean".
But "clean", when it comes to meat, is a relative standard. Most chickens spend the bulk of their short lives covered or standing in feces (to say nothing of the conditions in which cows, pigs or even turkeys are raised), and the way in which they are dispatched in the modern era is so sordid that farm states are actually passing laws to keep you from ever bearing witness to the slaughter.
Old Macdonald had a farm – once – but corporations interested in maximizing profits bought him out.
The one small hope for human health has been that the US Department of Agriculture has inspectors to watch over those processing plants and make sure we don't eat sick chickens or chickens covered in their own feces as they make their way through the processing plant. That is, it's been the one hope until now.
8/ Not sure if you watch this show, but the first woman ever to complete the "American Ninja Warrior" course was Kacy Catanzaro.....and this video of her doing it has gone viral with over 8 million views.
She's 5 ft. nothing, amazingly strong, and competing against male hunks......quite entertaining if you've never seen this junk TV offering......7 exciting minutes.....
9/ A most amusing Andy Borowitz story.....Rick Perry has ordered the Dallas Cowboys to the Mexican border.......
DALLAS (The Borowitz Report)—In his boldest move yet to address the immigration crisis, on Thursday Texas Governor Rick Perry dispatched the Dallas Cowboys to the United States’ border with Mexico.
10/ This is reasonably funny - an 84 year old man sings a fairly naughty song about his penis on "America's Got Talent"- it's actually quite amusing and the old geezer is a pretty good comic too.....five minutes, but don't bother with the last two minutes, just the "celebs" getting their moment in the spotlight....
11/ Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister of Canada has been super supportive of Israel during this Gaza crisis, and this article explains why - Harper is a member of an extreme evangelical fringe church that believes the Jews in Israel will battle and defeat the Antichrist when "the beast" returns.....this Christian extremist is leading Canada into being an uncritical supporter of Israel, and has turned Canada into a polluting petrostate.
Scary shit folks - he goes out of his way to hide his looniness, but this is an excellent [and brave] piece of investigative reporting by a Vancouver paper......
Do religion and politics mix in Canada?
The recent love-in between Canada’s Prime Minister and Israel's arch-conservative leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, has begun to fade from our Sochi-saturated minds. But the importance of this exercise in foreign policy will last long after the Olympics are over. As most Canadians plan to sit down and watch the athletes, officials, and the increasingly controversy-bedevilled Russian authorities, it's worth reflecting on what Stephen Harper did -- and why -- when he went off to a rapturous sojourn in the land of the Bible.
Stephen Harper's devotion to Israel began long before he boarded the plane. It began years ago, and culminated, just before he left, in a lavish supper in Toronto at which the Stephen Harper was the honoured guest.
The evening included the Prime Minister’s musically off-key rendition of the Beatles’ song “Hey Jude", subsequently repeated in Israel.
Stephen Harper’s entirely uncharacteristic outpouring of warmth and emotion around the trip was and is at odds with his generally cold, resistive and truculent behaviour when in his own country.
This warmth has had an impact on Israeli politicians, if not on the rest of the world.
During Harper’s first-ever visit to Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu repeatedly described him as “my good friend”, with body language that indicated emotional openness and an almost maternal concern for Harper’s comfort and well-being. Harper’s demeanor, in numerous YouTube videos, is very much that of a blissful pilgrim.
12/ Today's guy video -
Men - you definitely need this product to tell you what women really mean....."The Manslater"......two minutes of something that could save you days or weeks of grief.....very amusing.....
13/ Quite a column from Carl Hiaasen on Governor Skeletor's trip to the King Ranch in Texas, paid for by big sugar......Hiaasen is pissed at the corrupt, scum sucking pigdog we have as our leader.....
Carl Hiaasen: Bought and paid for with a Texas hunting trip
BY CARL HIAASEN
CHIAASEN@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Festival of Whores (continued):
Back when he first ran for governor as a self-styled outsider, Rick Scott lambasted his opponent in the Republican primary for taking campaign money from U.S. Sugar, one of the worst corporate polluters of the Everglades.
Scott indignantly squeaked that Bill McCollum had been “bought and paid for” by U.S. Sugar. He said the company’s support of McCollum was “disgusting.”
“I can’t be bought,” Scott declared.
Seriously, that’s what the man said. Stop gagging and read on.
Four years later, the governor’s re-election campaign is hungrily raking in money from U.S. Sugar, more than $534,000 so far.
Exactly when Scott overcame his disgust isn’t clear, but in February 2013 he and undisclosed others jetted to the King Ranch in Texas for a hog- and deer-hunting junket on U.S. Sugar’s 30,000-acre lease.
Apparently this has become a secret tribal rite for some top Florida Republicans. Exposed last week by reporters Craig Pittman and Michael Van Sickler of the Tampa Bay Times, the politicians ran like jackrabbits for the hills.
All questions were redirected to the state Republican Party, which couldn’t get its story straight. “Fundraising” wound up as the official explanation for the free pig-shooting sorties.
14/ Calvin Harris with his EDM megahit "Right Now".....interesting video set in the southwest about young love, broken dreams and a ballerina......very good......
15/ We live in Lake County, Florida and have the county commission you might expect from a non-metro county in North Central Florida, i.e. pretty conservative. So when the Commissioners propose to raise property taxes 19% you know the situation is pretty dire, but that didn't stop the Tea Party crazies from protesting at the out of control gub'ment.....forgetting that most of the commissioners are their boys.....
Another great column from Lauren Ritchie......
The day of reckoning has been coming since 2008, and it is no surprise to four of the five Lake County commissioners.
They voted last week to tentatively increase the property-tax rate by nearly 19 percent, which seems absurd for a single year.
Or is it?
The real-estate market crashed in 2007, and that had a direct effect on how much money governments got to run their operations. Granted, in the run-up to the bubble bursting, governments got crazy and spent what was coming in without a thought for the future, so some reduction in the size of the operations was warranted.
Since then, the Tea Party anti-tax extremists have been celebrating because budgets are way down and the size of government has shrunk.
But a few other things have been going on, too, and some of them are no reason to rejoice. What happened in the last six years is that county government initially cut back, and then, under pressure, it began delaying — not reducing — spending. Now, there's a backup. And while the anti-tax folks are partying, county commissioners have been balancing their budgets with reserves.
In fact, Tea Party darling Leslie Campione has been the worst. She initially agreed to a deal last year that would have required a modest tax raise, and at the last moment, she blew it all up and caved in to balancing the budget from the county's savings account.
The supposed plan was temporarily to balance the budget with reserves, then come back in the new year and make cuts. Anybody in doubt as to how that went? Right. No significant reductions.
If Campione, the most anti-tax commissioner around, couldn't find ways to reduce the budget that went beyond postponing expenses, that should have been a sign — not just to her followers, but to her, too: Time to rethink.
Todays videos - trailers for two movies I absolutely can't wait to see.......
"Mad Max - Fury Road", directed by George Miller who made the original series 20 years ago........wow......coming next year.....
The First 'Mad Max: Fury Road' Trailer Promises an Action Movie of Epic ProportionsImage Credit: YouTube
The news: On Saturday, San Diego Comic Con-goers got the first look at the trailer for Mad Max: FuryRoad, and on Sunday the first trailer was officially released for everyone else.
Fury Road tells the story of an apocalyptic desert wasteland where everyone is constantly fighting for basic necessities. Two rebels, Max (played by Tom Hardy) and Imperator Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron), are the only hope to restore order.
"Interstellar", directed by Christopher Nolan ["Dark Knight" and "Inception"].....another wow......coming in November......
Released Wednesday, the trailer shows a very human, very emotional journey through the cosmos. Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway helm a team of astronauts sent by Michael Caine's character to find another inhabitable planet. McConaughey leaves behind his wife, played by Jessica Chastain, and a daughter, and is forced to battle with the feelings of leaving his beloved clan on a dying Earth as he explores the universe.
The trailer focuses more on tableaus and iconic images than it does the plot — there's Chastain with a burning flare in a field, there's Caine reciting a verse of Dylan Thomas, there's a solar flare as a planet surfaces drifting past the ship. But even through these snapshots, Interstellar
Todays oldie joke
An old fella was celebrating 92 years on this earth.
He spoke to his toes. "Hello toes.", he said. "How are you? You know, you are
92 today. Oh the times we've had! Remember how we walked in the park in the
summer every Sunday afternoon. The times we waltzed on the dance floor?
Happy Birthday toes!"
"Hello, knees.", he continued. "How are you? You know you're 92 today..
Oh, the times we've had! Remember when we marched in the parade?
Oh, the hurdles we've jumped together. Happy Birthday, knees."
Then, he looked down at his crotch. "Hello Willie! You little bugger. Just think.
If you were alive today, you'd be 92.
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Todays parenting joke
A woman and her ten-year-old son were riding in a taxi. It was raining and all the prostitutes were standing under the awnings.“Mum," said the boy, "what are all those women doing?"“They're waiting for their husbands to get off work," she replied.The taxi driver turns round and says, "Geez lady, why don't you tell him the truth? They’re hookers, boy! They have sex with men for money.”The little boy’s eyes got wide and he said, "Is that true, Mum?"His mother, glaring hard at the taxi driver, answered in the affirmative.After a few minutes, the kid asked, “Mum, what happens to their babies?"“Well, Son, most of them become taxi drivers," she said.
Todays redneck jokes
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