1/ An essay by Thomas Frank on fast food chain restaurants and what they say about the state of our society.....it's a contemplative piece, and details how the workers in these restaurants are victims of the drive for efficiency and lower costs......it's fascinating to read how his mind works, and how it all goes back to the huge issue we have which is inequality......all money flows to the top, minimal to the working poor.....
(Credit: AP/Richard Drew)
Let me tell you about this one stretch of Hillsborough Road in Durham, North Carolina. It’s between two freeways, just a short drive from the noble towers of Duke University, and in the space of about a mile, you will find a McDonald’s, a Cracker Barrel, a Wendy’s, a Chick-fil-A, an Arby’s, a Waffle House, a Bojangles’, a Biscuitville, a Subway, a Taco Bell, and a KFC. As you walk down this roaring thoroughfare, you’ll notice that the ground is littered with napkins and bright yellow paper cups. But then again, you aren’t really supposed to be walking along this portion of Hillsborough Road and noticing things like those cups, or that abandoned concrete pedestal for some vanished logo, or the empty Aristocrat Vodka bottle hidden behind that broken Motel 6 sign. This is a landscape meant to be viewed through a windshield and with the stereo turned up. In fact, drivers here sometimes seem bewildered by the very presence of pedestrians, which may be the reason I was almost run down twice.
But it wasn’t a car that struck me on Hillsborough Road, it was a vision: a spontaneous understanding of fast-food efficiency. I was gazing on a simple yellow structure that contained the workings of a Waffle House when it came to me—the meaning of this whole panorama of chain restaurants
2/ Jon Stewart is back, and in good form as we see from his look at the contenders for the 2016 Presidential race.....with special attention to fat boy Chris Christie, who was seen in the Dallas Cowboys VIP box this Sunday with the owner of the team.....
A pretty good five minutes, not his best, but good....
Jon Stewart’s first Daily Show segment of 2015 was all about 2016. And while the host had plenty to say about potential Democratic candidates Jim Webb, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, as well as potential Republican contenders Mike Huckabee and Jeb Bush, he reserved his personal brand of New Jersey-style outrage for Governor Chris Christie and his display of male affection for all things Dallas Cowboys.
“Motherfucker!” Stewart exclaimed after watching Christie’s awkward post-game celebration with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. “You lead a state, Christie, that’s half Giants fans, half Eagles fans, and you’re groping the owner of the Dallas fucking Cowboys? Why don’t you just break a copy of Born to Run over the head of a Hurricane Sandy victim, you backstabbing piece of shit?!”
Of course, since Stewart’s broadcast, we’ve learned from the Wall Street Journal that Christie’s hug might represent a larger, more serious ethics violation on the part of the governor.
3/ We have a myth in this country about the military.....heroes to a man, competent with the utmost integrity defending our freedoms. This BS is a mantra for the right, but many on the middle and the left believe it too.
So ask yourself this - why, after the trillion dollars spent in the last 13 years in Iraq, has their army fallen apart in the face of a few fanatics in ISIS? We have spent our country's infrastructure, our educational system, our healthcare system on this pisshole in the Middle East, and for nothing. The sheer scale of the corruption is amazing.....
Good story from Patrick Cockburn on how we have an expensive, wasteful and incompetent military.....
here is a scene in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass in which Alice meets the White Knight who is wearing full armour and riding a horse off which he keeps falling. Alice expresses curiosity about why he has placed spiked metal anklets on his horse’s legs just above the hoofs. “To guard against the bites of sharks,” he explains, and proudly shows her other ingenious devices attached to himself and his horse.
Alice notices that the knight has a mouse trap fastened to his saddle. “I was wondering what the mouse trap was for,” says Alice. “It isn’t very likely there would be any mice on the horse’s back.” “Not very likely, perhaps,” says the Knight, “but if they do come, I don’t choose to have them running all about.” It’s as well “to be provided for everything”, adds the Knight. As he explains his plans for countering these supposed dangers, he continues to tumble off his horse.
The White Knight’s approach to military procurement is very similar to that of the American and British military establishments. They drain their budgets to purchase vastly expensive equipment to meet threats that may never exist, much like the sharks and mice that menace Alice’s acquaintance. Thus the Pentagon spends $400bn (£257bn) on developing the F-35 fighter (Britain is buying planes at a cost of £100m each) to gain air superiority over Russia and China in the event of a war with either power. Meanwhile, equipment needed to fight real wars is neglected, even though no answer has been found to old-fashioned weapons such as improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that caused two-thirds of the US-led coalition’s casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A strange aspect of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is that there has been so little criticism of the failure of expensively equipped Western armies to defeat lightly armed and self-trained insurgents. This is in sharp contrast to the aftermath of the US Army’s failure to win the war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. The question is of more than historic interest because the US, UK and other allies are re-entering the wars in Iraq and Syria where they are seeking to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis).
4/ Scots are sooooooo romantic....as you can see in this very amusing one minute clip about airport security and cavity searches......
5/ And to follow up on this story the most expensive boondoggle ever foisted on the American public, the F-35 fighter jet, won't be able to fire it's guns till 2019 and will only carry 180 rounds of ammo anyway.....this is the jet we will be spending over $400 billion on and it's still doesn't work properly.
But more than that - even if it did, who would be the opposition? The ISIS Air Force? The Russians? The Chinese? No country is developing planes that can beat our existing Air Force, so this is the most blatant example of waste we have in this country.
Reuters
The Pentagon’s newest stealth jet, the nearly $400 billion Joint Strike Fighter, won’t be able to fire its gun during operational missions until 2019, three to four years after it becomes operational.
Even though the Joint Strike Fighter, or F-35, is supposed to join frontline U.S. Marine Corps fighter squadrons next year and Air Force units in 2016, the jet’s software does not yet have the ability to shoot its 25mm cannon. But even when the jet will be able to shoot its gun, the F-35 barely carries enough ammunition to make the weapon useful.
The JSF won’t be completely unarmed. It will still carry a pair of Raytheon AIM-120 AMRAAM long-range air-to-air missiles and a pair of bombs. Initially, it will be able to carry 1,000-pound satellite-guided bombs or 500-pound laser-guided weapons. But those weapons are of limited utility, especially during close-in fights.
“There will be no gun until [the Joint Strike Fighter’s Block] 3F [software], there is no software to support it now or for the next four-ish years,”
6/ If you like sarcasm, you will love "Honest Trailers", a sardonic look at big movies a lot of people have seen.....this one is for the "Lord Of The Rings" trilogy........and look at the last name on the cast list.....four minutes....
7/ Interesting story on how to revive the liberal agenda, and it's not by drafting Elizabeth Warren. She would help, but the problems are much deeper than that.....
Elizabeth Warren (Credit: AP/Charles Dharapak)
2014 was not a good year for the left. Republicans now have a stranglehold on the House, where they control the most seats they’ve had since 1948. That lead will likely last fordecades. Democrats didn’t just lose the Senate, they have significantly diminished their chance of regaining it in 2016. Republicans control 31 governorships, as well as 68 of 98 legislative chambers. And of, course, the Democratic party has shown itself to be only nominally liberal, with the current frontrunner for 2016 raising money from Wall Street financiers. The left then has two problems: how to get Democrats winning and how to get Democrats to avoid becoming a party permanently in the callous hands of capital.
Currently, much of the hope for a more liberal Democratic party rests on the shoulders of Elizabeth Warren, who is being drafted to run against Hillary Clinton. While Warren is formidable, it was only six years ago that the left laid its hopes for victory on a single individual and found itself sorely disappointed. The left must remember that leaders do not make movements; rather, movements make leaders. Instead of vacillating from one hero to another, the left must create a formidable power base from which to both defeat Republicans and shift Democrats to the left.
8/ John Oliver with his investigative reporter/very funny comedian combo on the subject of food labeling.....a splendid five minutes, skewering the food companies that are poisoning us all......
John Oliver issued another call to action — this time against food manufacturers who want to hide the amount of sugar they put into food. Americans spend $2.2 billion on candy a year. Average American eats 75 pounds of sugar a year. Sugar acts on the brain in a special way that’s reminiscent of cocaine. Rats fed sugar can’t find their way to an island when dumped into a vat of water. The FDA wants to put an Added Sugars category onto their mandatory food labels. The food industry wants to list it in grams, rather than teaspoons — because nobody knows what a gram is, Oliver said.
9/ And just to emphasize John Oliver's point, the honey you have in your cupboard isn't honey - honey contains pollen, and Big Ag uses high pressure filters to remove "contaminants" that also remove the pollen, so you end up with clean, but nutritionally worthless sugar - not honey. It also has the effect of disguising the source of the honey, and it's almost certainly Chinese.....
Organic honey is better but still deceptive - only 70% of organic honeys are OK.....which is an unacceptable rate for food you pay a premium for. As I wrote this I thought I'd better check what's in the DDD cupboard, and our 1/2 a bottle of Publix Organic Honey had on the label "Organic Filtered Honey", so it's Chinese.......gone!
Buy your honey from local farms, ma/pa brands, and make sure it's unfiltered!
After my post revealing the shocking truth about olive oil adulteration, I received a number of outraged comments along the lines of this one: “Is nothing sacred? First honey, and now this?!!!”
My interest was piqued. Honey? Since when was my honey fake?
Oh, I’d known about the fake “honey” they serve in single-serving packets at restaurants and cafeterias. That’s because I read the ingredients label. Almost all of them fessed up to being what they are — honey-flavored corn syrup. But I didn’t know that the vast majority of the major labels of honey sold in the U.S. aren’t real honey. Thankfully, I always buy mine from one of two local farms. My favorite is from a little old lady who keeps bees just a few miles from me. The other is from a farm in the town next door. According to my recent research, that means I’m safe. But those rows and rows of non-local honey from major distributors found in the supermarket? Those aren’t safe. In fact, they’re almost guaranteed to be fake.
10/ Jenny Lewis with "Just One Of The Guys".....a slow rocker, with a fascinating all girl back up band featuring Anne Hathaway and Kristen Stewart.....wow.
It's sort of a tribute to Robert Palmer's "Simply Irresistible"......the song is fairly forgettable, but the video is great.....
Jenny Lewis' new video for "Just One of the Guys" features Academy Award winner Anne Hathaway, Kristen Stewart, Brie Larson, and the former Rilo Kiley frontwoman's rainbow tuxedo. They all dress up as skeezy dudes with fake mustaches in tracksuits. Check out the new clip, directed by Lewis herself, below, via GQ.
11/ A fascinating story on how the Koch Brothers have created a parallel political apparatus to the "official" Republican Party, with better funding, more data and research and a relentlessly Libertarian agenda. It's hard to predict how this will play out, because noone has done this before but it's a look at what is happening in the shadow rightwingworld.
David Koch (Credit: Reuters/Carlo Allegri)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
It is time to stop talking about the Koch brothers and instead talk about the Koch Party, the nation’s third largest political network that is a full-blown but privatepolitical operation. The Koch Party has come into view in 2014, as some of the country’s best investigative reporters have traced and exposed various elements of their operation.
The Koch Party is not as large as the Democrats or the Republicans, but is still unprecedented in size, scope and reach. Like other political parties, it has a platform, donors and constituents, electoral and advertising strategies, voter data, and—after the 2014 midterms—members of Congress ready to shepherd its pro-corporate, anti-regulatory agenda.
But unlike the Democrats and Republicans, the Koch Party is not public. It doesn’t have national political conventions attended by the media and delegates. Instead it has secretive getaways for mega-millionaires and billionaires in posh gated resorts where the public and press are neither invited nor allowed.
If you want to see how super-wealthy citizens and private corporations are using private money and secretive tactics to gain and consolidate their power and influence, pushing agendas that often prey on middle- and working-class Americans—look no further. Here are nine hallmarks of the Koch Party.
12/ Ever heard of "Parahawking"? Neither had I, but it's parasailing with a hawk and boy does it look cool......a beautiful 1 1/2 minute clip of soaring above the California coast with hawks.....
13/ California is a smart state.....read how they have implemented new rules for chickens.
Instead of telling farmers how to raise their poultry more humanely which would have the effect of moving egg production out of state, they have given guidelines and said "all eggs sold in California must comply with the rules", putting the onus on all farmers to follow the script if they want to sell eggs in CA.....smart!
California’s revolutionary animal-welfare rules — which mandate that chickens be given enough room to “lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely” — are finally going into effect with the new year, 2015. Voters passed the law (it was a ballot initiative) in 2008. Since then, there have been legislative tweaks and a lot of legal wrangling, all culminating in a law that bars selling eggs in California unless they come from chickens that are given a little more room to move around.
There are two things that make this fascinating to a food-policy nerd like me. First, instead of primarily regulating farmers, the rules primarily regulate eaters. So far, voters and lawmakers have been a lot more interested in telling farmers what to do than in passing laws that constrain what eaters can buy. The distinction has massive implications for the effects of the law.
Second, the rules institute a completely new logic for determining animal welfare than has traditionally been used in American farming. That has chicken farmers tearing at their hair in frustration: If you accept the traditional logic, these animal-welfare rules may actually leave the chickens worse off; but if you accept the logic of the reformers, it’s clear that this will be an improvement (if only a marginal one). It’s one of those tricky situations where the conclusions matter less than the reasoning used to reach those conclusions.
14/ The price of gas is now the lowest it's been for years, and it's Obama's fault! Actually it's all our fault because Americans are so allergic to taxes we haven't raised the gas tax for 20 years......
Good story from Grist.....
Amid all the celebration over America’s plunging gas prices — down some 40 percent since June – it’s easy to forget a very basic fact: In a global sense, U.S. fuel has been cheap for years. In late 2012, for instance, the United States ranked toward the bottom of a world list of gas prices, wedged between the likes of Tunisia and Chad on one side and Russia and Kazakhstan on the other. Most first-world countries paid at least double what America did then, just as they do today.
The situation is hardly a happy coincidence for U.S. motorists. On the contrary, American fuel prices are kept down artificially by low gas taxes that fail to address the true social cost of driving. An international comparison of gas taxes shows the United States in back of the pack by a wide margin:
Tscharaktschiew, Economics of Transportation (2004)
This national refusal to increase gas taxes — which have gone unchanged at the federal level since 1993 — has two enormous impacts on everyday life.
Todays video - the final bar shootout scent from "The Unforgiven".....Clint at his best, three minutes of pure testoserone......
Todays Australian joke
An airplane was about to crash..
There were five passengers on board, but only four parachutes.
The first passenger said, “I am President Obama, the chosen one. The world needs me, I can’t afford to die.”
So he took the first parachute and left the plane.
The second passenger, Tony Abbot said, “I am the Prime Minister of Australia and I am the smartest man in Australian history, so Australia’s people don’t want me to die.”
He took the second parachute and jumped out of the plane.
The third passenger, John Kerry said, “I’m the US Secretary of State and a decorated war hero from the Army of the United States of America.”
He grabbed the parachute next to him and jumped.
The fourth passenger, ex-President George W Bush said to the fifth passenger, a 10-year-old schoolgirl;
“I have lived a full life and served my country the best I could. I will sacrifice my life and let you have the last parachute.”
The little girl said “That’s okay, Mr President. There’s a parachute left for you..., Australia’s smartest man just took my schoolbag.”
Todays computer joke
Please enter your new password:
"cabbage"
Sorry, the password must be more than 8 characters.
"boiled cabbage"
Sorry, the password must contain 1 numerical character.
"1 boiled cabbage"
Sorry, the password cannot have blank spaces.
"50bloodyboiledcabbages"
Sorry, the password must contain at least one upper case character.
"50BLOODYboiledcabbages"
Sorry, the password cannot use more than one upper case character consecutively.
"
IfYouDon'tGiveMeAccessnow”
IfYouDon'tGiveMeAccessnow”
Sorry, the password cannot contain punctuation.
"
YouDontGiveMeAccessnow”
YouDontGiveMeAccessnow”
Sorry, that password is already in use.
Todays sardonic jokes
We are here on earth to do good unto others. What the others are here for, I have no idea.
I'm not saying let's go kill all the stupid people. I'm just saying let's remove all the warning labels and let the problem work itself out.
I changed my car horn to gunshot sounds. People move out of the way much faster now.
You can tell a lot about a woman's mood just by looking at her hands. If they are holding a gun, she's probably angry.
Gone are the days when girls used to cook like their mothers. Now they drink like their fathers.
You know that tingly little feeling you get when you really like someone...that's common sense leaving your body.
I don't like making plans for the day because then the word "premeditated" gets thrown around in the courtroom.
I didn't make it to the gym again today. That makes five years in a row.
I decided to stop calling the bathroom the John. I renamed it Jim. I feel so much better saying I went to the Jim this morning.
To the paranoid people who check behind shower curtains for murderers: if you find one...what's your plan?
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