Intrepid DDD readers - we have some disturbing stories this week about the dark undercurrents in our society surfacing, but before you get to those watch George Carlin's "American Dream" again, and even though he was on stage nine years ago it's like he was psychic about what's happening now......
There is a little difference though - "the owners" are losing control because of the rage, and Trump and Bernie are channelling this anger - Bernie responsibly, Trump cynically......
Anyway watch the Master before you read #1 and #4......
1/ Matt Taibbi with a serious article about Trump, and how he has stopped being funny. I, like you, have been greatly amused by this buffoon but he has wakened something in the American fringe, just like the election of the President in 2008 focused the racial hatred that was kept under wraps.
This is becoming dangerous folks.....read Taibbi - an excellent article.....
Donald Trump Just Stopped Being Funny
Win or lose, Trump's campaign threatens to unleash the Great American Stupid
"The people that are following me are very passionate," Donald Trump said recently.
So two yahoos from Southie in my hometown of Boston severely beat up a Hispanic homeless guy earlier this week. While being arrested, one of the brothers reportedly told police that "Donald Trump was right, all of these illegals need to be deported."
When reporters confronted Trump, he hadn't yet heard about the incident. At first, he said, "That would be a shame." But right after, he went on:
"I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that."
This is the moment when Donald Trump officially stopped being funny.
2/ Paul Krugman with a great column that says how the Republican candidates, all of them not named Trump, are proving they are just creatures of the oligarchy.
Why? They are all backing cutting or privatizing Social Security, a program that is extremely popular with 99% of the country but a program the 1% don't need or want......
Most interesting......
Something strange is happening in the Republican primary — something strange, that is, besides the Trump phenomenon. For some reason, just about all the leading candidates other than The Donald have taken a deeply unpopular position, a known political loser, on a major domestic policy issue. And it’s interesting to ask why.
The issue in question is the future of Social Security, which turned 80 last week. The retirement program is, of course, both extremely popular and a long-term target of conservatives, who want to kill it precisely because its popularity helps legitimize government action in general. As the right-wing activist Stephen Moore (now chief economist of the Heritage Foundation) once declared, Social Security is “the soft underbelly of the welfare state”; “jab your spear through that” and you can undermine the whole thing.
3/ Larry Wilmore with an amusing four minutes on the Republican issue de jour - birthright citizenship.......
After playing the clip of Fox News’ Bill O’Reillychallenging Donald Trump on his plan to apparently repeal the 14th Amendment and eliminate birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants, Larry Wilmore exclaimed, “I never thought I’d say this, Trump, but Bill O’Reilly is correct!”
The Nightly Show decided he needed to take Trump to “Knowledge College,” explaining how we arrived at the 14th Amendment in the first place, over the objections of Senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania, AKA “the Donald Trump of his day.”
“Craziest of all, the 14th Amendment was a Republican idea,” Wilmore said. “It was something they got completely right the first time, like health care exchanges and hating John Edwards.”
4/ To be read after Taibbi.....yes Trump has been amusing, and Democrats are laughing at the chaos the Republican field has got itself into, but he is channelling the rage and alienation felt by tens of millions of Americans, and as this perceptive story says this is the way dictators start their rise to power.
Trump's rise is beginning to be a dark and sinister chapter.....
In this July 11, 2015, photo, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at FreedomFest in Las Vegas. In a state where early organization is key to a successful presidential campaign, Trump’s New Hampshire operation has the trappings of a legitimate political organization. (AP Photo/John Locher)(Credit: AP)
Ever since The Donald descended that escalator at Trump Tower a couple of months ago to announce his entry into the presidential race, Democrats have been laughing. Watching the Republicans squirm and Fox News jump through hoops has made the GOP presidential primary a delightful entertainment for their rivals on the other side of the aisle. I don’t know how many of them had it in them to watch the whole Trump Town hall extravaganza in Derry, NH, on Wednesday — but those who did were unlikely to be laughing by the end of it.
There was the standard braggadocio and egomania that characterizes his every appearance and weird digressions into arcane discussions of things like building materials (for The Wall, naturally.) He complained about the press and politicians and declared himself superior to pretty much everyone on earth. But after you listen to him for a while, you come away from that performance with a very unpleasant sense that something rather sinister is at the heart of the Trump phenomenon.
Trump was still talking when Chris Hayes opened his show that night with this comment:
I want to talk about what we are seeing unfold here because I think what we are seeing is past the point of a clown show or a parody. I believe it is much more serious and much darker…
5/ Did you watch the Republican debate? Actually you didn't....what you really saw is captured by "Bad Lip Reading"......a very clever and hysterically funny four minutes.....but the Ben Carson bit is real!
It may have taken them a few weeks — and who can blame them, given the inherent silliness of their source material — but the folks over at Bad Lip Reading finally got around to working their charms upon the first Republican presidential debate and, suffice it to say, you’ll never look at any of the candidates quite the same again.
On its Facebook page, BLR stated that “as a new presidential election gets under way, it’s important to stay informed about the candidates.” If by “informed” they mean, “you’ll never look at them and their pepper-spray tans or little paper hats the same way again,” they are absolutely correct.
6/ The is one of the better 'Honest Trailers" for "The Matrix Trilogy".....I was surfing the other night in Quebec and caught 10 minutes of Matrix 1 in French, and it was still awesome.....
An amusing four minutes......
7/ This story from the Times has caused an Internet and Social Media frenzy, with Amazon scrambling to do some positive spin. It's a piece of great journalism about the corporate culture at Amazon, and how it's almost cult-like American corporate culture on steroids.....
There is an element of this in every large US company - to get ahead or even survive you have to play the game and swallow the bullshit - Amazon is an extreme case, but not that OTT I'll bet.....
SEATTLE — On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazon’s singular way of working.
They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs, one employee recalled. When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported. To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, “I’m Peculiar” — the company’s proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions.
At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)
8/ And having read that horrifying story about a company Mary and I use frequently [we have Amazon Primeas well], you end up conflicted - I have also read stories on how the Amazon warehouse workers are treated like Chinese labourers, but Amazon is so useful and cheap.....we won't go to Walmart because they are such an evil company, but Amazon seems to be evil too!
What to do.....
Anyway the author of this story in Grist [also based in Seattle] is going cold turkey - no more Amazon.....
We’ve written a lot about Amazon at Grist, from the company’s high-tech campus a couple miles from our own office to brogrammers taking over Seattle’s gayborhoodto the real cost of your Prime account. When you live in Seattle, as both Grist and Amazon do, it just comes up. The company is an ever-growing presence in our city — one often blamed for the population boom, the traffic problem, and the rising cost of living. Most of us know people who work there, and while we may hear our neighbors bitching about the long hours and the few perks (you’ll find no laundry service or free lunches at Amazon HQ), the rest of the world got a rare inside look at what life is like for Amazon’s white-collar workers this weekend, thanks to The New York Times.
One hundred former and current employees spoke to the Times about their experiences at the monolithic company, and the atmosphere comes across as a bit like the Hunger Games for coders.
9/ A sad story from Onion News about parents struggling with the difficult decision to euthanize their brain dead daughter.....such sorrow I think all parents can relate to.......
Two teary minutes.....
The parents of 13-year old Caitlin Teagart have decided to end her life, saying she can now do nothing but lay on the couch and whine about things being "gay."
10/ There's a Canadian election coming in about a month, but the Harper Government is acting strangely about it.....
This article in the Times caused a lot of comments north of the border......and note everyone we met in Canada hates this bastard Harper......even my Uncle Jim who just turned 100, won't vote for him again.....
The Closing of the Canadian Mind
THE prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, has called an election for Oct. 19, but he doesn’t want anyone to talk about it.
He has chosen not to participate in the traditional series of debates on national television, confronting his opponents in quieter, less public venues, like the scholarly Munk Debates and CPAC, Canada’s equivalent of CSPAN. His own campaign events were subject to gag orders until a public outcry forced him to rescind the forced silence of his supporters.
Mr. Harper’s campaign for re-election has so far been utterly consistent with the personality trait that has defined his tenure as prime minister: his peculiar hatred for sharing information.
Americans have traditionally looked to Canada as a liberal haven, with gun control, universal health care and good public education.
But the nine and half years of Mr. Harper’s tenure have seen the slow-motion erosion of that reputation for open, responsible government. His stance has been a know-nothing conservatism, applied broadly and effectively. He has consistently limited the capacity of the public to understand what its government is doing, cloaking himself and his Conservative Party in an entitled secrecy, and the country in ignorance.
His relationship to the press is one of outright hostility.
11/ Taylor Swift with her video "Bad Blood", almost a mini-movie with a few traces of "Matrix" effects.......a feminist video to be sure, with some guest celebs....
The existence of someone who finds the notion of a woman as action-film hero threatening or offensive helps go a long way to explaining what the heck is happening in Taylor Swift’s video for “Bad Blood.” Before premiering Sunday night at the Billboard Music Awards, it had a real claim to being the most pre-hyped music video of all time, due to the fact that Swift had spent days teasing the Internet about its horde of celebrity cameos. Lena Dunham, Cindy Crawford, Jessica Alba, and more than a dozen others got poster treatment, announcing them as futuristic-crimefighter characters with names like “Slay-Z,” “Knockout,” and “The Crimson Curse.” The video lives up to its advertising, offering a hodgepodge of tropes from spy, superhero, and sci-fi movies featuring a bevy of famous women—plus Kendrick Lamar, rapping newly penned verses for the remix—toting bazookas, nunchaku, and in one case, a throwing star disguised as a compact.
12/ And continuing our focus health and how to stay in decent shape, an Australian film maker decided to eat "healthy", "natural" and "low fat" foods for thirty days. Nothing nasty like carbs, just packaged goods that Big Food tries to tell you are good for you. Read what happened.......
Damon Gameau features in and directs That Sugar Film, his documentary investigating hidden sugar in food. Photograph: Madmanctor That Sugar Film: how 60 days of eating ‘health food’ led to fatty liver disease
Australian documentary maker Damon Gameau cracks open the refined sugars hidden in so-called ‘healthy’ packaged food in a gonzo activist mission to map his own mental and physical disintegration
The twist is that Gameau didn’t splurge on sloppy nosh such as cheeseburgers, chips and sundaes – in other words food everybody knows is bad for you. Gameau consumed the typical Australian’s 40 teaspoons of sugar a day, maintained exercise, the same kilojoule intake of his regular diet and – the clincher – only ate foods perceived to be healthy. This includes cereal, smoothies, muesli bars and low-fat yoghurt. The kind of products at the heart of advertising campaigns built on extolling their supposed virtues, using faux science and deceptive packaging.
"That Sugar Film"....trailer.....
13/ Pursued by ads when you go to a website? Do ads follow you around? Want to stop it?
Read this article from the Times, and download the software mentioned in the story - I did, and it works. After you install it there is an icon that goes in your tool bar that shows how many ads it blocks from each website you go to.....some are as high as 30......
The great philosopher Homer Simpson once memorably described alcohol as “the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.” Internet advertising is a bit like that — the funder of and terrible nuisance baked into everything you do online.
Advertising sustains pretty much all the content you enjoy on the web, not least this very newspaper and its handsome, charming technology columnist; as I’ve argued before, many of the world’s most useful technologies may never have come about without online advertising. But at the same time, ads and the vast, hidden, data-sucking machinery that they depend on to track and profile you are routinely the most terrible thing about the Internet.
Now, more and more web users are escaping the daily bombardment of online advertising by installing an ad blocker. This simple, free software lets you roam the web without encountering any ads that shunt themselves between you and the content you want to read or watch. With an ad blocker, your web browser will generally run faster, you’ll waste less bandwidth downloading ads, and you’ll suffer fewer annoyances when navigating the Internet. You’ll wonder why everyone else in the world doesn’t turn to the dark side.
This is the free software......
14/ We heard an interview on the radio with Max Blumenthal, the author of a new book about Israel this week, and it was harrowing stuff......the Israel you have in your head isn't the Israel of today after 20 years of hard line right wingers and Ultra Orthodox Jews running the government. They aren't treating the Palestinians and the Gaza strip very well.....putting it mildly.....
One year ago today, Israel invaded, bombed and shelled Gaza, and continued to do that for the next seven weeks. According to the U.N., at least 2,104 Gazans were killed — 1,462 of whom (69 percent) were civilians, including 495 children. A total of 6 Israeli civilians, and 66 soldiers, were killed. The shockingly high civilian death rate in Gaza included the now-iconic imagery of four young boys from the same family being killed by Israeli warships while they played on a beach in front of a hotel filled with foreign journalists.
Months after the attack concluded, U.N. Chief Ban Ki-moon visited Gaza and labeled the destruction “beyond description,” far worse than prior Israeli attacks. At least 17,000 homes “were obliterated or severely damaged during the conflict,” and it will take two decades to rebuild them; that means that “nearly 60,000 people have lost their homes.” On countless occasions, entire large families of Gazans were instantly extinguished by Israeli violence. Because the population of Gaza is so young — 43 percent are under the age of 15, while 64 percent are under the age of 24 — the majority of its residents know little beyond extreme suffering, carnage, violence and war.
As harrowing as that data is, it tells only a small part of the story. Statistics like these have an abstract property to them: cold and clinical. Viewing the devastation of Gaza through their lens can have a distancing effect. They erase the most affecting facts: the stories of human suffering and devastation caused by this attack, the sadism and savagery that drove it.
That is what makes Max Blumenthal’s new book about this Israeli attack so compelling, so necessary. Entitled The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza, it humanizes this event like nothing else I’ve read.
15/ Florida is doomed without a political revolution.....everywhere you look is stupidity and corruption....listen to the whining from the Republicans in the House and Senate because the Florida Supreme Court ordered our scumbag pols to redistrict fairly.....
OCCUPIED TALLAHASSEE – They stamp their feet, they scream till they’re sick, and hold their breath till they’re blue. They act like 5-year-olds caught with their grotty little paws in the cookie jar, their faces covered in crumbs, as they swear they didn’t do anything wrong.
The Special – or Remedial – Session.
While all the other political kids get to have fun lying and money-grubbing, these poor little legislators they have to stay in and do the homework they refused to do earlier: drawing congressional districts that sorta-maybe-almost fairly represent the people of Florida.
Sen. Tom Lee pouted that the court maybe violated his First Amendment rights and muttered darkly about hiring a personal lawyer. Sen. Joe Negron whined that the court had made him feel like some kind of a “suspect” unfairly hauled down to the station house, because the court had directed legislators keep emails and even record conversations with aides – if it’s to do with redistricting. “I believe at my core that the Florida Supreme Court has grossly overstepped its boundaries,” said Rep. Dana Young, looking pious, while Richard Corcoran, heir apparent to the House speakership, huffed, “We are under direction by a court that continues over and over again to exceed their constitutional authority.
Todays video - for guys......a land clearing/tree mulching machine.....ahoooooooogah.....
Todays old guy joke
Ron Chestna, 89 years of age, was stopped by police around 2 am and was asked where he was going at that time of night.
Ron replied, “I’m on my way to a lecture about alcohol abuse and the effects it has on the human body, as well as smoking and staying out late.”
The officer asked, “Oh, really? Who’s giving that lecture at this time of night?”
Ron replied, “That would be my wife.”
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Todays man joke
A guy goes to the supermarket and notices an attractive woman waving at him.
She says hello.
She says hello.
He's rather taken aback because he can't place where he
knows her from.
knows her from.
So he says, 'Do you know me?'
To which she replies, 'I think you're the father of one of my kids.'
Now his mind travels back to the only time he has ever been unfaithful to his wife and says,
'Are you the stripper from the bachelor party that I made love to on the pool table with all my
She looks into his eyes and says calmly, 'No, I'm your son's teacher.'
Todays Nun joke
John was sitting outside his local pub one day, enjoying a quiet pint and generally feeling good about himself, when a nun suddenly appears at his table and starts decrying the evils of drink.
"You should be ashamed of yourself young man! Drinking is a Sin! Alcohol is the blood of the devil!"
Now John gets pretty annoyed about this, and goes on the offensive.
"How do you know this, Sister?"
"My Mother Superior told me so."
"But have you ever had a drink yourself? How can you be sure that what you are saying is right?"
"Don't be ridiculous--of course I have never taken alcohol myself"
"Then let me buy you a drink - if you still believe afterwards that it is evil I will give up drink for life".
"How could I, a Nun, sit outside this public house drinking?!"
"I'll get the barman to put it in a teacup for you, then no one will ever know."
The Nun reluctantly agrees, so John goes inside to the bar.
"Another pint for me, and a triple vodka on the rocks", then he lowers his voice and says to the barman "and could you put the vodka in a teacup?"
"Oh no! It's not that Nun again is it?"
"You should be ashamed of yourself young man! Drinking is a Sin! Alcohol is the blood of the devil!"
Now John gets pretty annoyed about this, and goes on the offensive.
"How do you know this, Sister?"
"My Mother Superior told me so."
"But have you ever had a drink yourself? How can you be sure that what you are saying is right?"
"Don't be ridiculous--of course I have never taken alcohol myself"
"Then let me buy you a drink - if you still believe afterwards that it is evil I will give up drink for life".
"How could I, a Nun, sit outside this public house drinking?!"
"I'll get the barman to put it in a teacup for you, then no one will ever know."
The Nun reluctantly agrees, so John goes inside to the bar.
"Another pint for me, and a triple vodka on the rocks", then he lowers his voice and says to the barman "and could you put the vodka in a teacup?"
"Oh no! It's not that Nun again is it?"
Bill Maher decided at the end of his show that even though Hillary Clinton is still the most likely candidate to get the Democrat nomination, he couldn’t stand idly by and watch her positive points take a free fall from recent events.
Matt Taibbi hit the road with the Republican Party circus 
Roger Goodell and Tom Brady 
 "The public tab for defending Gov. Rick Scott, Cabinet members and staff from public records went up another $300,000 according to public records obtained by the Herald on Wednesday evening. The documents were requested on June 17.")
