1/ Paul Krugman with column that could become a classic....he essentially says that becoming a billionaire has the effect of making you an asshole....
Wealth can be bad for your soul. That’s not just a hoary piece of folk wisdom; it’s a conclusion from serious social science, confirmed by statistical analysis and experiment. The affluent are, on average, less likely to exhibit empathy, less likely to respect norms and even laws, more likely to cheat, than those occupying lower rungs on the economic ladder.
And it’s obvious, even if we don’t have statistical confirmation, that extreme wealth can do extreme spiritual damage. Take someone whose personality might have been merely disagreeable under normal circumstances, and give him the kind of wealth that lets him surround himself with sycophants and usually get whatever he wants. It’s not hard to see how he could become almost pathologically self-regarding and unconcerned with others.
So what happens to a nation that gives ever-growing political power to the superrich?
2/ Not often you get an original concept on Youtube, but this sendup of a Western bar scene where the players can hear the voiceover is really, really clever and funny.....
Recommended! Eight minutes, most amusing......
In the tradition of classic westerns, a narrator sets up the story of a lone gunslinger who walks into a saloon.
However, the people in this saloon can hear the narrator.
3/ Another study, this from Credit Suisse, finds the top 1% worldwide hold 50% of the worlds wealth, and all of the growth is going to the top.....I know you've heard all this before [yawn] but this is from Credit Suisse, the bank for oligarchs to stash their loot so they should know!
Great analysis of the report from the CBC.......
The so-called 1% have become the focus of increasing opposition in recent years, as the world's ultra-rich have seen their share of global wealth increase at a much faster pace than everyone else. (Scott Eells/Bloomberg)
The richest one per cent now own half of all the wealth in the world, a new report from Credit Suisse says.
The bank's Global Wealth Report 2015 marks the first time that the world's super rich have amassed enough wealth to cross that symbolic line.
By the bank's reckoning, just over $250 trillion US worth of wealth has been amassed by households. At the top sit the ultra-rich, which the bank defines as having a net worth of at least $50 million in assets. Worldwide, there are 120,000 people in the group.
Just below the ultra-rich are 34 million people, with a collective net worth of at least $1 million. Collectively, people in that part of the pyramid make up 0.7 per cent of the world's population, but own 45.2 per cent of the world's wealth. If you extend the cut-off to one per cent of the world's population, they own more than half of all wealth in the world.
"Wealth inequality has continued to increase since 2008, with the top percentile of wealth holders now owning 50.4 per cent of all household wealth," the report said.
4/ An incredible video of the Chinese version of a Christmas tree.....it's an amazing eight minutes, but you get the idea after the first three......worth a look just to appreciate the discipline needed to make this.
5/ Some of these TED talks are wonderful - this one is about a study that followed groups of men for 75 years to see what influences mattered to health, longevity and happiness.....
It's low key, quiet but very interesting.....if you want 12 minutes that might make a difference in YOUR life watch this.....it's excellent.....
What keeps us happy and healthy as we go through life? If you think it's fame and money, you're not alone – but, according to psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, you're mistaken. As the director of a 75-year-old study on adult development, Waldinger has unprecedented access to data on true happiness and satisfaction. In this talk, he shares three important lessons learned from the study as well as some practical, old-as-the-hills wisdom on how to build a fulfilling, long life.
6/ It's obvious there is immense frustration with the corruption and gross unfairness in our society, as we reach out to Trump and Bernie to fix the system....but they can't because the real control of policy and decisions is in the "Deep State", a combination of the military-industrial complex and Wall Street oligarchs.....
Excellent story from Mike Lofgren in Salon.....
(Credit: Brandon Bourdages via Shutterstock)
One of the predominant themes of the 2016 presidential campaign thus far — and one that is unlikely to lose significance once the primaries give way to the general election — is the American people’s exasperation with a political system they see as corrupt, self-serving, disingenuous and out of touch.
It is not an especially partisan or ideological sentiment; you can just as easily find it among supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders as among fans of Donald Trump. You can even find those who support paragons of the status quo, like Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush, making similar complaints. It’s about as close to a consensus position as you’re likely to find nowadays in American politics.
Yet despite the widespread agreement that something is seriously wrong with democracy in the U.S., there’s much less of a consensus as to what that something is — and, crucially, how to fix it. The answers Bernie Sanders offers, for example, are not exactly the same as those proffered by Donald Trump. Is the problem too much government? Not enough government? Too much immigration? Not enough immigration? Too much taxing and regulating? Not enough taxing and regulating?
Our lack of a systemic analysis of the problem is part of the reason why our answers are so diffuse and ill-fitting. And that’s just one of the reasons why “The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government,” the new book from ex-longtime GOP staffer turned best-selling author Mike Lofgren, is so valuable.
7/ Seth Meyers with "A Closer Look" at Trump"s campaign......a pretty good six minutes....
Donald Trump is starting to spend his promised $2 million a week on TV ads in early voting states, but he has already benefited from hours of free media coverage, said Seth Meyers on Monday's Late Night. That's partly because the media has "obsessively" covered every new poll this election cycle, there are lots more polls than in 2012, and Donald Trump has led in most of them, Meyers said. "But here's the thing about those polls: There's reason to think they might not really mean anything." One reason is that people hate talking to pollsters — the response rate has fallen from 90 percent to a dismal 8 percent, according to one study, which is "a lower response rate than student-loan collector and mother-in-law," Meyers quipped.
In the end, Trump could win all the primaries or none of them, but there are plenty of reasons to think his support is softer than the polls and media coverage indicates, Meyers said. You can watch his entire argument below.
8/ The Miami Herald publishes Dave Barry's year in review, and this year 2015 is for you fans of sardonic humor and sarcasm......I personally love his style, but it's an acquired taste.....
Sometimes we are accused — believe it or not — of being overly negative in our annual Year in Review. Critics say we ignore the many positive events in a given year and focus instead on the stupid, the tragic, the evil, the disgusting, the Kardashians.
OK, critics: We have heard you. This year, instead of dwelling on the negatives, we’re going to start our annual review with a List of the Top 10 Good Things That Happened in 2015. Ready? Here we go:
1. We didn’t hear that much about Honey Boo Boo.
2.
OK, we’ll have to get back to you on Good Things 2 through 10. We apologize, but 2015 had so many negatives that we’re having trouble seeing the positives. It’s like we’re on the Titanic, and it’s tilting at an 85-degree angle with its propellers way up in the air, and we’re dangling over the cold Atlantic trying to tell ourselves: “At least there’s no waiting for the shuffleboard courts!”
Are we saying that 2015 was the worst year ever? Are we saying it was worse than, for example, 1347, the year when the Bubonic Plague killed a large part of humanity?
Yes, we are saying that. Because at least the remainder of humanity was not exposed to a solid week in which the news media focused intensively on the question of whether a leading candidate for president of the United States had, or had not, made an explicit reference to a prominent female TV journalist’s biological lady cycle.
9/ Interesting story on how dangerous Fox News is, because it has created the "angry old white people" Trump constituency and feed the constant bullshit.....but all of cable news isn't much better.....
Good article.....
They created our Bundy/Trump hellscape: Fox News’ angry white audience will destroy us yet
47 percent of Fox viewers get all their news there. They are horribly misinformed. And we wonder why Trump leads?
(Credit: AP/Rick Bowmer/AP/Richard Shiro/Photo montage by Salon)
The latest ratings are in: Fox News is No. 1 in cable news, No. 2 overall (behind ESPN) in Nielsen’s report for 2015—the highest-ever ratings for a cable news network. So it’s official: Fox News has finally destroyed television news and turned it into nothing more than blood sport.
It should come as little surprise that 2015 offered Fox News a healthy bump. Not only did it have the ongoing GOP clown car and the opportunity to host the first GOP debate, which yielded a record-breaking 24 million viewers, but it also had the gift that keeps on giving—Donald Trump. While all of the news networks (and the fake news ones as well) offered viewers a healthy dose of Trump coverage, Trump was a big boon to Fox News.
It wasn’t simply the shared party affiliation between Fox News and Trump that made the difference; it was the fact that Trump literally embodied everything that Fox News stands for — you know, like making things up and refusing to be questioned, rampant bigotry, misogyny and class warfare. Oh, also, favoring cult-like populism over rational democracy; an attitude of bluster, bias and bullying; and a rhetoric of patriotism veiling a politics of elitism.
Just as Trump’s popularity didn’t drop in the face of his ongoing insult to everything this nation stands for, so, too, with Fox News. They can fight all they want, but it does not change that down deep, they are peas in a pod. Fox News’ ratings didn’t go down in response to the ongoing fact-averse, bigot-machine it has become– they went up! Every time Fox News –like Trump—gets called out for crossing the line or lying, its loyal band of followers circles the wagons, hunkers down and keeps on watching
10/ A decent Colbert, on the standoff in Oregon let by the younger Bundy......mildly amusing.....four minutes.....
When armed militiamen were lead into a standoff in Oregon by Ammon Bundy, the right-wing extremists expected a huge battle but what they’ve got has been nothing but ridicule from everywhere, including even Fox News. The government response hasn’t been anything like Ruby Ridge or Waco, it has been more like, “meh.” It’s hard to be taken seriously as a domestic terrorist these days with ISIS beheading people and throwing them off roofs and Al Queda bombing stuff. That’s why Stephen Colbert has a solution.
Two depressing stories about food and our food supply......you can't trust what you see in your markets, and I don't know what the answer is. You may have seen this week it is now illegal to put country of origin on meat labels......so you will have no clue if your meat comes from the organic butcher in the next county or China.....Big Ag wants to make it impossible to eat healthily.....
11/ The first story is about shrimp - one thing is clear - if you buy peeled shrimp at Public or indeed any other supermarket you are almost certainly buying shrimp that 1/ is grown in horribly unhygienic conditions and 2/ processed by slave labour.
If you can live with that, enjoy your poisonous shrimp.....
Last year, the Guardian shed light on an uncomfortable — and unfortunate — truth about much of the shrimp sold in North America, Europe, Japan and elsewhere around the world. A six-month-long investigation revealed that torture, wage-theft, beatings and various other illegal practices were a reality in the production chain of the world's largest supplier.
"If you buy prawns or shrimp from Thailand, you will be buying the produce of slave labor," Aidan McQuade, director of Anti-Slavery International, told the Guardian at the time. And many countries do, including the United States, which imports about half of the shrimp Thailand harvests.
The investigation followed a 2013 report by the Environmental Justice Foundation, a nongovernmental organization, which chronicled the abuse in the Thai shrimp industry. It also spurred a flurry of corporate responses: Walmart said it was "actively engaged" in the issue; Costco said it was telling its suppliers "to take corrective action;" and Tesco, the largest supermarket chain in Britain, called it "completely unacceptable."
But almost two years later, the problem persists.
12/ The second is an upscale problem - Italian Olive Oil......the Extra Virgin olive oil you pay top dollar for might be fake......watch this 14 minute story from "60 Minutes" - Agromafia......
JANUARY 3, 2016, 8:17 PM|In Italy, Bill Whitaker finds out that the long arms of the Mafia extend to agricultural products, especially olive oil, on which the mob makes huge profits by exporting imitations
Todays video - a Russian website for pistol shooting......best I could do was a 27!
It's in Russian, but just click on the gun and left click to fire....
http://deti.mil.by/templates/swf/Pistol/index.swf
Todays one liner jokes....
If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates.~Jay Leno~The problem with political jokes is they get elected.~Henry Cate, VII~We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office~Aesop~If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these State of the Union speeches, there wouldn't be any inducement to go to heaven.~Will Rogers~Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.~Nikita Khrushchev~When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.~Clarence Darrow~Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.~John Quinton~Why pay money to have your family tree traced; go into politics and your opponents will do it for you.~Author unknown~Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.~Oscar Ameringer~I offer my opponents a bargain: if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them.~Adlai Stevenson, 1952~A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country.~ Tex Guinan~I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.~Charles de Gaulle~Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.~Doug Larson~There ought to be one day -- just one -- when there is open season on Congressmen and/or women.~Will Rogers~=
Todays Farmer joke
BEING A FARMER IS TOUGH !
A farmer was selling his peaches door to door. He knocked on a door and a shapely 30-something woman dressed in a very sheer negligee answered the door.
He raised his basket to show her the peaches and asked, "Would you like to buy some peaches?"
She pulled the top of the negligee to one side and asked, "Are they as firm as this?"
He nodded his head and said, "Yes ma'am," and a little tear ran from his eye.
Then she pulled the other side of her negligee off asking, "Are they nice and pink like this?"
The farmer said, "Yes," and another tear came from the other eye.
Then she unbuttoned the bottom of her negligee and asked, "Are they as fuzzy as this?"
He again said, "Yes," and broke down crying.
She asked, "Why on earth are you crying?"
Drying his eyes he replied, "The drought got my corn, the flood got my soy beans, a tornado leveled my barn,
... And now I think I'm gonna get fucked out of my peaches."
Todays oldie joke
During a visit to my doctor, I asked him, "How do you determine whether or not an older person should be put in an old-age home?""Well," he said, "we fill up a bathtub, then we offer a teaspoon, a teacup and a bucket to the person to empty the bathtub"Oh, I understand," I said. "A normal person would use the
bucket because it is bigger than the spoon or the teacup."
"No" he said. "A normal person would pull the plug. Do you
want a bed near the window?"
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