1/ Paul Krugman on the Supreme Court now that Scalia has gone....
Once upon a time, the death of a Supreme Court justice wouldn’t have brought America to the edge of constitutional crisis. But that was a different country, with a very different Republican Party. In today’s America, with today’s G.O.P., the passing of Antonin Scalia has opened the doors to chaos.
In principle, losing a justice should cause at most a mild disturbance in the national scene. After all, the court is supposed to be above politics. So when a vacancy appears, the president should simply nominate, and the Senate approve, someone highly qualified and respected by all.
2/ Men - you need to watch this 3 minute video....really. Find out what she REALLY means....."The Manslater"
The Manslater” is a funny fictive gadget that would help many men to understand women, because it can translate what women say! Ladies do not worry, this gadget also works the other way, and you will also understand what men want to say … A pretty funny video!
3/ One of the best stories about Miami's building boom in the face of sea level rise - it goes into the why, including developers who a looking for a two year return, capital flight from South America, the stupidity of our Florida politicians, the willful refusal of people to think about the future but the most disturbing reason is the heavily subsidized flood insurance.....subsidized by YOU!
A very good story that should be read by every resident of South Florida....yes you may realize it's coming, but if you think you are going to beat the panic when the flooding really starts and then sell your house, think again....
AP Photo/Lynne Sladky
A cyclist and vehicles negotiate heavily flooded streets as rain falls, Tuesday, September 23, 2014, in Miami Beach, Fla. Certain neighborhoods regularly experience flooding during heavy rains and extreme high tides. New storm water pumps are currently being installed along the bay front in Miami Beach.
E
ven from thousands of feet in the air, it’s obvious that Miami is disturbingly low-lying. Luxury sky-high buildings, bridges, and cranes tower over swampy marshlands and the slowly rising sea. The latest development has resulted in a sprawling metropolis on sinking land. Rising seas combine with porous limestone—which is like Swiss cheese—to allow saltwater to infiltrate under the land during floods, and makes the greater Miami area the most climate-vulnerable place in the United States.
In Southeast Florida, the sea could rise three feet by 2060, and that doesn’t count temporary storm surges from increasingly intense hurricanes. Seventy-five percent of Florida’s population lives in coastal counties that generate 79 percent of the state’s total annual economy. The infrastructure in these coastal counties had a replacement value of $2 trillion in 2010 and is estimated to increase to $3 trillion by 2030.
Of the 2.6 million people who live in Miami-Dade County, nearly 129,000 of them are living less than three feet above sea level. The county alone has more people living less than four feet above sea level than in any other state except Louisiana. The county’s estimated beachfront property value is more than $14.7 billion—not including infrastructure.
You might think, therefore, that developers, investors, and homebuyers would be very gun-shy about putting more money into Miami real estate. One good-sized hurricane, or another decade of relentless sea-level rise, and their investment will be washed away. At the very least, values are likely to fall because escalating climate threats will scare off other investors and falling demand will depress property values.
But you’d be wrong on both counts.
4/ Seth Meyers takes "A Closer Look" at the kerfuffle with Apple and the FBI.....a reasonably good six minutes....
In the latest edition of his always-on-point “Closer Look” segment, “Late Night” host Seth Meyers tackled Apple CEO Tim Cook’s refusal to cooperate with the FBI in accessing encrypted info on one of the San Bernardino killers’ iPhone.
Cook refused a judge’s order to unlock the info, citing government overreach and prompting a heated debate over the issue of privacy.
“That’s right, Cook refused a judge’s order,” Meyers said. “Although, technically, he never received it because the judge tried to find him on Apple Maps.”
The FBI is, more specifically, trying to bypass the security feature on the iPhone that permanently encrypts the phone’s info if the incorrect password is entered more than ten times on the home screen.
5/ It's clear Antonin Scalia was an evil bastard, but there haven't been too many writers brave enough to take this subject on.....so read what Frank Rich has to say about what's going to happen next....
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: the GOP's attempt to block Obama's Supreme Court nominee, W. stumps for Jeb!, and Grammy highlights.
Mitch McConnell's pledge to block any Supreme Court nominee to succeed Antonin Scalia is finding what appears to be near-unanimous support from Senate Republicans, but others speculate that President Obama may use the fight to increase Democratic turnout at the polls this fall. What are the risks of McConnell's strategy?
Excuse me, but if we are talking about the politics of this brawl, it’s a no-brainer. Obama, a lame duck who will not be on the ballot in November, has nothing to lose by standing on principle and carrying out a president’s duty to submit a nominee to the Senate. The GOP, by contrast, has a lot to lose come Election Day — including control of the Senate. Though a Times front-page headline this morning reads “Court Path Is Littered With Pitfalls, for Obama and the G.O.P.,” the only potential pitfalls it actually identifies are all for the GOP.
Excuse me, but if we are talking about the politics of this brawl, it’s a no-brainer. Obama, a lame duck who will not be on the ballot in November, has nothing to lose by standing on principle and carrying out a president’s duty to submit a nominee to the Senate. The GOP, by contrast, has a lot to lose come Election Day — including control of the Senate. Though a Times front-page headline this morning reads “Court Path Is Littered With Pitfalls, for Obama and the G.O.P.,” the only potential pitfalls it actually identifies are all for the GOP.
Still, before we get to the politics of the Scalia vacancy, please let’s talk about the bigger picture. The constitutional picture, if we must be grand about it.
6/ Tom Tomorrow with some thoughts on the conservative media's reaction to Scalia's death....wonderful cartoon....
7/ Have you ever read or seen how badly less affluent kids eat, and thought what can't they eat properly? Fruits and vegetables etc.....
As this excellent story from the Times says, you are forgetting one thing - how picky kids can be about food.....
WHY do poor children have poor diets?
Some commentators contend that healthy diets are too expensive. Others argue that wholesome options are affordable and that junk foods that seem cheap are hardly a good deal. But both camps overlook what most parents know well: Children are picky.
Finicky eating can frustrate any parent. But pickiness has particular effects on the poor. By understanding these effects, we can do more to improve the diets of low-income children.
I spent over two years studying how 73 Boston-area families decided what to feed their kids. Some families made more than $100,000 a year. Some made ends meet with little left over.
Others were poor. I wanted to know how parents actually choose what to feed their families, given the situations they face and the resources they have. I quickly learned that poor parents not only have to calculate how much their food costs, they must also consider what happens if no one eats it.
Describing her grocery-shopping routine, a poor mother from South Boston with a 3-year-old son quickly highlighted waste: “I get my food stamps on the 5th and I try to make them last for a month, but that’s really difficult because toddlers waste a lot of food.” When another poor mother’s kids refuse what she cooks, she thinks of things she could have purchased instead. In the direst cases, parents worried that if children rejected food, someone else in the family would go without.
The problem isn’t poor children. According to psychologists, most children treat new foods with trepidation.
8/ This is amusing....two minutes of Canadian common sense about our election.....
9/ Want to read how billionaires are treated by the criminal justice system? It's quite disturbing.....
Prosecutors meted out a special kind of justice for Jeffrey Epstein, larded with fawning obsequiousness, secret dealings and an astoundingly lenient sentence. After all, billionaires — even billionaire sex abusers — aren’t like you and me.
Investigators documented that at least 34 underage girls, some as young as 13, were repeatedly exploited by Epstein and his buddies for their carnal amusement at his Palm Beach mansion from 1999 to 2007. According to court documents, the girls were required to administer “topless or nude massage while Mr. Epstein masturbated himself.” Occasionally, “the conduct escalated to full sexual intercourse.”
State and federal prosecutors happily reduced what amounted to hundreds of federal and state sex crimes to two state charges — soliciting prostitution and procuring a person younger than 18 for prostitution. Meanwhile, the feds not only promised not to ring him up on federal charges, they granted immunity to his various co-conspirators.
The federal prosecutors — who seemed cowed by Epstein’s high powered attorneys, including Roy Black, Kenneth Starr and Alan Dershowitz — worked out the secret plea deal without bothering to inform victims that their abuser would be spared federal charges.
10/ "Trump meets the Honeymooners".....cleverly done and amusing, about 45 seconds....
A creative filmmaker has created a timeless sendup of Donald Trump — by digitally meshing the presumptive blowhard-in-chief with classic footage from "The Honeymooners."
http://www.nydailynews.com/
11/ Fascinating story from HuffPo about how big sugar owns all of our Florida politicians, and explains why we are having a Lake Okeechobee runoff crisis - Big Sugar does't want the water going on their fields.....oh and Marco Rubio's in the story too, owned by the Fanjets....
True conservatives rail against Big Sugar's command of Congress through Farm Bill subsidies and political contributions they shed freely as the hair of a shaggy dog. For example, Grover Norquist is making opposition to sugar subsidies, supported by Marco Rubio, a GOP litmus test for presidential candidates in 2016. (For a reasoned explanation, read Robert McElroy, publisher of ThisWeekInCongress.com: "
Multiple, six-figure campaign contributions have been shunted Rubio's way by the Fanjul billionaires and by US Sugar, the other branch of the Big Sugar cartel, owned primarily by the 'environmentally sensitive' Mott Foundation.
The Fanjuls summoned Rubio to run against then-governor Charlie Crist in 2010. They were outraged when Crist in 2008 had offered to buy US Sugar lands -- more than 125,000 acres at a projected cost to the state of about $1.2 billion -- without consulting them. The reason for the fury: if government built wetland marshes using US Sugar lands to store and cleanse filthy agricultural waters, then the state would be a step closer to key parcels owned by the Fanjuls in the Everglades Agricultural Area.
For the public, the end game is to provide connectivity between Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, building a solution toward cleansing Big Ag's toxic mess of Lake Okeechobee. Halting toxic releases to tide -- measured in trillions of gallons -- would eventually provide clean, fresh water to the remaining three million acres of Everglades, owned in perpetuity by the public thanks to the national park and other public entities.
The cycnical, deadly chess game between Big Sugar and government is set out on a board called Lake Okeechobee. The lake is one of the largest fresh water bodies in the United States.
12/ Sounds like a really good old fashioned horror movie - "The Witch", set in the 1600's....
A finely calibrated shiver of a movie, “The Witch” opens on a scene of religious wrath. On a New England plantation, around 1630, a true believer, William (Ralph Ineson), and his family are facing a grim assemblage. The setting is a kind of meeting house crowded with men, women and children, a congregation whose silence and unsmiling faces imply disapproval or perhaps fear. Whether they’re standing in judgment doesn’t matter to William, whose arrogant faith in his own notion of Christianity is as deep and darkly unsettling as his sepulchral voice. It’s the sort of soul-and-earth-quaking voice you can imagine one of the biblical patriarchs having, the kind that Abraham used on God and Isaac alike.
Written and directed by Robert Eggers, “The Witch ” takes place in an America that in its extremes feels more familiar than its period drag might suggest. It’s set a decade after the Mayflower landed in Plymouth and tracks William’s family as it leaves the plantation to settle down alone at the edge of a forest. There, the family members build a farm, grow corn and commit themselves to God, a contract tested by a series of calamities that turn this story of belief into a freak-out of doubt. As the wind stirs the trees and the children taunt one another with talk of witches, you may remember that the movie’s subtitle is “A New-England Folktale.” Something wicked this way comes?
"The Witch" trailer.....
Todays video - three Russian gymnasts with an incredible dance routine.....a WOW....
Todays baseball joke
Two 90-year-old men, Phil and Joe, had been friends all of their
lives.
When it was clear that Phil was dying, Joe visited him every
day.
lives.
When it was clear that Phil was dying, Joe visited him every
day.
One day Joe said, "Phil, we both loved playing baseball all our
lives, and we played all through high school. Please do me one favor:
when you get to heaven, somehow you must let me know if there's baseball there."
lives, and we played all through high school. Please do me one favor:
when you get to heaven, somehow you must let me know if there's baseball there."
Phil looked up at Joe from his deathbed and said, "Joe, you've
been my best friend for many years. If it's at all possible, I'll do this
favor for you."
been my best friend for many years. If it's at all possible, I'll do this
favor for you."
Shortly after that, Phil died.
A few nights later, Joe was awakened from a sound sleep by a blinding flash of white light and a voice calling out to him,
"Joe, Joe ."
"Joe, Joe ."
"Who is it," asked Joe, sitting up suddenly. "Who is it?"
"Joe -- it's me, Phil"
"You're not Phil . Phil just died."
"I'm telling you, it's me, Phil," insisted the voice.
"Phil - Where are you?"
"In heaven," replied Phil. "I have some really good news and a little bad news."
"Tell me the good news first," said Joe.
"The good news," Phil said with joy and enthusiasm, "is that there is baseball in heaven. Better yet, all of our old
buddies who died before me are here, too. Even better than that, we're all young again. Better still, it's always Springtime and it never rains or snows.
And best of all, we can play ball all we want, and we never get tired." And we get to play with all the Greats of the past.
buddies who died before me are here, too. Even better than that, we're all young again. Better still, it's always Springtime and it never rains or snows.
And best of all, we can play ball all we want, and we never get tired." And we get to play with all the Greats of the past.
"That's fantastic," said Joe "It's beyond my wildest dreams!
“So what's the bad news?"
"You're pitching Tuesday."
Todays Jewish joke
A female CNN journalist heard about a very old Jewish man who had been going to the Western Wall to pray,
twice a day, every day, for a long, long time.So she went to check it out. She went to the Western Wall and there he was, walking slowly up to the holy site.
She watched him pray and after about 45 minutes, when he turned to leave, using a cane and moving very slowly,she approached him for an interview."Pardon me, sir, I'm Rebecca Smith from CNN. What's your name?"Morris Feinberg," he replied."Sir, how long have you been coming to the Western Wall and praying?""For about 60 years.""60 years! That's amazing! What do you pray for?""I pray for peace between the Christians, Jews and the Muslims.""I pray for all the wars and all the hatred to stop.""I pray for all our children to grow up safely as responsible adults and to love their fellow man.""I pray that politicians tell us the truth and put the interests of the people ahead of their own interests.""How do you feel after doing this for 60 years?""Like I'm talking to a f$#*@ wall."Todays hospital jokeA wealthy hospital benefactor was being shown around the hospital.
During her tour, she passed a room where a male patient was masturbating furiously.
...
"Oh my GOD!" screamed the woman. "That's disgraceful! Why is he doing that?"
The doctor who was leading the tour calmly explained, "I'm very sorry that you were exposed to that, but this man has a serious condition where his testicles rapidly fill with semen, and if he doesn't do that at least five times a day, he'll be in extreme pain and his testicles could easily rupture."
"Oh, well in that case, I guess it's okay," said the woman.
As they passed by the next room, they saw a male patient laying in bed while a nurse performed oral sex on him.
Again, the woman screamed, "Oh my GOD! How can THAT be justified?"
Again the doctor spoke very calmly, "Same illness, better health plan. "
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