1/ A very insightful story about the root cause of the anger felt at all levels in America - technological change.....it's driving a lot of the problems causing middle class jobs and wages to decline.....
Really interesting.....
Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders (Credit: AP/Reuters/Brynn Anderson/Joshua Roberts/Charlie Riedel/Salon)
Peel away the billionaire braggadocio, set aside the insults and bile, and Donald Trump is running for president on a promise to build a protective wall around America’s white working class. Most famously he is promising to build a physical wall on the Mexican border – which he will somehow persuade the Mexicans to pay for – to protect American workers from immigrants bent on stealing their jobs. But he is also promising to build trade walls by renegotiating free trade agreements so workers in China and elsewhere can’t undercut American workers. And he is promising to wall us off from the world diplomatically so American blood and treasure will no longer be spent defending our allies in Asia and Europe.
This is the core message Trump hopes to ride to the Oval Office: If we build a big, beautiful wall around Fortress America, we can sustain ourselves without the help of the rest of the world.
Let us ignore for a moment all the practical reasons why this make no sense. Forget that, whoever ends up paying for it, no wall can keep out desperate, hungry people who already tunnel miles underground and cross searing deserts for a better life in America. Forget, too, that with more than 11 million illegal aliens living in this country, some of them for decades, we are never going to be able to send them all home. And forget that free trade deals, while they do send many jobs overseas, also benefit Americans by reducing the cost of goods we all buy.
Forget all that. Trump is wrong because, while he, along with Democratic firebrand Bernie Sanders, have tapped into the deep pain being felt by America’s working class, they are misdiagnosing its root cause.
2/ "God Is A Boob Man" is a clever SNL spoof on the rise of the anti gay bigots.....cleverly done, just over 2 minutes.....
North Carolina is the middle of a fallout after Gov. Pat McCrory signed into law a bill that bars transgender people from using public bathrooms for the gender they identify as and limits cities from passing nondiscrimination laws. Mississippi passed its own anti-LGBTQ law that allows some businesses to deny services to LGBTQ people based on "religious freedom." And in Georgia last month, Gov. Nathan Deal vetoed a similar "religious freedom" bill.
In response to these laws and the unintentionally hilarious Christian movie God's Not Dead 2 (about a teacher who gets in trouble over saying "Jesus" in class), Saturday Night Live created a satirical trailer for a movie called God Is a Boob Man.
3/ This story was in last weeks DDD, and because it's one that stays with you and rehash in your mind I realized I missed one of the central points of the piece, which is the right wing media empires are moneymaking machines and it's been incredibly profitable to dumb down and scare conservatives - it's just business folks.......the collaboration between the media and the Republican establishment has worked for decades.....until now, because the base that they have manipulated all these years is awake.....
This is a better summary of the story, so if you read it last week - great, but if you passed it by, it's eye opening.....
7/ This is an insightful article about how the disaster that has befallen the Republican Party has come about.....and it's the right g media and the GOP in an unholy alliance that has caused the choices coming down to Trump or Cruz.....
win
An intelligent, informative story for anyone interested in our politics.....
Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity (Credit: Fox News)
The Republican Party is in a pickle.
The Party itself despises its own two leading presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. This is a remarkable oddity just in itself. But there is good reason for it. Both of these candidates are so extreme and disastrous that they will almost certainly never be able to win a national election for the Republican Party.
But much worse, if and when one of these candidates does become the Republican Party’s nominee, the GOP could very well be torn asunder into factions. This could devastate the party for years or even decades to come.
The Republicans, however, have no one to blame but themselves. This is a crisis of their own creation. And it didn’t just happen overnight.
The Republican Party has been fomenting anger and discontent in the base of its own party for years. The mechanism through which this hate has been disseminated has been the network of extremist media of right-wing talk radio and the Fox News Channel, which is essentially talk radio transposed onto television.
4/ Remember Samantha Bee doing a focus group of young Trump supporters, and how weird it was? She did the same with a diverse bunch of Bernie voters......quite different....five minutes....
"You can't unfeel the Bern once you feel the Bern," the Bernie Sanders supporter said, showing off her left-arm tattoo of the presidential candidate.
That was one of the several memorable moments that came from Full Frontal host Samantha Bee's interview with Sanders supporters, in which she tried to capture why they seem to have a faith in Sanders and American politics that she lacks.
"I'm not here to bash Bernie," Bee said. "I'm just here to understand your optimism, and stick my fingers in it, and just roll it around in my hands, and restore myself to the person I used to be."
But try as she might, Bee just couldn't get it. She kept asking them about the political process and Sanders's chances of sustaining a movement to change America, and they repeatedly came back with the same determined enthusiasm for their presidential candidate.
5/ NYT story on how the warming of the oceans is decimating the coral reefs of the world, including the Great barrier Reef in Australia.....like a lot of stories on how our environment is being destroyed by climate change and indifference, this qualifies for the "nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care" Carlin award.....
SYDNEY, Australia — Kim Cobb, a marine scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, expected the coral to be damaged when she plunged into the deep blue waters off Kiritimati Island, a remote atoll near the center of the Pacific Ocean. Still, she was stunned by what she saw as she descended some 30 feet to the rim of a coral outcropping.
“The entire reef is covered with a red-brown fuzz,” Dr. Cobb said when she returned to the surface after her recent dive. “It is otherworldly. It is algae that has grown over dead coral. It was devastating.”
The damage off Kiritimati is part of a mass bleaching of coral reefs around the world, only the third on record and possibly the worst ever. Scientists believe that heat stress from multiple weather events including the latest, severe El Niño, compounded by climate change, has threatened more than a third of Earth’s coral reefs. Many may not recover.
6/ Bill Maher with a five minute riff on "why don't churches pay taxes?" Think about it - why the hell are they tax-free anyway?
Real Time host Bill Maher last night made the case that churches, in addition to corporations, should pay their fair share of taxes.
“There are 300,000 religious congregations in this country that pay no taxes,” Maher explained. “And they own $600 billion in property.”
“The Supreme Court of the United States really needs to take a case about taxing churches because it hasn’t done that since 1970,” he added. “And since then, religion has become a lot less popular, especially with younger people. To them, religion is the new pubic hair.”
7/ Why do fruits and vegetables taste better in Europe? And believe me, they do.....but as this article says there's no one definitive reason why their food is tastier, it's just that Europeans are much more aware of what they eat. And they won't eat the crap we get at Publix.....
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Tomatoes at a market in Italy. (Yulia Grigoryeva/Shutterstock)
Harry Klee, a horticulture professor at the University of Florida, spent years developing a nutrient-dense tomato that also happens to taste great. It’s been called — by a panel of 500 experts — one of the most delicious tomatoes on the planet. And it isn’t grown in the foothills of Mount Vesuvius, as Italy’s famous San Marzano tomatoes are. It’s grown right here in the US, in Gainesville, Florida.
Klee’s tomato, the Garden Gem, is also eminently durable, with a great shelf life and track record of disease resistance — properties growers care about. But he’s been told the Garden Gem is a little too small (about a half or a third the size of your average supermarket tomato). And that means it’d require more labor to pick, and therefore a little more cost. The fact that it's delicious doesn't count for much.
"The bottom line here with the industrial tomatoes is that tomatoes have been bred for yield, production, disease resistance," Klee told me. "The growers are not paid for flavor — they are paid for yield. So the breeders have given them this stuff that produces a lot of fruit but that doesn’t have any flavor."
8/ Matt Taibbi on the Obama Administration's attempt to cover up what really happened during the financial meltdown of 08.....there are some secrets folks!
For years now, the federal government has been quietly fighting to keep a lid on an 11,000-document cache of government communications relating to financial policy. The sheer breadth of the effort to keep this material secret may not have a precedent in modern presidential times.
"It's the mother of all privilege logs," explains one lawyer connected with the case.
The Obama administration invoked executive privilege, attorney-client and deliberative process over these documents and insisted that their release would negatively impact global financial markets. But in finally unsealing some of these materials last week, a federal judge named Margaret Sweeney said the government's sole motivation was avoiding embarrassment.
9/ One of the global crisies coming soon is water resources.....lack of water for farms and drinking has caused the instability in Syria and Yemen, and it's only going to get worse. Even in the US there are issues in the West, and although the story doesn't mention it fracking may have already polluted aquifers and groundwater to the point of danger to our drinking water.
The story in Newsweek also illustrates the fact that Saudi Arabia is draining aquifers in Arizona......did you know this? I didn't, and it just illustrates the corruption and stupidity in these Republican states..........
Woman wait to collect water in the drought stricken Somali region in Ethiopia, January 26. The drought relief effort in Ethiopia needs about $500 million to fund programs beyond the end of April to support 10.2 million people facing critical food shortages this year.
Secret conversations between American diplomats show how a growing water crisis in the Middle East destabilized the region, helping spark civil wars in Syria and Yemen, and how those water shortages are spreading to the United States.
Classified U.S. cables reviewed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting show a mounting concern by global political and business leaders that water shortages could spark unrest across the world, with dire consequences.
Many of the cables read like diary entries from an apocalyptic sci-fi novel.
“Water shortages have led desperate people to take desperate measures with equally desperate consequences,” according to a 2009 cable sent by U.S. Ambassador Stephen Seche in Yemen as water riots erupted across the country.
10/ We watch quite a few comedy videos, but one of the funniest ever is this six minute clip of Amy Schemer on the Ellen show....it's truly hilarious.....
11/ I think it's pretty clear how I feel about our disgusting piece of roach slime Governor.....here's just another reason to hate the evil bastard.....
RICK SCOTT VETOES DENTAL CARE PROGRAM FOR THE POOR
Gov. Rick Scott Thursday vetoed legislation that could have helped poor and rural Floridians get dental care, saying it held too much potential for abuse of public dollars.
The bill (HB 139), filed by state Rep. Travis Cummings, had been passed unanimously by both chambers of the Legislature in the 2016 Legislative Session.
It created a grants program aimed at dentists to serve patients in counties with a shortage of dentists or in otherwise “medically underserved areas.” The grants, anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000, were to be administered by the Department of Health.
In his veto letter, Scott said he agreed that “maintaining good oral health is integral to the overall health of Florida families.” But he added he could not “support a program that does not place appropriate safeguards on taxpayer investments.”
12/ Music video - a charming rendition of "Over The Rainbow" by IZ, a stout lad from Hawaii......the song is backed by a ukulele and IZ's haunting voice, and the video has beautiful Hawaiian scenery.....
13/ And speaking of Floriduh politicians, are you aware that Rep. Jennifer Sullivan has been taking money from Gambling interests? Me neither, but also look at the excerpt below.....she doesn't think unmarried people should live together!
Mount Dorans - THIS IS YOUR STATE REPRESENTATIVE! Vote this dingbat out!
Sullivan has co-sponsored bills to protect pastors from having to perform same-sex marriages, to prohibit induced abortions, and was one of only five lawmakers to oppose repealing a nearly 150-year-old law in Florida that said it was illegal for unmarried men and women to live together.
Todays video [mainly for guys] - watch a car get devoured by a shredder.....quite hypnotic, about 2 minutes.....
Todays intellectual joke
No dictionary has ever been able to satisfactorily define the difference between "complete" and "finished." However, during a recent linguistic conference, held in London , England , and attended by some of the best linguists in the world, Samsundar Balgobin, a Guyanese linguist, was the presenter when he was asked to make that very distinction.
The question put to him by a colleague in the knowledgeable audience was
this: “Some say there is no difference between ‘Complete’ and ‘Finished.’
Please explain the difference in a way that is easy to understand.”
Mr. Balgobin’s response: “When you marry the right woman, you are ‘Complete.’
If you marry the wrong woman, you are ‘Finished.’ And, if the right one catches you with the wrong one, you are ‘Completely Finished.’”
His answer received a five minute standing ovation.
The question put to him by a colleague in the knowledgeable audience was
this: “Some say there is no difference between ‘Complete’ and ‘Finished.’
Please explain the difference in a way that is easy to understand.”
Mr. Balgobin’s response: “When you marry the right woman, you are ‘Complete.’
If you marry the wrong woman, you are ‘Finished.’ And, if the right one catches you with the wrong one, you are ‘Completely Finished.’”
His answer received a five minute standing ovation.
Todays one-liners
If I had a dollar for every girl that found me unattractive, they'd
eventually find me attractive.
I find it ironic that the colors red, white, and blue stand for
freedom, until they're flashing behind you.
Today a man knocked on my door and asked for a small donation towards the local swimming pool, so I gave him a glass of water.
I changed my password to "incorrect" so whenever I forget it the
computer will say, "Your password is incorrect."
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
I'm great at multi-tasking--I can waste time, be unproductive, and
procrastinate all at once.
If you can smile when things go wrong, you have someone in mind to blame.
Never tell your problems to anyone, because 20 percent don't care and the other 80 percent are glad you have them.
Doesn't expecting the unexpected mean that the unexpected is actually expected?
Take my advice — I'm not using it.
My wife and I were happy for twenty years; then we met.
I hate it when people use big words just to make themselves sound
perspicacious.
Hospitality is the art of making guests feel like they're at home when
you wish they were.
Television may insult your intelligence, but nothing rubs it in like a
computer.
eventually find me attractive.
I find it ironic that the colors red, white, and blue stand for
freedom, until they're flashing behind you.
Today a man knocked on my door and asked for a small donation towards the local swimming pool, so I gave him a glass of water.
I changed my password to "incorrect" so whenever I forget it the
computer will say, "Your password is incorrect."
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
I'm great at multi-tasking--I can waste time, be unproductive, and
procrastinate all at once.
If you can smile when things go wrong, you have someone in mind to blame.
Never tell your problems to anyone, because 20 percent don't care and the other 80 percent are glad you have them.
Doesn't expecting the unexpected mean that the unexpected is actually expected?
Take my advice — I'm not using it.
My wife and I were happy for twenty years; then we met.
I hate it when people use big words just to make themselves sound
perspicacious.
Hospitality is the art of making guests feel like they're at home when
you wish they were.
Television may insult your intelligence, but nothing rubs it in like a
computer.
Todays old-timer joke
OLD people have problems that you haven't
even considered yet!
An 85-year-old man was requested by his
Doctor for a sperm count as part of his physical exam.
The doctor gave the man a jar and said, 'Take
this jar home and bring back a semen sample
tomorrow.'
The next day the 85-year-old man reappeared
at the doctor's office and gave him the jar,
which was as clean and empty as on the
previous day.
The doctor asked what happened and the man
explained, 'Well, doc, it's like this -- first I tried
with my right hand, but nothing. Then I tried
with my left hand, but still nothing.
'Then I asked my wife for help. She tried with
her right hand, then with her left, still nothing.
She tried with her mouth, first with the teeth in,
then with her teeth out, still nothing.
'We even called up Arleen, the lady next door
and she tried too, first with both hands, then
an armpit, and she even tried squeezin' it
between her knees, but still nothing.'
The doctor was shocked!
'You asked your neighbor?'
The old man replied,
'Yep, none of us could get the jar open.'
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