1/ This column from Paul Krugman is titled "The Tainted Election".....says it all.....
The C.I.A., according to The Washington Post, has now determined that hackers working for the Russian government worked to tilt the 2016 election to Donald Trump. This has actually been obvious for months, but the agency was reluctant to state that conclusion before the election out of fear that it would be seen as taking a political role.
Meanwhile, the F.B.I. went public 10 days before the election, dominating headlines and TV coverage across the country with a letter strongly implying that it might be about to find damning new evidence against Hillary Clinton — when it turned out, literally, to have found nothing at all.
Did the combination of Russian and F.B.I. intervention swing the election? Yes. Mrs. Clinton lost three states – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – by less than a percentage point, and Florida by only slightly more. If she had won any three of those states, she would be president-elect. Is there any reasonable doubt that Putin/Comey made the difference?
Blonde Christmas joke
2/ The horror of Trump has made many liberals switch off from half of the country - "if my friend is a Trumpie, he/she's not my friend any more". This is dangerous, because you will be retreating even further in the liberal bubble which is one of the reasons we now have Trump.
As Nicolas Kristof in this very good column says you have got to talk rationally to conservatives, because no one side is always right. That being said, we still need to fight and keep on fighting hate and stupidity....
I share apprehensions about President-elect Trump, but I also fear the reaction was evidence of how insular universities have become. When students inhabit liberal bubbles, they’re not learning much about their own country. To be fully educated, students should encounter not only Plato, but also Republicans.
We liberals are adept at pointing out the hypocrisies of Trump, but we should also address our own hypocrisy in terrain we govern, such as most universities: Too often, we embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological. Repeated studies have found that about 10 percent of professors in the social sciences or the humanities are Republicans.
3/ Jimmy Kimmel with the worst viral clips of the year.....three minutes of stupid videos.....watch the last one again and you will see what I mean....
Jimmy Kimmel assigned a task to four people that many of us do anyway: Sift through countless hours of television to find odd snippets to distract us from our daily drudgery.
On his show Wednesday, the host introduced his “Clip of the Year” finalists ― “the absolute best of the absolute worst” ― and then announced a winner.
Our personal favorite was an awkward news interview with a boy and his dad, who told the world he wanted to buy his son hand lotion for scholastic achievement.
But we don’t get paid to make the big decisions for talk shows. Watch bits from all the nominees ― yep, there’s a Donald Trump one in there ― and then find out which actually won above.
4/ Hedge funds, private equity and the giant banks quietly bought up European debt during the crisis [using our bailout money], and now they are trying to do to Europe what they have been doing here - screwing people....but Europe is fighting back.....
Good luck with that!
DUBLIN — The Tobun family never missed a rental payment on their modest brick rowhouse in eight years. But in February, the couple, who have two young children, received a letter warning that they would have to leave their home when the lease expired. Forty of their neighbors got the same notice.
When they went to investigate, the tenants, in the working-class suburb of Tyrrelstown, discovered a trail that led all the way to Wall Street.
5/ George Carlin with "The American Dream".......it's time to watch this again and see how right he was......remember he said all this in 2007......
This is an extended version of 4 1/2 minutes with some new material, and even if you have seen this before, watch it again and while you listen to this great man, think about the news stories you remember since the last time you saw this and how spot on he is, nine years later.
Here's a quote from his rant - "nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care"....which totally applies to Trump.....
6/ Trump's awful choice of Scott Pruitt to "head" the EPA is just one of many Cabinet picks designed to destroy our Government so corporations can basically operate without any rules.....great column from Carl Hiaasen in the Miami Herald.....
Get ready - unless you live in a whitebread middle class area with people who aren't afraid to speak up about their environment, it's going to be nasty, including the Indian River lagoon and Lake Okeechobee runoff - there we have a solid Republican county of well-off whites vs Big Sugar.....and the lobbyists win again, because Florida politicians are completely owned by the sugar industry...
A man named Scott Pruitt received some exciting news last week: Donald Trump has chosen him to “lead” the Environmental Protection Agency.
If you were the attorney general of Oklahoma, you’d be thrilled to go to Washington, D.C. — and not just for the opportunity to gut a federal agency that you despise.
A bonus benefit of leaving that part of the Midwest is getting away from the many earthquakes caused by oil and natural gas operations. These days the only seismic activity on Pennsylvania Avenue is non-geological.
Up until 2009, Oklahoma was averaging about two earthquakes a year that exceeded 3.0 on the Richter scale. In 2015, the state experienced 907 quakes measuring 3.0 or higher.
It’s now the “induced” earthquake capital of the continent, thanks to the industry for which Pruitt proudly shills.
7/ You may have reading the non-mainstream media Trump tweeting insults about Vanity Fair, the magazine and it's editor Grayson Carter. This is why - they just published a review of the Trump Grille restaurant, and it's scathing.....
Think about it - the President elect took the time to read and then tweet about a bad review of his restaurant.......amazing....
Halfway through a recent late lunch at the Trump Grill—the clubby steakhouse in the lobby of Trump Tower that has recently become famous through the incessant media coverage of its namesake landlord, and the many dignitaries traipsing through its marbled hall to kiss his ring—I sensed the initial symptoms of a Trump overdose. Thanks to an unprecedented influx of diners, we were sitting at a wobbly overflow table outside the restaurant, in the middle of a crush of tourists, some of whom were proposing to their partners, or waiting to buy Trump-branded merchandise, or sprinting to the bathroom.
8/ Nothing political, nothing fancy just a collection of weird and unusual photographs without captions.........
http://www.interestingthingsda
9/ This is lovely - the song "Happy Birthday" imagined by Beethoven, Bach, Mozart etc.....amusing and clever, played by Nicole Pence.........about four minutes.....
10/ Trump's cabinet will be a combination of losers, frauds and dangerous people.......Rick Perry for Energy Secretary? Ben Carson for HUD? both fools and frauds, but one of his most dangerous picks is Betsy DeVos for Education......she's anti public schools, AND a religious whacko.....
Here's a warning story about this fanatic, from the Times....
BOSTON — At the rightmost edge of the Christian conservative movement, there are those who dream of turning the United States into a Christian republic subject to “biblical laws.” In the unlikely figure of Donald J. Trump, they hope to have found their greatest champion yet. He wasn’t “our preferred candidate,” the Christian nationalist David Barton said in June, but he could be “God’s candidate.”
Consider the president-elect’s first move on public education. Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, the largest Christian university in the nation, says that he was Mr. Trump’s first pick for secretary of education. Liberty University teaches creationism alongside evolution.
When Mr. Falwell declined, President-elect Trump offered the cabinet position to Betsy DeVos. In most news coverage, Ms. DeVos is depicted as a member of the Republican donor class and a leading advocate of school vouchers programs.
That is true enough, but it doesn’t begin to describe the broader conservative agenda she’s been associated with.
11/ The Aizhai suspension bridge just opened in China, and it's a wow! Here is a photo gallery of this amazing bridge from the Guardian....
Aizhai is the world’s highest tunnel to tunnel bridge and the fourth suspension bridge in China to cross a valley so wide it seems to be connecting two mountain ranges.
12/ KYNect was one of the success stories of Obamacare, with over 40% of Kentuckians signed up for it's coverage and subsidies to Medicaid.....now as this story in Vox says they are horrified that the man 80% of them voted for is going to repeal the ACA .
Interesting isn't it - on one hand liberals should feel sorry for all these poor and working poor losing their health coverage.....but some liberals don't.
"You voted for him, now suck it up" .....
CORBIN, Kentucky — Kathy Oller is so committed to her job signing up fellow Kentuckians for Obamacare that last Halloween, she dressed up as a cat, set up a booth at a trick-or-treat event, and urged people to get on the rolls. She’s enrolled so many people in the past three years that she long ago lost count.
“Must be somewhere in the thousands,” she said to me one morning at a local buffet restaurant where she’d just finished an enrollment event with the staff.
The health care law has helped lots of people in Whitley County, where Oller works. The uninsured rate has fallen from 25 percent in 2013 to 10 percent today, according to data from the nonprofit Enroll America. Overall, Kentucky is now tied with West Virginia for the biggest increase in health coverage.
But Obamacare’s success in Whitley County and across Kentucky hasn’t translated into political support for the law. In fact, 82 percent of Whitley voters supported Donald Trump in the presidential election, even though he promised to repeal it.
Oller voted for Trump too.
13/ Your scribe has resolutely resisted getting sucked into the controversy or researching theories of what really happened to the Twin Towers etc etc on 9/11, but this report published in Europhysics Magazine is remarkable by being [to a layman's eye] scientifically based - they conclude all three buildings went down in controlled demolition explosions.....
August 2002, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched what would become a six-year investigation of the three building failures that occurred on September 11, 2001 (9/11): the well-known collapses of the World Trade Center (WTC) Twin Towers that morning and the lesser-known collapse late that afternoon of the 47-story World Trade Center Building 7, which was not struck by an airplane. NIST conducted its investigation based on the stated premise that the “WTC Towers and WTC 7 [were] the only known cases of total structural collapse in high-rise buildings where fires played a significant role.”
Indeed, neither before nor since 9/11 have fires caused the total collapse of a steel-framed high-rise—nor has any other natural event, with the exception of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which toppled a 21-story office building. Otherwise, the only phenomenon capable of collapsing such buildings completely has been by way of a procedure known as controlled demolition, whereby explosives or other devices are used to bring down a structure intentionally. Although NIST nally concluded after several years of investigation that all three collapses on 9/11 were due primarily to fires, years after the event a growing number of architects, engineers, and scientists are unconvinced by that explanation.
Indeed, neither before nor since 9/11 have fires caused the total collapse of a steel-framed high-rise—nor has any other natural event, with the exception of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which toppled a 21-story office building. Otherwise, the only phenomenon capable of collapsing such buildings completely has been by way of a procedure known as controlled demolition, whereby explosives or other devices are used to bring down a structure intentionally. Although NIST nally concluded after several years of investigation that all three collapses on 9/11 were due primarily to fires, years after the event a growing number of architects, engineers, and scientists are unconvinced by that explanation.
Fact check
Because of the proliferation of fake news and the explosive [!] subject of this story, I checked this article and it's source - Europhysics News is a real online magazine http://www.europhysicsnews.or
In other words Europhysics is a real scientific magazine, and they took this article seriously enough to publish it.
The editors of Europhysics had this disclaimer above the story:
NOTE FROM THE EDITORS
This feature is somewhat different from our usual purely scientific articles, in that it contains some speculation. However, given the timing and the importance of the issue, we consider that this feature is sufficiently technical and interesting to merit publication for our readers. Obviously, the content of this article is the responsibility of the authors.
This feature is somewhat different from our usual purely scientific articles, in that it contains some speculation. However, given the timing and the importance of the issue, we consider that this feature is sufficiently technical and interesting to merit publication for our readers. Obviously, the content of this article is the responsibility of the authors.
On the other side we have a website article devoted to debunking the story, doubting the science and attacking the four authors - which is what you might expect from someone defending the official report and dismissing anything that says 9/11 was a conspiracy at the highest levels of Government [Cheney].
On this one "we report, you decide" folks, but it sure looks convincing......
14/ "Rogue One" Star Wars - really good review! Yeay!
Talk about a blast from the past – Rogue One: A Star Wars Story literally is just that. Taking place just before the events of the first released Star Wars movie in 1977, this spin-off/prequel has the same primitive, lived-in, emotional, loopy, let's-put-on-a-show spirit that made us fall in love with the original trilogy. It's the first stand-alone chapter in the franchise, and not the bridge between then and now that J.J. Abrams cleverly constructed last year with Star Wars: The Force Awakens. As a movie, it can feel alternately slow and rushed, cobbled together out of spare parts, and in need of more time on the drawing board. But the damn thing is alive and bursting with the euphoric joy of discovery that caught us up in the adventurous fun nearly four decades ago. Familiar faces, human and droid, make cameos. But not once do you doubt that the new characters are breathing the same air as Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie and that baddest of badasses, Darth Vader.
"Rogue One" trailer....
Todays video - Rodney Dangerfield on the Johnny Carson show.....awful quality, but funny, funny.....
Todays golf jokes....
Ten Best Caddy ResponsesNumber :10Golfer: "I think I'm going to drown myself in the lake."Caddy: "Think you can keep your head down that long?"Number : 9Golfer: "I'd move heaven and earth to break 100 on this course."Caddy: "Try heaven, you've already moved most of the earth."Number : 8Golfer: "Do you think my game is improving?"Caddy: "Yes . . . . You miss the ball much closer now."Number : 7Golfer: "Do you think I can get there with a 5 iron?"Caddy: "Eventually."Number : 6Golfer: "You've got to be the worst caddy in the world."Caddy: "I don't think so . . . .That would be too much of a coincidence."Number : 5Golfer: "Please stop checking your watch all the time. It's too much of a distraction."Caddy: "It's not a watch - it's a compass."Number : 4Golfer: "How do you like my game?"Caddy: "It's very good - but personally, I prefer golf."Number : 3Golfer: "Do you think it's a sin to play on Sunday?Caddy: "The way you play, it's a sin on any day."Number : 2Golfer: "This is the worst course I've ever played on."Caddy: "This isn't the golf course . . . . We left that an hour ago."And the Number : 1 . . . . Best Caddy Comment:Golfer: "That can't be my ball, it's too old."Caddy: "It's been a long time since we teed off, sir."
Todays Chinese jokes.....
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*Man who eat manyPrunes get good run for money.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*Baseball is wrong:Man with four balls cannot walk.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*War does notDetermine who is right, war determine who is left.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*Wife who putHusband in doghouse soon find him in cathouse.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*Man who fight withWife all day get no piece at night.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*It take many nails to build crib, but one screw to fill it.*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*Man who drive likeHell, bound to get there.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*Man who live inGlass house should change clothes in basement.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*Man who fish in other man's well often catch crabs.*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*Crowded elevator smell different to midget.Todays "out of the mouths of babes" joke.....After Christmas, a teacher asked her young pupils how they spent their holiday away from school.One child wrote the following:
We always used to spend the holidays with Grandma and Grandpa. They used to live in a big brick house but Grandpa got retarded and they moved to Batemans Bay where everyone lives in nice little houses, and so they don't have to mow the grass anymore!
They ride around on their bicycles and scooters and wear name tags because they don't know who they are anymore.
They go to a building called a wreck center, but they must have got it fixed because it is all okay now. They do exercises there, but they don't do them very well.
There is a swimming pool too, but they all jump up and down in it with hats on.
At their gate, there is a doll house with a little old man sitting in it. He watches all day so nobody can escape. Sometimes they sneak out, and go cruising in their golf carts!
Nobody there cooks, they just eat out. And, they eat the same thing every night - early birds.
Some of the people can't get out past the man in the doll house. The ones who do get out, bring food back to the wrecked center for pot luck.
My Grandma says that Grandpa worked all his life to earn his retardment and says I should work hard so I can be retarded someday too.
When I earn my retardment, I want to be the man in the doll house. Then I will let people out, so they can visit their grandchildren.
great stuff!
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