Those of you lucky enough to be in a normal environment, enjoy this DDD.
If you are sitting in a hot, humid house in Florida [or Texas] without power, getting wifi from your cellphone company that is ripping you off, I don't know what to tell you.......
Welcome to the club!
1/ David Wallace-Wells with a question written before Irma hitting but even more valid - will these horrible storms wake people up to the fact climate change is real?
Will Irma Finally Change the Way We Talk About Climate?
For decades, a kind of market logic has governed the way we talk about global warming, emanating from the moderate right: climate change may well be real, the Chamber of Commerce types say, but the need for economic growth is much more urgent and climate action will hamper American business (perhaps even enough to delay development of new, dramatic planet-saving technologies). More recently, especially under Obama, progressives have pushed the positive-case counter-argument: that green energy could be a booming growth sector and massive job creator. Which, by the way, it is already: solar employs more people today than coal, and overall clean energy accounts for more jobs than dirty in almost every state (the job growth numbers are even more impressive, with green energy generating work twelve times faster than fossil fuel.) But the negative side of things is just as important — and here the calculus is just as clear. Even in the short term, and even with cost defined in the narrowest ways, inaction on climate is likely to be devastatingly more expensive than action. That is what happens when centuries worth of natural disasters are compressed into a few decades — or in our case, a few weeks.
This month of extreme weather demolishes the old economic-cost paradigm—or should, if we could let ourselves really see climate change for what it is and what it does.
2/ And the answer to Wallace-Wells's question - a fascinating article about why conservatives continue to deny climate change.......with a very interesting conclusion. It's nothing to do with the science, but all to do with their "leaders" telling conservatives what is true and what isn't.....and the facts don't matter. The tribe does....
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/56565835/GettyImages_74067120.0.jpg)
On Tuesday afternoon, as Southern Floridians nervously watched Hurricane Irma become a Category 5 monster, they received an odd message from popular right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh: The hurricane forecasts are not to be trusted.
In “official meteorological circles,” he said, “they believe that Al Gore is correct” about climate change. They “desire to advance this climate change agenda,” he warned, “and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it.” So these meteorologists, he argued, create needless fear and panic.
What’s more, local TV stations are hyping the hurricane to drum up bottled-water sales for local businesses. (Seriously.) For Limbaugh, the hurricane conspiracy goes deep.
If you can put aside how irresponsible it is to send that kind of message to a group of people in real and serious danger (uh, extremely irresponsible), it’s almost funny. This is what conservative climate denial has come to.
3/ Money shot of the week.....
Golfers at the Beacon Rock Golf Course in North Bonneville, Wash. play on Sept. 4, 2017 while the Eagle Creek wildfire burns a mile away on the other side of the Columbia River in Oregon.
4/ John Oliver on Trump and DACA.....very good, almost comedic reporting....four minutes.....
Host John Oliver returned to HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” on Sunday after a vacation and addressed President Donald Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children (aka Dreamers).
As Oliver pointed out, Trump has been “maddeningly vague” in his statements on the Dreamers.
“He’s all over the place,” Oliver said. “Dreamers have to go. Or maybe they can come back. Or maybe they don’t have to go at all. And in the meantime, 800,000 people’s lives are in the balance.”
5/ A controversial and quite long story about Michael Moore, and whether you love him or hate him he has been right too often to ignore. You aren't going to like his look into the future, but you can't say he hasn't warned us if and when it happens....
You’d think that by now They would have stopped giving Michael Moore such a hard time. Everything he portended in Roger & Me, his 1989 film about the impact of the closing of General Motors plants on his hometown of Flint, Michigan, and everything he has been banging on about for 30 years since — outsourcing, automation, corporate hegemony, moral and political corruption, elite apathy and greed, the decimation of the middle class, angry white people, the fear and loathing of the far right — all of it has come home to roost, in the form of a very large, very orange turkey in the White House.
Which, by the way, Moore also predicted. “I’m sorry to have to kind of be the buzzkill here so early on, but I think Trump is going to win,” he said on Bill Maher’s show in July 2016, going on to precisely outline how this unthinkable event would unfold. The audience booed him. But when the smoke cleared, Moore looked — especially to those who remembered his unpopular but accurate speech at the 2003 Oscars denouncing the war in Iraq — like a prophet, a Cassandra in a T-shirt.
6/ Our Mount Dora artist Taylor Jones with another cutting cartoon......I think that's Pam Bondi on the right...
7/ Amazon made the news this week because it is looking to build a new 50,000 person office in the US, and is asking cities to apply. The Times used Amazon's criteria and has chosen the only logical site for Amazon's new office.....
Really interesting....
Amazon has set off a scrum among cities that are hoping to land the company’s second headquarters — with the winner getting the prize of a $5 billion investment and 50,000 new jobs over the next two decades. We’re offering to help, using Amazon’s own criteria to identify a winning city.
The company announced this week that it was looking for a metropolitan area in North America with at least a million people, so we’ve started with the map above. (With apologies to Canada, we’ve set aside Toronto and several other large cities because they’re not included in most of the data sets we’ve used to determine which places meet Amazon’s needs.)
In the eight pages of guidance that Amazon has provided cities, one of its central requirements is a “stable business climate for growth.” That led us to this subset of places:
8/ Seth Meyers with a three minute segment called "Hey".....he tells Hillary to stop blaming Bernie.....pretty good....
“Late Night” host Seth Meyers had a harsh message for Hillary Clinton on Wednesday night after reading excerpts from the former Democratic presidential nominee’s new book.
In one passage, Clinton writes that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), her Democratic rival, caused “lasting damage” during the primary that led to President Donald Trump’s “crooked Hillary” campaign against her.
“Bernie is not the reason you lost,” Meyers said to Clinton. “You know how I know that? You beat Trump by 3 million votes. If you want to blame something ancient, blame the Electoral College.”
Clinton’s forthcoming book, What Happened, hits shelves next week and details the former secretary of state’s perspective on her stunning election loss in November.
9/ One of our favourite writers Thomas Frank on the way universities are supressing the efforts of grad student professors to unionize, while maintaining their stance of being the last liberal institutions standing. It's all posturing.....another way the elites are dividing and conquering....
I
t’s back-to-school season in America, and that means it’s the time of year when the pundit class is moved to lament the sad state of elite higher education. Over the next few weeks, our thought-leaders will scold this year’s class of overly sensitive Ivy League students, what with their safe spaces and trigger warnings.
Tough-minded columnists will sputter against fancy colleges that are covering up offensive sculptures and censoring offensive speakers. Readers will be invited to gape at the latest perversity served up by our radicalized professoriate and to mourn the decline of their dear old alma mater. What, oh what is this generation coming to, they will cry.
But while they weep, let us turn our attention to an entirely different aspect of life on the American campus that doesn’t fit into the tidy narrative of fancy colleges coddling the snowflake generation. Let us look instead into the actual conditions under which the work of higher education is done. Let us talk labor.
10/ Interesting story about the rich.....not the Trump type, but the majority....
What the Rich Won’t Tell You
“There’s nobody who knows how much we spend. You’re
the only person I ever said those numbers to out loud.”
Over lunch in a downtown restaurant, Beatrice, a New Yorker in her late 30s, told me about two decisions she and her husband were considering. They were thinking about where to buy a second home and whether their young children should go to private school. Then she made a confession: She took the price tags off her clothes so that her nanny would not see them. “I take the label off our six-dollar bread,” she said.
She did this, she explained, because she was uncomfortable with the inequality between herself and her nanny, a Latina immigrant. She had a household income of $250,000 and inherited wealth of several million dollars. Relative to the nanny, she told me, “The choices that I have are obscene. Six-dollar bread is obscene.”
An interior designer I spoke with told me his wealthy clients also hid prices, saying that expensive furniture and other items arrive at their houses “with big price tags on them” that “have to be removed, or Sharpied over, so the housekeepers and staff don’t see them.”
These people agreed to meet with me as part of research I conducted on affluent and wealthy people’s consumption
Todays jokey questions
How important does a person have to be before they are considered assassinated instead of just murdered?
Why do you have to 'put your two cents in'... but it's only a 'penny for your thoughts'? Where's that extra penny going to?
Why do you have to 'put your two cents in'... but it's only a 'penny for your thoughts'? Where's that extra penny going to?
Once you're in heaven, do you get stuck wearing the clothes you were buried in for eternity?
Why does a round pizza come in a square box?
What disease did cured ham actually have?
Why is it that people say they 'slept like a baby' when babies wake up like every two hours?
If a deaf person has to go to court, is it still called a hearing?
Why are you IN a movie, but you're ON TV?
Why do doctors leave the room while you change?
They're going to see you naked anyway...
Why is 'bra' singular and 'panties' plural?
If corn oil is made from corn, and vegetable oil is made from vegetables, what is baby oil made from?
If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?
Do the Alphabet song and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star have the same tune?
Why did you just try singing the two songs above?
Why do they call it an asteroid when it's outside the hemisphere, but call it a hemorrhoid when it's in your butt?
Did you ever notice that when you blow in a dog's face, he gets mad at you, but when you take him for a car ride, he sticks his head out the window?
Why do we press harder on a remote control when we know the batteries are getting dead?
Why do banks charge a fee on 'insufficient funds' when they know there is not enough money?
Why does someone believe you when you say there are four trillion stars, but check when you say the paint is wet?
Why doesn't Tarzan have a beard?
Why does Superman stop bullets with his chest, but ducks when you throw a revolver at him?
Why do Kamikaze pilots wear helmets?
Whose idea was it to put an 'S' in the word 'lisp'?
If people evolved from apes,
why are there still apes?
Why is it that no matter what color bubble bath you use the bubbles are always white?
Is there ever a day that mattresses
are not on sale?
Why is it that no plastic bag will open from the end on your first try?
How do those dead bugs get into those enclosed light fixtures?
In winter why do we try to keep the house as warm as it was in summer when we complained about the heat?
How come you never hear father-in-law jokes?
And my FAVORITE.........
The statistics on sanity is that one out of every four persons are suffering from some sort of mental illness. Think of your three best friends -- if they're okay, then it's you.
Todays bar joke
I couldn't help but over-hear two guys in their mid-twenties while sitting at a bar.
One of the guys says to his buddy, "Man you look tired."
His buddy says, "Dude I'm exhausted. My girlfriend and I have sex all the time. I just don't know what to do."
A fellow about my age (65), sitting a couple of stools down had also overheard the conversation. He looked over at the two young men and with the wisdom of years says,
"Marry her. That'll put a stop to that shit"
No comments:
Post a Comment