1/ At last - an uplifting column in the Times.......
Nicolas Kristof is going on leave, but his final story was about the new high school national chess champions.....and they are not who you might think they are....
You see America and its education system in all their glorious, exhilarating, crushing, infuriating contradictions in our national high school chess champion team.
Chess tends to be the domain of privileged schools whose star players have had their own personal chess coaches since elementary school. Yet the national champion team comes from a high-poverty, inner-city school, and four-fifths of its members are black or Hispanic.
More astounding, these aren’t even high school kids yet. In April, New York’s Intermediate School 318 in Brooklyn, where 70 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, became the first middle school team ever to defeat kids about four years older and win the national high school championship.
The champs are kids like Carlos Tapia, a Mexican-American in the eighth grade, whose dad is a house painter and mom a maid. The parents can’t play chess and can’t afford to give Carlos his own room, but they proudly make space for his 18 chess trophies.
“Chess teaches me self-control” that spills over into other schoolwork, Carlos said in the I.S. 318 chess room, as a rainbow of students hunched over their boards, brows furrowed.
This will be my last column for a number of months, as I’m taking a leave to work on a new book with my wife. So I asked my Twitter followers what they’d like me to write about in this column, and one suggested I address: How do you do your job without getting incredibly depressed?
I promise, I’m not the Eeyore of journalists. The truth is that covering inequality, injustice and poverty can actually be inspiring and uplifting because of kids like Carlos. Just sprinkle opportunity around, and dazzling talents turn up.
2/ I found this article quite fascinating - Matt Taibbi with a story on the former Inspector General of the TARP fund Neil Barofsky, who was not a typical Washington insider but someone who tried to do his job, and how he was stymied at every turn by the process in the capitol. This article should be mandatory reading for everyone in the Tea Party because it typifies everything that's wrong with our politics, but it's got some big words in it so that's a nonstarter.
Neil Barofsky isn't going to like this, but the first person I thought of when I read the former TARP Inspector General's book, Bailout, was G. Gordon Liddy. Not that he has anything in common politically with Nixon's fanatical arm-roasting hatchet man, but after reading Bailout I had the same thought I had after reading Liddy's memoir, Will – that every now and then, a born writer ends up in some other, far more interesting profession, and we don't find out about it until he or she is forced for some reason to write a book.
Bailout has its first paperback release this week, and Barofsky accordingly is making the media rounds (check out Comedy Central tomorrow), where he'll mainly be asked about the political revelations in the book. You know, the inside-baseball stories of how the officials who administered the TARP bailout fought transparency at every turn, failed to do due diligence on the health and viability of bailout recipients, seemed totally uninterested in creating safeguards against fraud, and generally speaking spent more time bitching about the media and plotting against the likes of Elizabeth Warren and, eventually, Barofsky himself than making sure the largest federal rescue in history wasn't a complete waste of money.
As the former Special Inspector General of the TARP, a key official who was present at the highest levels throughout most of the bailout period and saw from the inside how both the Bush and Obama administrations attacked the economic collapse, Barofsky does have that story to tell, and the book unsurprisingly is full of historically weighty scenes and factoids that will be culled by reporters like me for years to come.
But there's a secondary and I think more interesting subplot to this book, a personal story that will give it more staying power. Just like Will was really a journey-of-self-discovery story that just happened to have the Watergate burglary as a backdrop (the book's real climax comes in the post-Watergate prison years, where Liddy really "finds himself"), Bailout is a kind of Alice in Wonderland tale of an ordinary, sane person disappearing down into a realm of hallucinatory dysfunction, with Tim Geithner playing the role of the Mad Hatter and Barofsky the increasingly frustrated Alice who realizes he's stuck at the stupidest tea party he ever was at.
3/ Bill Maher with a good one - although the main theme is Sarah Palin leaving Fox News he gets a lot of zingers in as well.....five minutes of great commentary.....
Democrats might be happy that Sarah Palin will no longer be paid $1 million a year by Fox News, but based on what happened when Glenn Beck left the conservative network, Bill Maher isn't thrilled to see her go.
After Beck left Fox, he took his "patented brand of apocalyptic race baiting" to the Internet and started charging his audience around $10 a month. Then, in 2012, he made $80 million.
If Palin takes a cue from Beck or Rush Limbaugh, she too could make a lot more money off her fans than she did at Fox. But Maher feels that's exactly what makes these pundits "con men":
4/ Very, very insightful article on how people close to retirement were the hardest hit by the recession and that the over 50 boomers are the most vulnerable part of this job market.....
Young graduates are in debt, out of work and on their parents’ couches. People in their 30s and 40s can’t afford to buy homes or have children. Retirees are earning near-zero interest on their savings
In the current listless economy, every generation has a claim to having been most injured. But the Labor Department’s latest jobs snapshot and other recent data reports present a strong case for crowning baby boomers as the greatest victims of the recession and its grim aftermath.
These Americans in their 50s and early 60s — those near retirement age who do not yet have access toMedicare and Social Security — have lost the most earnings power of any age group, with their household incomes 10 percent below what they made when the recovery began three years ago, according to Sentier Research, a data analysis company.
Their retirement savings and home values fell sharply at the worst possible time: just before they needed to cash out. They are supporting both aged parents and unemployed young-adult children, earning them the inauspicious nickname “Generation Squeeze.”
New research suggests that they may die sooner, because their health, income security and mental well-being were battered by recession at a crucial time in their lives. A recent study by economists at Wellesley College found that people who lost their jobs in the few years before becoming eligible for Social Security lost up to three years from their life expectancy, largely because they no longer had access to affordable health care.
“If I break my wrist, I lose my house,” said Susan Zimmerman, 62, a freelance writer in Cleveland, of the distress that a medical emergency would wreak upon her finances and her quality of life. None of the three part-time jobs she has cobbled together pay benefits, and she says she is counting the days until she becomes eligible for Medicare..
5/ A new video from the German producer Zedd - featuring Foxes, "Clarity".
I found this interesting because it made absolutely no sense whatever, with some of the video set in a beautiful desert, some in a cavern, the hero is a hippie loser thug you move across the sidewalk to avoid, the singer is the first Jewish American Princess I've seen in a music vid, but there are amazing graphics and it's got a convertible GTO so it's a good watch.....
There's also a vaguely demonic lad who pops in and out who I assume is Zedd, and he has also put in a chorus of what sounds like a full male choir......
Song is actually pretty good......very passionate and catchy.....
6/ Very amusing Jon Stewart where he takes on Fox News and Frank Luntz, the genius behind the divisive language used by the Republicans......a clever five minutes......
Jon Stewart opened Tuesday's "Daily Show" with a pointed rant against what he believes is one of the more cynical parts about Fox News and the Republican party: Their openness, and borderline boastfulness, about how their "rebranding" of certain policies helps them get ahead. But even Frank Luntz, the consultant and strategist who has become the public face of these rebranding efforts, couldn't help them win the 2012 election -- although not for a lack of trying.
Fox blamed the GOP's loss with a "messaging" problem, but Stewart hardly could believe that they lacked the means to properly get the message out. "What Republicans need is some kind of 24 hour, 7 day a week perpetual messaging refinement and distribution resource, preferably one cloaked in the trappings of journalistic authority but without any of its ethical constraints," he joked.
7/ I swear the food industry is trying to poison us all slowly.......genetically modified everything, pesticides, chemicals, antibiotics for animals and Monsanto......
But this is amazing - they are now introducing particles at the molecular level into food to make it tastier......even though this technology is banned in the EU the US FDA won't rule on it.......
Nanomaterials, substances broken down by technology into molecule-size particles, are starting to enter the food chain through well-known food products and their packaging, but there is little acknowledgment by the companies using them, according to a new report from a nonprofit group that works to enhance corporate accountability.
Some companies may not even know whether nanomaterials are present in their products, the corporate accountability group As You Sow said.
Only 26 out of 2,500 companies, including PepsiCo, Whole Foods and the corporate parent of Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, responded to a survey from As You Sow about their use of nanomaterials.
“Only 14 said they don’t use nanomaterials, and of those only two had any policies on the use of nanomaterials,” said Andy Behar, chief executive of As You Sow. Various food companies have said they are interested in nanotechnology, which can help make products creamier without additional fat, intensify and improve flavors and brighten colors.
Their small size allows nanoparticles to go places in the body where larger particles cannot and enter cells. They have been found in the blood stream after ingestion and inhalation, and while research on their health effects is limited,studies have shown them to have deleterious effects on mice and cells.
“We’re not taking a no nano position,” Mr. Behar said. “We’re saying just show it’s safe before you put these things into food or food packaging.”
He noted that the European Union requires labeling of foods containing nanomaterials and that the European Food Safety Authority has published guidance for assessing nanomaterials in food and animal feed.
Side note - as you know all wheat in the US is genetically modified except for organics, but all pasta sold here is GM.....we found some pasta imported from Italy that is non-GM in the Greenwise section at Publix.
Remember - GM foods are banned in Europe, so you are pretty safe eating most things from the EU.......
8/ An excellent Colbert, and Steven riffs on a homophobe State Senator from Tennessee that according to Colbert has the right stuff to be the next President......not.......about 8 minutes.....
Very funny indeed......
Ever since Barack Obama rose to the presidency only a few years after leaving the Illinois state senate, Stephen Colbert has had his eye on state legislatures for predicting the next president. In Thursday's installment of his semi-continuing series "Mr. Smith Goes to the State Legislature and Then Possibly Washington," Colbert profiled Sen. Stacey Campfield, the Tennessee state senator best known for introducing the controversial "Don't Say Gay" bill.
That bill, which failed in 2012 but which has been resurrected this year, would prohibit any mention of homosexuality in public classrooms. Campfield also attracted headlines last year when he told HuffPost's Michangelo Signorile, "Most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community -- it was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall."
Campfield believes that members of the LGBT community are the "biggest bullies in the world," so if he rose to the presidency, he would finally be able to do something about it, along with those pesky kids who suck up taxpayer money by not performing well enough in public schools.
9/ Continuing the nutrition theme, if you eat fast food and were appalled at the revelations in the UK that Burger King was routinely adding horse meat to their burgers and Findus frozen items were 100% equine, read this story "4 Fast Food Ingredients Way Worse Than Horse Meat".....and one of the bad additives is used in salad bars.....
This is scary sxxt man.....you can't trust anything you eat that's cheap......
As you’re likely aware, Burger King UK recently admitted that its famous fast food symbol the Whopper (and its other burgers) were actually made using horsemeat. In an admission that came just hours after denying the presence of horse meat in the burgers, the secret ingredient has been broadcast on media stations worldwide as a breaking news piece. But what about the ingredients we knowexist in many fast food creations and are actually far more concerning?
The fact that Burger King products contain horsemeat and the company denied the link to consumers before being forced to admit it due to DNA evidence reveals a few different things. First of all, it sheds even more light on how fast food eaters truly have no idea what they’re eating — a revelation that will be further revealed by exposing the known chemicals in these products. Secondly, it shows that Burger King either:
- Possibility A: Genuinely does not care about consumers and has denied the existence of horsemeat in their products as to not incite profit loss and media turmoil.
- Possibility B: Burger King genuinely has no idea what its own products contain. Whether it be horsemeat or other ingredients, they are honestly clueless.
It is debatable which of these possible scenarios is worse, however they both are concerning. Especially when you know what Burger King is telling you about. And that leads to the third thing that the horsemeat revelation tells us: considering the highly toxic chemicals and other admitted ingredients inside fast food products, a lack of true ingredients listing may mean an even more disturbing list of additives. As for what we do know, however, here are 4 fast food ingredients that are way worse than horsemeat:
1. Electronic Cigarette Filler, Synthetic Laxative
You may have fond memories of enjoying a Wendy’s Frosty, but the lengthy and gut-wrenching list of chemicals that create what is labeled as a ‘milkshake’ contain more than one bad surprise. Wendy’s Frosty contains the typical ensemble of fast food components such as traditionally-GMO corn syrup, artificial flavorings, and a list of thickening agents. Of the 14 ingredients it takes to create the fast food top seller, one chemical stands out. Contained in the Coffee Toffee Twisted Frosty, a laxative chemical and electronic cigarette filler known as propylene glycol is among the 25 new ingredients that make up this special Frosty.
10/ Watch Downton Abbey? Jimmy Fallon has his own version of this upscale soap......look at the guest stars in this episode [#3] including Whoopi Goldberg as the mother of the new heir to the palace.......silly but amusing.......the wine sequence is disgusting though.......7 minutes......
Forget "Downton Abbey," the third episode of Jimmy Fallon's "Downton Sixbey" is upon us, and there's plenty of drama and hot air balloon deaths to keep us interested. Plus, Whoopi Goldberg!
In this latest installment of spot-on "Downton Abbey" parody, we catch up with Fallon, Questlove, Edith (Fred Armisen), Higgins and the rest of the gang as they discuss their hard financial times in Studio 6B. Let's just say, desperate times call for desperate wine-drinking.
11/ Vanity Fair has some very good articles, and this is one of them - a discussion of the folly of most of the immigration debate in Washington. For the truth you have to go to the kookiest state in the union - Arizona.....
Border Folly
From Governor Jan Brewer to Sheriff Joe Arpaio to a Tea Party–dominated state legislature, no state deserves the tag “Kookocracy” as much as Arizona, and in Arizona there’s no bigger issue than immigration and border security. As immigration reform takes center stage in Washington, one man in Arizona is caught in the middle.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JORGE BALDERRAMA.
Bob Heilig in front of the U.S-Mexico border fence on his Double Bar R Ranch, 70 miles south of Tucson in the Sonoran desert.
Every few weeks Bob Heilig, a 67-year-old Arizona rancher, rounds up the Mexican cattle that have strayed over the border onto his land and herds them back to their rightful owners through the fence he calls “the taco curtain.” We are about 50 feet north of the Mexican border at the edge of Heilig’s Double Bar R Ranch, 70 miles south of Tucson. We are also at the point where the border fence, 18 feet of concrete-reinforced steel, simply stops for a while. “It’s a real hilarity, isn’t it?” Heilig says as he parks his Nissan Frontier atop a low, sandy knoll in the Sonoran Desert. To the west, looking like the Great Wall of China and about as successful at repelling invaders, the wall undulates over rolling hills at a cost of $5.4 million per mile toward the border town of Nogales. To the east, it becomes a single chest-high railroad rail and an Old West–style barbed-wire fence—not much of a change since John Wayne rode through these parts making Red River in the late 1940s.
Bob and his wife, Eileen Whalen, bought their ranch in 2004, near the height of the huge northward migration. The seller warned them, but couldn’t hand it over fast enough. For Eileen and Bob, a fourth-generation Arizona rancher who joined the Army at 17 and was gone for 41 years, coming home was the fulfillment of a long-held wish. They built their dream house in 2008, a promise from Bob to Eileen, who commutes from Seattle, where she is the executive director of Harborview Medical Center.
Heilig shows us where he pries the barbed wire back to shoo the Mexican cattle through. “The fence is the biggest joke in the world,” he says. “This huge, immense thing that cost millions, and then four-strand barbed-wire fence. You look at it and go, Huh?”
When you try to understand Arizona’s dysfunction—and maybe, God forbid, America’s—you have to start at The Fence and the grand self-delusion that the border could be fortified enough to keep out the invading brown horde. An ugly symbol of a frightened nation, it has fooled no one, except perhaps the politicians in far-off Washington who built it and made it their proxy for immigration reform.
12/ Men - time to enjoy the January fails from TwisterNederland.......one of their milder ones, only a few drunks, daredevils and misspent youth to the hospital.....
Ten minutes of chaos......
13/ Ah Florida......great weather for 8 months a year, and some of the most corrupt politicians in the country.......
Why do we keep electing these assholes to Tallahassee?
Anyway this column from Scott Maxwell in the Orlando Sentinel is about your tax dollars at work for the corporations who own the politicians.......thankfully we still have some journalists who expose these pond scum for what they are......
A few weeks ago, I took my family to Universal Orlando for an overnight stay.
Who knew I was risking their lives?
Apparently I was — because the company and its affiliates have received $8 million worth of tax breaks by claiming to be part of an "urban high-crime area."
Come to think of it, while riding Harry Potter, a dragon chased us. (Attempted murder?)
On the Simpsons ride, Krusty the Clown booby-trapped our cart. (Assault with deadly animation?)
Oh, and I paid 9 bucks for a soda with refills. (Highway robbery?)
Either those are the "crimes" we're talking about, or this is yet another in a long line of bogus tax breaks for corporations with good lobbyists.
Since you live in Florida, you can bet it's the latter. Here, politicians trip over one another to give big corporations the kind of incentives and tax breaks that most residents — and most small businesses — never get.
14/ How on earth do you make a skiing joke racist? Find out in this very funny clip from Conan O'Brian's show, with comedian Kevin Nealon......
This is one minute of laughter titled "Don't Ski Copper Mountain".......excellent.....
15/ As the clock ticks for all of us, for some of us leading edge boomers the noise is getting louder, so this is a very interesting and relevant essay about choices at the end of life. We all say about our choices "pull the plug if it's hopeless", but do you really have it in you to do it?
You don't know, but one thing is sure - you'll find out........
ONE weekend last year, we asked our vet how we would know when it was time to put down Byron, our elderly dog. Byron was 14, half blind, partly deaf, with dementia, arthritis and an enlarged prostate. He often walked into walls, stood staring vacantly with his tail down, and had begun wandering and whining for reasons we could not always decipher.
Attentive to Byron’s needs, we softened his food with water and sprinkled it with meat; we cuddled him when he whimpered and took him outside to relieve himself seven, even eight times a night. We couldn’t take a vacation because we couldn’t imagine asking anyone, friend or dog sitter, to do what we were doing. Nor could we fully trust anyone to provide the care we thought Byron required.
But it was also true that Byron often toddled along happily on his daily walks. He sniffed bushes and stained storefronts with the measured attentiveness of a research scientist, flirted with passers-by, and on occasion raised his ears and tail, marked a spot, then kicked his hind legs while growling, barking and asserting his dominance over some generally long-gone canine competition. Since Byron was an evidently elderly eight-pound Yorkshire terrier, this invariably provoked fond smiles from passing strangers.
When asked whether it was time to put Byron “to sleep,” our vet said he used the 50 percent rule: Were at least half of Byron’s days good days? Or was it two bad days for every good? When you get to the latter, he explained, it’s time.
This conversation gave me pause for two reasons. First, what did Byron want? Was 50 percent good enough for him? How about 70? Or 20? There was, of course, no way to know.
Which brings me to my second reason for pause. When not serving as faithful servant to our tiny dog, I am a geriatrician. Because older adults have a greater range of needs and abilities than any other age group, and because there is a national shortage of geriatricians, I care for the frailest and sickest among them.
Todays video - an infomercial for Axe Ball Cleaner that makes the kind of innuendo's you could only get away with on Australian TV......nice girls too......
Funny and raunchy.....
Todays redneck joke
Two rednecks are sitting on the front porch.One says, "Did you know that elks have sex 10 to 15 times a night?""Aw sxxt", says his friend, "and I just joined the VFW!"
Todays blonde jokes
SEVEN DEGREES OF BLONDE
FIRST DEGREE
A married couple were asleep when the phone rang
at 2 in the morning.
The very blonde wife picked up the phone,
listened a moment and said 'How should I know, that's 200 miles
from here!' and hung up.
The husband said, 'Who was that?'
The wife answered, 'I don't know, some woman wanting to know if the coast is clear.'
SECOND DEGREE
Two blondes are walking down the street. One notices a compact on the sidewalk and leans down to pick it up. She opens it, looks in the mirror and says, 'Hmm, this person looks familiar.'
The second blonde says, 'Here, let me see!'
So, the first blonde hands her the compact.
The second blonde looks in the mirror and says, 'You dummy, it's me!'
THIRD DEGREE
A blonde suspects her boyfriend of cheating on her, so she goes out and
buys a gun.
She goes to his apartment unexpectedly and when she opens the
door she finds him in the arms of a redhead. Well, the blonde is really
angry.
She opens her purse to take out the gun, and as she does so, she is
overcome with grief. She takes the gun and puts it to her head.
The boyfriend yells, 'No, honey, don't do it!!!'
The blonde replies, 'Shut up, you're next!'
FOURTH DEGREE
A blonde was bragging about her knowledge of state capitals.
She proudly says, 'Go ahead, ask me, ... I know 'em all.'
A friend says, 'OK, what's the capital of Wisconsin ?'
The blonde replies,'Oh, that's easy .. it's W.'
FIFTH DEGREE
Q: What did the blonde ask her doctor when he told her she was pregnant?
A: 'OMG, it can't be. Are you sure it is mine?'
SIXTH DEGREE
Bambi, a blonde in her fourth year as a UCLA Freshman, sat in her US
Government class. The professor asked Bambi if she knew what
Roe vs. Wade was about.
Bambi pondered the question; then, finally, said, 'That was the decision
George Washington had to make before he crossed the Delaware ...'
SEVENTH DEGREE
Returning home from work, a blonde was shocked to find her house
ransacked and burglarized. She telephoned the police at once and
reported the crime.
The police dispatcher broadcast the call on the radio, and a K-9 unit, patrolling nearby, was the first to respond.
As the K-9 officer approached the house with his dog on a leash,
the blonde ran out on the porch, shuddered at the sight of the cop
and his dog, then sat down on the steps.
Putting her face in her
hands, she moaned, 'I come home to find all my possessions stolen.
I call the police for help, and what do they do? They send me a BLIND policeman!'
OK, ONE MORE
TWO BEAUTIFUL WOMEN, A BLONDE AND A BRUNETTE, ARE WALKING DOWN A CITY STREET WHEN THE BRUNETTE SUDDENLY STOPS IN FRONT OF A FLORIST SHOP.
"WHAT IS IT?" ASKS THE BLONDE.
" THAT IS MY BOYFRIEND BUYING ME FLOWERS."
"HOW SWEET" SAYS THE BLONDE.
"OH NO" SAYS THE BRUNETTE, "EVERY TIME HE BUYS ME FLOWERS I SPEND THE WEEKEND ON MY BACK WITH MY LEGS SPREAD APART."
"WHY" SAYS THE BLONDE, CONFUSED, "DOESN'T HE JUST BUY A VASE?"
Todays Florida joke
BURGLARY IN FLORIDA
When south Florida resident Nathan Radlich's house was burglarized recently, thieves ignored his wide screen plasma TV, his VCR, and even left his Rolex watch.
A spokesman for the Fort Lauderdale police said that it looked similar to high grade cocaine and they'd probably thought they'd hit the big time.
Later, Nathan stood in front of numerous TV cameras and pleaded with the burglars: 'Please return the cremated remains of my sister, Gertrude. She died three years ago.'
The next morning, the bullet-riddled corpse of a local drug dealer known as Hoochie Pevens was found on Nathan's doorstep.The white box was there too; about half of Gertrude's ashes remained. Scotch taped to the box was this note which said:"Hoochie sold us the bogus blow, so we wasted Hoochie. Sorry we snorted your sister. No hard feelings. Have a nice day."
