My favorite in this DDD is #13.....fascinating.....
1/ Paul Krugman has some harsh words for the European elites on the way they have destroyed Greece's economy, and are in fantasyland about the continued viability of the Euro. He doesn't say this, but bankrupting Greece was a warning to any of the other countries - don't buck the system, or we [the banks] will punish you.....
Good column in the Times.....
There’s a bit of a lull in the news from Europe, but the underlying situation is as terrible as ever. Greece is experiencing a slump worse than the Great Depression, and nothing happening now offers hope of recovery. Spain has been hailed as a success story, because its economy is finally growing — but it still has 22 percent unemployment. And there is an arc of stagnationacross the continent’s top: Finland is experiencing a depression comparable to that in southern Europe, and Denmark and the Netherlands are also doing very badly.
How did things go so wrong? The answer is that this is what happens when self-indulgent politicians ignore arithmetic and the lessons of history. And no, I’m not talking about leftists in Greece or elsewhere; I’m talking about ultra-respectable men in Berlin, Paris, and Brussels, who have spent a quarter-century trying to run Europe on the basis of fantasy economics.
To someone who didn’t know much economics, or chose to ignore awkward questions, establishing a unified European currency sounded like a great idea. It would make doing business across national borders easier, while serving as a powerful symbol of unity. Who could have foreseen the huge problems the euro would eventually cause?
Actually, lots of people.
2/ Donald Trump has had an effect on our politics already - he has made it legitimate for some of the nastiest elements of the right wing to broadcast their venom and hate, starting with the blowhard in chief - Bill O'Reilly.
Matt Taibbi doesn't like him very much......
Bill O'Reilly has been warning Americans about the barely existent threat of killer Hispanic immigrants.
O'Reilly's effort to publicize the killing of a 31 year-old white woman named Kate Steinle, allegedly at the hands of an oft-deported immigrant named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, is turning into the surprise second act of Donald Trump's ill-fated "Mexicans are murdering, raping monsters" campaign.
He's even borrowing Trump's flair for rhetoric. In the past week, he's denounced a San Francisco councilman as a "pinhead" and compared Salon.com to the white supremacist site Stormfront. Both had downplayed O'Reilly's crusade.
"Obviously, that responsibility [for protecting our borders] is not being met," O'Reilly fumed. "And if you point that out, as Trump did, you are a racist, a piñata for the open-border crowd to bash!"
3/ John Oliver with another trademark comedic investigation, this one is how sports teams use threats and often bribery to get their home cities to build new stadiums for them.....incredibly good, and informative too.....17 minutes of jokes with some excellent research and reporting thrown in.....
John Oliver and the Last Week Tonight team have been on vacation, but now they’re back to their usual tricks. What’s more is, unlike the subject of the show’s “deep dive” segment, they didn’t require any taxpayer money for the production.
That’s because Oliver tackled sports stadiums, arenas and venues, and the rather wealthy major league sports teams who routinely ask for their host city’s financial aid for obtaining new ones. Turns out, the billionaire business owners behind the biggest franchises in the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL routinely use loopholes in local tax codes to request and receive millions of dollars of public assistance — even though they have the money to build everything on their own.After quoting a study that found “no substantial evidence that stadiums have increased jobs, incomes or tax revenues,” Oliver plays a rather interesting clip:
“This one economist said to me, ‘I love this lie.’ He said, ‘Rather than spend a billion dollars on a stadium, you’re actually better off flying a plane over a city and dumping a billion dollars on the populace, and just letting them pick up the money and spend it.'”
4/ Remember Key and Peele? Substitute teacher?
Here is another classic, in anticipation of the football season coming in about a month......an amusing three minutes....
Yes football fans, it’s that time of year again. Key & Peele have released their list of names for the East-West College Bowl 2.
5/ The same people that took down Acorn with a phony video are at it again, and this time they are after Planned Parenthood with a heavily edited discussion of PP's policies on contributing to stem cell research.
Needless to say Republicans are going crazy with indignation and calling for Congressional investigations.....and as with Acorn, no Democrat has the guts to stand up and defend PP.....
When are Dems going to get a spine?
A still from the video "Planned Parenthood Uses Partial-Birth Abortions to Sell Baby Parts" (Credit: YouTube/The Center for Medical Progress)
They say a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on. That’s certainly the case with a new and highly deceptive anti-choice propaganda video that claims to show a Planned Parenthood official caught on a hidden camera while allegedly discussing how the women’s health clinics are involved with the harvesting and selling of aborted fetus organs via a sordid underground black market.
In the video, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, is seen eating salad and drinking a glass of red wine as she discusses what the selectively edited video would lead us to believe is the process of acquiring intact organs from aborted fetuses and then selling them to buyers. Nucatola describes the most desirable organs, as well as the admittedly disturbing manner by which the fetuses are aborted in a way that doesn’t damage the organs that are to be harvested. She also appears to discuss the prices that buyers pay for a particular fetal organ.
As we’ve seen with similar “gotcha!” videos, this one completely misrepresents what Nucatola was discussing, and numerous sites have almost too-easily debunked just about every claim. (Full debunkery here, here, here and
6/ Very funny 2 minute video of a woman giving some advice for people who go to the beach.....
A Tennessee woman’s hilarious (yet actually very logical) advice on how to avoid shark attacks has made her an internet star.
Veronica-Pooh Nash Poleate’s ‘Summer Safety Tips’ video has now been viewed by over 11 million people on Facebook.
Veronica (aka Sister Pooh) was inspired to make her video after a shark attack in Surf City, on the North Carolina coastline. There has been a spate of shark attacks in the area in recent weeks.
‘I’m on my way to church this morning, but I wanted to make a quick video because my spirit was troubled this morning,’ she begins. ‘I had the news on and it was talking about somebody else done got ate up by a shark.’
So, Sister Pooh wants us to be mindful. Here’s her advice: ‘Don’t go to the ocean, okay? Because the ocean is the shark’s house.’ And ‘the shark has the right to eat you up when you in his house.’
Her supporting evidence is pretty sound. ‘When chickens come in my house, guess what?’ she says. ‘They get ate.’
7/ Remember when we were obsessed with running out of oil, and thus began fracking which uses and poisons huge amounts of water and also ethanol from corn, tying up millions of acres of irrigated farmland. It all contributes to our new crisis none is talking about - water.
As this story says another slow moving wave of global problems are coming, mainly for the poorer countries but also for us because of our abuse of our water resources. Mark my words - the next wars are going to be fought over water.....
The United Nations reports that we have 15 years to avert a full-blown water crisis and that, by 2030, demand for water will outstrip supply by 40 percent. Five hundred renowned scientists brought together by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that our collective abuse of water has caused the earth to enter a “new geologic age,” a “planetary transformation” akin to the retreat of the glaciers more than 11,000 years ago. Already, they reported, a majority of the world’s population lives within a 30-mile radius of water sources that are badly stressed or running out.
For a long time, we in the Global North, especially North America and Europe, have seen the growing water crisis as an issue of the Global South. Certainly, the grim UN statistics on those without access to water and sanitation have referred mostly to poor countries in Africa, Latin America, and large parts of Asia. Heartbreaking images of children dying of waterborne disease have always seemed to come from the slums of Nairobi, Kolkata, or La Paz. Similarly, the worst stories of water pollution and shortages have originated in the densely populated areas of the South.
But as this issue of The Nation shows us, the global water crisis is just that—global—in every sense of the word. A deadly combination of growing inequality, climate change, rising water prices, and mismanagement of water sources in the North has suddenly put the world on a more even footing.
8/ Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers were wonderful together, and there hasn't been dancing like this for a long time....a two minute clip of magic feet.....
9/ And continuing the water crisis, this is a most interesting story from the Times on how the Western states have an even more severe problem than they realize because of the byzantine rules on how the volume of water is measured.
The politics of water......
The story mentions Needles, CA.....ironically we had breakfast and got gas in that town last month, and the reason I remember it is that this pissant little city had a Tesla charging point in the gas station.....
The Colorado River in Mojave Valley, Ariz.
His beat includes Needles, Calif., a beleaguered desert town midway between Flagstaff, Ariz., and Los Angeles.
About 4,800 people live in Needles, on the western bank of the Colorado River where it cuts a swath in the mud between California and Arizona. The old railroad town is the gateway to the farmland of the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation across the river.
Mr. Matuska, a hydrologist, is one of about a dozen accountants for the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which controls water distribution along the lower half of the Colorado River. His job is to count the water used by cities like Needles and the farms around them — lands close to the essential Colorado — and make sure they don’t take more than their share of the river.
As it happens, Needles gets most of its water from underground — pumping an average of about 700 million gallons a year from four wells it has drilled into the local aquifer. In recent years, such withdrawals have taken on more importance in the West, particularly in California and Arizona, as streams shrivel, rivers are fought over and reservoirs run dry. About 60 percent of California’s water now comes from underground, according to estimates by NASA researchers. Arizona, staring down imminent rationing of Colorado River water, pumps nearly half its supplies from aquifers.
But in allowing their residents to tap underground resources this way, regulators and legislators in those states have ignored a basic truth about how much water is actually available. In many places, groundwater in aquifers and surface water in rivers and reservoirs are not separate supplies but interconnected parts of the same system.
10/ Golf and magic - a magician amazes some of the golfers on the European Tour with magic, and the golfers do some great tricks of their own.....three impressive minutes....
11/ In the last DDD we had a story on the corruption of the Justice Department under Eric Holder - this week it's the incompetence and worse of Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education who just left office....
Diane Ravitch’s devastating Arne Duncan critique: The education secretary earned his F
It will take years to recover from the damage that Arne Duncan's policies have inflicted on public education
Arne Duncan (Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing)
Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post has written a sympathetic article about Arne Duncan and the waning of his powers as Secretary of Education. He is a nice guy. He is a close friend of the president. He cares about individual children that he met along the way. The pending reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act will prohibit him and future Secretaries from interfering in state decisions about standards, curriculum and assessment. His family has already moved back to Chicago. But he will stay on the job to the very end.
When Obama was elected, many educators and parents thought that Obama would bring a new vision of the federal role in education, one that freed schools from the test-and-punish mindset of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind. But Arne Duncan and Barack Obama had a vision no different from George W. Bush and doubled down on the importance of testing, while encouraging privatization and undermining the teaching profession with a $50 million grant to Teach for America to place more novice teachers in high-needs schools. Duncan never said a bad word about charters, no matter how many scandals and frauds were revealed.
During Duncan’s tenure in office:
12/ You see bumper stickers all the time saying "Proud to Be An American" and at the end of every speech politicians always say "God Bless America"......listen to George Carlin ruminate about pride, and think about this skit when you hear these sayings next time.....
Four minutes of the master......
13/ I used to read some science fiction when I was younger, so I found this article totally fascinating. The author poses a question - "where are the aliens", and then proceeds to try to answer the unknowable question with seamless logic and the power of numbers......
Incredibly good story, especially if you are even remotely interested in science....
Some people stick with the traditional—feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old “existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour.” But everyone feels something.
Physicist Enrico Fermi felt something too—“Where is everybody?”
A really starry sky seems vast—but all we’re looking at is our very local neighborhood. On the very best nights, we can see up to about 2,500 stars (roughly one hundred-millionth of the stars in our galaxy), and almost all of them are less than 1,000 light years away from us (or 1% of the diameter of the Milky Way). So what we’re really looking at is this:
When confronted with the topic of stars and galaxies, a question that tantalizes most humans is, “Is there other intelligent life out there?” Let’s put some numbers to it:
14/ Michael Jackson's "Beat It" is one of our generation's iconic songs, but here is a version done on the acoustic guitar......unusual, and I thought it was excellent....
Michael Jackson brought us some of the best pop music of the ’80s.
These timeless pieces of music have been iterated and reiterated. This latest one, performed on guitar, is a masterpiece.
“I decided to start working [on] this arrangement because it was a great challenge,” Rivera said, according to Guitar World. “When you listen to the chorus of the original song, you can hear the main riff (recorded by Steve Lukather) together with the Michael’s vocal melody and, of course, drums, bass and other instruments.”
”My objective was to play all [of these parts] together: the main riff, the vocal melody and the percussion part. I had to find the proper tuning and make good use of the harmonics, but in the end I got it.”
15/ Fascinating story about how TV sitcoms have become gentrified, starting in the Reagan years, and solidify the domination of our national conversation by the upper classes.
Don't believe it? Read this article, then think about what you're watching...........
Television sitcoms are one of the most important outlets for American culture, and have long been a center of gravity for American society to grow and flourish. The iconic characters in television programming have often broken new ground in advancing the national discussion on a variety of issues.
But in recent years, television programming has trended away from featuring characters from working-class backgrounds dealing with the same problems as the rest of America. Instead, television has reoriented itself around the lives of the rich, or at least the comfortable, often throwing out the concept of any real struggles altogether. This trend is a direct assault on a recent history of television.
Working Class Heroes
The social movements of the '60s and '70s produced not only a more progressive policy regime, but a much more progressive culture. When it came to elevating that progressive culture to TV, one man had a greater impact than any other. Norman Lear was the brains behind the popular program that aired between 1971 and 1979, All In The Family, a show about a working-class family in Queens. http://www.alternet.
Todays video - the "Say What" scene from Pulp Fiction.....
Todays redneck joke
Billy Bob and Luther were talking one afternoon when Billy Bob says toLuther, "Yaw know, I recon I'm 'bout ready for a vacation. Only this year I'mgonna do it different. The last few years, I took your advice about where to go.Three years ago you said to go to Hawaii. I went to Hawaii and Earlene gotpregnant.Then two years ago, you told me to go to the Bahamas, and Earlene gotpregnant again.Last year you suggested Tahiti and darned if Earlene didn't get pregnant again."Luther asks Billy Bob, "So, what you gonna do this year that's different?""I'm taking Earlene with me".
Todays jokes that should offend just about everyone, especially Catholics
Got invited to a party and was told to dress to kill. Apparently a
turban, beard and a backpack wasn't what they had in mind.
After a night of drink, drugs and wild sex, Jim woke up to find
himself next to a really ugly woman. That's when he realized he had
made it home safely.
Seven wheelchair athletes have been banned from the Paralympics after
they tested positive for WD40.
ITS A BOY" I shouted "A BOY, I DON'T BELIEVE IT, ITS A BOY". And with
tears streaming down my face I swore I'd never visit another Thai
Brothel!
A boy asks his granny, 'Have you seen my pills, they were labeled
LSD?' Granny replies, f**k the pills, have you seen the dragons in the
kitchen?
Wife gets naked and asks hubby, 'What turns you on more, my pretty
face or my sexy body?'Hubby looks her up and down and replies, 'Your
sense of humor!
The wife's back on the warpath again. She was up for making a sex
movie last night, and all I did was suggest we should hold auditions
for her part.
I've accidentally swallowed some Scrabble tiles. My next crap could
spell disaster.
My sister-in-law sat on my glasses and broke them. It was my own
fault. I should have taken them off.
I spent a couple of hours defrosting the fridge last night, or
"foreplay" as she likes to call it.
After both suffering from depression for a while, me and the wife were
going to commit suicide yesterday. But strangely enough, once she
killed herself, I started to feel a lot better. So I thought, "Screw
it, soldier on!"
I woke up this morning at 8, and could sense something was wrong. I
got downstairs and found the wife face down on the kitchen floor, not
breathing! I panicked. I didn't know what to do. Then I remembered
McDonald's serves breakfast until11:30.
Bought the missus a hamster skin coat last week. Took her to the fair
last night, and it took me 3 hours to get her off the Ferris wheel.
The other night, my wife asked me how many women I'd slept with. I
told her, "Only you. All the others kept me awake all night!"
turban, beard and a backpack wasn't what they had in mind.
After a night of drink, drugs and wild sex, Jim woke up to find
himself next to a really ugly woman. That's when he realized he had
made it home safely.
Seven wheelchair athletes have been banned from the Paralympics after
they tested positive for WD40.
ITS A BOY" I shouted "A BOY, I DON'T BELIEVE IT, ITS A BOY". And with
tears streaming down my face I swore I'd never visit another Thai
Brothel!
A boy asks his granny, 'Have you seen my pills, they were labeled
LSD?' Granny replies, f**k the pills, have you seen the dragons in the
kitchen?
Wife gets naked and asks hubby, 'What turns you on more, my pretty
face or my sexy body?'Hubby looks her up and down and replies, 'Your
sense of humor!
The wife's back on the warpath again. She was up for making a sex
movie last night, and all I did was suggest we should hold auditions
for her part.
I've accidentally swallowed some Scrabble tiles. My next crap could
spell disaster.
My sister-in-law sat on my glasses and broke them. It was my own
fault. I should have taken them off.
I spent a couple of hours defrosting the fridge last night, or
"foreplay" as she likes to call it.
After both suffering from depression for a while, me and the wife were
going to commit suicide yesterday. But strangely enough, once she
killed herself, I started to feel a lot better. So I thought, "Screw
it, soldier on!"
I woke up this morning at 8, and could sense something was wrong. I
got downstairs and found the wife face down on the kitchen floor, not
breathing! I panicked. I didn't know what to do. Then I remembered
McDonald's serves breakfast until11:30.
Bought the missus a hamster skin coat last week. Took her to the fair
last night, and it took me 3 hours to get her off the Ferris wheel.
The other night, my wife asked me how many women I'd slept with. I
told her, "Only you. All the others kept me awake all night!"
My missus packed my bags, and as I walked out the front door, she
screamed, "I wish you a slow and painful death, you bastard!"
"Oh," I replied, "so now you want me to stay!"
A Catholic boy in confession says, "Bless me Father, I have sinned, I
masturbated while thinking about my sister."
"That's a disgrace," said the priest," especially when you have two
gorgeous brothers."
A government survey has shown that 91% of illegal immigrants come to
this country so that they can see their own doctor.
I've just installed strobe lights in the bedroom. It makes the wife
look like she's moving during sex.
Todays taxi driver joke
A passenger in a taxi heading for Midway airport, leaned over to ask the driver a question and gently tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention.
The driver screamed, lost control of the cab, nearly hit a bus, drove up over the curb and stopped just inches from a large plate window.
For a few moments everything was silent in the cab.
Then, the shaking driver said, "Are you OK? I'm so sorry, but you scared the daylights out of me."
The badly shaken passenger apologized to the driver and said, "I didn't realize that a mere tap on the shoulder would startle someone so badly."
The driver replied, "No, no, I'm the one who is sorry, it's entirely my fault.
Today is my very first day driving a cab.
I've been driving a hearse for 25 years....
I've been driving a hearse for 25 years....
Eric Holder is back at Covington & Burling after serving as U.S. attorney general for six years. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty
