Month: January 2011

Norman… Is That You? (1976) – IMDb: “There’s a Sexual Revolution Going On… And All the Leaders Are in My Family!

Director: George Schlatter Writers: Ron Clark (play), Sam Bobrick (play), and 3 more credits » Stars: Redd Foxx, Pearl Bailey and Dennis Dugan”

 

desire to inspire – desiretoinspire.net – Shipping container guest house: “It’s a clever idea but often the idea never lives up to expectations. Not in this case. Poteet Architects, San Antonio, Texas have designed and executed a fab backyard retreat that still leaves no doubt as to its origins. I think what separates this conversion from many other ho-hum versions is the attention to detail both internally and externally and especially in its siting and landscaping. Too cool! Just need to get my hands on a container.”

The Government Can Now Track You, Sans Warrant, Via GPS | Fast Company: “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers California and eight other Western states, just made what might be the scariest ruling of the year. You know who else thinks so? The dissenting judge, a conservative, no less, who himself made the connection to Orwell’s 1984. This is bad, bad news, and the sooner it gets overturned the safer we should all feel.”

The Most Popular Houses of 2010 – WSJ.com: “”

18 Hacked Digital Road Signs – Urlesque: “Road signs are pretty boring, albeit important. They tell us where to go, what to do and what we should avoid on the road. Road signs don’t usually make us laugh — until people figured out that they could be altered in a number of ways.

Pasting a sign over another sign is a simple idea, but hacking into the digital road signs that warn us about traffic delays and road hazards is a whole new level of dedication to mishievous shenanigans.

Here are 19 of the funniest hacked digital road signs. “

 

Study Confirms That Fox News Makes You Stupid | | AlterNet: “Study Confirms That Fox News Makes You Stupid A new survey of American voters shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. “

Daily Kos: State of the Nation: “NEW ROBES FOR THE SUPREME COURT JUDGES!”

A Village in Holland with no roads « Funny Pictures wallpapers paintings collections: “”

Best Buy Security Thinks I’m A Dumb Criminal, Stole iPad From Them – The Consumerist: “John has a bit of advice for iPad owners: don’t use the device in public. At least, don’t use it for price comparisons at a Best Buy with particularly clueless loss prevention staff unless you want to be accused of theft and have the police show up. He writes that this happened to him while checking some prices on his iPad. “

 

America in Decline: Why Germans Think We’re Insane | World | AlterNet: “As an American expat living in the European Union, I’ve started to see America from a different perspective.

The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less — right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical — the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population.

The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane.

Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called ‘A Superpower in Decline,’ which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at ‘balance’ found in mainstream U.S. media. On the Tea Parties:

Full of Hatred: ‘The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn’t quite know what he wants to be — maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher — and he doesn’t know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn’t come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred.’

The piece continues with the sobering assessment that America’s actual unemployment rate isn’t really 10 percent, but close to 20 percent when we factor in the number of people who have stopped looking for work.

Some social scientists think that making sure large-scale crime or fascism never takes root in Europe again requires a taxpayer investment in a strong social safety net. Can we learn from Europe? Isn’t it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.)”

 

“

Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com: “The video of the CNN debate I did last night about WikiLeaks with former Bush Homeland Security Adviser (and CNN contributor) Fran Townsend and CNN anchor Jessica Yellin is posted below. The way it proceeded was quite instructive to me and I want to make four observations about the discussion:

(1) Over the last month, I’ve done many television and radio segments about WikiLeaks and what always strikes me is how indistinguishable — identical — are the political figures and the journalists.  There’s just no difference in how they think, what their values and priorities are, how completely they’ve ingested and how eagerly they recite the same anti-WikiLeaks, ‘Assange = Saddam’ script.  So absolute is the WikiLeaks-is-Evil bipartisan orthodoxy among the Beltway political and media class (forever cemented by the joint Biden/McConnell decree that Assange is a ‘high-tech Terrorist,’) that you’re viewed as being from another planet if you don’t spout it.  It’s the equivalent of questioning Saddam’s WMD stockpile in early 2003.”