Mixed nutz and other news you can't use

(This is not an endorsement for whole foods or any other company. And no nutz were injured in the making of this presentation)

Just love taking the news and twisting it around to fit my snarky devious brain. Some people collect stamps or drier lint, well this is my diversion.

Fed officials spend week trying to calm investor fears about interest rate hikes.

Oh my get them a fainting couch. As if they didn't make a killing while the rest of us suffered.

British PM David Cameron backs Taliban peace talks on Afghan visit.

Okay just drop the last part there and the headline would read "Cameron backs Taliban". And now you know how right wingers think never reading any farther.

Obama urges dialogue instead of violence in Egypt.

There's the pot calling the kettle black. How about Obama stop killing people with drones before he opens his hypocritical mouth?

100th Tour de France begins in Corsica

Don't forget your caffeine pills boys or whatever it is to get the edge. Why not just have a steroids unlimited competition? That might make things interesting.

128 degree temps hit the southwest, record tornadoes in the central plains, and a hurricane that devastated New York and New Jersey and yet people won't face up to climate change. It's not about opinion folks it's about scientific fact. When the earth warms the energy is transfered to the atmosphere. Keep messing with mother nature and she'll bite you in the butt.

Say goodbye to Google reader.

Not that I used it anyway but hey after hearing that Google is in bed with the NSA who needs somebody leering over your shoulder when you read? As fast as tech is moving these days it's amazing that programers can get a product out the door before it becomes obsolete. Take the newly redesigned Blackberry as an example. It never had a chance.

Obama wants to dump $7bn into Africa for electricity

Here's an idea. Spend the 7bn on our infrastructure that's falling apart. Why dump more misery on them when it will take even more oil and coal to run those power plants? And we thought Obama was all for the environment.

Friday beaver is important

What is important?

As the world slowly crumbles around us the focus by the lame stream media seems always laser directed at things that are, let's say, of lesser value. The grand push for same sex unions is hardly earth shattering news when you look at the statistics. After all they aren't in the majority. So rather than focus on things like jobs and social well being our government is picking out the drapes while the house is on fire.

Senate focus at the moment is with providing us with the largest and historically most expensive security system in the world. And like any good corporation is dead set to fix the symptoms and not the problems. Building a 700 mile fence with a battalion of security guards won't work any more than the Berlin wall did of the cold war era. Yes it might have slowed a few folks down but it didn't solve the problem. And it's not just about a matter of freedom either. These people aren't leaving Mexico so they can voice their displeasure or exercise freedom of speech, they're just trying to survive. Five dollars a day wages doesn't cut it in any country.

So what is important? Being out of work, wondering if the retirement funds will stretch to the end of the month, and for some just making it to the end of the month on a fixed income, unemployment or those with no income living on savings. The powers that be have tried to frame what's happening as some religious extremism somehow wanting to be under our beds when in fact that's just a cover for one of the largest thefts of wealth this world has ever seen. While the lame stream media is busy touting the corporate talking points and has us (or tries to anyway) focused on the latest boogyman, the boys in finance are busy with business as usual which is to privatize profits while dumping the debt on the rest of us. Greed is not good in the end Mr. Geko because eventually those at the bottom will have their day and that is slowly happening on a world scale too. Look at Greece Spain Italy Turkey and now the one million who took to the streets in Brazil. You can't keep the shell game going much longer. The people can only be fooled so many times.

Short update: Was looking through the stats on this blog just to see if things were up or down and noticed that yesterday was a bit off the charts. The bulk of the people were from...wait for it... Iran. Go figure. I didn't think they were that much into climate change. Knew things were heating up over there but not in that way.

UPDATE: Missed this one: Beavers chewed through a fiber optic cable in N.M. causing an outage to internet and cell phones. And I always thought beavers liked the net. Maybe they're not happy with their service providers.

Bank fails later...
UPDATE: No bank fails this week

Burn baby burn - Climate change, global warming call it what you will

You can accept the fact or deny it but one thing is for sure our planet is changing. You can looks at melting glaciers and drying up lakes but the shrinking arctic doesn't lie. With 7 billion of us on this rock it shouldn't take a genius to figure out that things will change and fast. Nobody knows the exact tipping point but that should be beside the point. When you see a far off storm you don't just sit there with the windows open thinking it's an illusion.

What to do? The answer is simple and two fold. First is to stop burning fossil fuels or at the very least slow it down as much as possible until alternatives can be found. The other end is to conserve what we are using. It's estimated that we waste on average over 35% of the energy we use in the home. Most of that is heat loss from poor insulation and cracks around windows and doors. Not to sound like an ad from a hardware store but just some inexpensive materials can save a bunch of money in the long run. I found that replacing old leaky windows cut my energy bill in winter by half. Switching to CFL lighting same years back at least kept pace with the price increases. There is the push to LEDs but they're still too expensive at the moment at about the price of a compact bulb when they first came out. There's work to be done on their development. We have some LED street lighting here but it's less than impressive. It's closer to a street night light as it only covers about 20 feet or only two car lengths of illumination.

As to our president I have misgivings about his motivations. On the one hand he wants to promote conservation and renewables while on the other is promoting one of the dirtiest sources of energy the tar sands oil of the XL pipeline. Sorry but you can't have it both ways. And from his lame duck position I see no reason for him to side with oil industry giants. 

The tar sands oil is not carbon neutral and here's why: First it must be dug out of the ground almost like strip mining which means that trucks are running 24/7 to get at it for processing. Once processed (which is only for shipment by the way) it is sent via pipeline, rail or truck to be fully processed adding to pollution. Once it reaches it's final destination which is more than likely China it will be burned for home heating oil once again adding to the carbon count. And forgot to mention that in order to process the stuff it must be heated and it's by products burned off into the atmosphere. Shale oil and gas is not much better as it requires many of the same procedures.

Here's the trade offs and what the future holds in case you're around that long. There is a shift to biodegradable products which sounds all nice and warm and fuzzy. For some products that we only use once and throw away that's okay however they are now starting to use this concept in things like auto interiors with seats and dashboards made from partially organic materials. All well and good one might think until you figure you now have a car with a use by date. If you thought cars broke down rapidly now you haven't seen anything yet. It was bad enough they put enough computing power under the hood to get a man to mars, which by the way can be hacked, now the thing will begin to rot after so many years. So what's next, face creams for the ford and conditioners for the continental? And with back talking computers we'll wish it was back to the days of back seat drivers instead of a wise cracking computer whining about needing a facial. Ain't progress grand.

Run away random thoughts

Everything seems to be run away these days all to the extremes. Was a time that whistle blowers were honored. No more. Now it's run away before they catch you and convict you. Judges seemingly making up their own rules. Again run away before they convict you. Politicians creating laws that have no common sense. Juries that have made up their minds before the opening arguments. Soldiers mowing down innocent civilians. It's even permeated the inanimate and unpredictable. Cars with sticky accelerators, stock markets that react to good news with a plunge and even the weather dumping flooding rains, hurricanes and tornadoes. The world seems on a course like a run away locomotive and the engineer is nowhere to be found.

They say for every action there is a reaction and nothing could be truer at the moment. Worthless paper was pumped into markets some ten plus years ago and the world economy is taking a run away dive. Countries metal in others affairs and the end result is run away wars. An insulin pump will now come with an auto shut off because it doesn't know when to stop. They've even put a kill switch on most electric cars for the same reason. Nothing knows when to stop. What's that about an object in motion tends to stay in motion Newton's first law? But who's following laws these days? Yet it holds true since there's nothing stopping anything at least for the moment.

We are a stupid lot when you stop to consider it all. We dig nasty oil out of the ground, ship it and spill it in the process only to burn it and land up poisoning ourselves and the planet down the road. "What fools these mortals be" to quote Willy. We've become so industrialized so automated that just one wrong move results in a run away catastrophe the likes never seen before, a copy machine run amuck spitting paper and ink in all directions. So if you want to mess things up use a computer. Oops was that the send to all button you just hit? 

Beaver the friday tracking version

Irony. 

We have sophisticated GPS systems that somehow can't get us where we're going. There's technology galore with programs that can do functions within a mili-second and yet is anything any better than it was ten, twenty or thirty years ago? And I'm sure we've all experienced it when the check out gal somehow hit the wrong key on the register and it took the store manager to dash over complete with secret password and special key to unlock the great mystery of the system and unfreeze things. And they call that progress. But there was a time when it was a simple matter mashing down a mechanical key, giving a hand crank a spin and up popped a total. Even receipts were not that important because everybody had that long lost trust with the people they dealt with behind the counter. 

Where did trust go? I know it was here sometime in the past. Yeah yeah I know what you're thinking people have always lied, but it seems it was never this bad. You would have thought that with the internet it would have made people more honest not less. After all anything you say is documented and easily pulled up for later viewing. So don't tell me you didn't say something when it's your puss on the youtube video of years past.  Now we have secret courts and secret laws and snoopers on top of snoopers because you never know somebody somewhere might just get an evil idea. Whoa to him who even tries to think it. So what's next the thought police? If that happened we'd all be in jail for our nefarious subconscious thoughts. Kill him? Of course I'd like to kill him but only in the recesses of the grey matter.

So just to contribute to the mega terra bits of information that will I'm sure be stored for posterity and yet never see the light of day ever again (this is after all nothing more than electronic bird cage liner). And yet here we sit having our most private of private communications ransacked like a home invasion robber only these guys leave with all the furniture just as we left it. If you want to know what I'm up to just ask. I'll be more than happy to tell you. You don't need to snoop through my things because there really isn't anything here worth looking at. 

Bank fails later and let's all watch as the markets take a tumble...
UPDATE: No fails this week

Happy Hump Day

As if things weren't bad enough with the sequester and congress wanting to slather on more cuts to social programs, it appears the world  economy is about to tank in the next six months or less. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out. The last go round the bulk of 50 plus somethings were thrown out of work with economic shrinkage and down sizing. Those that did managed to make it back into the game had to settle for far less wages with little to no benefits. Those just starting out faced grim prospects as well. Saddled with student loans and a shrinking market many were forced to take whatever they could get which wasn't much. They're now stuck at home waiting for the big break to move out of the nest but that may not happen any time soon.

I bulk at people who say they can find work in this current state. Yes there are scraps of work here and there but not enough to be consistent and not enough to cover the bills. Even a ten dollar an hour job will not leave you with enough left over after paying the gas to get there to survive. We face a lost generation that will never see the dreams we once had of home ownership and raising a family. It's all perpetuated by greed at the top and an unwillingness to part with even scrapes to the masses. But it will all back fire when there's no one left to fleece of their last dollar. First they took our jobs away then came the house. The bulk of savings has been eaten up just to keep going and now it's the retirement funds if those weren't already wiped out when the job was shipped overseas. Only thing left then is social security which will become insecurity should they get their hands on it.

No I see no good things for the near future no matter what type of smiley face they try and put on it. Fridays were once a joy. Now they're just another day. One day closer to the end of the month and another cycle of bills to pay.   

Don't take my word for all this even those at the top in the game are saying the very same things:

Hear the train coming?

News you can't use and could care less about

G8 summit: live updates

As if we'd get any real information out of such meetings. We'll have to get it all from the NSA to hear what really happened.

McCaskill backs Clinton for president

Obama isn't less then six months into his term and they're already carving up the power seat. Nothing like waiting before the corpse is even cold to divvy up the estate.

End of the war in Afghanistan?

Don't bet the ranch on that one and even if we leave the end result will be a civil war between drug lords. Let's face facts. Afghanistan never really was a country and probably will never be one.

Lil Wayne steps on the American Flag

Big deal it's better than Bush and Cheney who wiped their butts with it along with the constitution.

G-8 (again?) turns focus to clampdown on tax dodging

Believe that when you see it. This "summit" is made up of only 8 of the worlds wealthiest countries. You can bet some green backs will be traveling after this thing gets done if they haven't already. And I guess were number one when it comes to cheating.

One article says "Consumer prices edge higher" while another says "inflation remains tame." 

Okay then which is it? Can't have it both ways. There isn't any such thing as a little bit pregnant.

Lastly we have

Temper tantrums are now considered a mental disorder.
 No for real? They now classify a kids fit because he didn't get candy at the check out as "disruptive mood disregulation disorder". And I'm sure big Pharma just has the right med for that and don't forget junior will need to be on it the rest of his life. Sheesh!