Tidbits From The Web #54

So you think you can...OUCH!
Vicious vortex...
20 disturbing facts about US healthcare...
Massive cosmic pileup on the Universe interstate...
What the world will look like by 2050...
Most painfully awesome Mike Tyson punchouts...
VODKA!
Remembering the boombox...
Sand art...
Hidden meanings in popular logos...
Call me...
Now that is a chess set!
Another awesome LEGO creation...
HD in slo-mo...
Spit or swallow?
Rowdy Romanian rugby rumbles...
Where do your federal taxes go?
Not even if you were the last man on Earth...
Surreal art...
If Dorothy stepped into Boogie Nights...
Beastie Boys vs Led Zeppelin by DJ Moule...
When you don't feel like explaining...again...
Part insect...part timepiece...
Why Congress won't investigate Wall Street...



Corn...it does a body good...





Dead or Alive?
Dead or Alive? can help you find answers to that all too common question of a person's existence. 'This site tracks whether famous people are still alive or whether they have passed away.' You can search the database of over 7800 people by last name, by age, by birthdate, sex, the field in which they excelled as well as by several other categories. There are even quizzes that list some really obscure famous people (a great resource for Trivia). On a positive note, our senior citizens, those over 85 years old, are listed with their ages. Currently there are 2 entries for people over 100 years young!

Oxymorons.info

"An Oxymoron is a combination of contradictory or incongruous words, such as 'Cruel Kindness' or 'Jumbo Shrimp' (Jumbo means 'large' while Shrimp means 'small'). It is a literary figure of speech in which opposite or contradictory words, terms, phrases or ideas are combined to create a rhetorical effect by paradoxical means." How's that for an explanation of this word combination! Oxymorons.info is an interesting resource for word scholars and the general public, well organized by subject as well as accessible by alphabetic listing. You'll find 'Top Favorites' and 'Self-Contradictory,' a 'Daily Oxymoron' and even an 'Oxymoron Forum' where you can discuss your favorite rhetorical figures of speech. Do take your time when browsing through the site. As Sir Winston Churchill said to his chauffeur, "Drive slowly, we're in a hurry."

HAPPINESS

Join with those who sing, tell stories, enjoy life and have joy in their eyes—because happiness is contagious….Join those who walk with their heads held high, even though they have tears in their eyes. Stay away from those who hold their heads high because they've never shed a tear. --Paulo Coelho

Happiness is like manna; it is to be gathered in grains, and enjoyed every day. --Author unknown

"Love doesn't grow on trees like apples in Eden - it's something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too." -Joyce Cary

He who wants to expand the field of happiness, let him lay the foundation of it on the bottom of his heart.

- Tao saying

FAITH

"Just as the body cannot exist without blood, so the soul needs the matchless and pure strength of faith." -- Mahatma Gandhi

"One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn't pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself." -- Lucille Ball

"When you come to the edge of all the light you know, and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing one of two things will happen: there will be something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly." -- Barbara J. Winter

"The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants from life is often merely the will to try it and the faith to believe that it is possible." -- Richard M. DeVos

A HARMONIUS BALANCE

I have been through a lot and I have suffered a great deal. But I have had lots of happy moments, as well. Every moment one lives is different from the other. The good, the bad, hardship, the joy, the tragedy, love and happiness are all interwoven into one single, indescribable whole that is called LIFE. You cannot separate the good from the bad. And perhaps there is no need to do so, either.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis


[F]riendship is precious, not only in the shade but in the sunshine of life; & thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine.

Thomas Jefferson

Whiskey & Gunpowder
By James Howard Kunstler
June 8, 2009
Saratoga Springs, New York, U.S.A.

Revolving Debt Cheap Energy Economy on Its Knees

Through the tangle of green shoots and sprouting mustard seeds, a certain nervous view persists that the arc of events is taking us to places unimaginable. The collapse of General Motors and Chrysler signifies more than the collapse of US car manufacturing. It spells the end of the motoring era in America per se and the puerile fantasy of personal liberation that allowed it to become such a curse to us.

Of course, many Nobel prize-winning economists would argue that it has only been a blessing for us, but that only shows how the newspapers are committing suicide-by-irrelevance. And if other societies, such as China’s late-entry industrial start-up, want to adopt a similar fantasy, they will only find themselves all the sooner in history’s garage with a tailpipe in their mouths.

Here in the USA, we will mount the most strenuous campaign to keep the motoring system going — in fact, we’re already doing it — but it will fail just as surely as two (so far) of the “big three” automakers have failed. It will fail because car-making is only one facet of a larger network of systems that is coming undone, namely a revolving debt cheap energy economy.

Americans will never again buy as many new cars as they were able to do before 2008 on the terms that were normal until then: installment loans. Our credit system is completely broken. It choked to death on securitized debt engineered by computer magic and business school hubris. That complex of frauds and swindles coincided with the background force of peak oil, which meant, among other things, that economic growth based on ever-increasing energy resources was over, and along with it ever-increasing credit. What it boils down to now is that we can’t service our debt at any level, personal, corporate, or government — and that translates into comprehensive societal bankruptcy.

The efforts of our federal government to work around this now, to cover up the “non-performing” debt and to generate the new lending necessary to keep the old system going, is a tragic exercise in futility. I’m not saying this to be “pessimistic” grandstanding doomer pain-in-the-ass, but because I would like to see my country make more intelligent choices that would permit us to continue being civilized, to move into the next phase of our history without a horrible self-destructive convulsion.

Another consequence of the debt problem is that we won’t be able to maintain the network of gold-plated highways and lesser roads that was as necessary as the cars themselves to make the motoring system work. The trouble is you have to keep gold-plating it, year after year. Traffic engineers refer to this as “level-of-service.” They’ve learned that if the level-of-service is less than immaculate, the highways quickly enter a spiral of disintegration. In fact, the American Society of Civil Engineers reported several years ago that the condition of many highway bridges and tunnels was at the “D-minus” level, so we had already fallen far behind on a highway system that had simply grown too large to fix even when we thought we were wealthy enough to keep up. Right now, we’re pretending that the “stimulus” program will carry us over long eno ugh to resume the old method of state-and-federal spending based largely on bonding (that is, debt).

The political dimension of the collapse of motoring is the least discussed part of problem: as fewer and fewer citizens find themselves able to buy and run cars, they will feel increasingly aggrieved at the system set up to make motoring virtually mandatory for all the chores of everyday life, and their resentments will rise against the elite that can still manage to enjoy it. Because our car-dependency is so extreme, the reaction of the dis-entitled classes is liable to be extreme and probably delusional to an extreme, too.

You can already see it being baked in the cake. Happy Motoring is so entangled in our national identity that the loss of it is bound to cause a national identity crisis. In places like the American south, the old Dixie states, motoring lifted more than half the population out of the dust, and became the basis of the New South economy. The sons and grandsons of starving sharecroppers became Chevy dealers and developers of suburban housing tracts, malls, and strip malls. They don’t have any nostalgia for the historical reality of hookworm and 14-hour-days of serf labor in hundred-degree heat. Theirs is a nostalgia for the present, for air-conditioned comfort and convenience and the groaning all-you-can-eat Shoney’s breakfast buffet off the freeway ramp. When it is withdrawn from them by the mandate of events, they will be furious.

Given the history of the region and the predilections of its dominant ethnic group, one might imagine that they will want to take out their gall and grievance on the half-African politician who presides over the situation. Among the ever-expanding classes dis-entitled from the so-called American Dream, the crisis is only marginally different in other regions of the nation. Mr. Obama faces a range of awful dilemmas, and it is painful to see them go unrecognized and unacknowledged by his White House. It’s hard to imagine that the president and his elite advisors are blind to these equations, but as the weeks tick by they seem stuck in a box of limited perception.

We’re in a strange hiatus for now. “Hope” levitates the legitimacy of the dollar, the stock markets, and the authority of leadership. In the background, implosion continues, debt goes unpaid, banks ignore bad loans to keep them off their books, jobs and incomes vanish, cars and other things go unsold, and a tragic wishfulness strains to sustain the unsustainable. Our expectations are inconsistent with what is happening to us.

It will be very painful for us to walk away from the car-centered life. Half the population faces the ugly obstacle of being hopelessly over-invested in a suburban house and all the life-ways associated with it. There will be no easy way out for them, whatever they chose to do politically, whatever noise they make, whomever they scapegoat, whatever fantasies they cultivate about what the world owes them, or who they think they are.

Mr. Obama should not waste another week pretending that we can keep this old system going. The public needs to know that we will be making our livings differently, inhabiting the landscape differently, and spending our days and nights differently — even while we suffer our losses. The public needs to hear this from more figures than Mr. Obama, too, from leaders in the state capitals, and the agencies, and business and education and what remains of the clergy. But somebody has to set in motion the chain of recognition, or events will soon do it for us.

Peace, love and happiness...until next time...

Tidbits From The Web #53

Disney World photo FAIL!
Make the Girl Dance...BABY BABY BABY!

Embrace flexible solar cells...

Health care reform my ARSE!
Japanese baseball FAIL!

An expert's guide to YouTube...

The rules of time travel...
Voyeurism to the next level...
Bike jump FAIL!
Now that's a food fight...
Get your inner confidence...
Why you might miss New York...
Just in time for summer...amazing jellyfish video!
The promises that matter...
Why life is broken...
Gymnastics FAIL!
Please don't have sex with steel benches...
New Yorkers don't feel at HOME...
Fireman FAIL!

Isn't outsourcing grand?

Music video FAIL!
Advent of sock...

One of the BEST Commencement Speeches of All Time


Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life's setbacks -- including death itself.

I tend to agree with Steve Jobs' assessment that Stanford is one of the best colleges in the world. Even though most of this speech was read, the content is absolutely phenomenal and should be listened to several times. It’s one of the best 15-minute investments of your time you can ever make.

"The Difference Between Joy and Pleasure..."

As we move along the path in life, in search of many things, we often make the mistake of seeking short term pleasure at the cost of long term joy. Many people confuse the two. Imagine going out to a gourmet restaurant every night for a month and feasting on great meals and luscious desserts. This is pleasure. But look at yourself in the mirror after that month and I don't think you will be so joyous. As joy is much deeper, it is being deeply satisfied with an accomplishment. If instead, you had put together a serious program, of eating healthy and fitness - and worked on it for 6 months - you would actually feel the joy of accomplishment and joy of where you are at.

Pleasure generally requires no effort. Joy on the other hand, has an aspect of pleasure, but its core existence is connected to working hard and succeeding at something. Joy is seeing your children graduate college or moving into a new home. Joy is the feeling after you have learned a new language or have elevated yourself spiritually. Pleasure is not something negative at all. It is a gift we have been given. We just have to learn moderation and to appreciate true vs. passing values.

This is Kristos reminding you to push hard in life and you will see real joy.

ACHIEVING SUCCESS BY EXPECTING SUCCESS

by Zig Ziglar

When you plan and prepare carefully, you can legitimately expect to have success in your efforts. When you recognize and develop the winning qualities that you were born with, the winner you were born to be emerges. When you plan and prepare to make a sale, for example, you can legitimately expect to make a sale. Although not all your expectations are going to come to pass, you give yourself an infinitely better chance of succeeding by taking the proper steps. Regardless of your goal--losing weight, making more sales, furthering your education, earning a promotion, saving money for a new home or an exotic vacation--you can expect to achieve your goal if you plan and prepare for it.

Also understand that the path from where you are to where you want to be is not always smooth and straight. The reason for the twists and bumps is simple, and it has nothing to do with you. It has more to do with the fact that not everyone is as interested in your success as you are. Some people may accidentally hinder your efforts; others who are in competition with you and have little or no integrity may try to sabotage your efforts.

Keep in mind, though, that when you hit those roadblocks your character, commitment, and attitude are the determining factors in your success... Carefully review your plan of action, seek wise counsel, and be particularly careful to feed your mind good information. An optimistic, positive mind is far more likely to come up with creative solutions than a mind that dwells on setbacks and difficulties.

Bottom line: expect success and you can achieve it!





J-Track Satellite Tracking

Have you ever wondered about those objects in the sky, those that appear to be stars but fly right by your field of vision? In all probability you've spotted a satellite. Now, J-Track, a service of NASA, will pinpoint the exact location of the various satellites. You can even set yourself up for e-mail notification for 'satellite prediction reports for up to 10 satellites (plus the Shuttle if it is flying). . . Each report gives you the times your chosen satellites are going to cross through your sky during the next three days, the approximate location, and the visible brightness.' No longer do you have to wonder whether you've spotted a UFO; the satellite tracker will let you know exactly what is that object in the sky or possibly add more credence to your UFO claim!


‘Dyeing’ to figure out how the brain works

Voltage-sensitive dye and optical recording techniques are giving neuroscientists at Georgetown University’s Department of Physiology and Biophysics, where Professor Jian-Young Wu has been conducting research on waves of neuronal activity, a new means for figuring out how the brain works. Full Article

DashTop Vehicle Infotainment System

Telemetria's DashTop is an in-dash platform that is fully customizable by the end user to enable a host of fleet productivity, safety, connectivity and management functionalities. The platform comes fully loaded with features such as: hands-free system operation, monitoring, recording and diagnostics of engine information, and built-in Smart Navigation. DashTop is built around the new Intel Atom processor, providing fast performance, power efficient design, rich graphics and multi-media experience, as well as integrated wireless for broadband connectivity and web browsing.

LOVE


The more you love, the more you can love--and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love.

Robert A. Heinlein


The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

Anais Nin

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
- Thomas A. Edison

Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee, and do not try to make the universe a blind alley.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

PARENTING

Once you bring a life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.

Elie Wiesel


A wise parent humours the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and advisor when his absolute rule shall cease.

Elizabeth Gaskell
North and South

Speak To My Lawyer...

A guy phones a law firm and says, "I want to speak to my lawyer."

The receptionist says, "I'm sorry, but your lawyer died last week."

The next day the same guy phones the law firm and says, "I want to speak to my lawyer."

Once again the receptionist replies, "I'm sorry, but your lawyer died last week."

The next day the guy makes his regular call to the law firm and say, "I want to speak to my lawyer."

"Excuse me sir," the receptionist says, "but this is third time I've had to tell you that your lawyer died last week. Why do you keep calling?"

The guy replies, "Because I love hearing it!"

Gassy Check Up...

A woman goes to her doctor next door and tell him the problems she's been having."Doctor, I've been having troubles with my farts, they're silent and have no smell.""That's weird, here, take these pills and come back in a week and tell me if they worked".So the woman takes the pills, twice a day, for a whole week, and then returns to the doctor a week later."Doctor, the pills you gave me are worse!""How come?" asks the doctor?"Well, my farts are loud now, but they still have no smell"."Good, now that we've unblocked your ears, let's get you some pills to clear up your nose".

Whiskey & Gunpowder

By James Howard Kunstler
May 19, 2009
Saratoga Springs, New York, U.S.A.

Decoupling from Reality

The Great Wish across America is to resume the life of comfort-and-convenience that seemed so nirvana-like just a few short years ago, when the very constellations of the heavens might have been renamed after heroic Atlanta realtors and Connecticut hedge fund warriors, and the boomer portfolios groaned with earnings, and millions of graying corporate salary mules dreamed of their approaching retirement to a satori of golf and Viagra, and the interior decorators grew so rich installing granite countertops that they could buy their own houses in the East Hampton, and every microcephalic parking valet in Las Vegas qualified for a bucket full of Ninja mortgages, and Lloyd Blankfein could dream of divorcing his wife to marry his cappuccino machine.

At the moment, there is tremendous hoopla and jubilation over the start-up of so many “shovel-ready” highway projects around America — as if what we need most are additional circumferential freeways to enhance the Happy Motoring lifestyle. How insane are we? Is this the only thing we know how to do?

I remain confident that the months ahead will introduce the American public and our leaders to a range of horrors that will begin to penetrate our addled collective imagination. We’re far from done with the crisis of banking and money and the related fiasco in mortgages — which translates into the very real situation of many people becoming homeless. It remains to be seen what may happen on the food production scene, but the current severe shortage of capital and the intense droughts shaping up around the world will resolve into a much clearer picture by mid-summer. The price of oil has resumed marching up and has now re-entered a range ($50-plus) that spun the airline industry into bankruptcy last time around. Enough carnage has already occurred on the jobs scene that the next act among many chronically jobless may tilt toward desperation, anger, and violence. The sporting goods shops aro und the nation are already rationing ammunition.

It’s not just the stock markets that have decoupled from reality as we enjoy the fragrant vapors of spring — it’s the entire conscious consensus of everybody holding the levers of power and opinion. To put it as simply as possible, we’re still sleepwalking into the future.

Bad Collateral

The wishes of the “green shoots and mustard seed” crowd really hinge on whether the various organs of the suburban economy can be jump-started back to life — the production home-builders, the granite countertop outfitters, the mall and strip-mall gang, the national chain discount retailers, all the people who make Happy Motoring possible from the factory to the showroom, and, of course, the banks who shovel money into these enterprises.

All these organs of our now-former economy are gravely impaired, and a realistic appraisal of them would have to conclude that they’ve entered the zone of congestive failure. The choice we face really comes down to this: do we put our dwindling resources and “hopes” into resuscitating those dying systems, or do we move forward to the next chapter of American life, cut our losses, and make new arrangements more consistent with the realities on offer from the universe? To take it a step further, can we remain one nation, a common culture, without such a conscious re-purposing of our collective spirit?

The bizarre spectacle being played out right now by President Obama and his team only adds layers of mystery and mystification to this big question. It is so dispiriting to see Mr. Obama’s White House mount a campaign to sustain the unsustainable in the economic realm. Everything they’ve done for four months involving money management and enterprise policy — from backstopping hopeless banks, to gaming the bankruptcies of the big car companies, to the bungled efforts to prop up artificially-high house prices — amounts to a gigantic exercise in futility. Worse, it gives off odors of dishonesty or stupidity, since the ominous tendings of our system are so starkly self-evident.

Not least of the problems entailed in all this are the scary political consequences. It’s one thing for a business such as a bank to fail; its another thing for the public to lose confidence in banking, or their own currency, or the credibility of all the people who work in banking, or the authority of those charged to regulate these activities, or the courts and their officers who are supposed to adjudicate misconduct in them. When faith in all these things starts to go, all bets are off for even larger social constructs like democracy, justice, and the destiny of a federal republic.

The Obama White House has very quickly painted itself into a corner on these things. The so-called bank “stress test” couldn’t have backfired more completely. Rather than bolster confidence in our money system and the people who run it, it only made the system appear more obviously corrupt. It made the Treasury Department (and the White House by extension) look idiotic for concocting it. Worse, the game of allowing the banks to audit themselves, and cook their books under newly jiggered accounting rules, only made them look less sound and trustworthy, and their executives more venal and mendacious. The stress test scam also virtually guaranteed that the banks will not get another dime out of congress — even while it is common knowledge that they will desperately need quadrillions more dimes in the months ahead.

Who knows what the point of this ludicrous exercise was? Observers in all corners of the media saw through it, and the public has only been made more cynical, and is now so furious over related stunts like AIG using taxpayer money to pay back swaps bets to Goldman Sachs that there is a whiff of revolution in the American air for the first time, really, since 1861. A lot of reasonable people see a good chance that our society will sink into disorder if these trends continue, and these fears could beat a path into radical politics, even the frightful prospect of coup d’etat — not something that I advocate, by the way.

The president is playing with fire on all this. The old economy is not going to recover, and so far he has not used his rhetorical talents to articulate what the next economy is likely to be about. It is reasonable to wonder whether he even really has a clear sense of it — and, based on the fatuous utterances of his economic mandarins like Larry Summers and Austan Goolsby, this team is really behind the curve.

There are plenty of things you can state about the economy past and future with some confidence right now:

• Cheap energy is over and our wishes for alt.energy are currently inconsistent with reality, meaning we have to live differently.
  
  
• We have to downscale and re-localize our major economic activities: food production, commerce and manufacturing, banking, schooling, etc.
  
  
• We can’t hope to have a stable money system unless we allow a workout of unpayable debt to proceed.
  
  
• Even if we can do this, universal easy credit is a thing of the past. From now on, we have to save for the things we want and run our businesses and households on accounts receivable.
  
  
• Major demographic shifts are inevitable as it becomes necessary to let go of suburbia and reactivate our derelict towns and smaller cities (and allow our giant metroplexes to contract).
  
  
• We have to face the truth that our major social contracts cannot be met, namely the continuation of social security as we know it and probably all pension arrangements. We’ll probably have to change household arrangements to make up for these losses.
  
  
• Health care will have to go through a revolution more comprehensive than just changing how we pay for it. Like everything else, it will have to downscale, re-localize, and become more rigorous.

We’re not going to rescue the banks. The collateral for their loans is no good and it will only lose more value. All those tract houses on the cul-de-sacs of America and scattered on the out-parcels of our tragically subdivided farming landscape will only lose value, one way or another, in the years ahead. Right now they’re simply losing inflated cash value — and that has been bad enough to sink the banks. In the months and years ahead, they’ll lose their sheer usefulness as the distances once mitigated by cheap gasoline loom larger again, and the jobs vanish and incomes with them, and the supermarket shelves cease to groan with eighty-seven different varieties of flavored coffee creamers, and one-by-one the national chain stores shutter, and the theme parks, and the Nascar ovals, and the malls, and the colossal superfluous cretin-cargo of consumer nonsense that we’ve bee n daydreaming in gets blown away in a hurricane of change that we were not ready to believe in.

Peace, love and hapiness...until next time...