"The Daily Show" returned from a two week hiatus Monday night, and could not have come back at a time more ripe for comedy. Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is currently under scrutiny for both his undisclosed tax returns and for his involvement with Bain Capital, the financial services company where he was CEO.
While the allegations -- namely, that Romney has been less-than honest about his finances and how long he was actually with Bain -- are heating up campaign tensions, Jon Stewart couldn't help but notice that the company's name bears a striking sonic resemblance to the name of a Batman villain.
"Bain. Not since Ayds diet candy suffered through their somewhat ill-timed 1980s 'Lose weight with Ayds!' sales campaign has a brand faced this type of challenge," he joked.
But in more serious analysis, Stewart took issue with Romney's evasive defense strategies. In reply to the Obama campaign's attack ad on Bain outsourcing, Romney claimed to be on a leave of absence during the time in question. The problem? He was still on the payroll for at least $100,000 a year. . . . . "
I admit to being a long time afficionado of the books and words of Maurice Sendak. An affair which began as I was finishing my undergrad work at L.A. State in 1963, and when his 'Where The Wild Things Are' was published, and my closest friend J. was pumping out yet another child. [Although she had never found a husband, she seemed to become impregnated with increassing regularity.]
Maurice Sendak was doing the same, but with phenomenal books for children.
Where the Wild Things Are (as read by Christopher Walken)
"Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet and host of the WGBH-produced TV series Nova ScienceNow talks about his passion for science, his efforts to make astronomy accessible, and why he doesn't think the sky is the limit."
You already may have heard that I'd be coming back in January with a new series on the public television station nearest you. But you may not have heard exactly why. It's not just that I lack retirement skills, as my wife and co-editor, Judith, keeps reminding me. Or that the squeaky rocking chair on the front porch got on my nerves. I'm coming back because in tumultuous times like these I relish the company of people who try to make sense of the tumult. These are the people I'll bring to our new broadcast, Moyers & Company.
Journalism has long been for me a continuing course in adult education. Given what's happening in this country, it's time to sign up for more classes. The lack of civility and common sense that has paralyzed our democracy, the vast economic and social inequality that sends both left and right raging into the streets, the corrosive influence of money in politics - we're in a tailspin with little hope for a course correction from our elected leadership or corporate-dominated media. The need for voices of reason, simple and eloquent, has rarely been stronger. ,,,"
As long as conservatives view the words "Happy Holidays" as a subtextual "F**k you and your Baby Jesus," there can be no peace
Fox News' annual "War On Christmas" coverage (and Jon Stewart's ensuing reaction segments) have become holiday traditions in and of themselves. This year, however, Stewart chose to debunk Fox's holiday paranoia in a slightly different way: declaring war on Christmas himself.
In part one, below, Stewart pinpoints who Fox News sees as this year's biggest Christmas offender: Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee, who's calling his state's Christmas tree a "holiday tree" instead. But Fox's outrage goes far beyond one person. A quick look at their recent segments showed that replacing "Christmas" with "holiday" not only puts our religious freedoms "on the rocks," but goes against everything the pilgrims and our founding fathers would have wanted.
Naturally, Stewart was ready with some light research to disprove all those claims. He also pointed out how Fox should be more outraged about the tax payer money funding all the Christmas decorations you see in public spaces (not to mention the atrocities that are Mariah Carey and Justin Bieber's Christmas songs) rather than worry about semantics. After a thorough takedown, Stewart left his desk to address the nation in a slightly more serious way: declaring his own war on Christmas.
"Fox, you take for granted the ubiquity of christmas, but if there has been a war, Christmas is the aggressor nation," Stewart explained. "As long as our enemies view the term 'Happy Holidays' as a subtextual, "F*ck you and your baby Jesus," there can be no peace."
It's time for the world to face the realities of climate change.
That is the message expressed by Al Gore's Climate Reality Project, which has launched "24 Hours of Reality," an event beginning at 7pm CT (8pm ET) on September 14, and running for 24 hours straight. It is a global event featuring 24 presenters in 24 time zones, who "will connect the dots between recent extreme weather events — including floods, droughts and storms — and the manmade pollution that is changing our climate."
The event comes on the heels of hurricanes, droughts, and other extreme weather events slamming the United States, and as the country ended its second-hottest summer ever recorded.
HuffPost blogger Rocky Kistner recently reported on the connection between extreme weather and climate change. According to his post, Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said "There is now a pervasive human influence in all climate events."
In a recent Mediaite interview with Climate Reality Project’s Alex Bogusky, Gore said:
Powerful polluters ... see it as a useful strategy to try to convince the public that the scientists are liars and that they're greedy and they're making stuff up. All in the service of their overarching strategy of creating enough doubt to persuade people that there shouldn't be any sense of urgency about addressing this crisis.
In anticipation of the event, the Climate Reality Project released video ads suggesting that when it comes to the climate crisis, "the fat lady has sung and the *#!? is hitting the fan."
You can watch the "24 Hours of Reality" event livestream in English here, beginning at 8pm ET, or click here to find the location where you would like to watch a presentation.
By now nearly everyone has heard about how the end of the Mayan calendar on 21 December 2012 is a sign of doom and destruction for the world. But how much of what has been written is actually based on facts?
In the vast Mesoamerican region which comprised northern Mexico to central America, there were two major groups of people, those who lived in the Aztec region and those who lived in the Mayan area. They had very differiing historical antecedents and cultural mythologies.
Mayan / Aztec Civilizations Mayans
The first clearly Maya settlements were established around 1800 BC in the Soconusco region of the Pacific Coast [southern Mexico]. The Maya centers of the southern lowlands went into decline during the 8th and 9th centuries and were abandoned shortly thereafter. This decline was coupled with a cessation of monumental inscriptions and large-scale architectural construction.There is no universally accepted theory to explain this collapse and the disappearaance of millions of people.
During the succeeding 'Postclassic period' [from the 10th to the early 16th century], development in the northern centers in Yucatan persisted. The Maya cities of the northern lowlands in Yucatán continued to exist until the Spanish colonization in the 16th century. The arrival of the Spanish marked the end of the Mayan civilization.
Aztecs
The true origin of the Mexicas [who would become the Aztecs] is uncertain. According to their legends, the Mexica tribe place of origin was 'Aztlán'. It is generally thought that Aztlán was somewhere to the north of the Valley of Mexico; the Mexicas eventually arrived on a small swampy island in Lake Texcoco where they founded their capital city of Tenochtitlan in 1325.
The Aztecs would, in the next 100 years, come to dominate the Valley of Mexico and extend its power to both the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific shore. Over this period, Tenochtitlan gradually became the dominant power of central Mexico.
In the spring of 1521 Hernan Cortes and his Spanish troops lay siege to Tenochtitlan, a battle that ended on August 13 with the destruction of the city, and the eventual collapse of the Aztec empire.
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Now that the brief history lesson is over, time for a few facts about the '2012 Mayan Calendar Doomsday Scenario'. Google '2012' and you will come up with millions of sites to sift through. Very few of them have any authentic information, since the majority are little more than uninformed, sensationalist nonsense. And nearly all will have a photo of the 'Aztec Calendar Stone' [pictured below, and which is NOT Mayan and has nothing to do with the Mayans] and just might be your first clue that the owners of the site don't know what they are talking about.
A notable exception is the site of Mark Van Stone, a Mayan epigrapher.
The Maya Cosmic Prophecy: From Sensation to Sensibility
"Maya Scholars, in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador and North America, have been watching with amusement and dismay as self-styled experts proclaim that ancient Maya prophets foretold an earth-shattering happening to occur December 21, 2012. This predicted phenomenon gets described in contradictory but often cataclysmic fashion--as an ecological collapse, a sunspot storm, a rare cosmic conjunction of the earth, sun, and the galactic center, a new and awesome stage of our evolution, and even a sudden reversal of the Earth's magnetic field which will erase all our computer drives. One even predicts the earth's initiation into a Galactic Federation, whose elders have been accelerating our evolution with a "galactic beam" for the last 5000 years. In sum, the world as we know it will suddenly come to a screeching halt.
These predictions are alleged to be prophecies by so-called "Ancient Mayans" whose "astronomically precise" calendar supposedly terminates on that date. According to such accounts, these mysterious Maya geniuses appeared suddenly, built an extraordinary civilization, designed in it clues for us, and then suddenly, inexplicably, vanished, as if they had completed their terrestrial mission. These same experts claim special credibility for the Maya prophecies by asserting that these historic sages, with their possible extraterrestrial origins, had tapped into an astonishing esoteric wisdom. . . . . . "
Is the world really going to end? Did the Maya really believe the world would end?
There is nothing in the Maya or Aztec or ancient Mesoamerican prophecy to suggest that they prophesied a sudden or major change of any sort in 2012. The notion of a "Great Cycle" coming to an end is completely a modern invention. "
David Morrison: Surviving 2012 and Other Cosmic Disasters
A video of a Chinese male cheerleader has hit the web and instantly became an Internet sensation. The identity of the person is yet to be announced, but some assume him to be a student from Shandong University of Science and Technology.
The student, dressed up in a skirt, hopped, kicked, threw his pom-pons in the air, and moved just like the other girl cheerleaders. He was also given a solo moment toward the end to steal the show for the night.
My favorite comment, "Sure, he might be gay. OR he might just be the smartest motherfucker in the entire school."
First posted on YouKu, Chinese equivalent of YouTube.
[Male cheerleaders are nothing new (remember America's last president), but we haven't seen a male cheerleader with moves quite this good. This guy has got the pep, the attitude and even the sequined skirt and skimpy top--and totally steals the show away from the girls. The cheerleaders are performing a half-time routine at a college basketball game, and Ministry of Tofu has translated a number of funny comments to the video--and they are generally positive.
He's now know as Coquettish Brother [风骚哥] in the netizen world. But what's so awesome about the video is that the cheerleaders made the decision to have this effervescent guy the star of the squad. Check out his solo moves to near the end of the video.]
Rachel Maddow covered the passage of same-sex marriage legislation in New York live on MSNBC Friday night.
Maddow, who is one of just three openly gay cable news anchors on television, let the cheers of the crowd play uninterrupted for minutes after the successful vote was announced.
"This will become law," she said, adding that the number of people in the United States "for whom same-sex marriage rights are a reality" had just doubled.
A sad, sad day for conservatives and religious bigots who continue to insist, without any rational justification, that some people are more equal that others.
Currently in the world there are ten countries have legalized same-sex marriage in the past decade. Those countries are: Canada, Belgium, Spain, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Iceland and Argentina.
"Last week, a number of religious freedom activists, bloggers and organizations were alerted by Sgt. Justin Griffith, a soldier at Fort Bragg, N.C., to a mandatory U.S. Army survey called the "Soldier Fitness Tracker." One of the areas included in this survey, which measures a soldier's fitness in a number of areas, is "spiritual" fitness. According to his survey results, Sgt. Griffith is unfit to serve. . . . . ."
Test Was Designed by Psychologist Who Inspired CIA's Torture Program
An experimental, Army mental-health, fitness initiative designed by the same psychologist whose work heavily influenced the psychological aspects of the Bush administration's torture program is under fire by civil rights groups and hundreds of active-duty soldiers. They say it unconstitutionally requires enlistees to believe in God or a "higher power" in order to be deemed "spiritually fit" to serve in the Army. ..... the test contains questions written predominantly for soldiers who believe in God or another deity, meaning nonbelievers are guaranteed to score poorly and will be forced to participate in exercises that use religious imagery to "train" soldiers up to a satisfactory level of spirituality.
The growing controversy over military chaplains using the armed forces to spread the Word.
Ever since former president George W. Bush referred to the war on terror as a “crusade” in the days after the September 11 attacks, many have charged that the United States was conducting a holy war, pitting a Christian America against the Muslim world. That perception grew as prominent military leaders such as Lt. Gen. William Boykin described the wars in evangelical terms, casting the U.S. military as the "army of God." Although President Obama addressed the Muslim world this month in an attempt to undo the Bush administration's legacy of militant Christian rhetoric that often antagonized Muslim countries, several recent stories have framed the issue as a wider problem of an evangelical military culture that sees spreading Christianity as part of its mission.
A May article in Harper’s by Jeff Sharlet illustrated a military engaged in an internal battle over religious practice. Then came news about former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s Scripture-themed briefings to President Bush that paired war scenes with Bible verses. Later in May, Al-Jazeera broadcast clips filmed in 2008 showing stacks of Bibles translated into Pashto and Dari at the U.S. air base in Bagram and featuring the chief of U.S. military chaplains in Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, telling soldiers to “hunt people for Jesus.”
Jim Ammerman is the founder of an organization called the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches (CFGC), which provides the official endorsements for 270 chaplains and chaplain candidates in the U.S. military (including the disgraced Gordon Klingenschmitt, who retains his endorsement from the group despite having been discharged from the military). Ammerman was himself an Army Colonel.
