Saturday, June 21, 2014

Funniest internet handle?

A clip from the Absolute Sounds (TAS) internet audio magazine’s forum where a recent article discussing identical bit streams being sent over a proprietary interface trouncing the same stream sent over USB. The quality of system required is astounding, and of course one has to wonder if the golden ears required to actually hear the difference in digital streams where the only difference is the transport is actually a definition of hallucination.

Anyway … that’s not what this is about …. this is about the funniest internet handle I have seen to date …

image

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

A video that explains very clearly the true level of devastation wrought in the USA in the last 35 years against the middle class and the poor …

I really enjoy the YouTube channel TYT (The Young Turks) because they give really good analyses of current events in language that is crisp and yet can be very amusing. But sometimes they are as serious as a heart attack and it is those essays that I like the best. Especially when delivered by Cenk Uygur, their lead reporter (not sure what title he actually holds.) And given that I have an interest in social politics, i.e. the policies that have destroyed the middle class in western society, I thought this video would be very interesting.

What an understatement.

Cenk goes through a series of statistics that show that the USA has fallen to #2 overall for both middle class wealth, and for median income. The first is what the middle brackets take home, and the second is the line where 50% of people make more and 50% less.

Each of these numbers is important because they show how the primary tax base is doing. And it is not doing well in the USA. In fact, it has been stagnant since 2000 where Canada and Britain (for example) have risen 19.7% …. that is a staggering difference. But to underscore it, Sweden and the Netherlands also had solid growth and even Spain had 4.1% growth!

So WTF happened? Well, that’s actually pretty simple … the 1% in the USA figured out how to sucker voters into believing in trickle down economics – where you reduce taxes on the 1% and they pay you back by trickling that down in jobs and health care and so on. So the voters gave them what they wanted and the socked all that money away, leaving the poor and middle class quite literally devastated.

I’ll stop there, since what you really should do is watch this video. If you are an American, this should give you serious pause. He’s not lying … he’s showing you want independent research says has really happened since 1979, not what the prevailing fantasy would have you believe. And if you are Canadian, Swedish, Dutch, etc. then this should not only make you proud, but also very wary of right wing governments and their penchant for servicing corporate greed. We absolutely cannot allow these same policies to devastate our countries’ middle classes and poor as they have the USA!

Saturday, June 7, 2014

The Greatest Car Ever Made – ‘57 Chevy

I’ve always loved this car. When I was 16, I wanted to buy one but could not find one that was not already ruined by rust. So I bought a ‘65 Plymouth Savoy instead and enjoyed it. Later, I got a ‘67 Mustang and then traded it for a ‘67 Chevy Convertible.

But I never got over getting the car of my birth year. Here is an image of the car that I shot at the Kanata Cruise Night last summer … you can see why it is so prized.

And this year the car and I both turn 57.

So when I saw this video I admit that my mind was totally blown ….