If you've wanted to know what Fred's thought are, watch the video on this link.  Since it's on Fox News and features a conservative I can hear the howls already.  Check it out anyway.  Lots of links and articles too.

http://www.fredhub.com/

Mark (motopoet) sent this to me this morning and  it's a hoot.  It actually works but the most fun I had was letting it just run. 

Try it out.

http://www.msdewey.com/

This is from the British (original) version of American Idol.  Paul Potts, a mobile phone salesman sings Nessun Dorma to the great surprise of the panel.  Give it a try and watch the audience as well as the panels faces..  Some of you may have seen it but it's worth another listen.

Click here: YouTube - Paul Potts singing Opera

Below is Pavarotti singing the same aria.

Just in on the 11 o'clock news.  The Kern County employees union members (SEIU) voted to reject the county's final offer and strike.  They will meet to decide how and when the strike will take place.

(edited)  Story in todays paper.  (Sunday)http://www.bakersfield.com/...

 I got this in email and couldn't resist sharing.  If you've seen it before I hope you enjoyed it.  If you haven't, I hope you really enjoy it.  My favorite was about running boards.

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Interesting video.

 http://www.terrorismawarene...

I knowIknowIknow...these have been around a while but with the smoke headed toward L.A. like it should be, and our cover gone, I'm told it's heating up again..  That means it's time for our "It's So Hot"  blog again.  This should be our last real heat wave of the summer.  Be grateful..we really skated with the heat this year.

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Courtesy of the morning email.

GLOBAL WARMING: CASE NOT CLOSED

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, August 19, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/...

Second of two parts

     If there's anything climate-change crusaders are adamant about, it is that the science of the matter is settled. That greenhouse gases emitted through human activity are causing the planet to warm dangerously, they say, is an established fact; only a charlatan would claim otherwise. In the words of Al Gore, America's leading global warming apostle: "The debate among the scientists is over. There's no more debate. We face a planetary emergency. . . . There is no more scientific debate among serious people who've looked at the evidence."

     But as with other claims Gore has made over the years ("I took the initiative in creating the Internet"), this one doesn't quite mesh with reality.

     Scientists and other "serious people" who question the global warming disaster narrative are not hard to find. Last year 60 of them sent a letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada, urging him to undertake "a proper assessment of recent developments in climate science" and disputing the contention that "a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause." The letter cautioned that "observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models" and warned that since the study of climate change is relatively new, "it may be many years yet before we properly understand the earth's climate system."

     Among those signing the letter to Harper were Fred Singer, the former director of the US Weather Satellite Service; Ian Clark, hydrogeology and paleoclimatology specialist at the University of Ottawa; Hendrik Tennekes, the former director of research at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute; physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton; the University of Alabama's Roy Spencer, formerly senior scientist in climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. -- plus 55 other specialists in climate science and related disciplines.

     The debate among the scientists is over?

     NASA administrator Michael Griffin told National Public Radio in May that while the general trend of global warming exists, that doesn't make it "a problem we must wrestle with." To insist that any change in climate must be bad news "is to assume that the . . . earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have." The planet's temperature has been fluctuating for millennia, he added. "I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change."

     In 2003, environmental scientists Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch surveyed 530 of their peers in 27 countries on topics related to global warming. One question asked: "To what extent do you agree or disagree that climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes?" On a scale of 1 (strongly agree) to 7 (strongly disagree), the average score was 3.62, reflecting no clear consensus.

     Asked whether abrupt climate changes will wreak devastation in some areas of the world, the percentage of scientists strongly agreeing (9.1) was nearly identical to the percentage strongly disagreeing (9.0). Another question asked: To what degree might global warming prove *beneficial* for some societies? A striking 34 percent of the scientists answered 1 or 2 (a great degree of benefit); just 8.3 percent answered 6 or 7 (very little/no benefit).

     Plainly, the science *isn't* settled. It changes all the time.

     Take the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Unlike its previous report in 2001, which foresaw a possible rise in sea levels over the next century of around 3 feet, the new report cuts that figure in half, to about 17 inches. Why the revision? "Mainly because of improved information," the IPCC notes in the fine print. It goes on to note that even its latest estimate involves some guesswork: "Understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood." The science is getting better, but it's far from settled.

     Or take the discovery just this month that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year in the continental United States since record-keeping began in 1880. NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies quietly changed its ranking after a Canadian statistician discovered an error in the official calculations. Under the new data, five of the 10 hottest US years on record occurred before 1940; just three were in the past decade.

     Climate scientists are still trying to get the basics right. The Aug. 10 issue of Science magazine notes that many researchers are only beginning to factor the planet's natural -- i.e., not anthropogenic -- climate variations into their calculations. "Until now," reports Science, "climate forecasters who worry about what greenhouse gases could be doing to climate have ignored what's happening naturally. . . . In this issue, researchers take their first stab at forecasting climate a decade ahead with current conditions in mind."

     Their first stab, please note, not their last. The science of climate change is still young and unsettled. Years of trial and error are still to come. Al Gore notwithstanding, the debate is hardly over.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for the Boston Globe.)

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Received in email today. 

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If you don't accomplish anything else today, you should watch this video.
Regardless of what you may think of him, Gingrich seems to be one political person who is aware of the huge dangers that are developing for our future.

After all the hoopla about the closing of all those altruistic medical marijuana shops, I'm wondering why no one posted this article.

http://www.bakersfield.com/...

Some of us tried to discuss this but were overshouted by people determined that these cards were only issued help the ill or injured.

larger view

I hate cell phones.  Even though they've saved me time and again with flat tires, hitting metal on the freeway and ripping my tire necessitating a call to AAA and so on, I still hate them.

Questions for you folks.  When you're with a companion and your cell phone rings, do you answer it or let it go to voice mail?  If you answer it, do you chat with the caller or do you excuse yourself saying you can't talk at that moment?

Not too many things are more aggravating than to go to lunch with someone and have that someone keep answering their phone and talking with someone else.  I don't know about you, but I feel like that invisible person is more important than I am.  What do you do while your companion is chatting away?  Do you hum?  Do you tap your fingers?  Do you do deep sighs?

Before we, or I,  had a cell phone, people called the house and if we/I didn't answer, they left a message.  What happened to that concept? 

Back in the dark ages, when people came to your house to visit, did you answer your house phone and chat away while guests sat there twiddling their thumbs?  Has it never occured to some folks that the cell phone just has a longer leash but isn't any more important?  When did we decide that we had to be in constant contact with everyone we know at all times?   It's really rude when you're in the middle of telling a story, or spilling your feelings to a friend that riiiinnnggg (more likely lively tunes) and your listener is off listening to someone else.  After the call, they return their attention to you and say "now, what were you saying?"   Too late..the moment was lost.

We've talked about cell phones in movies, and lack of privacy..all that stuff.  But what about every day, ordinary courtesy?

I hate cell phones.

David S. Broder: Shaking up presidential race

Sacramento Bee, Opinion

David S. Broder

When Fred Thompson makes his long-delayed entrance into the Republican presidential race, he will not tiptoe quietly.

Instead, he will try to shake up the establishment candidates of both parties by depicting a nation in peril from fiscal and security threats -- and prescribing tough cures he says others shrink from offering.

In a two-hour conversation over coffee at a restaurant near his Virginia headquarters, the former senator from Tennessee said that when he joins the battle next month, he "will take some risks that others are not willing to take, in terms of forcing a dialogue on our entitlement situation, our military situation and what it's going to cost" to assure the nation's future.

After spending most of the last few years on TV's "Law and Order," and starting a new family with two children under 4, the 65-year-old lawyer says he finds himself motivated for the first time to seek the White House.

"There's no reason for me to run just to be president," he said.

"I don't desire the emoluments of the office. I don't want to live a lie and clever my way to the nomination or election. But if you can put your ideas out there -- different, more far-reaching ideas -- that is worth doing." Thompson, like many of the others running, has caught a strong whiff of the public disillusionment with both parties in Washington -- and the partisanship that has infected Congress, helping to speed his own departure from the Senate.

But he says he thinks that the public is looking for a different kind of leadership. "I think a president could go to the American people and say, 'Here's what we need to be doing. and I'm willing to go half-way.' Now you have to make them (the opposition) go half-way." The approach Thompson says he's contemplating is one that will step on many sensitive political toes. When he says "we're getting a free ride" fighting a necessary war in Iraq with an undersized military establishment, "wearing out our people and equipment," it sounds like a criticism of the president and the Pentagon.

When he says he would have opposed adding the prescription drug benefit to Medicare, "a $17 trillion add-on to a program that's going bankrupt," he is fighting the bipartisan judgment of the last Congress.

When he says the FBI is perhaps incapable of morphing itself into the smart domestic security agency the country needs, he is attacking another sacred cow.

Thompson repeatedly cites two texts as fueling his concern about the country's future. One is "Government at the Brink," a two-volume report he issued as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee at the start of the Bush administration in 2001 and handed to the new president's budget director as a checklist of urgent management problems in Washington.

The difficulties outlined in federal procurement, personnel, finances and information technology remain today, Thompson said, and increasingly "threaten national security." His second sourcebook contains the scary reports from Comptroller General David Walker, the head of the Governmental Accountability Office, on the long-term fiscal crisis spawned by the aging of the American population and the runaway costs of health care. Walker labels the current patterns of federal spending "unsustainable," and warns that unless action is taken soon to improve both sides of the government's fiscal ledger -- spending and revenues -- the next generation will suffer.

"Nobody in Congress or on either side in the presidential race wants to deal with it," Thompson said. "So we just rock along and try to maintain the status quo. Republicans say keep the tax cuts; Democrats say keep the entitlements. And we become a less unified country in the process, with a tax code that has become an unholy mess, and all we do is tinker around the edges." Thompson readily concedes that he does not know "where all those chips are going to fall" when he starts challenging members of various interest groups to look beyond their individual agendas and weigh the sacrifices that could assure a better future for their children.

But these issues -- national security and the fiscal crisis of an aging society with runaway heath care costs -- "are worth a portion of a man's life. If I can't get elected talking that way, I probably don't deserve to be elected."

Thompson says "I feel free to do it" his own way, and that freedom may just be enough to shake up the presidential race.

They have me on their mailing list so I get these new signs regularly.   I'm still amazed the guy doesn't get sued.  Maybe it's because so many people agree with him.

If the link above isn't to your liking..use this one...  The first link has two sogns..the one for the site has one but you can find all of them.

http://www.casadice.com/out...

Imagine if United States manufacturing company heads were executed or committed suicide after a major disaster or recall of products.

Those Chinese sure know how to find a scapegoat.

http://money.aol.com/news/a...

larger view

Comments?

ZIMBABWE'S HORRORS

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, August 12, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/...

     Given the "massive risk to life" the regime poses, says Pius Ncube, the archbishop of Bulawayo, "I think it is justified for Britain to raid Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe. We should do it ourselves but there's too much fear. I'm ready to lead the people, guns blazing, but the people are not ready." Millions of Zimbabweans have fled the country, and those who remain tend to be hungry, impoverished, and intimidated by Mugabe and his goons. "How can you expect people to rise up," Ncube asks, "when even our church services are attended by state intelligence people?"

     The archbishop, normally an advocate of nonviolence, is no saber-rattler. But given the misery and murder spawned by Mugabe and his fascist Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, it is immoral *not* to fight them. "If you are no longer serving your people and are choosing death for them," says Ncube, "then certainly . . . stronger nations have a right to put you down."

     Considering that "stronger nations" have been unwilling to put down Omar al-Bashir, the head of Sudan's Islamist regime that is perpetrating genocide in Darfur, the likelihood that they will muster the fortitude to drive Mugabe from power in Zimbabwe is, in a word, nil. Instead they will go on issuing empty condemnations, like the Bush administration's recent statement that it "deplores actions taken by the Mugabe regime," but is "ready to engage a new Zimbabwean government committed to democracy, human rights, sound economic policy, and the rule of law."

     Unfortunately, hollow pieties from the free world will not end the chaos and cruelty that have turned Zimbabwe into a hellhole. In the nation once known as the breadbasket of Africa, Mugabe's deranged policies are starving millions. In a land many hoped would be a model of postcolonial self-government, opposition politicians are beaten and imprisoned and elections are blatantly rigged to keep ZANU-PF in power. In a country where a decade ago the currency traded at the rate of eight Zimbabwe dollars to $1, it now takes 200,000 Zimbabwe dollars to buy a single American dollar.

     The wretchedness that is Mugabe's Zimbabwe was captured recently by New York Times reporter Michael Wines, who described what happened when the dictator -- in the face of hyperinflation estimated at more than 10,000 percent a year -- commanded merchants nationwide to cut their prices in half or face jail time and the confiscation of their businesses:

     "Bread, sugar, and cornmeal, staples of every Zimbabwean's diet, have vanished. . . . Meat is virtually nonexistent . . . Gasoline is nearly unobtainable. Hospital patients are dying for lack of basic medical supplies. Power blackouts and water cutoffs are endemic. Manufacturing has slowed to a crawl because few businesses can produce goods for less than their government-imposed sale prices. Raw materials are drying up because suppliers are being forced to sell to factories at a loss . . . As many as 4,000 businesspeople have been arrested, fined, or jailed."

     Eighty percent of Zimbabwe's adults are now unemployed. Life expectancy has plummeted to 37 years. The death rate for children 5 and under has soared 65 percent since 1990. While Mugabe's kleptocratic cronies and thugs drive expensive cars, build elaborate mansions, and amass fortunes by manipulating the currency market, ordinary citizens are reduced to unspeakable degradation. Schoolteachers sell themselves for sex in order to feed their children, the Times of London reports. A man in Rushinga was convicted of killing his 10-year-old son with an ax handle for eating four mice meant for the family's lunch. One-time accountants, bankers, headmasters -- former middle-class professionals now refugees in South Africa -- survive through menial labor or begging in the streets.

     Yet Mugabe, with his Hitler-style moustache and armed loyalists, remains firmly in control.

     "Anyone who is ready to starve his people to death for the sake of power is a murderer," Archbishop Ncube says. "What more does he have to do?"

     Countless lives could be saved, and incalculable suffering ended, if Mugabe were forced from power. A detachment of US Marines, I wrote on this page in 2002, could do the job on its lunch break. The British could do it. South Africa could do it.

     But of course no one will do anything. The death toll in Zimbabwe will continue to mount; the misery will continue to spread; the horror stories will continue to multiply. Cry, the beloved country.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

I don't know this guy, didn't look him up, am just posting an email I got this morning for your comments or thoughts....

http://www.bakersfield.com/...

Call me an old fogie but I'm not overly fond of skateboards whizzing by me or teens smoking and swearing (dropping the "F" bomb every other word) so having the police hang out with them for a while is OK with me.

I can hear it now..."Where are we supposed to go?"  Well, for starters, try not being loud, obnoxious, drunk, cussing, yelling, skateboarding, pushing and shoving and people might not pay attention to you. 

This will cause a ruckus and an outcry far and wide, but there must be some validity to it or there wouldn't have been complaints.  What the kids aren't taking into consideration is that the Marketplace is there for ALL to use...not just teens.

Last night I was watching an educational video (not English 101) and at the end the presenter was telling the people not to get discouraged because  "There's a rainbow at the end of the tunnel."  I was about half listening but when I heard that I went "HUH?"   I heard chuckles around the room so I knew some of them caught it too.

Do you have any favorite mixed metaphors?  Ones you've heard or even said yourself?

SCRAP THE SCALPING LAWS

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/...

     I'm not a sports fan; never have been. Maybe that's why all the atmospherics surrounding ticket scalping raise more questions in my mind than they answer.

     For example: Why is someone who sells tickets to a Red Sox fan outside Fenway Park for a heavily inflated price called a "scalper," while someone who charges the same fan $4 for a bottle of water inside the stadium is called a "concessionaire"?

     Another question, admittedly not germane to the transaction itself: How can people who shudder with revulsion when Atlanta Braves fans do the "tomahawk chop," or who find Chief Wahoo, the Cleveland Indians' cheerful emblem, politically offensive, refer so disdainfully to the resale of tickets as "scalping"?

     But what I really don't understand about the scalping brouhaha is why anyone thinks the government should be involved in deciding how much a willing buyer can pay a willing seller for tickets to a lawful entertainment event. We all take it for granted that if you're willing to pay for the privilege, you can stay at the best hotel, live in the best neighborhood, eat at the best restaurant, or hire the best lawyer. So what accounts for the heavy breathing when some fans pay a premium in order to see Daisuke Matsuzaka take the mound or watch David Beckham bend it with the L.A. Galaxy? Or -- this isn't only about sports -- to hear Beyoncé sing "Irreplaceable" or catch a sold-out "Wicked" on Broadway?

     Actually, around the country much of the heavy breathing has been subsiding lately. On Aug. 1, Minnesota dumped an anti-scalping law dating back to 1913, enabling ticket-reselling scofflaws to finally come out of the shadows. "This country was built on free trade and now I have to worry about more competition," scalper Michael Stratton told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "But I don't have to worry about my daughters seeing me handcuffed."

     In New York, too, consenting adults can now publicly engage in supply and demand. A bill signed by Governor Eliot Spitzer in June largely deregulated the resale of tickets to theatres, concerts, and sporting events. "Ticket scalping laws historically have not worked," Spitzer said. "I think permitting a free market to work its magic there is the smart approach."

     They think the same thing in Florida, which repealed its anti-scalping law last year, and in Illinois, which embraced the free market in 2005, and in Connecticut, where reselling tickets at a profit will become legit this October.

     All told, 42 states have decided that the heavens won't collapse if people who own tickets to games and shows are free to sell them for whatever the market will bear -- as free as people who own real estate, shares of stock, Beanie Babies, or just about anything else. Last week, abandoning its irrational bias against scalping, Major League Baseball announced a five-year agreement with StubHub, a leading online reseller of tickets to entertainment events. Teams will recommend StubHub to fans who want to sell their tickets or buy some from other fans; in return, Major League Baseball will collect a share of StubHub's revenue.

     Here in the People's Republic of Massachusetts, however, a free market in tickets is still just a fantasy. For months, state legislators have been making noises about scrapping the state's archaic anti-scalping law, under which tickets may not be resold for more than $2 above face value. But while Beacon Hill dithers, Boston's mayor and police department have launched a holy war against ticket resellers, 21 of whom have been arrested near Fenway Park so far this year. Most of those arrested have been charged with not one, not two, but *three* crimes -- ticket scalping, occupying a street for the resale of tickets, and unregistered hawking and peddling -- for which the combined penalty can be as much as $800 and a year in prison.

     With 45 murders in Boston so far this year -- five in the past week alone -- it strikes me as more than a little crazy to be siccing police officers on harmless ticket-sellers.

     But even if Boston were as safe as Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, treating scalpers as criminals would serve no public benefit. Price controls -- whether on gasoline, medical care, or baseball tickets -- are never a smart idea. They invariably distort the market, frustrate consumers, encourage hoarding, and lead to shortages. Letting buyers and sellers sort things out in a free market is the best way to keep the supply of any commodity available at a fair price.

     Want to see the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium later this month? As of yesterday, StubHub had tickets for as little as $26 apiece. I may not be a sports fan, but that doesn't sound like "scalping" to me.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

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Disclaimer...these signs may or may not be the opinion of the author of this blog.  However, I'm posting it anyway.  :-)

http://www.casadice.com/out...

Lessons in Life
By Regina Brett

The Plain Dealer, Cleveland , Ohio     To celebrate growing older, I once wrote lessons life taught me. It is the most-requested column I've ever written. My odometer rolls over to 50 this week, so here's an update:


Life isn't fair, but it's still good.

Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.

Don't take yourself so seriously.      No one else does.

Pay off your credit cards every month.

You don't have to win every argument.      Agree to disagree.

It's OK to get angry with God.      He can take it.

Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present.

Don't compare your life to others'.      You have no idea what their journey is all about.

If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it.

It's never too late to have a happy childhood.      But the second one is up to you and no one else.

Be eccentric now.      Don't wait for old age to wear purple.

Frame every so-called disaster with these words: "In five years, will this matter?"

Time heals almost everything.      Give time time.

Your job won't take care of you when you are sick.      Your friends will.       Stay in touch!

Growing old beats the alternative -- dying young.

If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back.

All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.

(Disclaimer:  As all things passed around the internet, this may, or may not be the original author of this piece.  Regardless of who wrote it, it's great advice.)

Class action lawsuit notification.  Pretty clever.  I received this in my snail mail today because I ordered business cards through them several years ago.

http://www.vistaprint.com/v...