Toon

World Map According to Americans

Jambo! Kenya's Biggest Music Video

This Kenyan group, "Just a Band" did a music video for their song "Ha-He" with all the flavor of blaxploitation, Tarantino and Kung-Fu. It's going viral in Kenya. Pretty sweet.

David Simon does New Orleans

Check out the NYT Mag article on David Simon's new series on post-Katrina New Orleans. . . can't wait.

Toon

This Guy Saw the Wall Street Collapse Coming - and Cashed In

Michael Lewis has an excellent exerpt from his forthcoming book in Vanity Fair on Michael Burry, an ex-doctor with a penchant for trading who started a fund and made a killing off credit default swaps before anyone on Wall Street knew what he was up to.

This is What the GOP Wants to Repeal

Within a year

-- Provides a $250 rebate to Medicare prescription drug plan beneficiaries whose initial benefits run out.

90 days after enactment

-- Provides immediate access to high-risk pools for people who have no insurance because of preexisting conditions.

Six months after enactment

-- Bars insurers from denying people coverage when they get sick.

-- Bars insurers from denying coverage to children who have preexisting conditions.

-- Bars insurers from imposing lifetime caps on coverage.

-- Requires insurers to allow young people to stay on their parents' policies until age 26.

2011

-- Requires individual and small group market insurance plans to spend 80 percent of premium dollars on medical services. Large group plans would have to spend at least 85 percent.

2013

-- Increases the Medicare payroll tax and expands it to dividend, interest and other unearned income for singles earning more than $200,000 and joint filers making more than $250,000.

2014

-- Provides subsidies for families earning up to 400 percent of the poverty level -- or, under current guidelines, about $88,000 a year -- to purchase health insurance.

-- Requires most employers to provide coverage or face penalties.

-- Requires most people to obtain coverage or face penalties.

2018

-- Imposes a 40 percent excise tax on high-end insurance policies.

By 2019

-- Expands health insurance coverage to 32 million people.

SOURCES: Speaker of the House, Congressional Budget Office, Kaiser Family Foundation

-- McClatchy Newspapers

FDR, LBJ, BHO

Legacy.

Glenn Beck Gets Done

MUST SEE TV: watch Jon Stewart spend the first half of the show spoofing and mocking Glenn Beck.

"Collapse" The Movie

I've forgotten to post about this, but I saw Collapse a few weeks ago at this little indie college theater - and it's really incredible. It's a documentary based around an interview, and commentary, by one guy, Michael Ruppert, discussing the "everything comes to a head" scenario that ends up with collapse: peak oil, peak soil, peak currency, you name it. It's undeniable. Start considering the "paradigm shift" we will encounter when things change.

Watch the Trailer here.

A Dose of Truth!

(via VH1) Check out this YouTube video on the "Story of Stuff" - it's a great, brief, animated explanation of how our linear consumer society is on a dead-end course. Collapse - if we don't change the way we consume.

At Long Last: Does the 2nd Amendment Apply to the States?

This is the question that the Supreme Court will hear arguments on tomorrow - whether the Heller decision that found an "individual" right of gun ownership in DC (a federal enclave) will be incorporated to the States via the 14th Amendment.

Where does Coal Come From??

Back in December, Talk of the Nation did a segment on Christopher Lloyd's new book "What on Earth Evolved" which discusses the 100 most important species in the Earth's evolution. This is the part that really stuck out to me:

CONAN: And speaking of forests, there is a species of which I had never heard called lepidodendron

Mr. LLOYD: Yeah.

CONAN: which is - I perhaps put in Irish. But I'm sure it's got an apostrophe there after the O. But anyway, this was a species of tree which vanished a long time ago, and only flowered at the very top and once in its life.

Mr. LLOYD: That's absolutely right. And to think about it, actually, bamboos only flower once in their life. So it is a sort of ancient habit of some plants. But the lepidodendron tree was amazingly successful. It was the first really, really successful tree that evolved about 320, 350 million years ago. And it would - there were like giant telegraph polls. So they would shoot up incredibly quickly in a race to try and get to a light.

And because they didn't have any branches or leaves on their trunks, but only at the top, they could grow incredibly densely. So they're the most densely packed forests. And then therefore when they die, they would fall over and they'd all fall over on top of each other and they'd never properly rot because there were layers and layers of these trees in the forests and the air could never really get to them.

So as the sediment built up and as the forests were flooded, as the seas rose and things, all these deposits of these trees got pressed and mashed up in the geological process of the earth, and have become for us the most valuable commodity, really, over the last 200 or 300 years to man, and that is coal. So most of the coal deposits, the best coal deposits, actually, are the ancient remains of lepidodendron trees.

CONAN: So think about West Virginia or Kentucky or parts of Wyoming covered

Mr. LLOYD: You've got it.

CONAN: in all these trees.

Mr. LLOYD: Absolutely.

So, think about that the next time people argue that we "have enough" or will "find more" coal (or any other natural resource for that matter - like oil). Get it: coal is made from a telephone pole sized bamboo-like tree, that grew thick as thieves in West Virginia 350 MILLION years ago. No biggie.