Tag Archives: studio

Donald Trump Isn’t Doing So Well In the Outside World

by NereidaMcneal Posted on June 19, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Josh Marshall says that Donald Trump’s meltdown of the past few weeks is just what happens when a fast-talking hustler moves from the cozy confines of a friendly audience to the harsh outside world where his longtime act is met with wariness and ridicule:

The Trump world is based on a self-contained, self-sustaining bullshit feedback loop. Trump isn’t racist. He’s actually the least racist person in America. Hispanics aren’t offended by his racist tirades against Judge Curiel. He’s going to do great with Hispanics!

….Trump’s problem is that the general election puts him in contact with voters outside the Trump bubble….That creates not only turbulence but turbulence that builds on itself because the interaction gets in the spokes of each of these two, fundamentally different idea systems. You’re seeing the most telling signs of that with the growing number of Republicans who, having already endorsed Trump, are now literally refusing to discuss him or simply walking away when his name is mentioned.

Like a one-joke comic trying to move up from the local nightclub circuit Trump is bombing now that he’s facing a more cosmopolitan audience. And that prompts me once again to share Al Franken’s description of what happened to high-flyer Rush Limbaugh in the early 90s when he decided to see if he could move beyond the narrow confines of his radio show:

Whenever he’s ventured outside the secure bubble of his studio, the results have been disastrous. In 1990, Limbaugh got what he thought was his chance at the big time, substitute hosting on Pat Sajak’s ailing CBS late night show. But the studio wasn’t packed with pre-screened dittoheads. When audience members started attacking him for having made fun of AIDS victims, he panicked, and they had to clear the studio. A CBS executive said, “He came out full of bluster and left a very shaken man. I had never seen a man sweat as much in my life.”

Limbaugh later apologized for joking about AIDS and promised to “not make fun of the dying.” But by early ’94, he had forgotten the other lesson: he needs a stacked deck. This time disaster struck on the Letterman show. The studio audience turned hostile almost immediately after Rush compared Hillary Clinton’s face to “a Pontiac hood ornament.” Evidently, that’s the kind of thing that kills with the dittoheads, but Letterman’s audience wasn’t buying.

This is Donald Trump’s new world. Sure, the dittoheads are still there. And they’re enough when you’re just trying to win the local nightclub circuit that calls itself the Republican Party these days. But it’s not enough to win a general election.

View the original here:

Donald Trump Isn’t Doing So Well In the Outside World

Posted in FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Isn’t Doing So Well In the Outside World

2015 Was by Far the Hottest Year on Record

by Myrna Posted on January 20, 2016

Global warming is real. Scientific Visualization Studio/Goddard Space Flight Center 2015 was almost certainly the hottest year since we began keeping records, according to data released today by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In a press release Wednesday, NASA stated that it was 94 percent confident that last year was the warmest since 1880. Here’s a chart from NOAA: NOAA/NASA “Record warmth was spread throughout the world,” said Thomas Karl, director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “Ten of 12 months were records. That’s the first time we’ve seen that.” NASA/NOAA Shattered global temperature records are becoming increasingly commonplace, thanks to climate change; with today’s announcement, all five of the hottest years on record have occurred in the last decade. But the amount by which 2015 shattered the previous record, in 2014, was itself a record, scientists said. That’s due in part to this year’s El Niño, characterized by exceptionally high temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. NASA/NOAA But Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said the effects of El Niño only really appeared in the last few months of the year, and that 2015 likely would have been a record year regardless. “2015 was warm right from the beginning; it didn’t start with El Niño,” he said. “The reason this is such a record is because of the long-term trend, and there is no evidence that trend has slowed or paused over the last two decades.” NASA/NOAA Schmidt added that El Niño is likely to persist into 2016, which means we could be in for a record-breaking year yet again. Credit:   2015 Was by Far the Hottest Year on Record ; ; ;

More – 

2015 Was by Far the Hottest Year on Record

Posted in eco-friendly, FF, For Dummies, G & F, GE, LAI, Monterey, ONA, OXO, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 2015 Was by Far the Hottest Year on Record

Kansas Republicans Have Come Up with a Disgraceful New Way to Screw the Poor

by ClaudioFitzGibb Posted on May 22, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Starting in July, a new law in Kansas will restrict the amount of cash a welfare recipient can take out of ATM’s to just $25 a day—a move that critics say introduces a whole new host of financial burdens—including high ATM fees and travel costs—when they access cash.

Max Ehrenfreund at the Washington Post explains:

Since most banking machines are stocked only with $20 bills, the $25 limit is effectively a $20 limit. A family seeking to withdraw even $200 in cash would have to visit an ATM 10 times a month, a real burden for a parent who might not have a car and might not live in a neighborhood where ATMs are easy to find.

The law, backed by a GOP-dominated Kansas legislature and Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, will benefit the pockets of large banks while taking money from poor families who rely on food stamps.

In Kansas’s system, every withdrawal incurs a $1 fee, and if the beneficiary doesn’t have a bank account, they will have to pay the ATM fee, too. Those fees might be worth it for some families, though, because the card issued by the state of Kansas isn’t like a debit card from an ordinary bank. Ordinary debit cards allow their holders to make purchases for free in stores. In Kansas, beneficiaries get two free purchases a month. After that, they pay 40 cents every time they use the card to buy something.

The ostensible rationale for this redistribution of wealth is to minimize waste and prevent low income residents from spending their money on non-essentials like alcohol and the much-feared lobster feast. This is the demonizing-the-poor trope that Republican lawmakers frequently deploy to justify punitive control over how low income people spend their money. In addition to the limit on withdrawals, the state’s new law carries restrictions to ludicrous levels by prohibiting spending on items such as swimming pools and fortune telling sessions.

As Mother Jones has written in the past, such concerns are wildly misplaced and seriously hurt the poor. President Obama recently addressed this conservative characterization, calling out Fox News for portraying the poor as lazy “leeches” eager to waste government funds.

Fortunately, Kansas’ controversial new provision may actually turn out to be illegal, violating federal law that mandates welfare recipients “have adequate access to their cash assistance” without enduring high fees.

Link – 

Kansas Republicans Have Come Up with a Disgraceful New Way to Screw the Poor

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Kansas Republicans Have Come Up with a Disgraceful New Way to Screw the Poor

This Is Why You Crave Sugar When You’re Stressed Out

by LeahShowers Posted on April 23, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Here’s something that won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has ever devoured a pint of Rocky Road after a miserable day at work: Researchers at the University of California-Davis recently found that 80 percent of people report eating more sweets when they are stressed. Their new study, published in the the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, offers a possible explanation.

Sugar, the researchers found, can diminish physiological responses normally produced in the brain and body during stressful situations. With stress levels on the rise, this could explain why more people are reaching for sweets.

The three-phase study involved 19 women, ages 18 to 40, who spent three days on a low-sugar diet at the research facility. Saliva samples and MRIs were taken and stress was induced through timed math tests. After being discharged, over the course of 12 days, the women consumed sweetened drinks three times a day. Half had beverages sweetened with the artificial sweetener aspartame, while the rest had drinks sweetened with real sucrose. This phase was followed by an additional three-day stint at the facility during which MRIs and saliva samples were taken again.

After the 12-day period, the group that had sucrose-sweetened beverages showed higher activity in the left hippocampus (an area of the brain responsible for learning and memory that is sensitive to chronic stress) and significantly reduced levels of cortisol (the hormone released in response to stress) compared to those who had artificially sweetened beverages.

While this study was one of the first to show that sugar can reduce stress responses in humans, it followed up on previous studies that found similar conclusions in animal subjects. The researchers noted the need for future research—especially on whether long-term sugar consumption has the same effect.

“The concern is psychological or emotional stress could trigger the habitual overconsumption of sugar,” lead author Kevin D. Laugero told Science Daily. Not exactly great news for those of us who enjoy eating our feelings.

Continue reading:

This Is Why You Crave Sugar When You’re Stressed Out

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Is Why You Crave Sugar When You’re Stressed Out

Hollywood Backstabbing Over "The Interview" Now in Full Swing

by AthenaRucker Posted on December 24, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

We all heard yesterday that Sony Pictures made a last-minute decision to release The Interview on Christmas after all, thanks to pleas from a couple hundred independent theaters that agreed at the last minute to defy Kim Jong-un and show it. So the honor of Western civilization is saved and everyone is happy. Right?

The film’s limited release drives a further wedge between Sony and the nation’s largest theater owners, who blame the studio for yanking away a potential hit. It was supposed to open on 3,000 screens before Sony and theater chains shelved the movie.

Theater owners are also upset that Sony is negotiating to release the movie simultaneously on a video-on-demand platform….“They could have a full theatrical release. Instead they have a token,” said one theater executive who asked not to be identified because it could harm his relationship with the studio.

Wait. What? I thought this whole fiasco had been driven in the first place by the refusal of big theater chains to show the movie amid fears of terrorist retaliation. So what are they all griping about?

The disagreement over a digital release played into larger tensions between Sony and theater owners after hackers last week threatened physical harm on moviegoers who saw “The Interview.”….Worried about a potential threat, Sony said it canceled the movie after large chains backed away from the film.

But theater owners have been pointing the finger at the studio for originally giving them the OK to not run the film amid the threats. Then Sony blamed the nation’s four big theater chains for forcing the studio to cancel the original release….Representatives of Regal, AMC, Cinemark and Carmike declined to comment on the matter.

OK, I guess I’m officially confused. Did Sony cancel the Christmas release date of The Interview because malls and theater chains were desperate to back out of showing it? Or did malls and theater chains back out because Sony had implicitly urged them to do so when it gave the chains permission to break their contractual commitments to show the movie? Or are both sides now just furiously trying to shift blame after being called out for cowardice by everyone from George Clooney to President Obama?

The latter, I suppose. In any case, now I know what I want for Christmas: A country that doesn’t spin into a damn tizzy over every little thing. From Ebola to ISIS to the Sony hack, you’d think we were all at risk of losing our lives to outside forces every time we step off our front porches. In the immortal words of Aaron Rodgers, can we all please R-E-L-A-X?

More – 

Hollywood Backstabbing Over "The Interview" Now in Full Swing

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hollywood Backstabbing Over "The Interview" Now in Full Swing

Robyn: Rökysopp’s New Album Is "Fucking Amazing"

by ReggieGRSccub Posted on August 25, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Under the harsh fluorescent lights in the basement of a suburban DC concert venue, as they picked at a pre-show dinner of salmon and rice—I interrogated Swedish superstar Robyn and her Norwegian collaborators, the electro-pop duo Rökysopp, for details about their upcoming releases. The hugely popular Scandinavian acts are on a joint tour promoting Do It Again, their five-song, 35-minute, “mini-album” released in May.

Robyn got her start back in the ’90s as a teen-pop idol, only to leave that image behind in the mid-2000s, ditching her major label and transforming herself into an electro-pop superstar who has pumped out a string of club bangers with the sort of feminist messages seldom heard on the radio. Norwegian duo Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland formed Röyksopp in 1998, and since then have remained at the forefront of a worldwide boom in electronic music.

During our chat, Berge dropped the previously undisclosed title of their upcoming album: The Inevitable End is slated for release in November. “It’s fucking amazing!” Robyn chimed in. The duo’s last full-length album, 2010’s Senior, was a relatively downtempo affair, full of instrumental tracks that lacked the electro-pop dance sensibilities defining the band’s previous work. With The Inevitable End, Röyksopp will return to its roots, re-adding vocals, while still holding onto a bit of that introspective tone. “It’s got a dark energy,” Berge says. “And I think it’s very sincere in many ways. Well, all the music we make is hopefully sincere, but it sits with me.”

Berge and Brundtland said they might just have to steal Robyn’s description of their album: “It’s sad, but it’s not cold. It’s very warm.” If Röyksopp keeps its promise to fans, a new version of “Monument,” the opening track of their partnership with Robyn, will be on the tracklist.

Robyn has been working on a new album herself, a follow-up to her three-part Body Talk series, which spawned megahits like “Dancing On My Own” and “Call Your Girlfriend” (below).

She’s hoping to have the new one out by year’s end, co-produced with her longtime collaborator Christian Falk, who died of cancer just a few weeks ago. “I worked with him for the first time on my first album—when I was 16. So I’ve known him half of my life. We became good friends and we kept working in different ways,” she told me. “We’re finishing the album without him, which is a really strange experience, but also a really beautiful thing because we get to be around the memory of him and the music a little bit longer.”

She’s been testing out some of the new material onstage recently. The show I saw this past Thursday included three fresh songs, which blended in seamlessly alongside her old hits.

Once the Röyksopp tour wraps up, she and Markus Jägerstedt, a member of her touring band and key collaborator on her latest songs, plan to head into the studio to put the finishing touches on the album. “I think it’s maybe messier than what I usually do, because Christian was messy,” she says. “It’s a raw energy and it’s based on a club world. I think it’s going to be fantastic, I’m really happy about it.”

Jump to original:

Robyn: Rökysopp’s New Album Is "Fucking Amazing"

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Robyn: Rökysopp’s New Album Is "Fucking Amazing"

15 MB of Fame: Never-Before-Seen Digital Art by Andy Warhol

by ErnestinaWrenn Posted on April 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Making art with a computer ain’t easy. Just ask Andy Warhol. The American icon mastered numerous art forms and shaped our culture with his work. But a newly-discovered collection of files from 41 floppy disks—yes, floppy disks—shows that he struggled with early digital design tools. Today, members of Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Club and STUDIO for Creative Inquiry in Pittsburgh released a previously unseen set of images Warhol created in the 1980s using a Commodore Amiga 1000. (That used to be a type of computer, kids.)

The work was discovered after artist Cory Arcangel found a fuzzy You Tube video from 1985. In it Warhol sits next to Blondie singer Debbie Harry and uses the Amiga to paint her digital portrait. Jonathan Gaugler of the Carnegie Museum of Art says Arcangel was “relatively sure” the disks containing Warhol’s digital prints would be housed in the Warhol Museum. Sure enough, they were. But, Gaugler says, “It’s risky. Because reading them in a drive, there is a chance of wiping it just by trying.”

So the museum’s curator, Tina Kukielski, connected Arcangel with the Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Club, which wrote original code to safely read the data without damaging it. The process was captured in the upcoming documentary film series The Invisible Photograph, premiering May 10 at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall.

Here are some of Warhol’s digital works, and stills from documentary showing how they were retrieved. Enjoy—while listening to Blondie if you can:

“Andy 2” Andy Warhol, 1985, ©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visuals Arts, Inc., courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

Campbell’s Andy Warhol, 1985, ©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visuals Arts, Inc., courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

“Venus”, 1985, ©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visuals Arts, Inc., courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum Andy Warhol

Amber Morgan of the Andy Warhol Museum and Cory Arcangel in The Invisible Photograph, Part II – Trapped: Andy Warhol’s Amiga Experiments © Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Commodore Amiga computer equipment used by Andy Warhol between 1985-86 Courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

View this article: 

15 MB of Fame: Never-Before-Seen Digital Art by Andy Warhol

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 15 MB of Fame: Never-Before-Seen Digital Art by Andy Warhol

Kate Winslet’s “Divergent” Character Is Like a Brainy, Science-Driven Hitler

by Billy Zane Posted on March 21, 2014

Mother Jones

The people who made Divergent desperately want it to be the next The Hunger Games, with all the piles of money that come with a franchise of the kind. The new sci-fi movie (released on Friday) is based on the Veronica Roth young-adult novel of the same name, set in an isolated, dystopian Chicago. Much like The Hunger Games books and movies, Divergent depicts young, good-looking people fighting totalitarianism in a war-ravaged future. (In Divergent, the youthful heroine is Beatrice “Tris” Prior, played by the talented Shailene Woodley.)

There is plenty wrong with Divergent, including that it’s a drowsy action flick (first in a planned trilogy) that reeks of studio executives’ cynical attempts to cash in on the international commercial success of a similarly themed series. Whereas the villains in The Hunger Games make up a totalitarian regime that resembles North Korea but with superior reality TV, the bad guys in Divergent resemble grown-up college nerds who are black-out drunk on political power.

Continue Reading »

More: 

Kate Winslet’s “Divergent” Character Is Like a Brainy, Science-Driven Hitler

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Kate Winslet’s “Divergent” Character Is Like a Brainy, Science-Driven Hitler

Can Balkan Beat Box Bring Us Together?

by jp19gkx Posted on November 18, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Ori Kaplan/DJ Shotnez

It’s 3 p.m. on a foggy August day at San Francisco’s Outside Lands music festival, but inside the Heineken Dome it feels like an after-hours party. Ori Kaplan, a founding member of the contagiously high-energy ensemble Balkan Beat Box, and formerly of the popular gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello, had just performed as his solo alter ego, DJ Shotnez. Festival goers writhed and cheered to his mix of cumbia and Balkan horns, an amalgamation of sounds he calls Global Crunk Base.

In his trailer after the set, Kaplan sparks a cigarette and kicks his feet up on a table. His appearance at the fest was one stop on a short West Coast tour to test out his new material on a non-European audience. A local promoter stops by the trailer to offer praise. “Today was really excellent,” Kaplan says, grinning. “It was a super crowd, really open and excited. I love San Francisco.”

The Israel-born, Vienna-based DJ and multi-instrument has had a love affair with the City by the Bay since his early days with Gogol, and before that with the New York band Firewater, a pioneer of the immigrant punk sound. This week, Balkan Beat Box launches a new mini-West Coast tour before heading into the studio to work on a new EP. With its members spread to the winds—Kaplan in Austria, other members in New York and Tel Aviv—the band keeps its sound fresh by “meeting on airplanes” and bringing the sounds and influences they’ve collected from their side projects back into the studio. At Outside lands, we chatted about the virtues of DJing and the origins of melting-pot music at Mehanata, a little black hole of a bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Continue Reading »

Link: 

Can Balkan Beat Box Bring Us Together?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Can Balkan Beat Box Bring Us Together?

Why More Climate Science Hasn’t Led to More Climate Policy – Yet

by Myrna Posted on September 27, 2013

Why there’s a gap between climate science and climate policy. Read original article:  Why More Climate Science Hasn’t Led to More Climate Policy – Yet ; ;Related ArticlesClimate Panel’s Fifth Report Clarifies Humanity’s ChoicesEconomix Blog: The Cost of Climate ChangeWill Hurricane Lull Blunt Coastal Shifts? ;

Link: 

Why More Climate Science Hasn’t Led to More Climate Policy – Yet

Posted in alternative energy, Casio, Citadel, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, Instructables.com, LAI, Landmark, Monterey, ONA, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why More Climate Science Hasn’t Led to More Climate Policy – Yet