"The Global Consciousness Project, also known as the EGG Project, is an international multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers, artists and others continuously collecting data from a global network of physical random number generators located in 65 host sites worldwide. The archive contains over 10 years of random data in parallel sequences of synchronized 200-bit trials every second."
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Wednesday, January 5, 2022
Dr. Diane Ravitch, PhD, is a Research Professor of Education at New York University, a historian of education, and author. She is an unashamedly ardent advocate of taxpayer funded public education, primarily at the K-12 level, and is the Founder and President of the Network for Public Education (NPE) — “an advocacy group whose mission is to preserve, promote, improve and strengthen public schools for both current and future generations of students.” From 1991 to 1993, she was Assistant Secretary of Education and Counselor to Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. Additional biographical details about her may be found on her professional website linked here.
She also maintains a blog — DianeRavitch.net — separate from her professional website, where she contributes regularly, opining primarily upon matters of education.
Seniors at Downtown Magnets High School gather inside the College Center for an information session with UC Irvine. (image by Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
The following entry is one of her most recent observations, and shares excerpted portions of a human interest news feature sharing greatly encouraging findings of phenomenal successes and accomplishments of a taxpayer-funded public school in Los Angeles, California — Downtown Magnets High School.
Los Angeles Times: The “Unentitled Kids”: California’s New Generation of College-Bound Stars
Teresa Watanabe wrote a wonderful story about kids in a public school in Los Angeles who are college-bound, despite their demographic profiles. They don’t have college-educated parents or SAT tutors. What they do have is a school — the Downtown Magnets High School — where the professionals are dedicated to their success. Read about this school and ask yourself why Bill Gates is not trying to replicate it? Why is it not a model for Michael Bloomberg or Reed Hastings or the Waltons? Why do the billionaires insist, as Bloomberg said recently, that public education is “broken”? Despite their investing hundreds of millions to destroy public schools like the one in this story, they are still performing miracles every day.
They represent the new generation of students reshaping the face of higher education in California: young people with lower family incomes, less parental education and far more racial and ethnic diversity than college applicants of the past. And Downtown Magnets, a small and highly diverse campus of 911 students just north of the Los Angeles Civic Center, is in the vanguard of the change.
Last year, 97% of the school’s seniors were accepted to college, and most enrolled. Among them, 71% of those who applied to a UC campus were admitted, including 19 of the 56 applicants to UC Berkeley — a higher admission rate than at elite Los Angeles private schools such as Harvard-Westlake and Marlborough.
This month, the Downtown Magnets applicants include Nick Saballos, whose Nicaraguan father never finished high school and works for minimum wage as a parking valet but is proud of his son’s passion for astrophysics.
There’s Emily Cruz, who had a rough time focusing on school while being expected to help her Guatemalan immigrant mother with household duties. Emily is determined to become a lawyer or a philosopher.
Kenji Horigome emigrated to Los Angeles from Japan in fourth grade speaking no English, with a single mother who works as a Koreatown restaurant server. Kenji has become a top student and may join the military, in part for the financial aid the GI Bill would provide.
“The main thing my kids lack is a sense of entitlement,” said Lynda McGee, the school’s longtime college counselor. “That’s my biggest enemy: The fact that my students are humble and think they don’t deserve what they actually deserve. It’s more of a mental problem than an academic one.”
What the students do have is a close-knit school community, passionate educators and parents willing to take the extra step to send them to a magnet school located, for many, outside their neighborhoods.
Downtown Magnets High School Seniors Patricia DeLeon, 17, LEFT, and Kiana Portillo, 17, talk with college counselor Lynda McGee at the College Center at Downtown Magnets High School in Los Angeles. (image by Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Principal Sarah Usmani leads a staff mindful of creating a campus environment both nurturing and academically rigorous; she has Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Saturday, February 6, 2021
The Number 1 smash hit popularized by Atlanta, Georgia-based family band of Gladys Knight and the Pips in October 1973 was the work of a native Mississippian from Pontotoc named Jim Weatherly.
His family reported that Jim died recently at his residence in Brentwood, Tennessee, a tony suburb of Nashville, of natural causes, aged 77.
Weatherly wrote two additional tunes that became hits for Gladys Knight and the Pips: “Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye)” and “Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me” – which was originally recorded by country singer Ray Price.
A star quarterback for the University of Mississippi, aka “Ole Miss,” in the 1960s, after graduation, Weatherly, who had already formed a band with some classmates, moved to Nashville where he hoped to find his fortune. Nashville, however, long known as a very cliquish town musically, rejected him. So he and his band moved to the Los Angeles area where he became a songwriter in that area’s then-hot music scene. It was a “training ground” for many musicians who later became immensely popular, super-star caliber artists, including Glen Campbell, Jackson Browne, Tom Petty, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Brian Wilson, Beck, and many others who populated the Laurel Canyon area – a mountainous canyon region in LA’s Hollywood Hills West district, in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Although Laurel Canyon is a rocky, arid, and largely agriculturally inhospitable area, it was fertile ground for artists like Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, The Byrds, Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison, Buffalo Springfield, Love, Michelle and John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, Roger McGuinn, Gene Clark, Chris Hillman, J. D. Souther, Judee Sill, Carole King, the Eagles, Richie Furay (of Buffalo Springfield and Poco) and many, many more, almost too numerous to mention.
But, lesser known is the backstory of Jim Weatherly’s first hit song for Gladys Knight and the Pips.
After his college football days ended, Weatherly worked in Los Angeles as a songwriter.
During his off-time in LA he often played flag football with other creative types who had athletic backgrounds – among them, Lee Majors, who himself was a former college football player and was then starring in The Big Valleyas Heath Barkley, alongside the lead and central character Victoria Barkley, played by renown actress Barbara Stanwyck. The Big Valley was a unique western television serial whose central character was a woman (Stanwyck), who had taken Heath as her own, though he was the illegitimate son of her character’s late husband Thomas Barkley, following his death.
Jim Weatherly was inducted to the Songwriters Hall of Fame at their 45th Annual Induction and Awards ceremony at the Marriott Marquis Theater on June 12, 2014 in New York City.
Talk show host Larry King, face of CNN for 25 years, dies at 87
by Rodney Ho
Larry King died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to a tweet by Ora Media, the studio and network which he co-founded. No cause of death was given, but The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other media outlets had reported earlier this month he was hospitalized with COVID-19.
Larry King in his office prior to his CNN show in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles Friday, Feb. 11, 2000. (AP Photo/Rene Macura)
He has had many health problems over the years including Type 2 diabetes, heart attacks and two bouts with cancer.
His 9PM show “Larry King Live” ran from 1985 to 2010 on CNN, and for many years, the inquisitive man with his signature suspenders and hunched shoulders hosted CNN’s top-rated show, and he and CNN founder Ted Turner became close friends.
His long-running USA Today column, with its random thoughts and observations separated by ellipses, was a precursor to a Twitter feed.
Marlon Brando, right, gestures while talking with Larry King during a break in the taping of CNN’s ‘Larry King Live’ in Los Angeles, Friday, April 5, 1996. Brando denied his opinions are anti-Semitic, but militant and mainstream Jewish leaders said his comments about Jews controlling Hollywood were ‘sloppy’ and shameful. (AP Photo/Larry King Live, Danny Feld)
Over the decades, King interviewed hundreds of celebrities, news-makers and politicians ranging from Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Tuesday, September 1, 2020
Let’s play “PRETEND” for just a moment.
Pretend that you’re riding a bicycle.
Pretend that in the area where you’re riding the bicycle, that regulation, ordinance, or law, requires you to wear a helmet, or have some kind of flashing light, or readily observable denotation that you’re a cyclist, such as maybe a certain color of garment, or reflective vest.
Now, let’s pretend that you’ve not done any of those things – if they’re required.
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Friday, December 20, 2019
MA Senator Elizabeth Warren – D
The Democrats’ 6th debate Thursday, 19 December 2019 at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA proved to be their best yet.
With just days before the Christmas holidays, Democrats continued their appeals to voters by touting their prospective policies, doubling down on defeating the President, and realigning core American values which have sorely suffered under the incumbent Trump.
Despite the fact that the Democratic field had been winnowed considerably from the initial 20 candidates spread over 2 nights of debate, the 7 remaining on the island were up for the match, with plenty of interaction between front-runners Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Bernie Sanders.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders -I
Candidates Tom Steyer, Andrew Yang, and Amy Klobuchar certainly had their moments, and for the most part, Steyer and Yang steered clear of any attacks directed at other candidates, while Klobuchar proved herself up to the task and took a mediator’s role to redirect candidate’s passions away from each others’ prospective policy ideas and campaign practices, and toward the Democratic party’s goal – make Donald Trump a one-term President.
All the candidates expressed a disheartening sense that there was not more ethnic, racial, and sexual diversity among them, with only 2 women, and candidate Andrew Yang being the only non-Anglo candidate on stage.
Debate participation rules established by the party included escalating demonstrations of public support as evidenced by by public polling and campaign finance contributions. Neither California Senator Kamala Harris nor New Jersey Senator Cory Booker appeared on stage, though Booker remained in the race, while Harris had announced the end of her bid in November.
Former Vice President Joe Biden – D
Much like a football game, most of the lively exchanges occurred in the last quarter of the debate, with candidates Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Sanders, and Steyer in that order, weighing in on disagreements over campaign finance reform. Candidate Yang remained completely silent on that subject, and no moderator invited his remarks.
Bernie and Biden had their moments, as one might expect, though it was congenial, rather than adversarial.
Toward the conclusion of the debate, candidate Biden had been asked by Moderator Alberta about Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Oh, PLEASE!!!
“The response claims that it would cost Sterling $300 million to $500 million in capital gains taxes if he is forced to sell now rather than pass the team to his heirs.”
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Friday, January 18, 2013
History’s a funny thing, ain’t it?
FaceBook The Internet is full of false “quotes” attributed to such luminous historical figures as Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers, along with fallacious – even mean-spirited and evil – attempted parallels to Hitler and the sitting President Barack Obama.
It’s just pure hatred. That, ignorance and selfishness.
But when it comes to one of the most iconic figures of the 20th century, a two-term Republican President held in high esteem by Democrats and Republicans alike, no one really likes to recall the things he said.
And so, here for your perusal and consideration, is an historical redux.
Enjoy.
—
Reagan’s 78th Birthday Includes Posh Party, Campus Speech, Courtesy Call
JEFF WILSON , Associated Press AP News Archive Feb. 7, 1989 5:54 AM ET
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Ronald Reagan celebrated his 78th birthday by saying he’s had enough of retirement and was ”saddled up and ready to ride again” for a balanced federal budget and repeal of the two-term presidency.
The 40th President’s birthday celebration Monday included an office chat with Japanese Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita, a black-tie party and a speech to students at the University of Southern California, where he was serenaded by the USC Marching Band.
”One of my biggest disappointments as president was I wasn’t able to balance the budget,” Reagan told the college audience.
Reagan received extended applause when answering a question about over-the- counter military weapons, such as the AK-47 assault rifle used to gun down five Stockton schoolchildren last month.
”I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense,” he said. ”But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home.”
The speech was Reagan’s first public event since a spirited welcome home airport rally Jan. 20, the day he relinquished the presidency to George Bush. The former president said Read the rest of this entry »
New Bluebirdprepaid cardis alternative to checking accounts
Bluebird by American Express and Walmart
Walmart and American Express have teamed up to offer the new Bluebird card. They say it should help people avoid the high fees on checking accounts and debit cards.
Fewer fees mean more customers. That’s the hypothesis behind a new prepaid card called Bluebird. It’s the product of an odd-couple partnership between elite financial services company, American Express, and populist low-cost retailer, Walmart.
What makes the Bluebird card different? In a word: Fees. The prepaid card promises no minimum balance requirements, no monthly fees, no annual fees, and no overdraft fees.
Dan Schulman with American Express says, “Last year, banks charged $31.6 billion in overdraft fees. And according to a recent Bank Rate study, the minimum balance average to avoid a maintenance fee is now $723.02. That’s up 23 percent from last year.”
By Maura Dolan, Los Angeles TimesSeptember 23, 2012
Don Heller wrote the 1978 initiative restoring capital punishment and is now trying to get Californians to ban it. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Donald Heller wrote the 1978 ballot measure that expanded California’s death penalty. Ronald Briggs, whose father spearheaded the campaign, worked to achieve its passage. Jeanne Woodford, a career corrections official, presided over four executions.
The lawyer, El Dorado County supervisor and retired San Quentin Prison warden now want California’s death penalty abolished, contending the state no longer can afford a system that has cost an estimated $4 billion since 1978 and executed 13 prisoners.
“We started with six people on death row in 1978, and we never thought that there would one day be 729,” said Briggs, a conservative Republican. “We never conceived of an appellate process that is decades long.”
Backing Proposition 34, which would make life without possibility of parole the state’s toughest punishment, the three have joined with retired Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti to try to dismantle a system in which each has played a role.
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Friday, July 27, 2012
It’s time to 1.) Call the dogs; 2.) Pee in a cup, and 3.) Mandate pre-licensing testing & renewal testing.
But perhaps more than anything, this conclusively proves that the impairment effects of marijuana are more long-lasting than previously thought, or claimed by legalization proponents.
So much for the folks who claim no one ever died while stoned from smoking pot, because there are clear cut examples of those who have been permanently injured by those who have taken the wheel after toking.
(Reuters Health) – A new, small study suggests medicinal marijuana may impair users’ driving skills – but might be missed by typical sobriety tests.
At doses used in AIDS, cancer and pain patients, people weaved side to side more and had a slower reaction time in the hours after using the drug, researchers from the Netherlands found.
For people who hadn’t built up a tolerance to marijuana, those effects were similar to driving with a blood alcohol content of 0.08, the point at which drivers are considered legally impaired, they said. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Tuesday, June 26, 2012
If we adhered to the “we were here first,” model then we should seriously rethink those handful of bangles, baubles and beads for which early settlers traded for Manhattan Island.
And then, there’s the whole other deal of Native American land, and the Trail of Tears.
But the problem with that ideology is that we do not adhere to such philosophy.
Incidentally, that is a direct quote from someone who was interviewed for the story, which quote is the final statement in the story.
—
San Diego neighbors oppose veterans treatment center
Officials from a nearby school in Old Town fear disruptions from a facility for veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.
SAN DIEGO — A plan for a 40-bed treatment center for military veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan suffering frompost-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury has run into opposition from neighborhood groups and a nearby charter school.
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Thursday, June 14, 2012
It’s true!
You have cooties!
In fact, the 100 trillion+ bugs on your body collectively weigh in between 2 – 6 pounds.
But… there’s a catch.
You need them!
Read on to learn why.
—
Microbecensus maps out human body’s bacteria, viruses, other bugs
It gives scientists a reference point of what the microbial community looks like in healthy people, and they plan to use it to study how changes in a person’s microbiome can lead to illness.
After five years of toil, a consortium of several hundred U.S. researchers has released a detailed census of the myriad bacteria, yeasts, virusesand amoebas that live, eat, excrete, reproduce and die in or on us.
An undated handout image provided by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) shows a clump of Staphylococcus epidermidis bacteria (green) in the extracellular matrix, which connects cells and tissue, taken with a scanning electron microscope, showing. At right, undated handout image provided by the Agriculture Department showing the bacterium, Enterococcus faecalis, which lives in the human gut, is just one type of microbe that will be studied as part of NIH’s Human Microbiome Project. They live on your skin, up your nose, in your gut _ enough bacteria, fungi and other microbes that collected together could weigh, amazingly, a few pounds. Now scientists have mapped just which critters normally live in or on us and where, calculating that healthy people can share their bodies with more than 10,000 species of microbes. (AP Photo/NIAID, Agriculture Department)
Described in two papers in Nature and a raft of reports in other journals, the data released Wednesday describe microbes of the skin, saliva, nostrils, guts and other areas of 242 adults in tiptop health.
The $170-million, federally funded Human Microbiome Project also cataloged the genes contained within this zoo of life. The results shed light on the hum of microbial activity inside us as nutrients are chopped and guzzled, gas and other wastes are expelled, and bugs send chemical messages to one another, jostling for supremacy or attracting new neighbors to help keep their community going.
The research is important because it gives scientists a reference point of what the microbial community looks like in healthy people, and they plan to use it to study how changes in a person’s microbiome can lead to illness. A spate of studies in the last few years has documented potential links to conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, asthma and obesity.
Each of us is home to about 100 trillion microscopic life forms — a figure that’s about 10 times higher than the number of cells in the human body. In a 200-pound adult, these organisms can weigh a combined 2 to 6 pounds.
The vast majority of our microscopic denizens appear to be bacteria; 10,000 types may choose to make Homo sapiens home, the scientists found.
Some spots on the body, such as the mouth, are rain-forest-like in their diversity, inhabited by a rich community of bacteria that is fairly similar from one person to the next.
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Saturday, June 2, 2012
Proponents of marijuana legalization assert such things as “marijuana never killed anyone,” “no one ever crashed their car while on marijuana,” and other such nonsense.
Numerous records exist that prove otherwise. One such case is the unfortunate & preventable 2004 tragedy involving Lisa Torti, the Los Angelino who pulled her friend Alexandra Van Horn from her wrecked car, which also resulted in Miss Van Horn’s permanent paralysis. It was colloquially referred to as a test or invalidation of the 1980 Emergency Medical Service Act, sometimes called California‘s Good Samaritan Act.
Court records indicate – such information can also be found in various news reports – that Misses Torti and Van Horn had both smoked marijuana and consumed beverage alcohol before that fateful event.
Concerning other negative health effects of marijuana usage, there are indisputable, verifiable, long-term, scientifically valid medical & health studies that conclusively prove a positive correlation, cause-and-effect for increased risk of schizophrenia with marijuana use.
In other words, smoke dope, and you risk losing your mind. It’s not hype, nor is it the assertion of a poorly made B Hollywood movie.
In this nation, we are long overdue for a genuine discussion of behavior and mental health.
In some cases – for one reason or another – people turn to substance abuse (which can be of illegal or legal substances, including food), or irrational behavior to cope or deal with the problems of their lives. Substance abuse only serves to amplify behaviors or problems, and they certainly don’t lessen their severity.
If we were to address such root issues of human behavior, we could genuinely advance this nation, drive down criminality & incarceration associated with the production, sale & consumption of illicit substances, increase individual & national productivity, and so much more.
But only if we move forward… and that does not mean to “take the nation back.”
—
USC DORNSIFE / TIMES POLL
Most California voters don’t support legalizing pot, poll finds
Eighty percent support doctor-recommended marijuana use for severe illness, a poll finds. But only 46% support legalization of ‘general or recreational use by adults.’
In California, cradle of the marijuana movement, a new poll has found a majority of voters do not support legalization, even as they overwhelmingly back medicinal use for “patients with terminal and debilitating conditions.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Saturday, June 2, 2012
Change is inevitable.
Will things change for the better?
—
Doug Dillard, Bluegrass Banjo Virtuoso, Dies at 75
Doug Dillard, left, with Gene Clark, one of the founders of the Byrds. The men formed their own duo, Dillard and Clark. (A&M Records)
By PETER KEEPNEWS
Published: May 27, 2012
Doug Dillard, a banjo virtuoso who began the 1960s by helping to introduce a generation of listeners to bluegrass and ended the decade as an early advocate of country-rock, died on May 16 in Nashville. He was 75.
The cause was a lung infection, said Lynne Robin Green, the president of LWBH Music Publishers, which publishes his music.
Mr. Dillard rose to fame with the Dillards, a bluegrass band that also included his younger brother, Rodney, on guitar; Dean Webb on mandolin; and Mitch Jayne on bass. The Dillards’ instrumentation was traditional (except for the absence of a fiddle player) and so was much of their repertory, but they occasionally played electrified instruments and sometimes used a drummer. This approach alienated some purists, but it also helped interest young listeners in a style that the country-music establishment had come to consider passé.
In another venue, I had posted the following remark in response to the exorbitant healthcare costs, “It’s a simple concept, really. Anytime anyone gets in between you & who you’re buying from, it costs more. Insurance does that.”
And it’s true.
It’s not trite.
Let’s consider this example: You’re at the grocery store in the check-out line, about to pay for your groceries which have already been bagged and placed in your shopping cart. When the clerk announces the total, you have some strange feeling because the total is about ten times as much as you imagined.
When you double check the price of milk you find the sticker says $2.50/gallon, but your clerk rang up $25. You double check the price of frozen spinach. The sticker price says $1.37, but the clerk rang up $13.70. The chocolate was $4.50, but the clerk rang up $45.00. And the lean ground beef, instead of the posted $2.60/lb, the 5lb chub was… $130.00.
Talk about sticker shock!
You are aghast at the price, and in frustrated terms exclaim that “there is obviously some gross mistake!” – to which the clerk replies, “Let me check with your Food InsuranceAgent,” picks up a phone beside the register, presses one button, and whispers into the receiver.
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Huh?
What IS up with that?
Please, please, please…
—
Morehand sanitizerdrinking cases reported in dangerous trend
April 25, 2012, 10:36 am PST
The California Poison Control System has received 60 reports of teenagers drinking hand sanitizer since 2010, showing the dangerous trend is not unique to Los Angeles.
There were also 147 cases involving children ages 6 to 12 and 2,180 cases ages 0 to 5, believed to have accidentally ingested the gel, according to poison control service, part of the UC San Francisco‘s Department of Clinical Pharmacy.
The vast majority of all the cases statewide were minor and treated at home, but about 50 of the youths went to a hospital or were referred to a hospital for treatment.
In Los Angeles County since March, there have been 16 cases of teenagers requiring medical attention, according to the California Poison Control System.
Officials began separately tracking hand sanitizer cases in 2010.
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Sunday, April 22, 2012
The theme of the story is not new.
This particular story, however, is new.
Corporate corruption, or more accurately, the corrupting power of money through corporate influence, must come to an end in America.
Time and time again, corporate influence in America does NOT look out after the interests of the citizens, the people. They look out after their own interests, how they can obtain tax breaks, and obtain legislative favor over and above that of any other citizen.
It should come as no surprise, for we have seen this before. It’s a redux, if you will. Next up, federal courts and soldiers to stop striking workers.
The strike, and related violence, spread to Cumberland, Maryland, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Chicago and the Midwest. The strike lasted for 45 days, and ended only with the intervention of local and state militias, and federal troops.
Clearly, the United States government has a history of siding with Big Business.
Fast forward a few years.
The elimination of laws regulating corporate practices which have ultimately led to severe economic crisis has occurred because of corporate lobbyists.
So, should that come as any surprise?
Corporations have their denizen hoards of attorneys.
No other single corporation has spent more trying to influence legislators in recent years. It dispenses millions in political donations and has an army of lobbyists. Bills it opposes are usually defeated.
By Shane Goldmacher and Anthony York, Los Angeles Times
April 22, 2012
SACRAMENTO — As the sun set behind Monterey Bay on a cool night last year, dozens of the state’s top lawmakers and lobbyists ambled onto the 17th fairway at Pebble Beach for a round of glow-in-the-dark golf.
With luminescent balls soaring into the sky, the annual fundraiser known as the Speaker’s Cup was in full swing.
Lawmakers, labor-union champions and lobbyists gather each year at the storied course to schmooze, show their skill on the links and rejuvenate at a 22,000-square-foot spa. The affair, which typically raises more than $1 million for California Democrats, has been sponsored for more than a decade by telecommunications giant AT&T.
At the 2010 event, AT&T’s president and the state Assembly speaker toured Pebble Beach together in a golf cart, shaking hands with every lawmaker, lobbyist and other VIP in attendance.
The Speaker’s Cup is the centerpiece of a corporate lobbying strategy so comprehensive and successful that it has rewritten the special-interest playbook in Sacramento. When it comes to state government, AT&T spends more money, in more places, than any other company.
It forges relationships on the putting green, in luxury suites and in Capitol hallways. It gives officials free tickets to Lady Gaga concerts. It takes lawmakers on trips around the globe and all-expenses-paid retreats in wine country. It dispenses millions in political donations and employs an army of lobbyists. It has spent more than $14,000 a day on political advocacy since 2005, when it merged with SBC into its current form. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Tuesday, January 31, 2012
“He stood there holding a sandwich in front of him with no clue as to what to do.
He opened it up, looked at it, touched it.
I took it, and folded it over, and then he took a bite out it.
But then we had to tell him, ‘you have to chew.'”
That’s the tragic story of a sailor whom came in with his wife after he had smoked K2 Spice, a synthetic substitute for marijuana.
It was related by Lt. Commander Donald Hurst, a fourth-year psychiatry resident at San Diego Naval Medical Center whom witnessed it.
Recently, the actress Demi Moore was admitted to a hospital suffering from convulsions after “She smoked something — it’s not marijuana, but it’s similar to incense, and she seems to be having convulsions of some sort,” according to a female then present whom spoke with a Los Angeles9-1-1 operator.
Pentagon military officials are so alarmed by the appearance and use of those compounds and substances by their service members, that they have Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Saturday, December 10, 2011
Having just read a news item and watched a corresponding video of a female Cal Statestudent who goes ape during a study session, I only have this to say: There’s medicine for that. Oh, and get some therapy, hon. You need it.
Video: Student “freaks out” in library over others “breathing loudly”
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Friday, November 11, 2011
By now, if you’re not aware of Flickr… God help you!
All seriousness aside, of course, Flickr is – as they describe it – is “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.”
Image via CrunchBase
I agree.
While I am familiar with Google – it is so much more than a search engine – and their Picassa photo management service, I have chosen to stay with Flickr for several reasons… not the least of which is that I have found it more hospitable to the protection of photographers’ copyrights.
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Monday, October 24, 2011
Doubtless, if you’ve been paying any attention to news – either online, broadcast or print – you’ve had to at least heard something about the Occupy Wall Street movement. And no matter where you fall along the political spectrum – arch-conservative, neo-conservative, raging liberal, classical liberal, Austrian liberal, middle of the road, pragmatist, mash-up, federalist, states rights, moderate, or any conglomeration of the above, or even none at all – you certainly have some opinion – good, bad, or indifferent – about the message, the messengers, and the movement – no matter what you may hold to be true about it.
The movement has also spread to various cities throughout the United States, including Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and other areas. None, however, have had as much action and publicity as the New York City movement.
Warm Southern Breeze 