Younger generation driving less than 30 years ago

It's a trend that I like to see, but I wonder how they get around without a car. If you like in an urban area with good public transportation it's easy but that's not always the case in the US. There was no way I (or my parents) could afford to buy me a car when I was in high school so I mostly got around with friends who had a car or I hitchhiked.

Now I can afford a car but I prefer public transportation or riding a bike, but I also live in a city with one of the best and cheapest public transportation systems in the world. There seems to be more to the trend than just the bad economy. do social media tools really minimize the need for seeing people in person?

Driving is becoming so last century. Since the end of World War II, getting a driver's license has been a rite of passage for teens, but that's less and less the case. The share of people in their teens, 20s and 30s with driver's licenses has dropped significantly over the past three decades, not only the United States, but also in some other wealthy nations with a high proportion of Internet users, transportation researchers have found.

One possible explanation: Virtual contact through the Internet and other electronic means is reducing the need for face-to-face visits among young people, researchers say.

From 1983 to 2008, the share of 16- to 39-year-olds with driver's licenses declined markedly, with the greatest decreases among drivers in their late teens and early 20s, according to a study at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor. About 69 percent of 17-year-olds had a driver's license in 1983. By 2008, that had dropped to 50 percent. Among Americans ages 20 to 24 in 1983, nearly 92 percent had driver's licenses. Twenty-five years later, it was 82 percent.

Read the rest of this post...

Video: Peeps in a microwave

For you non-Americans out there, Americans eat these little yellow marshmallow chicks (called Peeps) for Easter. They're kind of famous here for being either beloved or loathed.  Apparently there's quite a cult on YouTube of people who have tried to microwave them for fun.  Here are a few of the better videos.

An entire box of peeps:



Peeps in a basket - this was an original approach:



This one is really dumb, but still had me laughing out loud by the end.



 These guys have an entire YouTube channel devoted to "Is it a good idea to Microwave this?" - in this one, they microwave gasoline - seriously. Read the rest of this post...

Video: Puppies, bunnies and chicks, oh my

I could have imagined how this video could have gone horribly wrong.  But it didn't.  The puppies got along quite well with the chicks and the bunnies.  My Sasha loved everything as a puppy, now not so much.  Every species learns to lose the love by a certain age, I guess.

Read the rest of this post...

Maddow: Bush-era torture "probably a war crime," Obama "legally obligated to prosecute"

The good folks at The Political Carnival have brought this to our attention — Rachel Maddow discussing the fact that Bush-era torture was illegal, "probably a war crime," and our government has a responsibility to prosecute it.

Let that sink in. (1) It is a fact. (2) Maddow really said what I attributed to her. On the always O-friendly, forward-leaning MSNBC, no less.

If I'm going to give out an Eleven-Dimensional Chess award, it goes to Maddow. This one is up there with her non-outing outing of Rick Perry.

She cleverly works this information into a segment about the nature of today's Republican party.

▪ She starts with four-minute intro about how these Republicans aren't even in sync with their 2008 incarnation.

▪ Then she talks about the Zelikow memo (a high-level Bush-administration opinion that raised objections to white-washing torture as legal), and how the recent release of that memo places responsibility for prosecuting Bush-torture on the U.S. government (the current executive branch, whoever is running it).

▪ She closes with a question, again about Republicans — now that Obama is vulnerable to the same charge as Bush (not prosecuting torturers), are Republicans too far gone to pass up this golden attack opportunity?

See how clever? I've trimmed off the introduction in order to highlight what she clearly says about Obama and his administration. Watch; I'll add a few comments afterward.



So the Bush administration tried to destroy all copies of Zelikow's memo to "disappear" evidence they were told internally that torture was illegal (2:32 in my clip).

The Obama part of the discussion starts at 3:32. The "war crime" comment comes at 3:50, followed by Obama being "obligated to prosecute." Notice, though — she cleverly says "we" are obligated ... meaning the government ... meaning the sitting president ... meaning Obama (but not by name, exactly). See how that works?

This is not disappearing the facts; this is telling the truth while keeping your high profile job. Maddow is a very clever woman, an Alekhine come to judgement.

For more, go to the Political Carnival post where I saw this clip. They have further information and a great many torture links, including and especially the continuing abuse of Gitmo prisoner Fayiz al-Kandari, an educated charity worker sold by Afghan bounty hunters to the Americans — who paid them. Fayiz is a prisoner to this day, under very harsh conditions.

Why didn't Obama pursue Bush-era torture prosecutions? Perhaps this is the reason (h/t my Twitter friend Les Zuazo). Makes one pause, does it not?

This stuff really does have to stop. Someone really will end up in The Hague. Even Obama could find himself on a No-Fly-Abroad list.

If you wish to follow on Twitter and send links, I'm more than happy to have them. Just click here: @Gaius_Publius. Thanks.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Texts from Hillary Clinton (funny)

You have to scroll through this site to get the full flavor.  They're faux text messages from Hillary Clinton, all based on a recent iconic photo of the Secretary of State.  Here are three of my favs.

1) My fav.

2) Pretty good.

3) This one made me laugh too.

Read the rest of this post...

Stephen Colbert: "Bro, It's Slime"

Pink slime pellets

There's quite a bit of Pink Slime news lately, and we at La Maison Chez Nous are happy to bring it to you.

So imagine our pleasure when we discovered that Stephen Colbert had incorporated much of that news into a hilarious comedy bit. Too many good lines to pull one out (they come pretty fast near the end) — you'll just have to find them for yourselves, below.

By the way, in case you've forgotten what "Pink Slime" is, here's a taste. It's:

[T]he rejected fat, sinew, bloody effluvia, and occasional bits of meat cut from carcasses in the slaughterhouse were a low-value waste product called 'trimmings'.

"Effluvia" just made my list of words to savor and enjoy.

Now watch and enjoy this; I'll highlight the news-news afterward. (If you want to see the video really big, click here, but you'll have to resize your window to get the ratios right.)

So the actual news:

■ Yesterday we covered the lobbying efforts by Beef Products Inc., one of the main producers of Pink Slime (my emphasis and some reparagraphing throughout):

Beef Products Inc. retains a team of lobbyists from the firm Olsson, Frank & Weeda. One lobbyist employed by the firm is Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, a former congresswoman from South Dakota and leader of the “Blue Dog Caucus” of pro-corporate Democrats.

We think the lobbying appears to be showing up, by the way, in the comments to Pink Slime posts on this blog. Several of our "commenters" seemed to be trolls writing from the same IP address, and quelle surprise, they were sending people to the industry sponsored web site, BeefIsBeef.com, until the Spam Mod caught them.

What's "BeefIsBeef.com" you ask? Three guesses:

A large producer of lean, finely textured beef isn’t going down without a fight in the viral social media campaign against “pink slime.” A Lubbock, Texas-based Beef Products Inc. created a response website called beefisbeef.com to offer “truth and reality” to its product, which is unappetizingly being called “pink slime.”

Hat tip to our own Mod 4 and her eagle eye.

■ Colbert covered the effort by three "Beefstate Governors" (Rick Perry of Texas, Terry Branstad of Iowa, and Sam Brownback of Kansas) to "end the smear campaign." In other words, to stop telling the truth, because in my kitchen, "bloody effluvia" and sinew are not "trimmings." Trimmings you can look at without gagging.

■ The never-disappointing GOP congressman Peter King has been taking beef money and talking Slime's praises. Think Progress:

This week, one passionate defender of pink slime emerged: Rep. Steve King (R-IA). ... [M]eat producers have also been major financial backers of King, who sits on the House Agriculture Committee, throughout his political career. ...

That money appears to have been well-spent. All this week, King has been defending pink slime — or “lean finely textured beef” as he calls it — to his constituents. Indeed, in every one of the half dozen town halls that ThinkProgress attended, King talked up pink slime unprompted. In Emmetsburg, for instance, he said pink slime was actually a “supplement” and an “enhancement.” In Algona, he pledged to hold congressional hearings not into pink slime, but into the “smear campaign” against pink slime.

Careful there, cowboy. As Colbert said, "pink slime may also contain traces of smear."

■ And finally, the progressive campaign we talked about here (last two paragraphs) may finally be paying off. Bloomberg (h/t reddit commenter LettersFromTheSky):

AFA Foods Files Bankruptcy Citing ‘Pink Slime’ Coverage

AFA Foods, a ground-beef processor owned by Yucaipa Cos., sought bankruptcy court protection with a plan to sell some assets after media coverage of “pink slime” cut demand for its products. ... “Ongoing media attention has called into question the wholesomeness” of the meat, and has “dramatically reduced the demand for all ground beef products,” AFA interim Chief Executive Officer Ron Allen said in court papers.

Ground beef demand will soften in the next several months as consumers shift to meat that doesn’t contain the lean, finely textured beef [sic], said Ann Gurkin, an analyst for Davenport & Co. Last month, the USDA said schools in the government’s lunch program can order ground beef without the product following public pressure to remove it from cafeterias.

I hope you caught that schools "can order" beef without the Slime. That certainly sounds as though schools were being given no choice at all prior to last week.

This means, of course, that the public awareness campaign is having an effect. This is when Progressives tend to let up. Don't, say I. This one we can win:

It's not drone warfare and dead babies, but it's a perfect emblem of so much that's so wrong — and it has all the elements, a really nasty name (Pink Slime, eww) and the perfect poisonous household cleaner (deadly ammonia) as a key ingredient.

If persistent progressives can't ride this horse to victory, I'm not sure what they can do. After all, even Obama has already half-folded. Let's get the other half.

What'dya say, cowboy — care to ride this horse to victory? I warn you though; victory can be habit-forming.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
  Read the rest of this post...

The Doors - Roadhouse Blues Live

Any fun Easter meals being prepared out there? We don't find whole hams over here the way you do in the US so I've never cooked one here. I did find an amazing deal on a leg of lamb (lamb is much more common over here than in the US) so will try doing the classic seven hour lamb, that's really more like four or five hours. I've done the traditional gigot (rare on the inside) many times and love it but wanted to try something that I haven't prepared before. The side will be flageolet beans which are delicious when cooked with some cream and garlic added. This will be followed by a nice long digestive walk. Read the rest of this post...