Saturday afternoon “couch” reading

Well. We’ve lived through another week and arrived at one of my least favorite days of the year. Yes, it’s time to “fall back” — I WISH it was as easy as falling back…. But, it seems like it takes me a whole week before my brain aligns with the new time.

What You Need to Know About the Daylight Savings Shift

 

For the tech obsessed, Daylight Saving Time gets a bit more complicated each year as our pockets and desks fill up with more and more tech gadgets. And Congress hasn’t made the shift any easier. The 2005 Energy Policy Act changed the start date of Daylight Saving Time beginning in 2007. This affected the auto-updating clocks on some tech products purchased before that date, including operating systems. Hopefully everything runs smoothly for you by now, but just in case, here are some things to consider:

• Some gadgets, like your phone, will be automatically updated by syncing with your cellular network.

• Others, like some iPods, base their clocks on whatever time your PC says it is.

• Unconnected devices like your watch or clock radio will likely need to be updated manually.

• Still others, like your computer, are hopefully patched to correctly update at the appropriate time, but may not be.

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I have a feeling we haven’t heard the last of THIS story …. I had more questions with almost every detail :

 

Man Started Flight Elderly and White, and Ended It Young and Asian

The CBC reports that the man, “made a claim for refugee status after he was taken into custody,” but his exact strategy in boarding the flight wearing such an elaborate disguise, and then removing it, has not yet been determined.

The intelligence alert added a few clues though.

The man apparently swapped boarding passes with a 55-year-old American passenger before boarding the plane in Hong Kong. After he was detained, the man initially told Canadian authorities that he had only one bag, but the flight crew then found two other pieces of luggage they said were his. One of them contained his clothing; the second, the elements of his disguise: the mask, glasses, a cap and a cardigan.

Now that we’ve got Republican domination of both houses of Congress and the Presidency, I guess we’ll have to start worrying about guys like this (you HAVE heard the news about the shift in power, haven’t you?) ::

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Rick Perry: Let States Secede From Social Security

 

His new suggestion is not to split Texas from the other 49 states, but rather to give it the option to secede from the national pension program that has defined retirement in the country for 75 years.

“When you look at social security, it’s broke,” Perry told the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning. “My kids, 27 and 24, they know this is a Ponzi scheme.”

One way out of this mess, in Perry’s mind? Just abandon Social Security altogether and let the states handle it. Texas (of course) has already fixed Social Security’s problem, Perry says, so why should it be saddled with paying the Ponzi debts of every other sucker?

“Why is the federal government even in the pension program or the health care delivery program?” Perry asked. “Let the states do it.”

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Road to War… Three?

 

Wikileaks Info Cherry-Picked by Corporate Media to Bolster Case Against Iran

A source provides details to the American government about the nefarious activities of a Middle Eastern country. That information ends up in scores of secret U.S. government documents. Subsequently, the information winds up on the front pages of major newspapers, and is heralded by war hawks in Washington as a casus belli.

Sound familiar? It should, but perhaps not in the way you’re thinking. Here’s a hint: It’s not 2003, but 2010. This is the story of what happened recently to Iran in the wake of the latest WikiLeaks document release, where U.S military field reports from Iraq made their way into major national newspapers and painted the Islamic Republic as a force out to murder U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

As the film Fair Game illustrates, shenanigans like this aren’t unheard of in recent times (or any time)

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Jill Clayburgh Dies at 66; Starred in Feminist Roles

 

Keith Olbermann suspended

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That’s it for my neighborhood (although I’ll post  — what’s going on in your neck of the woods?