I had honestly thought his first performance of that song on TV wasn't until 1978, where he did my favourite. Maybe the above doesn't count as it was a stage show that happened to be filmed.



Apparently he was good friends with Jim Henson, which only makes it sweeter.

Oh come now BOB, surely even you can do better than that.

Before Trump sniffed his chance for power running as a Republican, he had been a big time donor to the democratic party, and even invited the Clintons to his wedding.

Meanwhile Liz Cheney is a multi generational republican, with Dick Cheney's support for the part stretching back to winning his first election as a republican in 1978...

But yeah, they're the Republican's in name only, and Trump is clearly the party loyalist...

Unless you redefine republican as Trump loyalist, none of this makes any sense and is straight up madness.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/SUPERMAN-1978-Behind-the-Scenes-of-DC-Classic-Movie-1

SUPERMAN (1978) | Behind the Scenes (Part 2) has been added as a related post - related requested by ant on that post.

SUPERMAN (1978) | Behind the Scenes of DC Classic Movie (#1) has been added as a related post - related requested by ant.

I think that's at the discretion of the judge, if you asked for 15%, likely you'll get your principal back, if you asked for 1500%, chances are you won't get a dime back as punishment, and may end up owing the borrower if you went overboard trying to collect.

I live in California, building codes change constantly. I agree, it is maddening and often backwards. He was specifically talking about codes for building stand alone solar, which are newer building codes. Even old building codes are often poorly thought out and contradictory. I'm not saying there isn't an abundance of red tape here, especially for building.
That said, his contractor should have been aware of all codes, submitted his plan, and would have approval or notes on what to change in weeks tops. There's something wrong when it takes over a year to get a shed built, some reason his plans weren't approved like they weren't to code.
Citation : personal experience - I installed solar in California, it took 3 days for my permit approval....and only that long because my contractor was being lazy.

That's the thing I disagree with, no new laws are needed at all, just a removal of exemptions/deregulations for businesses that pay large enough bribes (contributions) to elected officials. Even making all credit businesses operate on the same rules, allowing them 30% interest, seems ok, but that isn't reality today. It's unconscionable to allow 1600% interest on loans peddled to desperate people that don't actually qualify for a real, legitimate line of credit, many of whom don't understand it's what they're agreeing to, but the payday loan lobby is well funded and connected.
Citation:
Although U.S. states set their own maximum legal interest rates, a Supreme Court interpretation of the National Bank Act of 1864 preempted state usury laws and created a path toward a national consumer lending economy. The most important federal case in credit card interest rate deregulation was decided in 1978.

Her problems were multifold. The predatory loan took a fixable issue, her terrible customer service, and compounded it with insurmountable and ever expanding debt, which in turn undoubtedly hurt her customer service more, thus increasing her debt..... It sounds like she never should have purchased a service oriented business, and likely overextended herself from day one just to do it.

I'm unsure of your point in the last paragraph.

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)

Newt, you've already lost.

You didn't lose with Trump in 2016, but with California's Prop 13 in 1978.

The goal of the Neocon movement was to decimate American public education because they knew that an educated population would never vote for the kind of shit they were selling, and because teachers (being educated and all) were a powerful Democratic voting block. Defunding public education was a win/win for them.

It worked beautifully.

The teacher's unions were starved. Public schooling imploded. We went from the most educated populace in the world to the point where 50% of the population can't find their own country on a map.

Then the real screw-job started with the wealth transfer. Unions were busted, jobs were moved overseas. The safety net that kept millions from abject poverty was dissolved ("welfare queens", "food-stamp cheats"). The Middle Class began to evaporate with about 10% climbing up the ladder and the rest being dumped into the street.

For people like me -- people with high-end skills and a college degree -- that shit worked out great. But people who aren't as lucky? Kinda sucks being them. So they got madder and madder. Luckily, there were dark-skinned people that this rage could be directed at. That good ol' American racism? That shit pays dividends if you play it the right way.

Now you have an increasing number of poorly educated people living in poverty with grievances. Hey, guess what -- we have a new tool to focus all that anger and it's called FOX News! They can show you whose dastardly plan it was to keep your poor, white self down on the farm while those FUCKING LIBERALS live it up in the cities!

Lather, rinse, repeat.

See Newt, people like Bob aren't an anomaly, they're the intended end result of a very well-conceived long-term plan by extraordinarily smart people who understood Chomsky, Orwell and Lasker better than you ever will. Bob is now the norm and you are the exception.

Go ahead and vote in Biden or Warren or even Sanders: it doesn't fucking matter because you can't vote out entrenched stupid. No matter who is sitting at 1600 Penn Ave, Bob is sitting in front of his computer, seething and being stupid. He's not going anywhere. He's not going to see things differently and he's damned well not going to get any smarter.

There's a shit-ton of Bobs in this country and their numbers are growing daily. What're you going to do with them? Put 'em in a camp somewhere? Shoot 'em? You cannot have Bobs and the America you want. That leaves you with exactly two choices: you pick up your gun and shoot them, or you pick up your passport and leave. It's one or the other. You might not like the taste of this shit sandwich, but you're going to eat it whether you like it or not.

Also, you think Bob's a little kooky? Go visit 4chan's /pol/, visit whatever 8chan became, visit the comments section of Zero Hedge, read the comments on FOX's YouTube videos: those motherfuckers make Bob look like a goddamn bastion of rationality. Those people, the ones who're yelling at their screens and pounding out febrile screeds? They're armed. They hate you. They want to kill you. The only reason they haven't is because they haven't reached critical mass yet. Give them a couple of years of post-Covid economic collapse and they'll get there.

I'll never forget the most important lesson a Holocaust Survivor taught me: "The smart Jews left first".

Good luck; see you in Lyon.

*doublepromote 1978 performance in HD. Never seen a band from the 70s look so good on video.

*backup=[...snipped...] for 1978.

Your video, Why GM Cancelled The 1973-1978 GMC MotorHome, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Someone asked Mayor Ed Koch: (mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989)

"What is your favorite thing to do in Manhattan that you can do nowhere else?"

"Count the water towers within my sight from my terrace."

I don't know why I remember that but, now that I've finally used it here, I can let it go.

If anyone wonders how to get their hands on a version of the special with the audio from rifftrax dubbed over, drop me a line. It's worth it. See also: https://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/the-star-wars-holiday-special-of-1978.htm

November 18, 1978.

Minimata disease was largely exposed by photographer W. Eugene Smith. The Chisso Corporation did not like being made famous for their business practice. Several employees attacked Smith in 1972. Smith survived, but never really recovered. He left Japan in 1974 to teach journalism at the University of Arizona. He died a in 1978, aged 59.

His most famous image of the environmental disaster was Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath.

You can see the rest of his images of Minimata at Magnum Photos.