All Down The Line

[Gio]

The latest ...

FAMOUS GRAVE TOUR - Evergreen (Eddie Anderson, Louise Beavers, etc.)

Hollywood Graveyard

"Welcome to Hollywood Graveyard, where we set out to remember and celebrate the lives of those who lived to entertain us, by visiting their final resting places. Today we're exploring Evergreen Cemetery, where we'll find such stars as Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Louise Beavers, and a Little Rascal named Styime.

Full list of stars visited today: Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, John Larkin, Louise Beavers, Katherine Grant, Johnny St. Cyr, H. T. Tsiang, Mathew "Stymie" Beard, Bobby Nunn, "Showmen's Rest," Bob Relf, Frank Braxton, George Ralphs, Francis Quinn, Isaac Lankershim, Isaac Van Nuys, Louisa Earp, Jesse Belvin, Phillip Walker, Everett Brown, Florence Barker."


Published on Feb 19, 2019

20:58 minutes

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T048gtdhAPQ

[Gio]

A real eye opener ...


The Crystal Meth Epidemic Plaguing Fresno

VICE

Fresno is experiencing a meth epidemic.

Located in California’s Central Valley, the city is a hub for many major highways and is surrounded by vast farmlands. And while now, most meth is smuggled from Mexico, the valley was once an ideal location for meth manufacturing labs in the 1990's.

Today, methamphetamine is the number one threat for the Central Valley Drug Task Force, and, because latinos make up half of Fresno's population, they are also being affecting by this epidemic.

VICE's Paola Ramos traveled to Fresno to explore the history, factors and the ongoing relationship between the Latino community and methamphetamine use.

Published on Feb 21, 2019

18:57 minutes

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxhyumdiVtw

[palooka's revenge]

A real eye opener ...


The Crystal Meth Epidemic Plaguing Fresno

VICE



Published on Feb 21, 2019

18:57 minutes

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxhyumdiVtw

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxA-Me-zGJU

[Gio]

Ah thanks, they mess well together.

[Gio]

This docu report is focused in Germany, but it is really a reflection on
of a fast moving global phenomenon that is quickly gaining control of
the future of humankind's destiny...

Watch & Learn.


Inequality - how wealth becomes power

(Poverty Richness Documentary) DW Documentary

(1/2)

DW Documentary
Published on Aug 18, 2018

"Germany is one of the world’s richest countries, but inequality is on the rise. The wealthy are pulling ahead, while the poor are falling behind.

For the middle classes, work is no longer a means of advancement. Instead, they are struggling to maintain their position and status. Young people today have less disposable income than previous generations. This documentary explores the question of inequality in Germany, providing both background analysis and statistics. The filmmakers interview leading researchers and experts on the topic. And they accompany Christoph Gröner, one of Germany’s biggest real estate developers, as he goes about his work. "If you have great wealth, you can’t fritter it away through consumption. If you throw money out the window, it comes back in through the front door,” Gröner says. The real estate developer builds multi-family residential units in cities across Germany, sells condominium apartments, and is involved in planning projects that span entire districts. "Entrepreneurs are more powerful than politicians, because we’re more independent,” Gröner concludes. Leading researchers and experts on the topic of inequality also weigh in, including Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, economist Thomas Piketty, and Brooke Harrington, who carried out extensive field research among investors from the ranks of the international financial elite. Branko Milanović, a former lead economist at the World Bank, says that globalization is playing a role in rising inequality. The losers of globalization are the lower-middle class of affluent countries like Germany. "These people are earning the same today as 20 years ago," Milanović notes. "Just like a century ago, humankind is standing at a crossroads. Will affluent countries allow rising equality to tear apart the fabric of society? Or will they resist this trend?”
_______

41:50

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFIxi7BiScI



***



Inequality: how wealth becomes power

(2/2)

"Christoph Gröner is one of the richest people in Germany. The son of two teachers, he has worked his way to the top. He believes that many children in Germany grow up without a fair chance and wants to step in. But can this really ease inequality? Christoph Gröner does everything he can to drum up donations and convince the wealthy auction guests to raise their bids. The more the luxury watch for sale fetches, the more money there will be to pay for a new football field, or some extra tutoring, at a children's home. Christoph Gröner is one of the richest people in Germany - his company is now worth one billion euros, he tells us. For seven months, he let our cameras follow him - into board meetings, onto construction sites, through his daily life, and in his charity work. He knows that someone like him is an absolute exception in Germany. His parents were both teachers, and he still worked his way to the top. He believes that many children in Germany grow up without a fair chance. "What we see here is total failure across the board,” he says. "It starts with parents who just don’t get it and can’t do anything right. And then there’s an education policy that has opened the gates wide to the chaos we are experiencing today." Chistoph Gröner wants to step in where state institutions have failed. But can that really ease inequality? In Germany, getting ahead depends more on where you come from than in most other industrialized countries, and social mobility is normally quite restricted. Those on top stay on top. The same goes for those at the bottom. A new study shows that Germany’s rich and poor both increasingly stay amongst themselves, without ever intermingling with other social strata. Even the middle class is buckling under the mounting pressure of an unsecure future. "Land of Inequality" searches for answers as to why. We talk to families, an underpaid nurse, as well as leading researchers and analysts such as economic Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz, sociologist Jutta Allmendinger or the economist Raj Chetty, who conducted a Stanford investigation into how the middle class is now arming itself to improve their children’s outlooks."

_______

42:25 minutes

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYP_wMJsgyg

[Gio]

Will share this here for your entertainment and inspection ...


Rick Steves' The Story of Fascism

"In this one-hour special, Rick travels back a century to learn how fascism rose and then fell in Europe — taking millions of people with it. We'll trace fascism's history from its roots in the turbulent aftermath of World War I, when masses of angry people rose up, to the rise of charismatic leaders who manipulated that anger, the totalitarian societies they built, and the brutal measures they used to enforce their ideology. We'll see the horrific consequences: genocide and total war. And we'll be inspired by the stories of those who resisted. Along the way, we'll visit poignant sights throughout Europe relating to fascism, and talk with Europeans whose families lived through those times. Our goal: to learn from the hard lessons of 20th-century Europe, and to recognize that ideology in the 21st century."

"Richard Steves is an American travel writer, author, activist and television personality. Since 2000, he has hosted Rick Steves' Europe, a travel series on PBS. Steves also has a public radio travel show called Travel with Rick Steves and has authored numerous travel guides" ... More here

Published on Mar 4, 2019

56:19 minutes

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU1IVW6uqM0

[Emil El Zapato]

A real eye opener ...


The Crystal Meth Epidemic Plaguing Fresno

VICE



Published on Feb 21, 2019

18:57 minutes

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxhyumdiVtw

I find this 'interesting'. My brother and sister-in-law have lived in Madera/Fresno for 30 years and have never mentioned Meth. (They were both peripheral to Law Enforcement in the 2nd half of their careers). I can't stand methamphetamines. Walter White look-alike. I can believe the part of the work aspect though. Meth has always been an American product.

If his quote about laws is true...why go to the problem of smuggling from Mexico...no need, just cook it in your back yard.

[Emil El Zapato]

Most drugs have been associated with urban life — acid in San Francisco, Prohibition in Chicago, cocaine in the New York nightclubs of the 80s. But meth is a completely different animal: It's rural, consumed not by monied elite on the East and West Coasts, but by white working-class Americans in the Mid and Southwest.

Meth is a blue collar drug, and you can make it at home. Over the years, its manufacture has been more refined, to the point where it can now be cooked in a bathtub or basement, or a self-made lab.

Methamphetamine is a synthetic chemical, unlike marijuana, which grows naturally. The person making the meth takes ingredients from common cold pills (hence the new restrictions on buying medicines that contain pseudoephedrine). The initial synthesis process is actually very easy, according to Breaking Bad's chemistry adviser, Dr. Donna Nelson. Making a pure and high quality product is the hard part, she said.

To increase the product's strength, the meth "cook" combines the substance with chemicals such as battery acid, drain cleaner, lantern fuel and antifreeze. These dangerous chemicals are potentially explosive, and because the meth cooks are potentially drugged out and disoriented, they are often severely burned and disfigured or killed when their preparations explode.

Still, this hasn't kept meth from taking America by storm. Since exploding onto the American drug scene in the 1980s, meth has spread rapidly across the U.S, but we haven't nailed down a single stronghold for it. In 2005, an analysis by Slate.com showed that U.S. newspapers had used the title “Meth Capitol of the World” to describe over 70 different American towns, cities, and countries, from California to New York.

Perhaps one of the most well known and highly acclaimed books about meth in Middle America is Nick Reding's Methland, for which he spent two years immersing himself in meth-stricken Oelwein, Iowa. The New York Times book review wrote that Reding's book was an "unnerving investigative account of two gruesome years" and describe the town "a railroad and meatpacking town of several thousand whipped by a methamphetamine-laced panic whose origins lie outside the place itself, in forces almost too great to comprehend and too pitiless to bear. The ravages of meth, or 'crank,' on Oelwein and countless forsaken locales much like it are shown to be merely superficial symptoms of a vaster social dementia caused by ... iron dominion of corporate agriculture and the slow melting of villages and families into the worldwide financial stew."

Reding wrote that meth had a "seeming distinctiveness among drugs" because of “the general resistance to associating narcotic use with small towns."

So where are these "small towns?"

The below maps show where meth labs have been identified and seized. Indiana, Tennessee, and Missouri have the highest rates of lab incidence.

In Tulsa County, Oklahoma, police identified 979 contaminated meth lab sites — the most of any county in the nation. In a 26-month period, The Tulsa Police Dept. cleaned up 690 labs at a cost of $118,560,000.

Next up on the graph is Jefferson, Missouri, where there were 472 sites. Outside of labs, the Missouri State Highway Patrol seized 37,295 ounces of methamphetamine in 2011.

Other notable sites of lab concentration include: Summit, Ohio (353 labs); Kanawha, West Virginia (235 labs); and Kalamazoo, Michigan (318 labs.)

Breaking Bad takes place in Bernalillo county, New Mexico. Of all 33 counties in New Mexico, Bernallilo has the highest number of illegal meth labs (97), even though it’s the third smallest in terms of area: 1,1666 square miles. (The county has the largest population, at around 670,000.)

Methamphetamine transportation routes.

Aggregate responses from local law enforcement when asked which drug posed the largest threat. (Over a quarter of them answered meth, over cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and prescription pills.)

(Source: National Drug Intelligence Center.)

According to the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), approximately 1.2 million people (0.4% of the population) reported using methamphetamine in the past year alone, and 440,000 (0.2%) reported using it in the past month. The average age of new methamphetamine users in 2012 was 19.7 years old.

Reuters columnist Jack Shafer, who has written extensively on the drug, said in an interview with PolicyMic that he has never adopted the word “epidemic.” First of all, he said, stimulants of the same sort have a 70-year history in the country. “I don’t think that meth is a mystery drug,” he said. And if we’re not calling alcoholism use or tobacco use an “epidemic,” why would we use the word for another drug?

But the thing is, it doesn’t matter what we call it. It's a problem, yes, but it’s not about meth — it’s about something greater. As Reding writes in Methland, “In truth, all drug epidemics are only in part about the drugs. Meth is indeed uniquely suited to Middle America, though this is only tangentially related to the idea that it can be made in the sink. The rise of the meth epidemic was built largely on economic policies, political decisions, and the recent development of American cultural history."

The Washington Post wrote of Methland that “it makes the case that small-town America is perhaps not the moral and hard-working place of the public imagination, but it also argues that big city ignorance — fueled by the media — toward small-town decay is both dangerous and appalling.

Reding summed it up. “If there was a chance to see the place of the small American town in the era of the global economy, the meth epidemic is it.”

[Gio]

I find this 'interesting'. My brother and sister-in-law have lived in Madera/Fresno for 30 years and have never mentioned Meth. (They were both peripheral to Law Enforcement in the 2nd half of their careers). I can't stand methamphetamines. Walter White look-alike. I can believe the part of the work aspect though. Meth has always been an American product.

If his quote about laws is true...why go to the problem of smuggling from Mexico...no need, just cook it in your back yard.

The access to the chemical (ingredients) is easily (unregulated) and readily available outside the U.S. in nearby Mexico ... With the poverty level along with other cheaper (less risky) manufacturing conditions makes perfect sense to the Cartels.

PS ~ I lived in the Midwest for over a decade, and as you probably already know Tweekers cooking meth is nothing new ...Though much more risky (with U.S. law enforcement) to be conducted in such large scale.

[Gio]

...

Will share this here for your entertainment and inspection ...


Rick Steves' The Story of Fascism

"In this one-hour special, Rick travels back a century to learn how fascism rose and then fell in Europe — taking millions of people with it. We'll trace fascism's history from its roots in the turbulent aftermath of World War I, when masses of angry people rose up, to the rise of charismatic leaders who manipulated that anger, the totalitarian societies they built, and the brutal measures they used to enforce their ideology. We'll see the horrific consequences: genocide and total war. And we'll be inspired by the stories of those who resisted. Along the way, we'll visit poignant sights throughout Europe relating to fascism, and talk with Europeans whose families lived through those times. Our goal: to learn from the hard lessons of 20th-century Europe, and to recognize that ideology in the 21st century."

"Richard Steves is an American travel writer, author, activist and television personality. Since 2000, he has hosted Rick Steves' Europe, a travel series on PBS. Steves also has a public radio travel show called Travel with Rick Steves and has authored numerous travel guides" ... More here

Published on Mar 4, 2019

56:19 minutes

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU1IVW6uqM0

[Elen]

How timely is that Gio! A lot of food for thought here.

[Aragorn]

This could just as easily have gone on the Lounge Thread, but then I thought of Gio's intent for this thread, and that's why I'm sharing it here.

I hadn't seen this interview yet before tonight, and I had already often been wondering what had become of Barry after all three of his younger brothers ─ first Andy, the youngest, and then Maurice, followed a few years later by his twin brother Robin ─ had come to pass away.

Barry Gibb, the last Bee Gee

When the Bee Gees put the Fever into Saturday Night, they became one of the most successful pop groups in history. Born in England but raised in Queensland, this band of brothers - Barry, Robin and Maurice - were musical geniuses.

When Robin died, eldest brother Barry became the sole surviving Bee Gee - or, as he puts it, "the last man standing". He spoke about it for the first time four months after the tragedy, coming to terms with his loss as he spoke to Rahni Sadler.

This story originally aired on the 23 September 2012.


Duration: 18 minutes

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpp3YQ3B0n0

[Emil El Zapato]

The interesting thing about Mussolini's 'supreme Italy' there was still the undercurrent that the 'light skinned' Italians (Northerners, Neapolitans) were better than the dark ones...southern Italy and Sicily...

[Gio]

The interesting thing about Mussolini's 'supreme Italy' there was still the undercurrent that the 'light skinned' Italians (Northerners, Neapolitans) were better than the dark ones...southern Italy and Sicily...

Please do note the term Neapolitan's refers to the inhabitants of Naples ...

And it is no secret that the Italian government (over the course of its short historic history),
has neglected the people and economy of its poorer southern regions ...

Still, i am very proud of my southern roots and relatives in the Calabria region ( San Giovanni in Fiore).

By the way my father's (family) skin is (was) white ...

If that really matters much ...

[Emil El Zapato]

of course it does, Giovonni, no disrespect meant...Your reflection on your roots is essentially universal...Spain, Mexico, India, Italy, Native American...we all 'fight' the same urges...

But since you brought it up...I don't suppose you have any Coccos floating around back there...