Best of the Decade

Best Pictures of the Decade

The privately run Federal Reserve spent more money in a year then the annual GDP of the entire nation...in secret.




The Hubble Telescope trained it's lens on a dark section of space, 1/10th the size of the moon. Galaxies with billions of stars were there for discovery. Amazing.

(click on pictures to enlarge)

Dec 26, 2004 a Tsunami created a 30 meter wave in Asia and claimed the lives of over 200,000 people in 11 countries.

This poor soul made his choice. Burn or jump.

Disgraceful.

"I hear you, the rest of the world hears you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon". The rally cry that began two wars.

Feb 1, 2003 the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry.

The small Palestine boy armed with a rock opposes an Israeli tank. He was later shot and killed.

Shock and Awe. Those three words no longer hold the same meaning as originally intended.

There isn't a person of a certain age alive today that does not remember this day. It was as if everything wasn't going to be alright for the first time...and we were scared in a very elemental way.

The setting sun....on Mars.

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5 Best Movies

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The Incredibles

Wedding Crashers

Gladiator

Y tu Mama Tambien

Barbarian Invasions

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5 Best Athletes

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Tiger Woods

Roger Federer

Lance Armstrong

Kobe Bryant

Tom Brady

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5 Best Tech

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Google

iPod

Facebook

WiFi

DVR

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5 Biggest Stories

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Browning of America. In 30 years white people will be a minority, most likely in perpetuity.

The Marketing of Obama. Some of the slickest branding since Ronald Reagan's campaign and massive outlays on TV elected the first Black President.

Uncle Sam takes over. Bailouts for Wallstreet and takeovers for GM and Chrysler. Never has so much money been spent so jarringly...except for...

The Secret Fed. $1.5 Trillion in TARP spending by the Government was peanuts compared to the $12 Trillion spent by an agency with no oversight that is privately controlled. We haven’t even begun to feel it’s affect.

WalMart. The retail chain became a retail juggernaut that makes gobs of money when the economy is good...or bad.

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3 Things We Never Knew We Needed

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Red Bull

YouTube

Wikipedia

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5 Biggest Stock Winners

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Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc +7,434% Keurig and gourmet coffee. What a combo.

Hansen Natural Corporation +6,455%. Energy drinks

Terra Nitrogen Company +6,156%. Fertilizer so a tomato only looks like a tomato

Southwestern Energy Corp +5,411%. Natural Gas is a hot commodity

Amedysis,Inc +4,452%. Health Services for the aging Boomers

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5 Most Influential

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George W Bush- Pre-emptive war was added to our lexicon

Osama Bin Laden- The face that launched the next wave of Imperialism

Ben Bernake- Current Federal Reserve Chairman and the most powerful man in a Global Economy ever. No one has spent more in the history of the world in so short a span. Did I mention in secret? Ok well I just did again.

Steve Jobs. From Pixar to iPods he is selling what the masses want. Style and substance carry the day.

L. Page and S. Brin. Google them. Oh wait they are Google.

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5 Best in Science

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Large Hadron Collider- The largest and most expensive demolition derby for protons ever.

Climate Change- Human causal or not it is a big story.

Stem Cell Research- Holds a possible key for much that ails us

Human Genome Project- Perhaps someday we’ll can scan a new date for a “pass” or “fail”

Ardi Hominid- Another ancestral link to Human Evolution. Can Creationists really believe the Earth is 6000 years old still?!

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5 Best TV Shows

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Six Feet Under

Family Guy

The Daily Show

Lost

Sopranos

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3 Best of YouTube

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Dick in the Box

2 Girls 1 Cup- If you haven’t seen it don’t. It the name of all things good and decent. Don’t. Consider yourself warned.

Lonely Girl- Dorks unite ... and fall in love.

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Most Impactful Deaths

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Pat Tillman

The NFL footballer/atheist that gave up millions to fight in Afghanistan. Only to be shot in the head 3 times by reported “friendly fire”. His clothes and notebook were burned by fellow soldiers in attempt to cover-up the cause of death. Tillman’s thoughts and grievances shared with his family about the expansion into Iraq were lost in that notebook. He went from a recruiting nightmare scenario to a re-branded patriot hero used to sound a call to service.

A world that more than ever...became about image/perception and no lie was too offensive.

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Neda Agha-Soltan

27 year old Iranian woman was protesting the Islamic regimes fraudulent election and was shot dead in the streets of Tehran. Bystanders videotaped the incident and she became the face of injustice. Iran was not a country of Evil doers. It is made up of people like us...and right and wrong is not a punch line it is a brutal truth.

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THE BANK SWAGGA Blog wishes for all of you in the coming years...the best decade of your lives.

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-Life is complicated and far from perfect but it is still great.

Spreading "Democracy"

I saw Avatar last night and I won’t mess about. It is Epic.

This fantasy movie has painstaking created a fully realized world so you can revel in your suspension of disbelief. The 3D is awe inducing and aids greatly in immersing you in a place that becomes very real.

It’s also a brilliant piece of business. More and more people are opting out of movie lines and smelly theatres when 50” plasmas adorn the walls of their comfortable homes. However you almost “have” to see this in a full size theatre to get the true affect. The box office will continue to reflect this I’m sure.

Now a lot of critics are complaining about the script and I am with them on that. We have heard Cameron wrote Avatar 12 years ago but back then he was clearly missing the archetype he ended up leaning tremendously on as a foil for the movie...George W Bush.

I don’t have a problem with the movie taking sides against Bush. He was at best incompetent and at worse dangerous, making him a tale of woe worth revisiting.

At times Cameron does a superlative evocation of our current political climate. When the Na’vi have their towering tree toppled the reactions shots could have been straight out of Ground Zero on 9/11. Very effective.

There is also a line Michelle Rodriguez delivers that addresses manufactured deception in order to fight that isn’t the most subtle but a passable allusion.

However I got frustrated with the overt use of uniquely Bush lexicon. Lines like: “Shock and Awe”, “Pre-emptive Strike”, “Fight Terror” is vernacular he gave the world to be sure. The problem is not that Bush shouldn’t be mocked. The problem is it ruins the escapism of the movie. You are pulled out of the experience of a far off planet in 2154, back to 2002...back here.

Why has Cameron done that? In my humble opinion it is because we are for the most part...morons. The theme of the movie is crystal clear. Harmony with our environment is more important than imperialistic gains. Unfortunately the metaphor isn’t enough and a chalk board has been carted out..and it is disjointing and disappointing.

Cameron deftly placed the highly desirable deposits the bad guys seek, underground and fancifully referred to them as “cheddar”. I get it is a metaphor for oil and that Americans don’t care what is in the way of that which they wish to obtain. However you don’t have to actually call the mineral they seek “unobtainium”. We get it. We should all get it.

Being consumed by the greed of attaining “things” to the detriment of “living things” is short-sighted, inane and possibly catastrophic. Great premise but no hammer over the head is needed.

Clearly Cameron’s original script had origins in Native Americans being slaughtered and relocated from their beloved land they connected with spiritually. What a tragic and shameful chapter in history that race and religion made them a lesser concern.

“I see you” was a simple, powerful and constructive means to buttress this point about a shared “humanity” being more important than perceived differences. “I see you” means you acknowledge “they matter”.

It is a very worthy picture. It does so many things so very well. I only wish it didn’t try at times to speak to those of us with a Grade 3 education.

-Life is complicated and far from perfect but it is still great.

Food For Thought

Egyptians in the time of the Pharaohs (5000 years ago) routinely lived into their 80’s. Back then most cultures were lucky to see 50.

In modern day there is an equally fascinating longevity trend found in the mountains of Pakistan, Russia, Ecuador and Peru, where people are seeing 120+.

What exactly is going on here? Life expectancy averages here in Western civilization are barely 80 and people rarely see 100. Aren’t we at a Medical advantage?

I think it comes down to what we put into our bodies that makes the difference.

Isn’t it remarkable that when you cut/scrape yourself that your body just goes about the business of clotting up the wound and replacing the cells? Our bodies are the result of eons of evolution and have been continually tuning themselves for the purpose of survival.

The human body is mostly water so what other nutrients/building-blocks are at its disposal, to rely on for this autonomous healing power?

After Carbon and Nitrogen we are chockfull of trace elements. Phosphorus, Potassium, Sulphur, Sodium, Chlorine, Magnesium, Iron, Zinc, Copper, Strontium, Bromine, Silicon, Fluorine...hell the list goes on forever.

Therefore it seems rational that keeping a good supply of these minerals may be a key to our well being. However we can’t absorb copper by chewing on a wire, as our bodies cannot absorb elements such as metals directly.

We need a medium, a plant for example, to absorb these things out of the ground so we can in turn ingest and derive the nutrients.

Unfortunately the vegetables in your grocery store are no longer filled with most minerals. You see you don’t need all of these elements to grow a tomato that looks and tastes like a tomato.

Vegetables are instead grown from soil that has long since been sucked dry of the multitude of rich minerals as farms really only need to replace the Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium to rear a crop. And so they do. They are after all...a business.

This brings us back to the Egyptians who planted their agriculture in the flood plains of the Nile River. Every spring the Ethiopian mountains would produce a melt that bore down all of this natural goodness across these very plains annually.

The other mountainous regions mentioned above are right at the “tap” of the irrigation bounty. Their water is so cloudy with nutrients that it has been dubbed “glacial milk”.

I watched the documentary Food Inc. the other day and it just solidified my concerns over the quality of our food. Perhaps the rising rates in asthma, autism and diabetes have their roots in what is stoking our fires. Perhaps we look like tomatoes....but we too are woefully short on ingredients.

It’s common to hear stories of mothers-to-be having wild food cravings. Is this a body’s innate reaction to lacking nutrients needed to satisfy the leeching child?

You know a horse will eat the wood in its stall if you do not give it a block of salt to lick. That animal needs something in its system and on some very elemental level it will bite and gnaw everything in sight until it gets it.

Time for me to take my daily vitamins!

-Life is complicated and far from perfect but it is still great!

Barack Tiger Obama Woods

Obama formally announced his decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. This decision was shared informally a week prior so that the American public would have time to digest...oh and to give the media time to sell this strategy.

General McChrystal hours later told his troops "We are here to help the Afghan people". The obvious purpose was to get the soldiers in step with winning hearts and minds. However did these soldiers really sign up to risk there lives for the Afghan people?

Does this blog think that is the right thing to do? I honestly don’t know, but I do know I like what one pundit said. “Why are we using 100,000 troops for 100 people that wish us harm?”

I get that 9/11 scared the be-Jebus out of Americans (btw Obama deftly slipped in that fear reminder nugget early into his speech), but that was a different time.

The entire population is now aware of Jihadists. There are hundreds of millions of people constantly cognizant of such threats. This is not to say another “attack” won’t happen but I think the game has changed and working in anonymity is no longer a luxury Jihadists have.

I’m no pacifist but this war has been going on for 8 years now.

When I hear about young married men and women being sent off for 15 months to do a tour of duty I think about the social cost for those poor bastards. Who out there in their 20’s has a relationship that could withstand that? “Bye honey, see you in well over a year. Wait for me”.

Then you come to realize that a lot of these people have been sent there 3 and 4 times. Are you fucking kidding me?!

Jesus Christ no wonder Americans always pay lip service to the military. “Our brave men and women in uniform who exemplify...” is a nice line of homage to score points but it smacks of contrivance.

Reminds me of the South Park episode with Japanese businessmen distracting locals from uncovering their plot by saying ”You Americans have such large penises”.

Now I’m not going to get into the corrupt Karzai government that the US has helped install or talk of oil pipelines, quagmires, free elections and women’s rights. There are all kinds of tributaries to go down. I’m not even here to hack on Obama (although that Nobel Peace Prize might burn a little in his fingers now), all I’m saying is that we are always being sold something.

Want a recent example of being sold a story line? We were told (some people even believed) Tiger Woods was out for a shoeless, 2:30 AM, prescription drug-riddled drive when he crashed into a tree and his wife pulled him out of the car to safety.

Personally I wondered why she was the first one on scene when he ended up at a neighbour’s house. Then I wondered why they said she used a golf club to break a window and free him...only to find out she smashed the back passenger side widow.

Maybe...just maybe she was chasing his cheating ass and swinging a golf club on the side exposed to the house as he drove away.

Maybe...just maybe Obama is pitching America a palatable story and the truth is a lot more obscure than a spurned Norwegian. Perhaps we will never be told the full truth so we are left with only one reliable reality; that many more lives will be profoundly changed and in some cases ended, in a plight that may or may not be as it appears.

-Life is complicated and far from perfect but it is still great.