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Friday, January 1, 2016
Ted Cruz Did A Strange But Interesting Interview On Geek Culture
“I was glad it did not feature Jar Jar Binks.”
YouTube
Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz gave an interesting interview this week on his love for geek culture.
Appearing on Geek Tank Radio on 600WREC, the Texas senator talked about everything from Star Wars, Star Trek, X-Men, and a variety of other topics.
Among the reveals from Cruz are that he watched Star Wars instead of the Democratic presidential debate late last month, that he stood "for three hours" in line to see Empire Strikes Back as a kid, and he believes Han Solo shot first.
Listen to interview the highlights below:
Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/1OxOl1g
President Obama's "Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee" Episode Is Hilarious
The newest episode of the series has Seinfeld driving around with the POTUS and commiserating over Larry David’s sunscreen use.
The newest episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is here, with Jerry Seinfeld's biggest guest yet: President Barack Obama.
Highlights include Jerry eating the Oval Office's apples.
Crackle
The president gets to test-drive his dream car.
Obama said that he used to admire the Stingray Corvette, and that if he ever owned one he'd know that he "really made it."
Crackle
Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/1Onmll4
Gun Control Is Obama's New Year's Resolution
The president is set to meet Monday with Attorney General Loretta Lynch to discuss options for fighting what he called an ongoing “epidemic of gun violence.”
Brennan Linsley / AP
President Obama plans to take aim at "unfinished business" during his final year in office, he said during his weekly address Friday, particularly looking at measures that can be taken in the United States to fight what he called an ongoing "epidemic of gun violence."
"Each time we're told that common sense reforms like background checks might not have stopped the last massacre or the one before that, so we shouldn't do anything," Obama said. "We know we can't stop every act of violence, but what if we tried to stop just one?"
The president is expected to take executive action on gun control, a move that comes after efforts through legislation have been blocked or died in the legislature, something Obama credited to strong lobbying by the gun lobby.
Obama is also scheduled to meet with U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch Monday, where he said they are expected to discuss what options are available despite congressional action.
During his weekly address, Obama noted the high-profile shootings in Newton, Connecticut, and of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, and said, "survivors of gun violence and those who lost a child, or a parent, or a spouse to gun violence are forced to mark such awful anniversaries every single day,"
"Yet congress still hasn't done anything to prevent what happened to them from happening to other families."
The White House / Via youtube.com
The president's actions will likely lead to a contentious year with Second Amendment advocates who have fought previous efforts at gun control.
Three years earlier, a bipartisan bill that would have called for universal background checks was blocked in the Senate, and across the country some states have been moving in the opposite direction.
As the president's address was published online Friday, for example, Texas enacted its open-carry law, which allows some Texans to wear their handguns in public and on display in holsters.
Politico reported some of the measures expected to come from the administration will include requirements for small-scale gun stores to be licensed, which would require they perform background checks.
Stronger rules requiring the reporting of stolen guns are also expected to be introduced.
With a possible political fight looming, the president asked advocates of gun control to step in.
"The gun lobby is loud and well organized," Obama said. "The rest of us are going to have to be just as passionate and well organized in our defense of our kids."
Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/1NZx9SP
10 DIY Projects We Totally Failed At In 2015
We literally get paid to do this for a living…and yet…
And even though, for the most part, we do practice what we preach...sometimes we do not live up to these ideals.
This attempt at making vodka-infused Gushers:
We really wanted to infuse fruit Gushers with vodka, like you would a gummy bear. Seems legit, right? Imagine biting into a Gusher and getting both sugary syrup AND vodka. Well, not so much. After soaking for a few hours, they were just a sloppy, weirdly waxy mess. And the vodka in the bowl had turned brown and tasted (yes, I tasted it) DISGUSTING. —Natalie Brown, associate lifestyle editor
Natalie Brown
The great giant balloon disaster:
Like all good Instagrammers, the BuzzFeed DIY team is obsessed with these giant balloons that spell things out. Especially when they spell out dirty and/or curse words. There's just something about a giant metallic FUCK YOU that feels so festive yet unserious. So when our DIY Instagram got 100K followers, we decided to get some celebratory balloons to photograph. But no one told us what a pain in the ass these things are to stage!! For one, they don't stay together for shit, and even if you can magically get them to stay on the same level for one minute, there's no way they will be in the right order. And a giant "010" just doesn't really do it. Cut to an hour and several popped balloons later (which, for the record, are also not cheap), and there's me crouching on the floor trying to stay out of the frame while keeping these horrible monstrosities in line.
We EVENTUALLY figured it out using the magic of Photoshop and cropping and our top-notch photo team. But if I never see those bullshit word balloons again it will be much too soon. —Jess Probus, DIY editor
Jess Probus
via IFTTT
31 Delicious Things You Should Eat In January
Meet The New Year’s Resolution That Will Kick Your Butt If You Mess Up
Like most American men, I dream of a future where I’ll be able to wear skinny jeans, drink fancy coffee and listen to music I don’t quite understand. The only problem is, I love eating so much I can’t quite pull off the jeans part.
For that reason, I spent the past month working on my New Year’s weight loss resolution in advance, both to get a head start on 2016 and to test out Rise, an app I heard was pretty effective at helping people shed the pounds.
Rise is a simple but wicked smart tool. You use it to snap photos of all the food you eat and a registered dietician or nutritionist rates each meal and snack with a green (good), yellow (not so good) or red (did you really need to eat five donuts??). When you join the app, you are assigned a dedicated ‘coach,’ so as you post your food the person reviewing it understands your specific eating habits and leaves comments, helping you figure out how to eat right. You can also message your coach with questions and feedback via a dedicated messaging line. The app costs $40 a month on a three month plan.
After telling Rise a little about myself and my goals, I was presented with a few options for coaches and settled on Nicole, a registered dietician based in California. Nicole immediately became significant part of my life.
Every time I’ve thought about food since, or actually consumed it, I’ve had an imaginary Nicole avatar in my head, ready with her red stamp in case I deviated from the healthy straight and narrow. I mentioned Nicole so much to friends and coworkers, she became an honorary part of our groups. They learned her name and warned me of her judgement at meals. When I posted a picture of a stir fry I cooked to Instagram, one coworker couldn’t help but comment: “Nicole will love this.”
She did.
The specter of Nicole kept me in line. And that’s one part of what you get with Rise: fear. (Or for the optimist: positive reinforcement.) The other part is education.
I may have been petrified to show Nicole the garbage I ate, but when I did post it, she was never too harsh and gave me constructive criticism after every foul up. A 520 calorie snack that received a red mark came with the following advice: “Your meals should be around 500-600 calories and snacks around 100-200 calories. So this snack was as much as a meal.” Good advice. In another instance, a dinner of chicken and rice was paired with the following comment: “One thing to work on when plating your food, you want to cover half your plate with veggies, ¼ with grain (rice) and ¼ with protein (chicken). So although you had all the components of a great meal here, your portions just need some work.” More good stuff. Education, though, is half the battle. The more important aspect of all this is actually executing the plan.
Plan the work, eat the plan
The Michael Moss book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, should be required reading for anyone thinking about their relation with today’s food economy. The book, in painstaking detail, lays out how some food companies in the United States have engineered our food to the point where the product is essentially addicting. Some soft drink companies, for instance, optimize towards a “bliss point,” pumping their beverages with enough sugar to make consuming them as pleasurable as possible without leaving us feeling rotten. Similar calculations are made by other food producers who find optimal levels of salt and fat. These operations made unhealthy food so enjoyable and crave-inducing, it’s often very hard to quit them.
And so perhaps unsurprisingly, in this first month with Rise, despite paying more attention to my food consumption than perhaps ever before, I haven’t been able to kick a junk food habit. Worse, I’ve cheated and kept many of my deviations secret, not telling Nicole due to a sense of shame.
Rise likes to pitch itself as something of an anti-diet. “Diets don’t work. #truth,” read the subject line of a recent email the company sent to me. So I wondered if it was possible for the app to help me break free from the bad stuff that’s a fundamental part of my food experience.
When I posted the question to Suneel Gupta, Rise’s CEO (and brother of famous neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta), he told me that eliminating bad food completely is not Rise’s goal. Gupta’s instead insisted that traditional diets aren’t strong enough to win against engineered food. Losing weight very difficult, he argued (I agree), and to achieve sustainable weight loss, you need more than a set of foods you can and cannot eat. You need real behavioral change. “We have to fight fire with fire,” Gupta explained.
To help its users succeed, Gupta said, Rise emphasizes cutting down on bad food instead of totally eliminating it, offering healthy substitute suggestions and teaching you how to balance the bad with the good. This feels a little weight watchers-y, but it’s helpful to receive constant feedback from someone on your approach to meals.
In a little over three weeks on the app, I’ve made small improvements in my approach to food. I’m eating more vegetables, cooking for myself more often (even trying out a few recipe suggestions sent over by Nicole) and thinking long and hard before scarfing down a bag of chips. If there’s a drawback, it’s that the app makes you think so much about food, it’s easy to become obsessed with your intake. This is dangerous territory for some.
By now you’re probably wondering how many pounds I lost with Rise. The answer is zero. Yes, it’s pretty embarrassing, especially considering I knew I’d be disclosing my results in this post. But though I may have fallen short of my goal, I like the direction I’m headed in. Or at least the one I think I’m headed in. And heck, not gaining weight during the holiday season is a small victory if you ask me.
via IFTTT
Sanders: America's New Year's Resolution Is To Say "Enough Is Enough"
Evan McMorris-Santoro / BuzzFeed News
DES MOINES, Iowa — There are jokey party speeches, there are teary party speeches, and then there are Bernie Sanders speeches to ring in the new year.
At a large party in a downtown Des Moines hotel, Sanders kicked off an early-evening New Year's Eve party without some of the usual policy-heavy details — but the general attitude of throw-everything-out-and-start-over was still there. The mood was upbeat even as the substance was for the most part very serious.
"In a few hours we're going to be in 2016," Sanders said, before hundreds of supporters who paid a small fee for hors d'oeuvres, a cash bar with a two-drink-at-one-time limit, and Sanders. "And we together have an opportunity to make 2016 a year that history will long remember."
That new year, should Sanders win the nomination, would be the first step toward ending "the disgrace of the United States having more people in jail than any other country."
"We are going to reform a very broken criminal justice system and end institutional racism in America," Sanders said.
"We're not going to continue to destroy our planet," he added. "We are going to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy."
About 1,000 showed up on Thursday night, according to a campaign aide. The crowd, packed in tight and emblazoned with special Bernie Sanders New Year's Eve stickers, cheered along. Some blew holiday noisemakers.
Evan McMorris-Santoro / BuzzFeed News
Sanders left the event well before midnight and hopped a plane back to the East Coast, where he is scheduled for another busy sprint of campaigning in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
There was no real new year's resolution from Sanders, but there was a rallying cry.
"What this campaign is about is understanding that no president, not Bernie Sanders not anybody else can solve this nation's problems unless — unless — millions of people, Iowa and across this country begin to stand up and say loudly and clearly: Enough is Enough. Thank you."
The New Year's Eve event wrapped up a busy swing through Iowa, where the candidate was again met with overflow crowds. The breakneck pace was evident in a pronounced hoarseness from the candidate.
"I lost my voice in Iowa, I'm still looking for it, in a town south of here," Sanders said. "If you see it, tell me about it."
Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/1UjbZD6
Top Aides Resign From Ben Carson's Campaign In Major Shakeup
Three staffers, including the campaign manager and communications director, resigned effective immediately on New Year’s Eve.
Mike Blake / Reuters
Three top aides to Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson's campaign resigned on New Year's Eve, in a major, and very public, shakeup just a month before the Iowa caucuses.
Campaign manager Barry Bennett and communications director Doug Watts resigned "effective immediately" Thursday morning. Shortly after, deputy campaign manager Lisa Coen announced she too had resigned.
The news was first reported by the Des Moines Register.
Over the past several months, Carson's once surging bid for the presidency suffered a series of missteps. Carson, popular with evangelicals and grassroots conservatives, appeared at times to not have a handle on foreign policy. Carson's own biography came under close scrutiny, and in both national and state polls, Carson has seen his support diminish.
In a statement released after the resignations were made public, Carson's campaign said they were announcing "enhancements," naming Major General Bob Dees as campaign chairman and Ed Brookover as campaign manager.
"As we enter a new phase of the campaign cycle, it is necessary to invigorate my campaign with a strategy that more aggressively shares my vision and world-view with the American people. I commend Barry Bennett and Doug Watts for their efforts to help me share my vision for America," Carson said in the statement.
In an interview the Washington Post after his resignation, former campaign manager Bennett said, "I spent the holidays hearing every day that I had lost my job. My relationship with Carson was always good and friendly but being campaign manager in that kind of situation, where outside advisers are in essence driving the campaign and setting up interviews and raising questions about everything, it's not the right atmosphere."
Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/1IGY0GN
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