Samuel L. Jackson To Obama: 'Stop Trying To Relate, Be F--king Presidential'

 
Samuel L. Jackson did not mince words when he said President Obama needs to "stop trying to 'relate'" and "be f--king presidential."
The 64-year-old recently gave a candid interview to Playboy's Stephen Rebello. The discussion opened with talk of his new flick with Spike Lee, "Oldboy," and then turned to talk of linguistic errors in society today. Jackson told an anecdote about how, when he was younger, he always made sure to address his elders properly. Nowadays, he sees people on Twitter who don't even know the difference between "your" and "you're." (To which the actor asked: "How the f--k did we become a society where mediocrity is acceptable?")
Rebello raised the point that even highly educated people, including Barack Obama, consciously drop g's from words in order to sound more like the average Joe.
"First of all, we know it ain’t because of his blackness, so I say stop trying to 'relate,'" Jackson replied while chatting with the men's magazine in West Hollywood. "Be a leader. Be f--king presidential. Look, I grew up in a society where I could say 'It ain’t' or 'What it be' to my friends. But when I’m out presenting myself to the world as me, who graduated from college, who had family who cared about me, who has a well-read background, I f--king conjugate."
He then addressed comments he made last year to Ebony magazine, saying he hopes "Obama gets scary in the next four years." Alas, he doesn't think much has changed since then, due to the political deadlock in Washington.
"He got a little heated about the kids getting killed in Newtown and about the gun law," he told Playboy. "He’s still a safe dude. But with those Republicans, we’re now in a situation where even if he said, 'I want to give you motherf--kers a raise,' they’d go, 'F--k you! We don’t want a raise!' ... How do we fix the fact that politicians aren’t trying to serve the people, they’re just trying to serve their party and their closed ideals?"
(The actor's use of the f-word is not out of anger. He has said that using the term "motherf**kers" helped stop his stutter.)
Despite his harsh words, Jackson has long been an Obama supporter. Last September, before the 2012 election, he starred in an ad telling people to "Wake the F--k Up" and vote for Obama, dubbing Mitt Romney an "out-of-touch millionaire."
In 2008, Jackson helped raised $10 million for Obama, according to The Hill. Both he and Sharon Stone donated $50,000. Other donors included Halle Berry, Jamie Lee Curtis and Jamie Foxx.

Life On Earth Likely to End in 2.25 Billion Years

I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that the Earth won't be destroyed by the inevitable heat death of the universe. The bad news is that the planet will be wiped out long before that, between 1.5 billion and 2.25 billion years from now, according to a new study by Andrew Rushby was recently published in Astrobiology.
You see, when our Sun starts running out of hydrogen fuel, it will expand until it swallows Mercury and Venus, and potentially even expands into our orbit. Obviously, this means bad things for anything left on Earth. Even if the Sun doesn't grow large enough to reach Earth's orbit, you don't want to hang around waiting for the oceans to boil away and the atmosphere to burst into flame. Trust me, you'll have a bad time.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons (cc by-sa 3.0)

So why study an event so unimaginably far in the future? Because it can give us a better idea of where to look for intelligent life outside our solar system. We've detected almost a thousand planets using a variety of methods around a few hundred stars in our galactic neighborhood. That's all well and good, but if the goal is to find life on other solar systems, finding planets is just the first step.
Given what we know about life on Earth, we assume that liquid water is required. That narrows down the potential billions of planets in the galaxy to only the ones that are the right size to hold an atmosphere at the right temperature and pressure for liquid water to exist. Planets that meet these conditions are said to be in the habitable zone.
At this point, it's important to note that it took a long time for life to evolve on Earth. The planet was formed about five billion years ago, it took between one and two billion years for basic microscopic life to evolve. Add another three billion years, give or take, between the rise of single-cellular life and the evolution of man, the taming of the atom and the invention of the digital watch. For simplicity sake, lets say it took 4 billion years for complex life to evolve on Earth. So, if astrobiologists want to avoid looking for life in all the wrong places, they need to consider the time that a planet will be habitable as well.
So that's why Rushby and his cohorts are studying the Sun's endgame. They're adding to the model that astrobiologists use to predicts the likelihood of the evolution of life into intelligent life, based on the long-term habitability of an exoplanet's star.
Now, with only a billion years and change left here on earth, I hope George R.R. Martin finally buckles down and finishes his Game of Thrones books.

Molly Reynolds: 'I Was Emotionally Abused'

 

 

 

We had pulled off the highway and into a remote parking lot at 2:00 AM. Without saying anything, my husband got out of the car and went to get something in the trunk. I was sure I was going to die. I sat in the passenger seat wondering how he was going to kill me. Would it be a gun? A knife? A tire iron? I put my hand on the car door handle, but I knew I would never be able to outrun him. Maybe it was better if I did die... it would be the only way I could escape from him. In my mind, I begged him to just go ahead and end it all.
After eight years of marriage, those were my thoughts on that cold day in March 2011. Why would I think those things? He had never even hit me. In fact, people in our neighborhood thought we had the perfect marriage. However, I would later come to understand that I had been emotionally abused.

 

 

 

“You were married to a predator,” my therapist told me, when I sought help after my divorce. “You were barely 20 when you met him, very sweet, and had very low self-esteem. He targeted you.” My heart stopped and I rattled off reasons why she was way off base.
“You are a victim of severe domestic abuse," the therapist said. "Your husband was born without empathy, but he was a very good actor. He emotionally battered you, which is very difficult to heal.” Then she began listing the traits of an emotional abuser as I painfully replayed our relationship in my head. In therapy I would come to see his behaviors were signs that I was wed to an emotional abuser.
Here are the traits that made my husband an emotional abuser:
He built me up and told me he would be my teacher. Our love affair started off very passionately. My husband (we’ll call him “Tom”) was 11 years older than me and much more experienced in relationships. Despite my insecurities, Tom made me feel like the most amazing person in the world. He told me that I had had very sheltered upbringing, but I shouldn’t worry since he would always be there to teach me. I trusted him and even lost my virginity to him. I felt like such a grown-up – out on my own for the first time and in an “adult” relationship! I was so in love with Tom that I didn’t notice the abuse start to creep in.
He tried to confuse and disorient me. A month or so into our relationship, he started to take a keen interest in how I presented myself in public. When we were going out, he’d ask me questions like “Why are you wearing that?” or “Why did you say it that way?” under the guise of trying to help me be perceived better. Of course I’d listen to him and go with his suggestions because I believed he was trying to help me. In the weeks following, he began to confuse me about things I was very familiar with and instil doubt in what I used to know for certain. One time, he said he’d pick me up from a friend’s house at a certain time, and then insisted I was supposed to pick him up, and yelled at me for standing him up! Instances like this started happening over and over again. I felt like I was losing my mind. And the more I’d "mess up" the more frazzled I’d become. But he looked so hurt that I questioned if I really WAS doing that.
He broke down my self-esteem. In order to “keep me in line,” he began to make me feel insecure about my looks (which wasn’t hard to do). He would say things like “Why are you wearing make-up? You know I hate make-up, so there’s obviously some guy you want to impress, huh?” Of course I adamantly said no, which was followed up by, “You shouldn’t be wearing make-up anyway, baby. Your skin is terrible and that’s making it worse.” The confusing part about all this is that things he would say always had a small truth to them. I was still going through puberty, my skin was that of a teenager. But he would blow them up to epic proportions to make me feel like I had a severe “condition” that nobody else had. The result was me constantly being self-conscious in public. I wanted to prove to him that he was the only one I loved, and I wanted so badly to be “better,” so I stopped wearing make-up and traded my dresses for cargo pants. Still, nothing was ever right.
He accused me of flirting. Eventually, any attention I received from other men, real or perceived, infuriated him and caused him to lash out at me.
He made me believe I was mentally unbalanced. I sank into a deep depression due to the demands of the relationship. I was often late for work, usually because I had done something “terrible” to him the night before and had to fix it. I felt like a train wreck in every aspect of my life. Soon, I lost my job and went into a downward spiral, clinging to Tom like a life raft. My family didn’t recognize me and they were terrified. They blamed Tom for my decline, but I fiercely defended him. He was the only one trying to help me, after all! Up until this point, I had never had a fight with my parents – now we were fighting all the time, which added to the extreme stress of the situation. The depression became worse. My hair was falling out. My skin was scaly. I was bleeding all month long. I had no job, my friends were freaking out, my family was angry and scared, and I didn’t know which end was up. Then one night, Tom solemnly sat me down for a heart to heart.
“Baby, you’re crazy,” he said. “I’m really scared for you. You came from a messed up family that altered your reality. Now that you’re out in the real world, you can’t cope.”
I sobbed in complete and utter confusion. “You need me to move in to your place and rehabilitate you,” he contended. “I love you. And I want us to work. But you’re going to need to listen to me.”
He isolated me. In my depression and despair, I thought an angel had come into my life. In my 20 years on this earth, I didn’t know how I’d become so broken. But it didn’t matter now - because Tom was there to pick up the pieces. Weeks later, he convinced me to marry him, all the while making it look like it was my idea. In reality, it was because he needed a visa to stay in the country.
My family was devastated and showed up at our apartment trying to get me out. I was so brainwashed at that point that I refused go with them. At their wit's end, they tried calling the cops knowing that I was being controlled and emotionally abused. But it wasn’t physical abuse, so it wasn’t a crime. Tom turned this around and used it as ammunition to wound and isolate me further – painting himself as my caring husband who was getting the cops called on him by my crazy, over-possessive family.
He physically intimidated me. Things were so difficult between me and Tom that several times, I started thinking maybe I’d go back to my family. This made Tom extremely angry and he’d list all the ways he was trying to help me and all the ways my family was trying to control me and keep me a child. The more I’d question him, the madder he’d become. He’d start breaking things around me or punching through windows. He said that I was the one who made him behave that way. And being that to everyone in our neighborhood, he was the “nice guy” that was the first to help old ladies cross the street, I believed he was right.
He controlled my finances. I became so brainwashed that Tom had complete control over every action I made – without even having to say anything. He never had a real job and asked that I work while he developed these projects he was working on (which never came to fruition while we were together). Any good wife would support her husband as he tried to build his career; that’s exactly what I did – sometimes working two full time jobs and donating my eggs for money.
Through hard work and an extreme stroke of luck, I became a marketing director at a young age and began making a very good salary. Eventually several of my writing projects were also bringing in money and promise – so Tom softened towards me a bit. He was spending this money as fast as I was making it.
Because of the jobs, I was out in the world more – and I was succeeding! My self-esteem started improving. The things Tom had always degraded me for, employers saw as “assets” and paid me well for them. I found the more that I trusted my own instincts as a person, the better I did. Separately, when I was at corporate parties, I started to see how other men treated their wives and realized that my marriage wasn’t healthy.
Standing Up to Abuse
Eventually, I stood up to Tom. The mind games and control poured out of him to the point where he said that we needed to move away from these people who were “bad influences” on me and have a baby right away. Though it was my intention to work things out and stay married, I wouldn’t back down. That’s when I found myself in that parking lot believing I was going to die...the wake-up call that ultimately forced me to leave.
Sadly, my story is quite common. Emotional abuse is becoming an epidemic and experts tout it as being the most debilitating form of domestic abuse. It leaves no visible bruises, but the wounds are much harder to heal.
With my family and friends beside me again, I worked through my pain. In the midst of my recovery, I wrote The Gingerbread Pimp – a musical based on my story, composed by my long-time friend and collaborator, Will Collyer. We presented the piece at the prestigious New York Musical Theatre Festival this past July to an audience of domestic abuse survivors, celebrities, and the general public.
I turned 30 this year and still can’t believe how different my life is now. I live in a beautiful little house on a quiet street, have my incredible family and friends next to me every day, and a very rewarding job among inspirational people – proof that humans can get over quite a lot…we just have to take action and know when to ask for help.
Molly Reynolds is a musical theater writer whose work has been seen throughout New York and her native Los Angeles. The Gingerbread Pimp is a dark musical comedy based on her personal story of domestic abuse and was most recently seen at the New York Musical Theatre Festival July 2013.

Retired Marketing Executive Flips Burgers To Make Ends Meet

A managerial career in corporate America is supposed to provide enough of a cushion to last through retirement. But five years into the financial crisis, even workers who once earned six-digit salaries are seeking low-wage service jobs to make sure they stay afloat. As part of its series on the "Future of Retirement," Bloomberg News just profiled one such worker -- Tom Palome, who as a marketing executive worked for companies like Oral B. But at the age of 77, Palome now works part-time in low-paying service jobs making $10 an hour to demonstrate food for Sam's Club and $8 an hour flipping burgers for a golf club in Tampa, Florida.

"I earn in a week what I used to earn in an hour," he told Bloomberg.

Why does Palome need to work the low-paying jobs? According to the report, he hasn't had a major financial failing, but he has had to deal with a family crisis. Back in 1983, his wife Edna died in a car crash and so he was left to raise their three children on his own. He's also turned down offers for help; his children have said he could move in with him, but he said he preferred to remain independent.

Palome needs the work because his savings ran thin. The $90,000 he had in savings dropped to $40,000 after the financial crisis struck in 2008. "Longevity should be a blessing, but if you haven't planned for it, you're going to work much longer than you ever dreamed of doing," he told Bloomberg.

And his story is reflective of the larger trend in America in which workers from all wage brackets are staying on in the workforce as they both live longer and have fewer retirement savings to rely on. Here are the data points:

• About 7.2 million Americans who were 65 and older were employed last year, a 67 percent increase from a decade ago, as AOL Jobs has also reported.
• A 2011 survey by the AARP found that roughly half of the respondents between ages of 50 to 64 don't think they'll ever have enough money for their retirement.

Palome can point to some impressive accomplishments over the course of his marketing career. Back in the 70s, when he was a vice president of marketing for the pharmaceutical company, The Cooper Companies, he helped secure an endorsement for the Oral-B toothbrush from the U.S. Olympic Committee. Now he's tasked with less high-flying work. Working for Sam's Club, he's expected to sell two boxes of the crackers during his seven-hour shift. And as for his job making hamburgers at the Rogers Golf Club in Tampa, he mans the takeout counter, cash register and grill. But he doesn't see his trajectory in a negative light. "I tell people I demonstrate food and I do short-order cooking. I don't mind saying it. What's important is that I can work today," he told Bloomberg.

And his appreciation is understandable. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the official unemployment rate for Americans 55 and over is 5.1 percent. But the true employment picture for older Americans is far more brutal. As AOL Jobs has reported, about 1.4 million Americans have been forced into early retirement during the financial crisis and so are left out of the official count.

Read the whole Bloomberg story here.