April 21, 2014

Whereas the National Geographic Channel’s web site seems to go out of its way to obscure the sequence of episodes, I have found a WikiPedia article Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey that lists the episodes in numerical order.

I am hoping that this list will enable me to break through the barrier of confusion of The NatGeo web site that is preventing me from finding out if there is an online video for the episode that I missed.

No, Charter Subscribers are still not allowed to watch the recent videos online, even though Charter carries The National Geographic Channel on its cable service.

April 9, 2014

I have discovered that you need to use a valid cable TV subscription to view the videos on the Web.

I have such a subscription with Charter Communications, but Charter is not one of the cable providers that NatGeoTV supports.

March 31, 2014

I have finally found the links to the episodes of Cosmos on the National Geographic web site.  I found that the first episode that I watched last week was episode 3.

So here is the list of episodes already aired.

The first episode will only be on the web site for the next 30 or so days, so you’d better look at it now.  I just watched this episode on my computer.  Watching it without commercial interruption is a blessing.

The upcoming episodes on the National Geographic Cable TV channel are shown in the next table.

I think the following table lists all the remaining episodes.

I have questions to think about after watching these episodes. I don’t see a good forum for talking about those questions on the web. Perhaps this post as echoed on my Facebook page will form that place for a few of us.

The UK Express has the story Malaysian plane: 20 passengers worked for ELECTRONIC WARFARE and MILITARY RADAR firm.

Freescale Semiconductor, which makes powerful microchips for industries including defence, released the powerful new products to the American market on March 3.

Five days later, Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people on board including 20 working for Freescale.

Twelve were from Malaysia, while eight were Chinese nationals.

This is not the most incendiary rendition of this story I could find, but it may be close.  Of course, if you go directly to the conspiracy theory websites, you’ll find even more breathless prose.

You can compare this telling of the story to the Austin, Texas Statesman story Freescale mum on new Malaysia Airlines reports.

Now, I wouldn’t even present this if Roger and João hadn’t goaded me  into it 🙂

Naked Capitalism has the post Cokie Roberts Picked a Fight With Alan Grayson on the TransPacific Partnership. Guess Who Won?  There are several links and commentary by Yves Smith in the post.

One of the links is to Alan Grayson’s rebuttal Cokie Roberts Attacks Us: This Is How DC Works. Warning: The links in the quote below take you to the page for contributing to Alan Grayson’s campaign.

Recently, ABC infohack Cokie Roberts, doyenne of the D.C. Establishment, attacked me in her nationally syndicated column. Why? Because I dared to speak the truth about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a so-called “free trade agreement” that has lobbyists and Washington insiders alike clamoring to stuff their pockets with corrupt corporate cash. And because I dared to speak the truth about “Fast Track,” legislation whose sole purpose is to cram TPP and other corporate rip-offs down our throats.

I am not sure the size of the trade deficit in and of itself is quite as big a problem as Grayson makes it, but that is really a minor quibble with what he has to say. The problems the trade deficit causes are certainly something to worry about.  Grayson explains them very well.

By the way, I have long since given up listening to Cokie Roberts and Steve Roberts.  Her penchant for ignoring truth in order to make her point became more than I could take.  Her husband, Steve, was a little less obvious in his biased approach to “reporting”.