Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Andrew Tobias: Nick Hanauer - Updated And Unpacked
The Mitch McConnell crowd believe that "by any standard" the President "has been a disaster for our country." And that global warming is a hoax; Darwin's theory of evolution is hokum (the planet is only a few thousand years old) - and on and on. Donald Trump seems pretty sure the President was born in Kenya. Seventy percent of those who voted to reelect George W. Bush believed Iraq had played a role in attacking us on 9/11.
Paul Krugman: Paging Robert Burns (NY Times)
"Billionaire Jeff Greene, who amassed a multibillion dollar fortune betting against subprime mortgage securities, says the U.S. faces a jobs crisis that will cause social unrest and radical politics. "America's lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence," Greene said … Greene, who flew his wife, children and two nannies on a private jet plane to Davos for the week …
Tom Danehy: Looking for new cheaper entertainment options? Tom suggests you consider Pima County Board of Supervisors meeting (Tucson Weekly)
Even with the economy doing better, it's still important to look for value whenever possible. With concert tickets often starting at a hundred bucks a pop and movie tickets costing in the double digits, it's hard finding good entertainment for a low cost. Well, I think I have just the thing along those lines.
Charles Bukowski's Letter to the Librarian Who Banned His Book (Disinformation)
If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women it is because of these who I met were that. There are many "bads"-bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even "bad" white males. Only when you write about "bad" white males they don't complain about it. And need I say that there are "good" blacks, "good" homosexuals and "good" women?
Luis Prada: What 5 Internet Celebrities Did After They Got Famous (Cracked)
#5. Ted Williams, the Homeless Man With the Incredible Voice, Got a Job, Got Paid, Got a House ... Then Lost It
Marc Lee: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, review (Telegraph)
Paul Newman and Robert Redford are stunning in the classic western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
A list of the 101 best movies on Netflix UK (Telegraph)
A list of the best movies currently available on the movie and TV subscription service Netflix UK, as reviewed by film critic Tim Robey.
Suzanne Moore: "Add faithophobia to my crimes: I have no respect for religions that have little respect for me" (Guardian)
Now is a time to remember that tolerance has to be reciprocal or it is not tolerance at all.
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
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David Bruce has approximately 50 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
"Doug's Most Shared Facebook Post" Today
answered:
is under the weather, and we wish her a speedy recovery.
has returned to semi-retired status.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
from Marc Perkel
BartCop
Hello Bartcop fans,
As you all know the untimely passing of Terry was unexpected, even by
him. We all knew he had cancer but we all thought he had some years
left. So some of us who have worked closely with him over the years are
scrambling around trying to figure out what to do. My job, among other
things, is to establish communications with the Bartcop community and
provide email lists and groups for those who might put something
together. Those who want to play an active roll in something coming from
this, or if you are one of Bart's pillars, should send an email to
active@bartcop.com.
Bart's final wish was to pay off the house mortgage for Mrs. Bart who is
overwhelmed and so very grateful for the support she has received.
Anyone wanting to make a donation can click on this the yellow donate
button on bartcop.com
But - I need you all to help keep this going. This note
isn't going to directly reach all of Bart's fans. So if you can repost
it on blogs and discussion boards so people can sign up then when we
figure out what's next we can let more people know. This list is just
over 600 but like to get it up to at least 10,000 pretty quick. So
here's the signup link for this email list.
( mailman.bartcop.com/listinfo/bartnews )
Marc Perkel
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
I'm not too good at the begging routine, but this page doesn't generate enough revenue for a high-speed connection, so I'm still on a crappy dial-up.
I'm grateful to my 3 pillars who faithfully send a monthly donation, but it's not enough to cover what the local cable monopoly charges ($59.99/mo) for a faster connection.
Many thanks to the 4 kind readers (Dale [twice], David, B2tbBob & John) who have responded.
The cable monopoly will visit on Tuesday, and as the kids at the beach used to say, "I'm stoked."
But I'm going to continue begging - want to cover as many months in advance as possible so I don't have to make this a regular thing.
Almost every website has embedded animated ads. The site will not open until the ad is delivered. On a crappy dial-up, all too often, they either don't open all the way, or they freeze, and I have to pop my old friend F5 a couple of times, and start all over again.
A lot of the liberal sites have heavy advertising, but I can only visit them at work, where surfing the net is greatly frowned upon.
Sure would be nice to read them at home, not sneak-reading bits at work.
Beard Glued Back On With Epoxy
King Tut
The blue and gold braided beard on the burial mask of famed pharaoh Tutankhamun was hastily glued back on with epoxy, damaging the relic after it was knocked during cleaning, conservators at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo said Wednesday.
The museum is one of the city's main tourist sites, but in some areas, ancient wooden sarcophagi lay unprotected from the public, while pharaonic burial shrouds, mounted on walls, crumble from behind open panels of glass. Tutankhamun's mask, over 3,300 years old, and other contents of his tomb are its top exhibits.
Three of the museum's conservators reached by telephone gave differing accounts of when the incident occurred last year, and whether the beard was knocked off by accident while the mask's case was being cleaned, or was removed because it was loose.
They agree however that orders came from above to fix it quickly and that an inappropriate adhesive was used. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals.
Another museum conservator, who was present at the time of the repair, said that epoxy had dried on the face of the boy king's mask and that a colleague used a spatula to remove it, leaving scratches. The first conservator, who inspects the artifact regularly, confirmed the scratches and said it was clear that they had been made by a tool used to scrape off the epoxy.
King Tut
New Lakes Discovered Under Ice
Greenland
The discovery of two large lakes hidden beneath Greenland's ice suggests that climate change now cuts all the way to the bottom of the ice sheet, according to two new studies.
The lakes, on opposite coasts, were only spotted because meltwater from Greenland's surface triggered gushing floods in the fall of 2011. Billions of gallons of water had flushed some 30 miles (50 kilometers) to the sea, leaving behind sunken craters in the surface of the ice above the lakes. Researchers found the fractured ice in high-resolution satellite images and then identified each lake, according to reports published today (Jan. 21) in the journals Nature and The Cryosphere.
The discovery of these lakes will help scientists better understand how Greenland's surface meltwater travels through the ice sheet. And because the water beneath ice sheets can lubricate the movement of glaciers, these newly found lakes and floods may help researchers more accurately forecast how Greenland's ice sheet will respond to future warming.
Researchers discovered a lake in northeastern Greenland that has now filled and drained twice since its first blowout in 2011. The mitten-shaped lake is marked by a crater measuring about 230 feet (70 meters) deep. Here, the lake fills with the meltwater coming directly from the ice sheet's surface, trickling downward through cracks in the ice, according to the findings published in Nature.
The other lake was found after other researchers spotted a crater in western Greenland that could swallow a football stadium, measuring 1.2 miles (2 km) across and 230 feet deep. On satellite images, the lake appeared stable for more than 40 years before draining in late fall 2011, according to the study in The Cryosphere. The scientists estimated that the lake contained about 6.7 billion gallons (about 25 billion liters) of water, enough to fill 10,000 Olympic swimming pools.
Greenland
2 Sunken Canal Boats Found
Lake Ontario
The wrecks of two 19th-century canal boats have been found on the bottom of Lake Ontario, an unusual discovery because such vessels typically weren't used on open water, a team of New York shipwreck hunters said Wednesday.
The three-member team from the Rochester area said they discovered the boats using side-scan sonar last year while searching for shipwrecks on Lake Ontario's eastern end. The sunken canal boats - one 65 feet long and the other 78 feet long - were found within a few miles of each other about midway between Oswego and Sackets Harbor, said Jim Kennard of Fairport.
Two professional divers using apparatus for deep-water work captured video images of the wrecks, located more than 200 feet below the surface, Kennard said.
The wrecks' identifications haven't been determined, but Kennard and fellow explorers Roger Pawlowski of Gates and Roland Stevens of Pultneyville believe the vessels were built in the mid-1800s when the Erie Canal was widened to accommodate larger boats.
Lake Ontario
Boys Will Be Boys
Duesseldorf
Tenants of a rented apartment may stand up while peeing in their own bathroom and not worry about the consequences, a German court said Thursday.
The district court in the western city of Duesseldorf ruled in favour of a man suing the owner of his flat for the full refund of his 3,000-euro ($3,490) deposit, the court said in a ruling obtained by national news agency DPA.
The proprietor had told the tenant he would withhold 1,900 euros because the marble floor of the washroom was permanently stained by splashed urine.
Judge Stefan Hank agreed with an expert's report that it was in fact uric acid that had eaten through the floor but said that standing to urinate was widespread.
"Despite the increasing domestication of men in this area, urinating while standing up is indeed still common practice," Hank said in the ruling.
Duesseldorf
Screech Pleads Not Guilty
Dustin Diamond
Actor Dustin Diamond, who played the nerdy Screech on the early '90s sitcom "Saved by the Bell," pleaded not guilty on Thursday to charges related to the stabbing of a man during a Christmas bar fight, according to court records in Wisconsin.
Diamond, 38, is charged with recklessly endangering safety, carrying a concealed weapon and disorderly conduct in the Dec. 25 incident, Ozaukee County Circuit Court records showed.
Diamond's fiancée, Amanda Schultz, 27, also pleaded not guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct.
The criminal complaint alleges that Schultz pushed a woman who was harassing her and Diamond on Christmas night at the Grand Avenue Saloon in Port Washington, Wisconsin, north of Milwaukee.
In a fight that ensued, Diamond stabbed a man with a switchblade, causing a wound that was not life-threatening, according to the complaint and to the police.
Dustin Diamond
Atomic Scientists
Doomsday Clock
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says Earth is now closer to human-caused doomsday than it has been in more than 30 years because of global warming and nuclear weaponry. But other experts say that's way too gloomy.
The advocacy group founded by the creators of the atomic bomb moved their famed "Doomsday Clock" ahead two minutes on Thursday. It said the world is now three minutes from a catastrophic midnight, instead of five minutes.
"This is about doomsday; this is about the end of civilization as we know it," bulletin executive director Kennette Benedict said at a news conference in Washington.
She called both climate change and modernization of nuclear weaponry equal but undeniable threats to humanity's continued existence that triggered the 20 scientists on the board to decide to move the clock closer to midnight.
Doomsday Clock
Yellowstone Begins Transferring
Bison
Yellowstone National Park has begun shipping wild bison for slaughter as part of a plan to reduce the park's population by as many as 900 animals this winter.
On Wednesday and Thursday, more than 150 bison captured near the park's northern border with Montana were removed from holding, loaded onto trailers and shipped off, according to the Buffalo Field Campaign, a wildlife advocacy group.
There were 4,900 bison in the park last summer. For more than two decades, officials have tried to curb the animals' winter migration into Montana to guard against potential disease transmission to livestock.
Park spokesman Al Nash confirmed the shipments of recently-captured animals for slaughter. But he said the park no longer plans to offer timely updates on how many bison are captured and shipped.
Bison
Gender Imbalance
China
Chinese health authorities on Wednesday described the gender imbalance among newborns as "the most serious and prolonged" in the world, a direct ramification of the country's strict one-child policy.
The statement will add to growing calls for the government to scrap all family planning restrictions in the world's most populous nation, which many scholars say faces a demographic crisis.
Like most Asian nations, China has a traditional bias for sons. Many families abort female fetuses and abandon baby girls to ensure their one child is a son, so about 118 boys are born for every 100 girls, against a global average of 103 to 107.
The agency said it would step up supervision on fetal sex determination, which is banned in China. It acknowledged that women were transferring blood samples overseas to determine the genders of their babies as part of an "underground chain for profit".
Researchers have warned that large sex-ratio imbalances could lead to instability as more men remain unmarried, raising the risks of anti-social and violent behavior.
China
'Mysterious' Journey To Jerusalem
Iraqi Torah
A 200-year-old Torah scroll has taken an unusual and mysterious journey from Baghdad to Jerusalem, where it was greeted with candies and song in a jubilant dedication ceremony Thursday.
Israeli experts in Jewish scribal tradition who restored the Hebrew parchment say it was written two centuries ago by two different scribes in northern Iraq using pomegranate ink, a rarely-used writing material.
The scroll is a remnant of Iraq's 2,500-year-old Jewish community, one of the world's oldest, which all but disappeared when large numbers of Jews left for Israel following the creation of the Jewish state in 1948. Only a handful of Jews are left in Iraq today, following decades of war and instability.
Like other ancient Jewish texts from Arab lands, the scroll's path to Israel remains unclear, with Israeli officials offering different theories.
Iraqi authorities forbade Jews who left for Israel from taking ritual objects and other property with them. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, American soldiers discovered ancient Iraqi Jewish Torahs and other community documents in the waterlogged basement of Iraqi intelligence headquarters in Baghdad and took the manuscripts to the U.S. for restoration. They have gone on display in the U.S., and American officials have promised to return the items to Iraq.
Iraqi Torah
New Gang On The Rise
Los Viagras
A new armed group is on the rise in Mexico's violence-wracked Michoacan state. It's called Los Viagras, and its members say they are fighting for "social causes".
The shadowy group is nevertheless also trying to take over old strongholds of a drug cartel on the decline, the Knights Templar.
In the mountains, members of Los Viagras are "quiet, waiting for the moment to muster strength and power," said Javier Cortes, a religious leader in the diocese of Apatzingan.
It also is the former bastion of the Knights Templar, who terrorized the entire state in recent years under the protection of the local authorities.
The once dominant Knights Templar is believed to have been weakened since the emergence of vigilante forces formed by lime and avocado farmers in 2013.
Los Viagras
PBS In Sweden
Dancing Genitals
In socially liberal Sweden, an educational video for children featuring dancing genitals has become an online hit - and even drawn criticism for not being progressive enough.
The one-minute animated video by public broadcaster SVT, promoting a television series about the human body, has been seen by more than 4 million YouTube viewers.
Producers say many parents found it a great way to explain about private parts to children, though some called it inappropriate for a program aimed at children aged 3-6.
Programming director Peter Bargee said Thursday the clip also drew "unexpected" criticism from some Swedes, who said portraying the penis with a moustache and the vagina with long eyelashes reinforced gender stereotypes.
Dancing Genitals
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