from Bruce
Anecdotes
Anti-Semitism
• Hadrian saw a Jew, who greeted him. Hadrian said, “Should a Jew see Hadrian and greet him? Cut off his head.” Hadrian’s soldiers carried off the Jew and beheaded him. Hadrian then saw a Jew, who did not greet him. Hadrian said, “Should a Jew see Hadrian and not greet him? Cut off his head.”
• In the former USSR, Jews suffered from anti-Semitism. In one underground joke, several Communists go to Heaven, form a party cell, and then discuss who should be the secretary. One of the Communists nominated God, but another Communist objected, “We can’t elect Him! He had a son in Israel!”
Baseball
• Sandy Koufax was a great Jewish major league pitcher. Umpire Tom Gorman was shocked to learn that Gene Oliver had hit .330 against Mr. Koufax, since Mr. Oliver was a left-handed hitter with a .220 batting average. He asked Mr. Oliver how he had managed to get so many hits against Mr. Koufax, and Mr. Oliver answered, “I’ll tell you, but it’s a secret. Don’t tell anybody. He thinks I’m Jewish.”
• Tim Burke was both a New York Mets pitcher and a Born-Again Christian. In 1991, he was asked about Jesus and his career. He replied, “If Jesus were on the field, he’d be pitching inside and breaking up double plays.”
Censorship
• While Maury Maverick, Jr. was a member of the Texas House of Representatives in the 1950s, a bill came up advocating censorship in the Texas schools. Remarkably, an organization of Texas schoolteachers came out in support of the bill — after having been bought off with a pay raise. This scared Mr. Maverick, who was knowledgeable about bookburning by the Nazis and who wrote, “When that starts happening, that’s the beginning of the end. That’s when someone is going to start killing Jews, or Presbyterians, or Methodists, or conservatives, or liberals, or whatever. Somebody’s going to get killed if that doesn’t stop.”
• Nancy Garden is the lesbian author of Annie on My Mind, a young people’s novel portraying lesbian characters in a positive manner. Religious groups in Kansas attacked the book, which was in school libraries, and a fundamentalist preacher even burned a copy of the book in public. However, students, parents, and librarians protested when Annie on My Mind was removed from school libraries. One boy and his friends even checked approximately 3,000 books out of school district libraries to show how empty the shelves would be if controversial books were removed.
• In the former USSR, members of the secret police attended church services to check the content of the sermons. Cardinal Wyszynski used to start his sermons by saying, “Brothers in Christ and delegates of the government….”
Charity
• Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Lublin often said that he had learned from a beggar how to collect money for charity. A beggar had appeared at his door, and the good Rabbi had given him a generous handout, but the beggar asked for more. Someone present said that he was surprised that the beggar had asked for more money because the beggar had often accepted much smaller sums of money without arguing. The beggar replied that when he was given a small amount of money, it wasn’t worth arguing about because what he would get if he won the argument? Another small amount of money. But a sizable amount of money was worth arguing about because if he won that argument he would get another sizable amount of money. Rabbi Meir Shapiro said, “Whenever I ask a donation from a wealthy man and he gives me a sizable sum, I tell that story.”
• Hei-zayemon was a wealthy philanthropist who tried to live his life in accordance with the insights gained by ancient sages. By using his money wisely, he relieved much of the hunger and misery of the poor people in his part of the world. One day, a monk showed up at his doorstep. Having heard of Hei-zayemon’s philanthropy, the monk requested money to build a gate for his temple. Hearing this, Hei-zayemon laughed, and then said, “I help people because I cannot bear to see them suffer. What’s so bad about a temple without a gate?”
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Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
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Current Events
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In The Chaos Household
Last Night
They've allowed a reduced capacity audience to return to the Sumo basho.
Social Justice Award
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar appreciates what today’s NBA players are doing in their attempts to make the world better, how they’re using their voices and platforms as conduits for change.
And going forward, one of those players will be rewarded by a trophy bearing Abdul-Jabbar’s name.
The NBA announced Thursday the creation of a new award — the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion Award — to recognize players who are making strides in the fight for social justice. Each NBA team will nominate one player for consideration; from there, five finalists will be selected and ultimately one winner.
The winning player will receive $100,000 for the charity of his choice; the other four finalists will receive $25,000 apiece, also for charity.
Abdul-Jabbar has spent most of his life as an activist in one form or another. He met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for the first time as a 17-year-old. He famously attended what was called The Cleveland Summit in June 1967 where he, Bill Russell, Jim Brown and other prominent Black athletes came together to talk with Muhammad Ali about his being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. He has worked to help economically depressed areas improve schools as well.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Canceled This Week
‘Real Time With Bill Maher’
HBO has scrapped this week’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher after the comedian tested positive for Covid-19. Maher, who is vaccinated and asymptomatic, tested positive during the premium cable network’s weekly PCR testing ahead of the show.
It is a blow for the late-night show, which was set to entertain astrophysicist and StarTalk podcaster Neil deGrasse Tyson as the top-of-show interview guest, and World War Z author Max Brooks and Hardcore History podcast host Dan Carlin as panelists.
“The Friday, May 14th taping of Real Time with Bill Maher has been cancelled. Bill tested positive during weekly staff PCR testing for COVID. He is fully vaccinated and as a result is asymptomatic and feels fine. Real Time production has taken every precaution following COVID CDC guidelines. No other staff or crew members have tested positive at this time. The show will be rescheduled at a later date,” an HBO spokeswoman told Deadline.
Real Time with Bill Maher, which is in its 19th season on HBO, was the first major show to bring back a small live audience in September after a Covid break and a number of episodes filmed in Maher’s backyard.
‘Real Time With Bill Maher’
Andy Warhol Artwork
Alice Cooper
An Andy Warhol canvas found years ago in the garage of rocker Alice Cooper could become the highest selling artwork ever in Arizona.
The music legend, who has a home in metro Phoenix, announced Thursday that he would auction off “Little Electric Chair.”
It will be up for bidding on Oct. 23 at an auction organized by the Larsen Gallery in Scottsdale. The gallery estimates it could fetch anywhere from $2.5 million to $4.5 million.
The red acrylic and silkscreen on canvas was part of Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series between 1964 and 1965. The pop artist often collected images from newspapers and magazines to use as inspiration for his work. Among them were images of the electric chair.
According to Cooper, the artwork was a birthday gift in the ’70s from a girlfriend who was friends with Warhol.
The gallery owners say they will donate part of any commission to Cooper’s nonprofit, Solid Rock, which works to bring music, dance and other forms of art to teens.
Alice Cooper
Newest Sock Puppets
Rupert
Fox "News" Channel is creating weekend shows for commentator Dan Bongino and former U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy starting early next month.
Bongino, who has become a popular online personality and commentator, will host a show on Saturdays at 10 p.m. Eastern starting on June 5. As part of a new deal with Fox, the Fox Nation streaming site will also stream Bongino’s weekday radio show, which airs at noon, Fox News Media said on Wednesday.
Gowdy, the former South Carolina congressman and Fox contributor, will host a show on Sundays at 7 p.m. Eastern, starting on June 6.
Fox also said it will begin hour-long panel talk shows on both weekend evenings, starting at 5 p.m. Eastern.
Rupert
Feckless Smear Machine
Project Veritas
Project Veritas, the shadowy yet wildly incompetent far-right group that stages sting operations to film and release hoax exposés on liberals, enlisted a British spy to help run an operation intended to discredit the FBI and suspected enemies within Donald Trump’s administration, the New York Times reported on Thursday.
The Ouroboros of an operation, which involved efforts to smear Trump’s own advisers, reportedly involved a $10,000 a month base of operations in a Georgetown residence, female operatives recruited to date FBI staffers, and former British spy Richard Seddon—who Project Veritas affiliate and mercenary contractor Erik Prince previously enlisted to help the group infiltrate labor unions and political campaigns. The Times reported that Project Veritas operatives launched surveillance of FBI employees in the hopes of recording something that could be twisted into evidence of an FBI conspiracy to dethrone Trump. Some of its members also planned a sting operation to send a woman with a hidden camera to meet with then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster with an identical objective, though the Times noted it they couldn’t verify Project Veritas actually directed it.
The Times report also doesn’t assert that Trump or the White House was actually aware of the effort, though one of the amateur agents claimed they had access to inside information:
Whether any of Mr. Trump’s White House advisers had direct knowledge of the campaign is unclear, but one of the participants in the operation against Mr. McMaster, Barbara Ledeen, said she was brought on by someone “with access to McMaster’s calendar.”
Project Veritas can really only point to one major slimy success in its past—it managed to force the dissolution of advocacy group ACORN with selectively edited and manipulated footage of Veritas founder James O’Keefe pressing low-level ACORN employees for advice on how to run a prostitution ring. The Government Accountability Office later cleared ACORN of mishandling any federal funds. Other than that, the group’s efforts have largely amounted to political stunts of the type that might conveniently convince deep-pocketed but not particularly discerning Republican donors that Project Veritas is a serious investigative operation.
Project Veritas
Defender Of Democracy
Liz Cheney
To the progressive part of America, the very idea feels like cheering for Hannibal Lecter during a Silence of the Lambs franchise watch-a-thon.
The record of the Republican Party’s ousted conference chair (the number three position in the House of Representatives) is almost comically horrible.
You can imagine a meeting of screenwriters picking over a biopic script and saying: “Yeah, it’s interesting but you’ve got to give people something to relate to. This one doesn’t even have any villainous charm.”
Liz Cheney has backed wars and defended “enhanced interrogation”. Need I spell out what that means? Until relatively recently she spat culture war bile on Fox News with the best, sorry worst, of them. She boasts a 93 per cent pro-Donald Trump voting record and has appeared cheering alongside him.
There are those who’ve argued that the Cheney family played a key role in opening the door to the Trumpist takeover of the Republican Party and helped drive its transformation from a party of the centre-right into one that today looks much more like one of the European extreme right.
Liz Cheney
MAGA Hat
QE2
Buckingham Palace has formally requested that a modified image of the Queen wearing a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat and a QAnon brooch be removed from a ‘Trump Train’ bus seen at a political rally held by allies of the former US president, according to a new report by BuzzFeed News.
A Palace spokesperson told the news outlet that they were aware of the fact that the Queen’s image was being used, saying “representations asking for [the photo’s] removal have been made.”
The bus, which is owned and operated by a supporter of Mr Trump named Buddy Hall, became a constant fixture at Trump rallies during the 2020 presidential campaign.
It features a series of doctored images, including Mr Trump’s head on a boxer’s body and former US president Ronald Reagan (R-Roasting In Hell) wearing a Trump hat.
The rally, which was held in Florida by Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene last week, saw both candidates declaring Mr Trump as the reigning leader of their party.
QE2
Rare 'Alien' Isotopes
Earth's Crust
Far down in the periodic table you'll find a list of heavy elements born in chaos. The kind of chaos you might find in an exploding star perhaps, or a collision between two neutron stars.
Physicists have uncovered a pair of large, still-radioactive isotopes in samples of deep-sea crust pulled up from 1,500 meters (nearly 5,000 feet) below the Pacific Ocean.
We'd expect to see many heavyweight elements in the swirl of dust and gas that formed our planet eons ago - but most should have decayed into more stable forms long before now. So finding examples in Earth's crust close to the surface today raises some interesting questions.
There are a few conditions in the Universe under which this 'rapid neutron capture', or r-process, can occur, including supernovae and neutron star mergers.
Over the history of the Universe, plenty of stars have crashed and popped to spill a thick dust of iron, uranium, plutonium, gold, and other fat atoms throughout the galaxy. So it's to be expected that planets like Earth would have scooped up a good amount of them.
Earth's Crust
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