Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Andrew Tobias: Cause for Hope
Democrats are appalled by today's Republican Party (obviously), but so, too, traditional Conservatives … George Will publicly quit, Joe Scarborough publicly quit, William F. Buckley, Jr. is rolling over in is grave … and, yes, traditional Republicans. E.g., Steve Schmidt, who ran McCain's campaign against Obama. He just quit, too: "29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of The Republican Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life. Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump."
Helaine Olen: Why Trump has upped the ante on cruelty (Washington Post)
American society has example after example of how we honor children and their parents more in the breach than the observance.
Paul Krugman: The Devil and Tom Donohue (NY Times Blog)
News item #1: The Trump administration is taking thousands of children away from their parents, and putting them in cages. News item #2: House Republicans have released a budget plan that would follow up last year's big tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy with huge funding cuts for Medicare and Medicaid. If you think these items are unrelated, you've missed the whole story of modern American politics. Conservatism - the actually existing conservative movement, as opposed to the philosophical stance whose constituency is maybe five pundits on major op-ed pages - is all about a coalition between racists and plutocrats.
Helaine Olen: Can Scott and Marlyn Pruitt have it all? (Washington Post)
A simple tale of an opt-outer made good.
Tom Danehy: After all these years, Tom is kinda-sorta warming up to soccer. Or at least highlights. (Tucson Weekly)
… it was announced that the 2026 World Cup will be played in the U.S. (with some of the early-round games being played in Canada and Mexico). This gushing ESPN soccer guy, Taylor Twellman, noted that soccer still hasn't gained full traction in the United States, but then added, "In eight years, we'll be having a different conversation." No, we won't.
Hadley Freeman: I don't want to be upskirted - are there any outfits I should avoid? (The Guardian)
It says a lot about attitudes to women that people haven't been angrier about upskirting before. Here's what the current row tells us about clothes, power and shame.
Jim Farber: "Nina Simone: the growing legacy of a dazzling, defiant talent" (The Guardian)
Nina Simone always felt underappreciated during her lifetime. She had a right to. After 1960, her albums never put more than a dent in the lower end of the pop charts. And her singles made no greater impression. More, the press, the industry and even some audiences found her uncompromising performances and adamant character either off-putting or baffling.
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David Bruce has over 80 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Presenting
Michael Egan
said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
David E Suggests
Super Mario
David
Thanks, Dave!
Reader Suggestion
"celebrity inequality"
Hi Marty,
Long time reader of bart cop (and congrats for crossing 500+ days of straight updates!).
Had a slightly different link suggestion for you:
I recently put together a study where I compared how fast top musicians make average incomes.
Like Beyonce made a teacher's annual salary in 5 hours last year.
Here's a summary: midination.com/share/income.png
I think it brings up interesting arguments about money and "celebrity inequality" - something that people don't often talk about.
Not your usual stuff, I know, but I thought your readers might enjoy it.
What do you think?
Best,
Ryan
Thanks, Ryan!
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Ha ha!
Hope it costs Mr. Womp Womp a ton of money:
Reader Question
Wanna start a meme?
Hey, Marty: Ever wanted to start a meme? Just to see how far it actually goes? How
about this one: Trump is planning on removing tens of thousands of American
Alligators from Florida, where they've become quite a problem, and relocating them
to the Rio Grande river in Texas because he can't get his wall! It's his latest
solution to stopping the illegal immigrants (and their kids) from entering America!
You heard it here first, a Tiera original! Fake news? Maybe, maybe not...
Your faithful reader,
Tiera in SD
Thanks, Tiera!
from Marc Perkel
Marc's Guide to Curing Cancer
So far so good on beating cancer for now. I'm doing fine. At the end of the month I'll be 16 months into an 8 month mean lifespan. And yesterday I went on a 7 mile hike and managed to keep up with the hiking group I was with. So, doing something right.
Still waiting for future test results and should see things headed in the right direction. I can say that it's not likely that anything dire happens in the short term so that means that I should have time to make several more attempts at this. So even if it doesn't work the first time there are a lot of variations to try. So if there's bad news it will help me pick the next radiation target.
I have written a "how to" guide for oncologists to perform the treatment that I got. I'm convinced that I'm definitely onto something and whether it works for me or not isn't the definitive test. I know if other people tried this that it would work for some of them, and if they improve it that it will work for a lot of them.
The guide is quite detailed and any doctor reading this can understand the procedure at every level. I also go into detail as to how it works, how I figured it out, and variations and improvements that could be tried to enhance it. I also introduce new ways to look at the problem. There is a lot of room for improvement and I think that doctors reading it will see what I'm talking about and want to build on it. And it's written so that if you're not a doctor you can still follow it. It also has a personal story revealing that I'm the class clown of cancer support group. I give great interviews and I look pretty hot in a lab coat.
So, feel free to read this and see what I'm talking about. But if any of you want to help then pass this around to both doctors and cancer patients. I need some media coverage. I'm looking for as many eyeballs as possible to read these ideas. Even if this isn't the solution, it's definitely on the right track. After all, I did hike 7 miles yesterday. And this hiking group wasn't moving slow. So if this isn't working then, why am I still here?
I also see curing cancer as more of an engineering problem that a medical problem. So if you are good at solving problems and most of what you know about medicine was watching the Dr. House MD TV show, then you're at the level I was at when I started. So anyone can jump in and be part of the solution.
Here is a link to my guide: Oncologists Guide to Curing Cancer using Abscopal Effect
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
WINNIE THE POOH PING.
"LET THEM EAT CAGES!"
SAVE AMERICA!
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
The skunks are back and the kitties are not happy.
Censored In China
John Oliver
Donald Trump famously sued HBO's Bill Maher when the Real Time host suggested the orange- and-thin-skinned future president was the offspring of an orangutan, and now John Oliver, host of HBO's Last Week Tonight, has gotten himself in dutch with a world leader for bear comparisons.
Well, not just any foreign leader: China's President Xi Jinping. And not just any bear: Winnie the Pooh. Whether it was the Pooh jokes or other parts of a biting segment Sunday about XJ, Oliver and his show have gotten banned at least temporarily from China's Twitter-like Weibo microblogging platform.
As reported earlier today in The New York Times, attempts to create Weibo posts with the words "John Oliver" are resulting in error messages. The most recent posts referring to Oliver were placed on the site prior to this past Sunday's show.
In the 20-minute segment, Oliver lambasts China's president for any number of despotic evils, like China's "dystopian levels of surveillance and persecution" of Uighur Muslims and the imprisonment of dissidents. Oliver said Xi was dismantling term limits put in place to avoid "another Mao."
Exactly what got new posts about Oliver's show booted from social media is unclear, but Chinese censors, as Oliver pointed out on his show, have been clamping down hard on jokes likening the president to Pooh in an effort to stop the spread of a popular meme.
John Oliver
$pinoff $et
Ro$eanne
ABC, which cancelled its "Roseanne" revival over its star's racist tweet, announced on Thursday it would air a Conner family sitcom minus Roseanne Barr this autumn.
The broadcaster ordered 10 episodes of the spinoff after Barr agreed to forgo any creative or financial participation in it.
In a statement issued by the show's producer, Barr said she agreed to the settlement in order to save the jobs of 200 cast and crew members.
"I regret the circumstances that have caused me to be removed from 'Roseanne,' she said, adding, "I wish the best for everyone involved."
ABC said on Thursday the new series has the working title "The Conners" and will star John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf, Sara Gilbert and other "Roseanne" co-stars.
Ro$eanne
Diversity Remains Low
Directors Guild
Diversity among feature film directors remained disappointingly low in 2017, the Directors Guild of America has reported in a new study.
The results, released Thursday, show the difficulty faced in achieving gains in increasing the numbers of female directors - in spite of the strong box office of Patty Jenkins' "Wonder Woman" and the awards recognition for Dee Rees on "Mudbound" and Greta Gerwig on "Lady Bird."
The DGA said it examined an expanded data set for the 651 feature films that were released theatrically in the U.S. last year, including those that earned less than $250,000 at the box office. It noted that even though the data included hundreds of micro-budget projects with limited releases, women only accounted for 16% of directors. Of those features with a box office total of at least $250,000, only 12% of the directors were women and 10% were people of color
"It's outrageous that we're once again seeing such a lack of opportunity for women and people of color to direct feature films," said DGA president Thomas Schlamme. "Our new study shows that discriminatory practices are still rampant across every corner of the feature film business. These numbers hit home how the chips are stacked against women and people of color."
The numbers for women directors increased in 2017 from 13 to 22 for the 175 films with box office over $250,000. But the number of minority directors for the 145 DGA signatory films last year with box office over $250,000 slid from 21 to 14.
Directors Guild
Chinese Fund Buys French Crystal Maker
Baccarat
The storied French crystal maker Baccarat, founded by Louis XV more than 250 years ago, said Thursday that a Chinese fund had finalised a deal to purchase the company, more than a year after the plan was first announced.
Fortune Fountain Capital, founded by the Chinese businesswoman and Baccarat collectioner Coco Chu, will pay 164 million euros ($189 million) to buy an 89 percent stake held by the US firms Starwood Capital and L Catterton.
The deal includes a plan to immediately invest 20 to 30 million euros in a drive to expand sales in markets including the United States and Asia.
The company, which employs around 500 people, mostly at its historic production site in the town of Baccarat in eastern France, is hoping to consolidate a financial rebound after years of failing to keep up with explosive growth for luxury firms.
After posting a net loss in 2015, the company returned to profit and last year booked a net profit of 3.4 million euros on sales of 146 million euros.
Baccarat
Canadian Firm Prepares To Mine
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
A Canadian company is looking to extract copper and other minerals from the site of a former mine that was, until recently, within the boundary of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and off limits to such development.
The land was part of one of two protected sites in southern Utah that President-for-now Donald Trump (R-Crooked) removed from monument protection late last year.
Glacier Lake Resources Inc., a Vancouver-based copper and silver mining firm, announced the acquisition of the Colt Mesa deposit in a press releaselast week, noting that the "area recently became open for staking and exploration after a 21 year period moratorium." The company is moving forward with an effort to mine copper, cobalt and other minerals from the approximately 200-acre parcel.
President Bill Clinton established the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996. In December, Trump cut the 1.87 million-acre site, the largest land national monument in the country, roughly in half. The nearby 1.35 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument was slashed by 85 percent. The moves opened the door for oil, gas and other development.
The Glacier Lake Resources announcement signals the first threat of new mining on land cut from either national monument.
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
Royal Chinese Tomb
Gibbon
About 2,300 years ago, the grandmother of China's first emperor received an elaborate burial outfitted with a macabre menagerie of buried animals - notably, the remains of an ancient, extinct gibbon that was previously unknown to science, a new study finds.
The discovery is remarkable because the ape - a gibbon the scientists named Junzi imperialis - is the first ape on record to go extinct since the last ice age, the researchers said.
Human activity and environmental factors likely played a role in J. imperialis' demise, said study co-researcher Helen Chatterjee, a professor of biology at University College London.
In 2004, archaeologists excavated the tomb attributed to Lady Xia, the grandmother of the emperor Qin Shi Huang (259 B.C. to 210 B.C.), in the Shaanxi province of central China. But the tomb contained more than Lady Xia's burial; it also included 12 pits filled with animal remains, including the skeletons of a leopard (Panthera pardus), a Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), an Asiatic black bear (Ursus thibetanus), a crane (Grus), domesticated mammals, birds and, surprisingly, a mysterious gibbon.
There are 20 species of gibbons and siamangs (large, mostly tree-dwelling gibbons) known to science, including six living species that are native to China. But the newfound gibbon's skull, jaw and teeth didn't look like any of these creatures, so the scientists gave it a new genus and species name.
Gibbon
Top 20
Global Concert Tours
The Top 20 Global Concert Tours ranks artists by average box office gross per city and includes the average ticket price for shows Worldwide. The list is based on data provided to the trade publication Pollstar by concert promoters and venue managers.
1. Phil Collins; $3,166,332; $107.86.
2. Justin Timberlake; $3,104,922; $145.40.
3. Kenny Chesney; $3,022,535; $92.84.
4. Pink; $2,516,606; $138.20.
5. Metallica; $2,146,657; $105.83.
6. "Springsteen On Broadway" $2,118,268; $507.92.
7. Jennifer Lopez; $1,742,496; $187.49.
8. Luis Miguel; $1,704,713; $103.12.
9. Kendrick Lamar; $1,579,630; $86.97.
10. Bon Jovi; $1,486,325; $95.59.
11. Romeo Santos; $1,400,474; $102.87.
12. Blake Shelton; $997,285; $78.17.
13. Harry Styles; $962,576; $74.07.
14. Kevin Hart; $878,734; $75.78.
15. Demi Lovato; $869,690; $74.45.
16. Kid Rock; $831,301; $87.28.
17. Tim McGraw / Faith Hill; $818,824; $83.02.
18. Imagine Dragons; $810,710; $59.29.
19. Maluma; $795,959; $94.50.
20. Ricardo Arjona; $791,473; $83.07.
Global Concert Tours
In Memory
Koko
Koko, the western lowland gorilla who gained worldwide fame for her mastery of sign language, has died at the age of 46.
She died in her sleep at The Gorilla Foundation preserve in California's Santa Cruz mountains on Tuesday.
Born in 1971 at San Francisco Zoo, Dr. Francine "Penny" Patterson famously began teaching Koko sign language from an early age.
Koko learnt more than 1,000 signs, according to Patterson, and became part of a Stanford University project in 1974, inspiring the formation of The Gorilla Foundation.
Koko featured in multiple documentaries and appeared on the cover of National Geographic twice.
Aged 19, Koko showed signs of having consciousness of self by successfully passing a self-recognition test (MSR), displaying "self-directed behaviour in front of a mirror".
The book Koko's Kitten, the true story of her friendship with a kitten first published in 1987, is still used in many primary schools worldwide today.
The Gorilla Foundation said it will continue to "honour Koko's legacy" and advance its mission through ongoing projects, including conservation efforts in Africa, a great ape sanctuary on Maui, and a sign language application featuring Koko for the benefit of both gorillas and children.
Koko
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