Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Now What? Personal Thoughts (NY Times Blog)
First of all, it's always important to remember that elections determine who has the power, not who has the truth. The stunning upset doesn't mean that the alt-right is correct to view nonwhites as inferior, that voodoo economics works, whatever. And you have to hold to the truth as best you see it, even if it suffers political defeat.
Paul Krugman: Ending the American Romance (NY Times Blog)
… we tell a story in which at times of crisis we always find the leader - Lincoln, FDR - and the moral courage we need. It's a particular kind of American exceptionalism; other countries don't tell that kind of story about themselves. But I, like others, believed it. Now it doesn't look very good, does it?
Josh Marshall: A Troubling Detail (TPM)
It now looks like Trump will win the electoral college 306 to 232. That's not final but that's pretty sure to be the result. But he will likely lose the popular vote by as much as 1 to 2 percentage points - perhaps two or three times the size of Gore's margin. (At the moment it's only about 200,000+ votes. But it will certainly grow as lots of additional votes on the West Coast get counted.)
David Wong: Don't Panic (Cracked)
4. What Trump's supporters just did, you can do.
Andrew Tobias: Ways He Could Surprise On The Upside
Put millions to work at good jobs revitalizing the national infrastructure. This is something we should have been doing for the last 30 years: just a tad more public consumption each year and a tad less personal consumption (but that would have required of the best-off a little more in taxes to fund it, so Republicans blocked it). Now we must do it in earnest. The Republican Congress blocked President Obama's American Jobs Act because it was his, but might well approve something very like it coming from Trump. This would be great for the country and the economy.
Suzanne Moore: So much has been broken by this election, but we can't collapse in on ourselves (The Guardian)
The pollsters are broken, the media is broken, hope for a post-racial society is broken. Nevertheless, we must find new ways to fight for social democracy.
Tom Danehy: Tom remembers his childhood friend, boxer Bobby Chacon (Tucson Weekly)
Bobby Chacon was a winner and a loser and I loved him dearly. He was a winner and a loser of many things-of world boxing championships, of untold millions of dollars, and, worst of all, of his beloved wife, Valorie.
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Suggestions
Happy Reading
We knew this to be true - this guy articulates it much better than I.
Team Coco
CONAN
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Angry Temp
Reader Request
meme
meme Victory over trump
take a lesson from the brits in ww2
or V for Vendetta
or V (the rat eater movie as my wife calls it)
in print put a small v before trump's name
if possible superimpose a v over the t
lastly whenever possible use a small t to spell his name
millions of instances... so that everywhere he or his supporters look
it will remind him that we are opposed to him
put a "v" over his name in magazines, signs etc.
especially places with faux tv or other repug propaganda
Eventually a "T" placed at random with the "V" over
it will show our dissent.
(I would love for this movement to go viral any - any suggestions?)
Some guy
P.S. Thought you'd enjoy this -
Thanks, Guy!
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
WHY.
POOR STUPID TRUMPETS!
THE DICTATOR!
TWO DICTATORS!
THREE DICTATORS!
"WHITE WON"
R.I.P. LEONARD.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Still haven't found the other one.
Art Collection Makes Millions
David Bowie
David Bowie's art collection went under the hammer on Thursday with one item reaching more than £7 million at auction, as buyers' enthusiasm for the late musician's collection exceed expectations in London.
The highest-selling item in Bowie's collection, the graffiti-inspired "Air Power" canvas by Basquiat, sold for £7.09 million ($8.9 million, 8.2 million euros) at Sotheby's auction house.
The piece had been expected to fetch between £2.5 and £3.5 million.
The canvas was one of 47 art works in Bowie's collection auctioned off on Thursday, the majority of which are modern British artworks, selling for a total £24.3 million.
A further 300 more works owned by the rock legend, who died in January from an undisclosed battle with cancer, are due to go under the hammer on Friday.
David Bowie
Art Basel Miami Beach Honors
David Bowie
"Ground Control" will be the theme of Art Basel Miami Beach's 2016 Public program, organizers revealed this week, with installations by 20 artists to go on display in the city's Collins Park during Art Basel Miami Beach next month.
Curator Nicholas Baume chose the focus for this year's event, taking inspiration from David Bowie, who died earlier this year. "Ground Control" will examine ways in which artists "invent and imagine new kinds of space: physical, social and psychic." Viewers will see the familiar surroundings of Collins Park reframed as a site for "transformational experiences" with art.
Several of the featured works will use repurposed everyday objects, such as Eric Baudart's "Atmosphère," which consists of a clear tank filled with peanut oil in which a fan slowly rotates. David Adamo contributes a series of small bronze sculptures of items such as flip flops, citrus fruits and a sandwich from Miami Beach food stand La Sandwicherie.
For Wagner Malta Tavares' "Malpertuis," a 19th-century-style outdoor lamp will be installed in the park landscape and will glow as darkness falls, while Alicja Kwade's "Reise ohne Ankunft (Mercier)" will feature a bicycle bent into a perfect circle.
A pair of large bronze handcuffs will shackle a tree for Yoan Capote's "Naturaleza Urbana," a commentary on urbanization, while four nearly life-sized aluminum-cast camel sculptures will stand on their own reflections in Jean-Marie Appriou's "Mirage."
David Bowie
Largest Yet from Antarctica
'Sea Monster'
About 66 million years ago, an ancient sea monster the height of a five-story office building once gnashed its sharp teeth as it swam around the dark waters of Antarctica, a new study finds.
The newfound beast, known as a mosasaur - a Cretaceous-age aquatic reptile that sped through the ancient seas using its paddle-like limbs and long tail - is only the second fossilized mosasaur skull ever found in Antarctica.
The mosasaur specimen is different enough from other known species that it qualifies for its own genus and species. Researchers named it Kaikaifilu hervei after "Kai-Kai filú," an almighty giant reptile that owns the sea in legends from the Mapuche culture from southern Chile and Argentina. The species name honors Francisco Hervé, a world-renowned Chilean geologist and Antarctic explorer, the researchers said.
Scientists with the Chilean Paleontological Expedition discovered the mosasaur skull on Seymour Island in January 2011. The team had run into bad weather, and only during the last few days in the field, while they were mucking around in knee-deep mud, did they discover the enormous fossil, the researchers said.
Based on the skull's anatomy and size (4 feet, or 1.2 meters, long), the reptile's entire body stretched about 33 feet (10 m), making it the largest marine predator in the region, the researchers said.
'Sea Monster'
Fossil Shows Dinosaurs Thrived
'Mud Dragon'
In a humid, tropical jungle in southern China eons ago, a remarkably bird-like dinosaur with wing-like arms, a toothless beak and a dome-shaped crest atop its head became trapped in mud, struggled in vain to escape and died.
Workmen blasting bedrock while building a school near the city of Ganzhou unearthed a beautifully preserved fossil of the roughly 6.5-foot-long (2-meter-long) dinosaur, nicknamed the "Mud Dragon," still in that contorted position, scientists said on Thursday.
The Cretaceous Period creature, called Tongtianlong limosus, lived 66 to 72 million years ago, at the twilight of the dinosaurs' more than 160-million-year reign on Earth. It was a member of a group called oviraptorosaurs, one of the closest relatives to birds, which evolved earlier from small, feathered dinosaurs.
Paleontologist Steve Brusatte of Scotland's University of Edinburgh, who worked on the study published in the journal Scientific Reports, said the fossil adds to the understanding of dinosaur evolution on the eve of destruction.
The discovery of Tongtianlong and five other oviraptorosaur species in southern China showed this group was still blossoming and diversifying during the last few million years before an asteroid struck Earth about 66 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs, Brusatte said.
'Mud Dragon'
Global Climate Accord
T-rump
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump (R-Grifter) could use legal short-cuts to pull out of a global agreement for fighting climate change within a year, keeping a campaign promise and by-passing a theoretical four-year wait, lawyers say.
Trump, who has called global warming a hoax and said it was invented by the Chinese to undermine U.S. manufacturing, has said he wants to cancel the 2015 Paris Agreement among almost 200 nations that entered into force on Nov. 4.
The accord, which seeks to phase out greenhouse gas emissions this century with a shift from fossil fuels, says in its Article 28 that any country wanting to pull out after joining up has to wait four years.
But Trump could pull out of the parent treaty of the Paris Agreement, the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change with just a year's notice, also voiding U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement, U.N. legal experts say.
That would be controversial, partly because the Convention was signed by former Republican president George Bush in 1992 and approved by the U.S. Senate. It would also severely strain relations with many foreign nations.
T-rump
Maintains Influence
GOP
Buoyed by Donald Trump's surprising strength, the Republicans maintained their control over a large majority of state legislatures across the country, setting up the GOP to enact conservative policies and potentially cement its political power for years to come.
With Tuesday's results, the Republicans will control at least as many legislative chambers as they do now - 68 out of 99, an all-time high for the GOP. And they will have full control of 33 legislatures, up from 31. (That includes Nebraska, which has a technically nonpartisan, single-chamber legislature.) The Democrats will be in full command in 13 states.
Republicans scored major victories by taking control of the Iowa and Minnesota Senates and the Kentucky House. They also held on to their majorities in chambers in several states that had been targeted by the Democrats, and apparently gained a tie in the previously Democratic-controlled Connecticut Senate.
The results give Republicans a better chance of directing the redrawing of congressional and legislative districts that the states will undertake after the 2020 census. That, in turn, could help the GOP maintain its grip on power for years.
GOP
Republican Utopia
Kansas
Kansas faces a $349 million shortfall in its current budget and even bigger gaps in the near future after officials issued a new, more pessimistic fiscal forecast for the state.
The forecasters slashed the state's previous projections for tax collections through June 2017 by 5.9 percent, or $355 million. They also issued the first projections for the two fiscal years beginning in July 2017 and kept their estimates for revenue growth conservative.
Legislative researchers projected budget shortfalls totaling $1.1 billion through June 2019, based on current legal requirements for spending. The state's annual spending is $15.5 billion.
The state's fiscal woes come amid a national debate over taxes. President-elect Donald Trump promised big income tax cuts while campaigning. Kansas has struggled to balance its budget after slashing personal income taxes in 2012 and 2013 in hopes of stimulating its economy, and Republican Gov. Sam Brownback touted the experiment as a national model.
Brownback blames the state's ongoing budget woes on slumps in agriculture and energy production that have also affected other states. The new fiscal forecast - replacing one issued in April - assumes that the sluggishness continues for the next two years.
Kansas
Another Republican Utopia
Flint, Michigan
A federal judge on Thursday ordered state and city officials to deliver bottled water directly to qualified residents in Flint, Michigan, where a water contamination crisis has made unfiltered tap water unsafe to drink since April 2014.
Officials must deliver four cases of bottled water a week immediately unless they can prove a water filter is installed and properly maintained at a home or if residents opt out of a filter or deliveries, U.S. District Judge David Lawson said.
The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by residents and advocacy groups Concerned Pastors for Social Action, the National Resources Defense Council and the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan.
"Here the plaintiffs seek a stop-gap measure that provides ready access to safe drinking water," Lawson said. "It is in the best interest of everyone to move people out of harms way before addressing the source of the harm."
The crisis drew international attention and numerous lawsuits and led to calls by some critics for Michigan Governor Rick Snyder to resign over the state's response.
Flint, Michigan
Reveals More Details About Hack
Yahoo
Yahoo provided more details on Wednesday about an epic hack of its services, including that the culprits may have planted software "cookies" for ongoing access to users' accounts.
In revelations that could jeopardize the company's pending $4.8 billion acquisition by US telecom giant Verizon, the internet pioneer said it was trying to pin down when it first knew its system had been breached and whether hackers gave themselves a way to get back into accounts whenever they wished.
There is no evidence the state-sponsored actor is still active in the California-based company's network, Yahoo told regulators.
Investigators are also trying to figure out how much people at Yahoo knew about the hack in late 2014, when the breach took place, according to the filing.
Yahoo announced the breach in September, saying it affected at least 500 million customers.
Yahoo
In Memory
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen, rock music's man of letters whose songs fused religious imagery with themes of redemption and sexual desire, earning him critical and popular acclaim, has died at age 82, said a statement on his Facebook page.
Cohen, a native of Quebec, was already a celebrated poet and novelist when he moved to New York in 1966 at age 31 to break into the music business.
Although he influenced many musicians and won many honors, including induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Order of Canada, Cohen rarely made the pop music charts with his sometimes moody folk-rock.
But Cohen's most famous song, "Hallelujah," in which he invoked the biblical King David and drew parallels between physical love and a desire for spiritual connection, has been covered hundreds of times since he released it in 1984.
"Hallelujah's" long road to mass appeal was matched by Cohen's own painstaking approach to writing it. He spent five years penning drafts, at one point banging his head on the floor of a hotel room in frustration.
Many of Cohen's songs became hits for other acts, including Judy Collins, who helped Cohen gain fame by recording some of his early compositions in the 1960s.
Cohen's most ardent admirers compared his works to spiritual prophecy. He sang about religion, which included references to Jesus Christ and Jewish traditions, as well as love and sex, political upheaval, regret and what he once called the search for "a kind of balance in the chaos of existence."
His lyrics were deeply personal and at times took on an element of prayer, as in 1969's "Bird on the Wire" in which he sang: "I swear by this song/And by all that I have done wrong/I will make it all up to thee."
Cohen's other well-known songs include "Suzanne," "So Long, Marianne," "Famous Blue Raincoat" and "The Future," an apocalyptic 1992 recording in which he darkly intoned: "I've seen the future, brother/It is murder."
Cohen toured extensively from 2008 to 2013 after being unable to collect most of a $9 million judgment against his former manager and lover, Kelley Lynch, whom he accused of draining his savings.
He released an album just last month, "You Want It Darker." But the New Yorker described him as ailing, quoting him as saying he was more or less "confined to barracks" in his Los Angeles residence.
Cohen's nasal voice and deep-bass, conversational vocals were criticized by some as being monotone. British musician Paul Weller once called his melancholy style "music to slit your wrists to."
But his work was also suffused with irony and self-deprecating humor, often touching on his relationship with fame and his reputation for romantic entanglements.
Born into a Jewish family in 1934 and raised in an affluent English-speaking neighborhood of Montreal, Cohen read Spanish poet Federico García Lorca as a teenager, learned to play guitar from a flamenco musician and formed a country band called the Buckskin Boys.
He attended McGill University in Montreal and published his first book of poetry shortly after graduation.
Living on grant money from the Canadian government and an inheritance from his family, Cohen published in the 1960s the poetry collections "The Spice-Box of Earth" and "Flowers for Hitler" and novels "The Favourite Game" and "Beautiful Losers."
But disillusioned with his meager income, Cohen turned to songwriting and landed an audition in 1967 with John Hammond, the producer who had discovered Dylan. Hammond signed him to Columbia Records, which would remain Cohen's label for five decades.
Cohen toured widely but also sought solace in meditation, far from the public eye. For part of the 1990s, Cohen lived in a Zen Buddhist monastery in the San Gabriel Mountains just outside Los Angeles, where he handled tasks as menial as cleaning toilets.
Cohen, who never married, is survived by his daughter, Lorca, and by his son, Adam.
Leonard Cohen
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