Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Froma Harrop: California Conquers Partisan Chaos (Creators Syndicate)
California has found a formula for ending the partisan warfare that once paralyzed its government: Get rid of one of the parties, in this case, the Republican. The state's famously dysfunctional government now hums with calm efficiency.
Marc Dion: Do We Really Honor Our Veterans? (Creators Syndicate)
But, hey, the people who start the wars are working steady. The senators get their pensions. The CEO gets his heath care. You get a quick trip through some dirty little war in the Third World, and then you come home to a handshake and a part-time, $9-an-hour job.
Susan Estrich: May I (Not) Help You?
Did she really think I would say, "Who needs the doctors and specialists who have been taking care of me for years and dealing with my family's history of heart issues when I can get advice from an RN who works for the insurance company?" But I was pleasant and just said no. … This is not, I should add, Obamacare that I'm talking about. I have old-fashioned, pre-Obama, employer-provided insurance.
Paul Krugman: Why is Obamacare Complicated?
Mike Konczal says most of what needs to be said about the underlying sources of Obamacare's complexity, which in turn set the stage for the current tech problems. Basically, Obamacare isn't complicated because government social insurance programs have to be complicated: neither Social Security nor Medicare are complex in structure. It's complicated because political constraints made a straightforward single-payer system unachievable.
Froma Harrop: Scandal in Candyland (Creators Syndicate)
Americans pay about three times the world price of sugar because of a complex farm program designed to greatly enrich U.S. sugar growers and processors, in actuality a handful of families. Among other things, it limits imports of far cheaper sugar from impoverished Caribbean countries.
Lucy Mangan: my greatest fear? Being arrested for child abuse (Guardian)
Times change, but if you don't change with them, you can easily find yourself in trouble.
Terry Savage: Nobel Stays in Chicago (Creators Syndicate)
The Nobel Prize for Economics stays in Chicago again this year - specifically at the University of Chicago. Today's announcement that Eugene F. Fama and Lars Peter Hansen of the U of C would share the 2013 prize with Robert J. Shiller of Yale University, means that the U of C now has 28 affiliated laureates in Economics. The three honorees will share a cash award of about $1.2 million, but the prize is truly priceless for the honor it confers.
Marilyn Preston: Pumping Iron and Pushing Politics -- It's all one (Creators Syndicate)
Politics does or does not contribute to a healthy lifestyle. It rules what our kids eat for lunch in their schools, how many hours they have recess and get to play sports, and who will get food stamps. Politics dictates how clean the air we breathe is, how honest our pharmaceutical companies are, when we'll able to tell the GMO foods from the non-GMO foods, we can make a smart choice.
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Michelle in AZ
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Marine layer hung around til late afternoon, again.
Detention Conditions
Greenpeace
Three of the Greenpeace activists held in Russia following a protest against Arctic drilling have given an insight into their detention conditions in comments published Sunday, with one complaining he was kept in isolation in a cold cell.
"The solitude is weighing on me and I am miserable," Swiss activist Marco Weber, 28, said in a letter published by the Sonntags Zeitung and Le Matin Dimanche weeklies.
He said he had been held for 24 days in isolation in the prison in the northern Russian region of Murmansk, and had no contact with the outside world besides regular visits from the Swiss consul.
Letters and notes from two British activists were also published in newspapers on Sunday, revealing marginally better conditions but a similar level of anguish.
Greenpeace
Cancels Shows
Fleetwood Mac
Fleetwood Mac is canceling planned performances in Australia and New Zealand as bassist John McVie is treated for cancer.
Band members Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham said in a statement Sunday that they're sorry to cancel the 14 show dates and hope "fans everywhere will join us in wishing John and his family all the best."
Band spokeswoman Liz Rosenberg did not specify what type of cancer McVie is treating.
Fleetwood Mac recently finished a European tour. The New Zealand and Australia shows were scheduled through Dec. 7. The band is also scheduled to perform in Las Vegas on Dec. 30.
Fleetwood Mac
100 Years Of Digging
La Brea Tar Pits
Surrounded by a gooey graveyard of prehistoric beasts, a small crew diligently wades through a backlog of fossil finds from a century of excavation at the La Brea Tar Pits in the heart of Los Angeles.
Digs over the years have unearthed bones of mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves and other unsuspecting Ice Age creatures that became trapped in ponds of sticky asphalt. But it's the smaller discoveries - plants, insects and rodents - in recent years that are shaping scientists' views of life in the region 11,000 to 50,000 years ago.
"Earlier excavations really missed a great part of the story," said John Harris, chief curator at the George C. Page Museum, which oversees the fossil collection. People "were only taking out bones they could see, but it's the hidden bones that provide clues to the environment."
The museum on Monday celebrates 100 years of digging, which has recovered some 5.5 million bones representing more than 600 species of animals and plants, the richest cache of Ice Age fossils.
La Brea Tar Pits
Gains Recognition
iPad Art
Happily hunched over his iPad, Britain's most celebrated living artist David Hockney is pioneering in the art world again, turning his index finger into a paintbrush that he uses to swipe across a touch screen to create vibrant landscapes, colorful forests and richly layered scenes.
"It's a very new medium," said Hockney. So new, in fact, he wasn't sure what he was creating until he began printing his digital images a few years ago. "I was pretty amazed by them actually," he said, laughing. "I'm still amazed."
A new exhibit of Hockney's work, including about 150 iPad images, opened Saturday in the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, just a short trip for Silicon Valley techies who created both the hardware and software for this 21st-century reinvention of finger-painting.
The show is billed as the museum's largest ever, filling two floors of the de Young with a survey of works from 1999 to present, mostly landscapes and portraits in an array of mediums: watercolor, charcoal and even video. But on a recent preview day, it was the iPad pieces, especially the 12-foot high majestic views of Yosemite National Park that drew gasps.
iPad Art
Breaks Probation, Again
Chris Brown
Chris Brown was arrested early Sunday in Washington after a fight broke out near the W Hotel, police said, complicating an already snarled legal history for the Grammy Award-winning R&B singer.
Brown, 24, was charged with felony assault in an incident that started just before 4:30 a.m., D.C. police spokesman Paul Metcalf said Sunday morning. Chris Hollosy, 35, also was arrested on felony assault charges, Metcalf said. Police believe the two men were together during the incident but said they couldn't confirm any relationship between the suspects.
The felony charges in the case were based, in part, on the extent of the victim's injuries, police said.
Brown remains on probation for the 2009 beating of his on-again, off-again girlfriend Rihanna just before the Grammy Awards. The photos of Rihanna's bruised face caused outrage among many fans. Brown pleaded guilty to one count of felony assault as part of a plea deal. He received five years' probation and had remained out of trouble until earlier this year, when prosecutors accused the singer of failing to perform his community labor sentence as instructed.
His probation was revoked briefly earlier this year after a hit-and-run incident, and he was given 1,000 more hours of community service to perform.
Chris Brown
Fined For Driving
Saudi Women
At least 16 Saudi women have received fines for taking the wheel on a day set by activists to defy the kingdom's traditional ban on female driving, police and reports said Sunday.
Only few women braved official threats of punishment and drove on Saturday in response to an online campaign headlined "Women's driving is a choice."
"Police stopped six women driving in Riyadh, and fined them 300 riyals ($80) each," said the capital's police deputy spokesman, Colonel Fawaz al-Miman.
Each of the women, along with her male guardian -- who could be a father, husband, brother, uncle, or grandson -- had to "sign a pledge to respect the kingdom's laws," Miman told AFP.
The absolute monarchy is the only country in the world where women are barred from driving. Public gatherings are officially banned.
Saudi Women
Removed from Endangered Species List
Steller Sea Lion Species
The eastern Steller sea lion, which roams the West Coast between Alaska and California, has been taken off the U.S. Endangered Species List after a major population comeback over the last several years.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Fisheries Service, which manages the population, announced the decision this week after proposing to delist the sea lion species last year.
According to biologists' estimates, the number of eastern Steller sea lions had dwindled to around 18,000 by the late 1970s. But by 2010, the population had bounced back to more than 70,000 individuals, NOAA officials said. That translates to a growth rate of 4.18 percent each year, exceeding the federal agency's recovery criteria.
The Endangered Species Act, signed by former President Richard Nixon, was one of the most powerful laws to come of the environmental movement of the 1970s. When an animal gains protection under this law, biologists and federal wildlife officials must outline a plan to help the species recover and determine how to measure the success of their conservation efforts. The recovery plan for the eastern Steller sea lion, revised in 2008, set a goal of a 3 percent annual population growth rate.
Steller Sea Lion
Magic Underwear
Shreddies
No more silent but deadly. No more dutch ovens. No one will wonder who dealt it. A British company is producing underwear that can filter out the smell of farts.
Shreddies, Ltd., a company in Loughborough, U.K., has used the same science that goes into chemical warfare suits to offer men's and women's underwear that can handle up to 200 times the noxious odour of the average flatulence. The science part comes from a layer of activated carbon cloth, called Zorflex, in the back panel of the underwear. This specially-designed cloth has a microporous structure, giving it a very large surface area. Apparently, just one gram of this cloth has a total surface area equivalent to half the size of a football field.
This incredible surface area means that there is a lot of absorption potential and it only takes throwing the cloth in the wash to reactivate it.
The men's underwear costs between $40-$47 and the women's costs between $32-35, before shipping. That's a bit pricey for one pair of underwear, but for anyone dealing with Crohn's disease or irritable bowel syndrome, or who's just renowned for producing especially noxious odours, it's a small price to pay to (as the company's motto says) "fart with confidence."
Shreddies
Weekend Box Office
'Bad Grandpa'
Paramount's "Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa" topped the weekend box office with $32 million, according to studio estimates Sunday, sinking three-week champ "Gravity" to second place.
Sony's high-seas thriller "Captain Phillips," starring Tom Hanks, held on to third place with $11.8 million.
An all-star cast including Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Penelope Cruz and Michael Fassbender wasn't enough to draw audiences to "The Counselor," which opened in fourth place. The gritty Fox drama is a "very challenging, provocative film," according to Chris Aronson, who heads distribution for Fox.
Another drama, Fox Searchlight's "12 Years a Slave," edged into the top 10 despite playing in only 123 theaters.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Rentrak. Where available, latest international numbers for Friday through Sunday are also included. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
1. "Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa," $32 million ($8.1 million international).
2. "Gravity," $20.3 million ($36.6 million international).
3. "Captain Phillips," $11.8 million ($12.1 million international).
4. "The Counselor," $8 million.
5. "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2," $6.1 million ($17.9 million international).
6. "Carrie," $5.9 million.
7. "Escape Plan," $4.3 million ($7 million international).
8. "12 Years a Slave," $2.15 million.
9. "Enough Said," $1.55 million.
10. "Prisoners," $1.06 million ($5.1 million international).
'Bad Grandpa'
In Memory
Arthur C. Danto
Arthur C. Danto, a provocative and influential philosopher and critic who championed Andy Warhol and other avant-garde artists and upended the study of art history by declaring that the history of art was over, has died. He was 89.
Danto, art critic for The Nation from 1984 to 2009 and a professor emeritus at Columbia University, died of heart failure Friday at his Manhattan apartment, daughter Ginger Danto said Sunday.
An academically trained philosopher, Danto became as central to debates about art in the 1960s and after as critic Clement Greenberg had been during the previous generation. Danto was initially troubled, then inspired by the rise of pop art and how artists such as Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein could transform a comic strip or a soup can into something displayed in a museum, a work of "art." Starting in the '60s, he wrote hundreds of essays that often returned to the most philosophical question: What exactly is art? Danto liked to begin with a signature event in his lifetime - a 1964 show at New York's Stable Gallery that featured Warhol's now-iconic reproductions of Brillo boxes.
Arthur Coleman Danto was born in Ann Arbor, Mich., and raised in Detroit. He served two years in the Army during World War II and was stationed in Italy and in North Africa. He then studied art and history at Wayne State University and received a master's and doctoral degree from Columbia University, where he taught from 1952 to 1992 and chaired the philosophy department for several years. He was especially influenced by the 19th-century Germany philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and drew extensively upon Hegel in his theory of art history.
After the Warhol show, Danto pursued a definition of art that could be applied to both the Sistine Chapel and a Brillo box. He rejected the ancient Greek idea that art was imitation and the Renaissance ideal that art was defined by esthetic pleasure. Danto was shaped by the 20th-century rise of "ready-mades," ordinary objects turned into "art," whether Warhol's Brillo boxes or the urinal Marcel Duchamp submitted to galleries during World War I. In "What Art Is," Danto concluded that art was "the embodiment of an idea," defined not by how it looked but by what it had to say.
Danto's stature as a critic overshadowed his early career as an artist. He was an accomplished printmaker whose woodcuts were exhibited in the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art and elsewhere in the 1950s. He later donated his prints to Wayne State.
Danto was married twice - to Shirley Rovetch, who died in 1978, and since 1980 to Barbara Westman. He had two children, Ginger and Elizabeth.
Arthur C. Danto
In Memory
Lou Reed
Lou Reed, a massively influential songwriter and guitarist who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music, died today. The cause of his death has not yet been released, but Reed underwent a liver transplant in May.
With the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties, Reed fused street-level urgency with elements of European avant-garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry. As a restlessly inventive solo artist, from the Seventies into the 2010s, he was chameleonic, thorny and unpredictable, challenging his fans at every turn. Glam, punk and alternative rock are all unthinkable without his revelatory example. "One chord is fine," he once said, alluding to his bare-bones guitar style. "Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz."
Lewis Allan "Lou" Reed was born in Brooklyn, in 1942. A fan of doo-wop and early rock & roll (he movingly inducted Dion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989), Reed also took formative inspiration during his studies at Syracuse University with the poet Delmore Schwartz. After college, he worked a staff songwriter for the novelty label Pickwick Records (where he had a minor hit in 1964 with a dance-song parody called "The Ostrich"). In the mid-Sixties, Reed befriended Welsh musician John Cale, a classically trained violist who had performed with groundbreaking minimalist composer La Monte Young. Reed and Cale formed a band called the Primitives, then changed their name to the Warlocks. After meeting guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker, they became the Velvet Underground. With a stark sound and ominous look, the band caught the attention of Andy Warhol, who incorporated the Velvets into his Exploding Plastic Inevitable. "Andy would show his movies on us," Reed said. "We wore black so you could see the movie. But we were all wearing black anyway."
After splitting with the Velvets in 1970, Reed traveled to England and, in characteristically paradoxical fashion, recorded a solo debut backed by members of the progressive-rock band Yes. But it was his next album, 1972's Transformer, produced by Reed-disciple David Bowie, that pushed him beyond cult status into genuine rock stardom. "Walk On the Wild Side," a loving yet unsentimental evocation of Warhol's Factory scene, became a radio hit (despite its allusions to oral sex) and "Satellite of Love" was covered by U2 and others. Reed spent the Seventies defying expectations almost as a kind of sport. 1973's Berlin was brutal literary bombast while 1974's Sally Can't Dance had soul horns and flashy guitar. In 1975 he released Metal Machine Music, a seething all-noise experiment his label RCA marketed as a avant-garde classic music, while 1978's banter-heavy live album Take No Prisoners was a kind of comedy record in which Reed went on wild tangents and savaged rock critics by name ("Lou sure is adept at figuring out new ways to shit on people," one of those critics, Robert Christgau, wrote at the time). Explaining his less-than-accommodating career trajectory, Reed told journalist Lester Bangs, "my bullshit it worth more than other people's diamonds."
Reed's ambiguous sexual persona and excessive drug use throughout the Seventies was the stuff of underground rock myth. But in the Eighties, he began to mellow. He married Sylvia Morales and opened a window into his new married life on 1982's excellent The Blue Mask, his best work since Transformer. His 1984 album New Sensations took a more commercial turn and 1989's New York ended the decade with a set of funny, politically cutting songs that received universal critical praise. In 1991, he collaborated with Cale on Songs For Drella, a tribute to Warhol. Three years later, the Velvet Underground reunited for a series of successful European gigs.
Reed and Morales divorced in the early Nineties. Within a few years, Reed began a relationship with musician-performing artist Laurie Anderson. The two became an inseparable New York fixture, collaborating and performing live together, while also engaging in civic and environmental activism. They were married in 2008.
Reed continued to follow his own idiosyncratic artistic impulses throughout the '00s. The once-decadent rocker became an avid student of T-ai Chi, even bringing his instructor onstage during concerts in 2003. In 2005 he released a double-CD called The Raven, based on the work of Edgar Allen Poe. In 2007, he released an ambient album titled Hudson River Wind Meditations. Reed returned to mainstream rock with 2011's Lulu, a collaboration with Metallica.
"All through this, I've always thought that if you thought of all of it as a book then you have the Great American Novel, every record as a chapter," he told Rolling Stone in 1987. "They're all in chronological order. You take the whole thing, stack it and listen to it in order, there's my Great American Novel."
Lou Reed
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