Recommended Reading
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Lucy Mangan explains what the Uber news means for women (Stylist)
It's Christmas party season. You may have your glad rags sorted, spare tights and Compeeds in your bag, but have you factored in your ride home? Or rather the sudden disappearance of it. The announcement that Uber has had its London licence revoked- until mid-December at least -has set many of us to work feverishly recomputing our travel arrangements.
Megan Murray: This taxi driver's viral post is a lesson on how men can be better allies to women in danger (Stylist)
Setting the scene in a post on the social media platform, Gale [a male taxi driver] explained that while working for Uber recently he had accepted a booking from a woman, who then messaged him through the app asking if he would pretend to be her boyfriend when he arrived. Initially confused, Gale responded to ask what she meant, to which she replied "I just need you to act like you know me, and that you're not my Uber driver." Understanding that something clearly wasn't right, Gale went above and beyond, removing the Uber stickers from the outside of his car and "making a mental note" to keep his wedding ring "out of eyesight."
Kayleigh Dray: Lili Reinhart speaks up about terrifying encounter with fake Uber driver (Stylist)
There's no denying that Uber, for all of its scandals and controversies, is cheap, fast and convenient: you can summon a car at just a click of a button, as well as pay/tip via your smartphone. However, while Uber does screen its drivers, there are still risks to accepting rides from strangers - something which Lili Reinhart discovered when she was approached by a man posing as an Uber professional.
Kayleigh Dray: "The real reason we should all be upset about Uber" (Stylist)
On 25 November 2019, Transport for London (TfL) confirmed that Uber will not be granted a new licence to operate in London, after it was revealed that at least 14,000 trips were carried out by uninsured drivers in late 2018 and early 2019. Helen Chapman, Director of Licensing, Regulation and Charging at TfL, told BBC News: "While we recognise Uber has made improvements, it is unacceptable that Uber has allowed passengers to get into minicabs with drivers who are potentially unlicensed and uninsured."
Hadley Freeman: Emma Thompson's ludicrous Last Christmas is the perfect Brexit festive movie (The Guardian)
The success of this film says quite a lot about Britain 2019.
Suzanne Moore: Advent calendars filled with gin and 7ft Christmas trees - have we all gone bananas? (The Guardian)
The Instagramification of the festive season has seen the rise of a decorations arms race. Humbug.
Suzanne Moore: Trust in politics has evaporated, now it offers only fantasy (The Guardian)
Members of the public are well-informed and opinionated. It's time journalists and politicians acknowledged that.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Song: "Cal Viva" from the album EN EL SALVAJE OESTE (IN THE WILD WEST)
Artist: Los Daytonas
Artist Location: Madrid, Spain
Info: "Band formed in Madrid, Spain in 1997, and was active until 2006. In 2012, the band was put together again searching for that classic twangy instrumental sound of the sixties."
Price: €1.5 EURO (approx. $1.67 USD) for track; €5 EUROS (approx. 5.55 USD) for six-track album
Genre: Rock Instrumental, Surf Instrumental, Spaghetti Western Instrumental
Los Daytonas at Bandcamp
En el Salvaje Oeste by Los Daytonas
David Bruce has over 140 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
New Venture
Michael Egan
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Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
JD is on vacation.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
More rain.
Kennedy Center Honors
Linda Ronstadt
At the Kennedy Center Honors dinner in Washington on Saturday night, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, introduced honoree Linda Ronstadt with a play on the title of one of her best-known songs.
"Ms Ronstadt," the most senior US diplomat said, "thank you and congratulations. And I will say my job, as I travel the world, I just want to know when I will be loved."
Ronstadt replied: when he stopped "enabling Donald Trump". The remark was relayed in a viral tweet by Sam Greisman, son of the actor Sally Field, another honoree.
"Linda Ronstadt got up to get laurels," he wrote, "looked the fucker right in the eye and said 'maybe when you stop enabling Donald Trump'. Icon."
Variety saw the incident slightly differently, reporting: "Ronstadt rose to the microphone a feet away from the host's table and looked straight ahead. 'I'd like to say to Mr Pompeo, who wonders when he'll be loved, it's when he stops enabling Donald Trump.' Then she sat down."
Linda Ronstadt
How The Kochs Bought America
Kochland
If the unbridled consumption of fossil fuels is indeed pushing the planet faster and faster toward Armageddon, Charles Koch probably deserves as much credit as anyone for the end of the world as we know it.
Christopher Leonard never makes that judgement in Kochland, his massive study of one of the most destructive corporate behemoths America has ever seen. But in more than 600 pages, he provides plenty of evidence to support it.
Charles and his late brother David were second-generation extremists. Their father, Fred, was not only one of the founders of the John Birch Society, which famously accused President Dwight Eisenhower of being a "tool of the communists". He also helped the Nazis construct their third-largest oil refinery, which produced fuel for the Luftwaffe - although you would have to read Jane Mayer's brilliant book, Dark Money, to learn that particular detail.
In 1980, David Koch was the Libertarian candidate for vice-president. The party's modest plans included the abolition of "Medicare, Medicaid, social security (which would be made voluntary), the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission."
Such political ambitions never got very far, although the family did purchase the Republican senator Bob Dole's friendship with $245,000 in contributions and David served as vice-chairman of Dole's 1996 presidential campaign.
Kochland
Burleigh County
North Dakota
Reuben Panchol was forced to leave war-torn Sudan decades ago as a child, embarking on an odyssey that eventually brought him to the American Midwest and left him eternally grateful to the country that took him in.
"I am an American citizen, a North Dakotan," said Panchol, a 38-year-old father of four. "And without North Dakota, I couldn't have made it."
Panchol hopes to share his story on Monday with members of a local commission who are set to vote on whether their county will stop accepting refugees. If they vote to bar refugees, as expected, Burleigh County - home to about 95,000 people and the capital city of Bismarck - could become the first local government to do so since President Donald Trump issued an executive order making it possible.
The county postponed a vote last week when more than 100 people showed up and overflowed the commission's normal meeting space. Monday night's meeting will be held in a middle school cafeteria to accommodate public interest that Chairman Brian Bitner said is the most intense he's seen in more than a decade on the commission.
Though he declined to predict which way the commission would go, Bitner said he would vote against accepting additional refugees.
North Dakota
Restaurants No Longer Segregated
Saudi
Women in Saudi Arabia will no longer need to use separate entrances from men or sit behind partitions at restaurants in the latest measure announced by the government that upends a major hallmark of conservative restrictions that had been in place for decades.
The decision, which essentially erodes one of the most visible gender segregation restrictions in place, was quietly announced Sunday in a lengthy and technically worded statement by the Municipal and Rural Affairs Ministry.
While some restaurants and cafes in the coastal city of Jiddah and Riyadh's upscale hotels had already been allowing unrelated men and women to sit freely, the move codifies what has been a sensitive issue in the past among traditional Saudis who view gender segregation as a religious requirement. Despite that, neighboring Muslim countries do not have similar rules.
Restaurants and cafes in Saudi Arabia, including major Western chains like Starbucks, are currently segregated by "family" sections allocated for women who are out on their own or who are accompanied by male relatives, and "singles" sections for just men. Many also have separate entrances for women and partitions or rooms for families where women are not visible to single men. In smaller restaurants or cafes with no space for segregation, women are not allowed in.
Reflecting the sensitive nature of this most recent move, the decision to end requirements of segregation in restaurants was announced in a statement published by the state-run Saudi Press Agency. The statement listed a number of newly-approved technical requirements for buildings, schools, stores and sports centers , among others.
Saudi
Waning
America's Influence
It's whispered in NATO meeting rooms and celebrated in China's halls of power. It's lamented in the capital cities of key U.S. allies and welcomed in the Kremlin.
Three years into Donald Trump (R-Fake Hair)'s presidency, America's global influence is waning. In interviews with The Associated Press, diplomats, foreign officials and scholars from numerous countries describe a changing world order in which the United States has less of a central role.
And in many ways, that's just fine with the White House. Trump campaigned on an ''America First'' foreign policy and says a strong United States will mean a stronger world.
Trump insists he's abandoning globalism for bilateral ties more beneficial to the U.S..
Instead, once-close allies - France, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mexico, Turkey, Germany and more - have quietly edged away from Washington over the past three years.
America's Influence
Harrowing Look
CIA Torture
The drawings show the detainee crouched and handcuffed in a small box; naked and strapped to a table as water pours over his covered face; shackled as an interrogator slams his head into a wall.
The graphic self-portraits, drawn in captivity by a Guantanamo Bay detainee, provide a new and harrowing account of the CIA's torture program during a dark chapter in the U.S. war on terror. They were published for the first time this week in a report called "How America Tortures," by the Seton Hall University School of Law's Center for Policy and Research.
"I don't recall how long I stayed in the standing position, but I know that I passed out while … my hands were tight to the upper bars. I felt they became paralyzed or severed. They were blue or green. The chains had left some traces of blood," said Abu Zubaydah, the detainee, in a description of a torture tactic called "wall standing."
Just days after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush (R-Chimpy) authorized the CIA to begin covertly detaining people it suspected of being terrorists. The Department of Justice provided a set of memos to outline what interrogation techniques were allowed and offered a legal defense for their use.
Abu Zubaydah "was subjected to treatment so egregious that the CIA sought and received official governmental assurances that their prisoner would 'remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life,'" Mark Denbeaux, the center's director and a co-counsel for Abu Zubaydah's defense, said in a news release.
CIA Torture
Our Anti-Democracy Decade
Natural Consequence
We're coming to the end of what might be called the anti-democracy decade. It began on 21 January 2010 with the supreme court's shameful decision in Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission, opening the floodgates to big money in politics with the absurd claim that the first amendment protects corporate speech.
It ends with Donald Trump (R-Fake Teeth) in the White House, filling his administration with corporate shills and inviting foreign powers to interfere in American elections.
Trump is the consequence rather than the cause of the anti-democratic decade. By the 2016 election, the richest 100th of 1% of Americans - 24,949 very wealthy people - accounted for a record-breaking 40% of all campaign contributions.
That same year, corporations flooded the presidential, Senate and House elections with $3.4bn in donations. Labor unions no longer provided any countervailing power, contributing only $213m - one union dollar for every 16 corporate.
Big corporations and the super-wealthy lavished their donations on the Republican party because Republicans promised them a giant tax cut. As Lindsey Graham warned his colleagues, "financial contributions will stop" if the GOP didn't come through. The investments paid off big. Pfizer, whose 2016 contributions to the GOP totaled $16m, will reap an estimated $39bn in tax savings by 2022. GE contributed $20m and will get back $16bn. Chevron donated $13m and will receive $9bn.
Natural Consequence
Physics Behind Floating "Rafts"
Fire Ants
Fire ants can survive floods by linking their bodies together to form large floating rafts. Now researchers at Georgia Tech have demonstrated that fire ants can actively sense changes in forces acting upon the raft under different fluid conditions and adapt their behavior accordingly to preserve the raft's stability. Hungtang Ko described their work at a meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics, held in Seattle just before the Thanksgiving holiday.
Fire ants (and ants in general) provide a textbook example of collective behavior. A few ants spaced well apart behave like individual ants. But pack enough of them closely together, and they behave more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties. You can pour them from a teapot like a fluid, or they can link together to build towers or floating rafts-a handy survival skill when, say, a hurricane floods Houston. They also excel at regulating their own traffic flow.
Any single ant has a certain amount of hydrophobia-the ability to repel water-and this property is intensified when they link together, weaving their bodies much like a waterproof fabric. They gather up any eggs, make their way to the surface via their tunnels in the nest, and as the flood waters rise, they'll chomp down on each other's bodies with their mandibles and claws, until a flat raft-like structure forms, with each ant behaving like an individual molecule in a material-say, grains of sand in a sand pile. And they can do this in less than 100 seconds. Plus, the ant-raft is "self-healing": it's robust enough that if it loses an ant here and there, the overall structure can stay stable and intact, even for months at a time. In short, the ant raft is a super-organism.
Ko works in David Hu's biolocomotion lab at Georgia Tech, which investigates not just the collective behavior of fire ants, but also water striders, snakes, various climbing insects, mosquitos, the unique properties of cat tongues, and animal bodily functions like urination and defecation. (One of his students, Patricia Yang, won a 2019 Ig Nobel Prize for her study of why wombats produce cubed poo.) Ko and his colleagues thought that fire ants might be able to sense changes in the forces acting upon the rafts under different conditions of fluid flow and decided to test that hypothesis.
Fire Ants
Weekend Box Office
'Frozen 2'
"Frozen 2" blanketed multiplexes for the third straight weekend, continuing its reign at No. 1 with $34.7 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday.
The Walt Disney Co. animated sequel has already grossed $919.7 million worldwide. It will soon become the sixth Disney release this year to cross $1 billion, a record sure to grow to seven once "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" hits theaters later this month. Early next week, Disney will cross $10 billion at the global box office this year.
This weekend produced an outright flop in "Playmobil: The Movie," the week's only new wide release. The STX Films release was never expected to do well, but it bombed so thoroughly that it will rank among the worst-performing wide-releases ever. It grossed $668,000 in 2,337 venues, giving it a per-theater average of just $286.
The top five films were almost unchanged from last weekend.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Where available, the latest international numbers for Friday through Sunday are also included.
1. "Frozen 2," $34.7 million ($90.2 million international).
2. "Knives Out," $14.2 million ($18 million international).
3. "Ford v Ferrari," $6.5 million ($8.3 million international).
4. "Queen & Slim," $6.5 million.
5. "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood," $5.2 million.
6. "Dark Waters," $4.1 million.
7. "21 Bridges," $2.9 million.
8. "Playing With Fire," $2 million.
9. "Midway," $1.9 million.
10. "Joker," $1 million.
'Frozen 2'
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