Recommended Reading
from Bruce
BTTDO - Bruce Took The Day Off
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David Bruce has over 80 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Presenting
Michael Egan
replied:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Comment
Current Events
Pardons
I have sent the message below to Mark Warner and Tim Kaine. Beside fearing the worst from Predator, I'm a bit upset about the Orange Traitor pardoning Scooter Liddy, another traitor. NOT that Predator actually knows the weasel or god-forbid has READ about what Liddy knowingly and willfully did!
Senator Warner/Senator Kaine:
While I was living in Tennessee in the 1970s, we had a corrupt, out-of-control governor Ray Blanton. When everyone realized the extent of his unfitness for office and feared how many pardons he would sell before his term ended, our brave legislators arranged for Lamar Alexander to be sworn in as the new governor 3 days early and ousted Blanton, preventing him from doing more harm. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Blanton#Scandals) I urge you to consider this as Trump pardons people. Will you stand by and watch him pardon those covering up his criminality? Or will you show the ingenuity and bravery of those Tennessee legislators?
Trevor Noah
Kathy shared this from Trevor Noah:
"Every week we seem to find out that someone else got money to keep quiet about one of Donald Trump's affairs," the Daily Show host quipped. "At this point it's almost like his dong has its own economy . . . a gross domestic penis."
Borowitz
Good Borowitz article today:
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
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
"MY GIRLS PUSSY"
THE "PEE PEE TAPE.
"GIRD YOUR LOINS."
BOOM!
THE BEGINNING OF THE END?
"THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS."
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Running late.
Door Auction Raises $400,000
Chelsea Hotel
The auction of old, chipped doors from New York's Chelsea Hotel where celebrities including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Madonna once stayed raised more than $400,000, an auction house said Friday.
The doors were saved thanks to an enterprising former homeless man after the historic bohemian hangout on 23rd Street closed in 2011 for extensive renovations.
Since opening in 1884 the Chelsea Hotel was a refuge for writers and artists who would stay days, weeks or indefinitely. Among them were Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, Bob Marley, Humphrey Bogart, Joni Mitchell, and Andy Warhol.
The door to the room where musician and 2016 literature Nobel laureate Bob Dylan once lived went for $125,000.
Late 60s pop icon Janis Joplin once had a tryst with novelist and singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen at the hotel, immortalized in the Cohen song "Chelsea Hotel Nš.2" That door went for $106,250.
Chelsea Hotel
Freeway Crash
Will Ferrell
Actor Will Ferrell was taken to the hospital Thursday night following a crash in Aliso Viejo, Calif., according to the California Highway Patrol.
Ferrell was a passenger in an SUV that was sideswiped and flipped over on the northbound I-5 at 10:55 p.m. Video footage from the scene showed Ferrell talking on a cell phone while being loaded into an ambulance.
The actor was not seriously hurt, his representative told TMZ. Ferrell was one of three passengers in the chauffeur-driven SUV, which was returning from a "Funny or Die" event in San Diego. Ferrell appeared as Ron Burgundy from "Anchorman."
A 27-year-old woman was also in the SUV. She was not wearing a seatbelt, and was seriously injured, according to the Orange County Register. The CHP reported that the SUV was headed north in the carpool lane, just north of La Paz Road. The driver of a Toyota in the lane to the right swerved into the SUV, causing it to hit the center divider and flip, Officer Rafael Reynoso told the Register.
Will Ferrell
Sues Ex-business Manager
Stan Lee
Stan Lee is fighting back against at least one person who he believes has been stealing from him following The Hollywood Reporter's in-depth investigative pieceabout alleged elder abuse and an ugly battle over his estate.
In a complaint filed Friday in L.A. County Superior Court, Lee claims Jerardo Olivarez is one of many "unscrupulous businessmen, sycophants and opportunists" seeking to take advantage of him following the death of his wife, Joan Lee, in July 2017.
"While Lee was in great distress over this severe loss, Olivarez ... fired his banker of 26 years," writes attorney Jonathan Freund in the complaint. "They also fired his lawyers of many years and caused approximately $4.6 million dollars to be transferred out of Lee's Merrill Lynch Account without Lee's authorization."
Olivarez, who was introduced to Lee by his daughter J.C., then convinced Lee to give him power of attorney, according to the complaint. The manager also allegedly tricked Lee into loaning $300,000 to a fake nonprofit organization dedicated to racial peace, bought an $850,000 condo in West Hollywood without his approval, removed almost $1.4 million from Lee's accounts through a series of wire transfers and used his position as a fiduciary to modify Lee's will.
Lee is suing for conversion, fraud, financial abuse of an elder and misappropriation of his name and likeness.
Stan Lee
Musical Time Travel
Mozart-Era Pianos
The sign on the old sunlit house reads "Machine Factory" but now handiwork reigns in this workshop where replicas of fortepianos once played by the world's greatest musical geniuses are created.
Since 1998, more than 200 copies of pianos played by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn or Frederic Chopin have left the house in the village of Divisov, some 40 kilometres (25 miles) southeast of the Czech capital, Prague.
"Authenticity. There can be no other purpose in replicating these instruments," says their builder Paul McNulty, a 64-year-old American of Irish descent, whose small round glasses liken him to John Lennon.
McNulty first studied guitar, then switched to piano tuning before embarking on his career as a fortepiano builder at a Boston workshop.
McNulty himself produces between 10 and 15 pianos a year, spending 800 to 6,000 hours on each of the instruments, whose prices start at 30,000 euros ($37,000) apiece, lifetime warranty included.
Mozart-Era Pianos
Reacts
Joe Wilson
Former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, a man whose family was turned upside down by Scooter Libby and other resident George W. Bush administration officials, sharply criticized President-for-now Donald Trump (R-Crooked) for pardoning Libby, saying it showed his disregard for America's national security.
"It has nothing to do with Libby, and it has nothing to do with me," Wilson told HuffPost Friday. "Libby's problem was with the Justice Department. He was indicted, tried and convicted on obstruction of justice and perjury charges for basically violating the national security of the United States of America."
"Now he's being pardoned for it, which suggests of course that Mr. Trump is willing to allow people to violate the essence of our defense structure, our national security, our intelligence apparatus and essentially get away with it," he added.
The Bush administration leaked the name of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, a covert CIA agent, to the press in its attempts to undercut Wilson. That move effectively ended her career with the agency.
Plame similarly told MSNBC on Friday that Trump's actions show "you can commit crimes against national security and you will be pardoned."
Joe Wilson
Black & White
US
Black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, according to the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And a new analysis from the New York Times using the most recent government data revealed that black infants today are more than twice as likely to die as white infants.
That's 11.3 deaths per 1,000 black babies compared with 4.9 per 1,000 white babies - "a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery, when most black women were considered chattel," the New York Times reported.
Eight years ago, Amnesty International flagged Georgia as the U.S. state with the worst maternal mortality. At the time, Georgia was 48th in the nation, and in 2016 its pregnancy-related maternal mortality ratio was 40.8 deaths per 100,000 live births overall, 27.1 for white women and 62.1 for black women, according to a Yale Global Health Justice Partnership policy report published in February.
The reasons behind the racial disparity in maternal health, which is apparent across class lines, have long been debated. In 1903, one doctor blamed the gap on blacks' "mass of imperfections" and "their own behavior," NPR reported last year. But research from social scientists and those in the medical field has shown that "the problem isn't race but racism."
US
Brown v. Board of Education
Judicial Nominee
A federal judicial nominee refused to say whether she agreed with the outcome of the landmark civil rights ruling Brown v. Board of Education during her confirmation hearing on Wednesday.
Wendy Vitter, a Louisiana lawyer nominated for a federal judgeship by President Donald Trump, would not say if she supported the 1954 Supreme Court decision that famously outlawed racial segregation in schools. During her confirmation hearing to be the district judge for Louisiana's Eastern District, Vitter repeatedly said she could not comment on her personal feelings about Supreme Court decisions.
"Do you believe that Brown v. Board of Education was correctly decided," Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, asked.
"I don't mean to be coy," Vitter responded. "But I think I get into a difficult area when I start commenting on Supreme Court decisions which are correctly decided and which I may disagree with. Again, my personal, political or religious views I would set aside. That is Supreme Court precedent. It is binding. If I were honored to be confirmed I would be bound by it, and of course I would uphold it."
Vitter evaded other areas of questioning in a similar manner. In another exchange with Blumenthal, the staunchly pro-life judicial nominee would not say if she still agreed with a false statement she made in 2013 that Planned Parenthood kills "over 150,000 females a year." When asked if she still stood by the claim, Vitter said, "My pro-life stance has been very clear. I have been very upfront with this committee about my views and about how serious I take it, and that I would set aside any personal or religious views if I were to be confirmed."
Judicial Nominee
Records Taken Away
'King of Kong'
For the past decade or so, video gamer Billy Mitchell has been known as the "King of Kong," at times holding the world record for the highest score in the popular arcade game Donkey Kong. But now his legacy is under dispute. His official high scores from Donkey Kong have been stripped as of Thursday, and he has been banned from submitting any future scores for consideration.
Twin Galaxies, the Iowa gaming institution that tracks these kinds of records, said on Thursday that they had collected enough evidence to determine that Mitchell cheated in his winning Donkey Kong scores, three of which exceeded 1 million points. According to their statement, they found - after a complaint brought to them in February and many months spent testing the veracity of the complaint - that some of the screens that Mitchell had submitted as part of his record-breaking runs were impossible to attain without using emulation software, known as MAME. The emulation software is strictly forbidden for record submissions for the classic arcade-style games.
As of Thursday, Mitchell had not publicly responded.
Mitchell became a popular face in the video game world after his rivalry with fellow Kong competitor Steve Wiebe was explored in the 2007 documentary King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters from director Seth Gordon. Now that Mitchell has been deposed from his throne, Twin Galaxies notes that Wiebe has become the new official record holder. Mitchell continues to hold the record as the first person to achieve a perfect score in Pac-Man in 1999.
'King of Kong'
Wolves Continue Comeback
Oregon
Biologists in Oregon counted 124 wolves in their annual tally, an 11 percent increase over last year's numbers, and hailed the results Thursday as evidence that wolves are regaining their foothold in the state after being wiped out by bounty hunters more than 70 years ago.
Wolf advocates, however, blasted the report by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and said the report exaggerates the success of wolf recovery at a critical juncture when state officials are considering how to manage the species going forward.
They also criticized the agency for allowing ranchers to kill wolves to prevent attacks on livestock, including a kill order that was issued this week for up to any two wolves from a new pack that includes a heavily pregnant female.
The report "demands accountability from an agency that insists on killing more wolves every year," Sean Stevens said, executive director of Oregon Wild.
Wolves were once so plentiful in the abundant forests that the earliest settlers gathered from far and wide to discuss how to kill them. Those "wolf meetings" in the 1840s, spawned by a common interest, eventually led to the formation of the Oregon territory, the precursor for statehood in 1859.
Oregon
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