Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Liberal Wonks, or at Least Elizabeth Warren, Have a Plan for That (NY Times)
The surprising power of evidence-based progressivism.
The warrior critic: in praise of Pauline Kael (The Guardian)
The New Yorker's legendary reviewer would have been 100 this year. Here, fans of her work assess her essential contribution to film journalism.
Mary Beard: Lead us not into temptation (TLS)
Now, I admit, that my knowledge of Greek is not based in the New Testament, but I really think that Mark is pretty clear here, and it is along the lines of the old version. Pope Francis may not like it theologically, but it looks as close as you can get to the earliest (Greek) version we have. 'Not a good translation' indeed! Doesn't say what I want it to, more like. Or can someone put me right?
Mary Beard: How long does it take to mark an exam? (TLS)
My guess would be that we are not far short of 1800 person hours … to examine about 90 candidates at the end of their second year. Unless my maths has gone awry, that is about 20 staff hours to examine each one of them.
Brittany Spanos: Hear Taylor Swift Celebrate Pride With Pointed New Single 'You Need to Calm Down' (Rolling Stone)
"'Cause shade never made anybody less gay," singer-songwriter sings, showing further support for LGBTQ rights.
Alexandra Petri: Exhausted Britain wishes Donald Trump would notice he was being gravely insulted (Washington Post)
An increasingly distraught Britain wondered for the duration of President Trump's visit to the country whether the president was ever going to notice that he was being gravely insulted. Indignities that would have sent previous presidents packing whistled harmlessly over his head and detonated behind him, unnoticed except by their perpetrators.
Alexandra Petri: "William Barr: Death is inevitable, legacies are meaningless" (Washington Post)
"Everyone dies and I am not, you know, I don't believe in the Homeric idea that you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?" - William P. Barr, asked about his legacy as attorney general
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
David Bruce's Blog #3
David Bruce's Lulu Storefront
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 100 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Presenting
Michael Egan
replied:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• Alex Patrick, Charlotte Pestell, and Helen Ritchie are Brits, and they are sisters-Alex and Charlotte are also twins. When Alex discovered that she had cervical cancer, she started chemotherapy treatments. Unfortunately, they made her infertile. Alex said that becoming infertile "was more upsetting than the cancer itself. Shaun [her husband] and I wanted to start a family and that had been taken away." Alex' sisters helped them get a child. Charlotte donated one of her eggs, which was fertilized with sperm from Alex's husband and then implanted into Helen, who carried the baby to term. In 2005, Charlie was born. Alex said, "He is an angel. I am forever indebted to my sisters." Alex added, "When my sisters found out [about my becoming infertile], they said, 'Is there anything we can do?' Shaun and I said we wanted children as closely related to us as possible. Charlotte said, 'No problem, you can have my egg.' It was almost like a joke." Charlotte said, "The fact that we are twins means such a lot-this is the closest we could get to it being her child. I don't need my eggs any more. I've had my children." By the way, on 8 October 2008, Charlie got a brother: Oliver, who came into the world just like Charlie did-with three mothers. Once again, one of Charlotte's eggs was used, Helen carried the baby to term, and Alex and her husband, Shaun, got a baby boy to raise. Alex said, "I'm so unbelievably happy to have a brother for Charlie. He's a beautiful little boy, and Shaun and I adore him. The best part was introducing him to Charlie, who was very excited. He knows little Ollie came from the same place he did-his Auntie Helen's tummy. He knows it was because my tummy doesn't work properly. When Oliver's old enough. I'll explain to him the same as I've explained to Charlie-that his creation was the greatest expression of love anybody could ever wish for. I feel like the luckiest woman alive to have such incredible sisters." Helen said, "I would never even consider being a surrogate for a stranger, but for Alex I'm prepared to do everything I can to help her because I love her." Charlotte said, "From this point on, we're just the aunties-very happy to leave the parenting to Alex. We're closer than ever, but to us Alex will always be Charlie and Oliver's mum. When I look at Charlie, I see my nephew, not my son, although he looks like me. It will be the same with Oliver."
• In November 2008 near Tillamook, Oregon, an 11-year-old girl named Maddie McRae helped save the lives of seven people. Two days of heavy rains washed out a culvert and a stretch of road. Two vehicles, including Maddie's mother's Ford Expedition, ended up going into the river. Inside the Ford Expedition were Maddie, two siblings, and her mother. The car was washed downstream for a quarter-mile until it ran into a tree. Maddie said, "I knew what was happening. I thought we were going to die because the water was going over our heads. But me and my mom prayed a lot, and we knew God could get us through it." Maddie crawled through the SUV's broken front window, reached a tree branch, and made her way to the riverbank. She then climbed an electric fence and went to a nearby farmhouse to call 911. Fire Captain Charles Spittles in Tillamook County said that by the time paramedics arrived, "The river was pounding on the roof and going over the roof." Rescuers threw an extension ladder over a limb and dangled ropes to Maddie's mother, Stephanie, who tied her two younger children to the ropes so that the rescuers could lift them to safety. Rescuers then tipped the ladder down to Stephanie, who then crawled along it to get to safety. Rescuers also saved the four people-Jodi Porter, her 9-year-old and 13-year-old daughters, and her father-who were in the other vehicle, a brand-new Ford 500, which entered the water before the McRae family's car did. Jodi said, "We were coming home from church and came around the corner like we have thousands of times in the 13 years we've lived out here and the road was collapsed in front of us. And we went down into the culvert and it collapsed and we were in the creek floating backwards for about a mile." Jodi used her cell phone to call a friend: "My first thought was to call my best friend because they were right behind us leaving church, and I didn't want her to fall in. So as we're floating backwards, I'm dialing her saying, 'Don't come, don't come, you're going to fall in, too.'" Jodi added, "We crawled on top of the car, but it kept sinking, so we crawled onto a logjam until the firefighters came and got us." No one was hurt except for a few cuts and bruises. Maddie said, "I just went and looked at the car. It's beaten up. I don't get how I climbed on the tree and got off."
• Beatrice Coles, a five-year-old girl in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, England, knew what to do when her mother lost consciousness in August 2005 due to low blood pressure. She dialed 999 (the British 911) and opened a door to let the ambulance crew inside. She also called her great-grandmother. Beatrice's mother, Bridget, who was pregnant at the time, said, "I had been suffering from low pressure and having little fainting fits. At this particular time, I had blacked out completely." Paul Ducommun, who works at the ambulance service, said about Beatrice, "She gave me the address straight away and then repeated the telephone number a couple of times to me as well and said her mum had collapsed. She said, 'I can't unlock the door because the door is a bit stuck.' So I said, 'We'll get the ambulance crew to push it while you're pulling it.' I asked her if she'd got any other telephone numbers of her dad, and she gave me all these different numbers. She was brilliant-really good."
• "There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children." - Nelson Mandela
***
© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
***
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Stormy Daniels and the Southern Cow
The Southern Cow:
"I hope that it will be that I showed up every day and I did the very best job that I could to put forward the president's message … to do the best job that I could to answer questions. To be transparent and honest throughout that process and do everything I could to make America a little better that day than it was the day before," Sanders told reporters.
Stormy Daniels responded with an eye roll.
"And I hope to be remembered for being a virgin … eye roll," she tweeted.
McCain trending on Predator's birthday
If you have twitter, here's a chance to troll Predator by making John McCain trend on twittler's birthday. (Hope his chocolate cake is moldy and his two scoops of ice cream dribble down his HUGE chins onto his stinking tie.):
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
JD is on vacation.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Lovely marine layer hung around til mid-afternoon.
Songwriters Hall of Fame
Missy Elliott
Missy Elliott has become the first female rapper inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Fighting back tears, Melissa Elliott -- her real name -- received the honor Thursday night from Queen Latifah, a rap pioneer from the previous generation.
Earlier, the academy broadcast a video in which former first lady Michelle Obama said she is a fan of Elliott, who is 47.
Before Elliott, two other rappers had made it into the hall of fame: Jermaine Dupri last year and Jay-Z in 2017.
At Thursday's ceremony the Songwriters Hall of Fame also honored five other creators, including singer Yusuf, formerly known as Cat Stevens, who penned such classics as "Wild World."
Missy Elliott
Attendance Cap
Burning Man
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is recommending attendance be capped at existing levels for the next 10 years at the annual Burning Man counter-culture festival in the desert 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of Reno.
Burning Man organizers had proposed raising the current 80,000 limit as high as 100,000 in coming years.
But the BLM said in releasing the final environmental impact statement on Friday its preferred alternative for the proposed 10-year renewal of Burning Man's special recreation would stick with the cap that's been in place since 2017.
The agency said it would work with event organizers to address environmental and security concerns, but it's not advocating at this time any of the changes proposed in the draft environmental impact statement, including a ban on dumpsters or new security barriers.
The federal agency may, however, hire a private security firm this year to conduct drug screenings. Or, it might wait until 2020, BLM spokesman Rudy Evenson told the Reno Gazette Journal on Friday.
Burning Man
The $20 Bill
Harriet Tubman
Extensive work was well underway on a new $20 bill bearing the image of Harriet Tubman when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (R-Vulture Capitalist) announced last month that the design of the note would be delayed for technical reasons by six years and might not include the former slave and abolitionist.
Many Americans were deeply disappointed with the delay of the bill, which was to be the first to bear the face of an African-American. The change would push completion of the imagery past President Trump's time in office, even if he wins a second term, stirring speculation that Mr. Trump had intervened to keep his favorite president, Andrew Jackson, a fellow populist, on the front of the note.
But Mr. Mnuchin, testifying before Congress, said new security features under development made the 2020 design deadline set by the Obama administration impossible to meet, so he punted Tubman's fate to a future Treasury secretary.
In fact, work on the new $20 note began before Mr. Trump took office, and the basic design already on paper most likely could have satisfied the goal of unveiling a note bearing Tubman's likeness on next year's centennial of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. An image of a new $20 bill, produced by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and obtained by The New York Times from a former Treasury Department official, depicts Tubman in a dark coat with a wide collar and a white scarf.
A spokeswoman for the bureau, Lydia Washington, confirmed that preliminary designs of the new note were created as part of research that was done after Jacob J. Lew, President Barack Obama's final Treasury secretary, proposed the idea of a Tubman bill.
Harriet Tubman
Art Expert Stakes Reputation
Caravaggio
Art expert Eric Turquin is not only convinced that a canvas found in the attic of an old house in southwest France is a Caravaggio -- he believes it is a revolutionary masterpiece.
France's leading authority on Old Masters paintings has staked his reputation on the assertion that the work -- left forgotten under an old mattress for 100 years -- is the fiery Italian artist's lost "Judith and Holofernes".
The painting depicting a grisly biblical scene of the beautiful Jewish widow Judith beheading a sleeping Assyrian general will be displayed in Paris on Friday before it goes under the hammer on June 27 in Toulouse, the city where it was discovered five years ago.
But although everyone agrees on the quality of the work, a minority of experts -- particularly in Italy -- have their doubts.
They believe it is a copy made by the Flemish artist Louis Finson, who worked alongside Caravaggio as he painted.
Caravaggio
Administration Providing 'False' Information
Gulf of Oman
The owner of the Japanese tanker attacked on Thursday said US reports have provided "false" information about what happened in the Gulf of Oman.
The ship operator said "flying objects" that may have been bullets were the cause of damage to the vessel, rather than mines used by Iranian forces, as the US has suggested.
Yutaka Katada, chief executive of the Japanese company operating the ship called Kokuka Courageous, one of two vessels attacked near the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, said the damage could not have been caused by mines or torpedos that are shot underwater, since the damage was reportedly above the ship's waterline.
"It seems that something flew towards them. That created the hole, is the report I've received," Mr Katada said at a press conference in Tokyo on Friday, the Financial Times reported.
The Kokuka Courageous and another Norwegian-operated vessel were ablaze for hours in the Gulf on Thursday. The owner's of the other vessel, the Front Altair, have not yet provided an explanation of what they believe to be the cause of the damage.
Gulf of Oman
Consulted Climate Change Denier
William Happer
A Trump administration national security official has sought help from advisers to a think tank that disavows climate change to challenge widely accepted scientific findings on global warming, according to his emails.
The request from William Happer, a member of the National Security Council, is included in emails from 2018 and 2019 that were obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund under the federal Freedom of Information Act and provided to The Associated Press. That request was made this past March to policy advisers with the Heartland Institute, one of the most vocal challengers of mainstream scientific findings that emissions from burning coal, oil and gas are damaging the Earth's atmosphere.
In a March 3 email exchange Happer and Heartland adviser Hal Doiron discuss Happer's scientific arguments in a paper attempting to knock down climate change as well as ideas to make the work "more useful to a wider readership." Happer writes he had already discussed the work with another Heartland adviser, Thomas Wysmuller.
Academic experts denounced the administration official's continued involvement with groups and scientists who reject what numerous federal agencies say is the fact of climate change.
Happer, a physicist who previously taught at Princeton University, has claimed that carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas from the burning of coal, oil and gas, is good for humans and that carbon emissions have been demonized like "the poor Jews under Hitler." Trump appointed him in late 2018 to the National Security Council, which advises the president on security and foreign policy issues.
William Happer
2 Billion Tons of Ice
Greenland
Over 40% of Greenland experienced melting yesterday, with total ice loss estimated to be more than 2 gigatons (a gigaton is equal to 1 billion tons).
While Greenland is a big island filled with lots of ice, it is highly unusual for that much ice to be lost in the middle of June. The average "melt season" for Greenland runs from June to August, with the bulk of the melting occurring in July.
To visualize how much ice that is, imagine filling the National Mall in Washington DC with enough ice to reach a point in the sky eight times higher than the Washington Monument (to borrow an analogy Meredith Nettles from Columbia University gave to the Washington Post.)
The sudden spike in melting "is unusual, but not unprecedented," according to Thomas Mote, a research scientist at the University of Georgia who studies Greenland's climate.
"It is comparable to some spikes we saw in June of 2012," Mote told CNN, referring to the record-setting melt year of 2012 that saw almost the entire ice sheet experience melting for the first time in recorded history.
Greenland
Perfectly Preserved
Ice Age Wolf
A Russian scientific institute says an almost perfectly preserved head of a 32,000-year-old wolf was found in Siberia, so complete that it is still covered with fur and its brain is intact.
Scientists from the Republic of Sakha's Academy of Sciences in Russia's Arctic region of Yakutia, announced the find this week, hailing it as the first of its kind.
The head was found by a local man, Pavel Efimov, close to the Tirekhtyakh River in Yakutia in the summer of 2018, according to a press release published on the institute's website. Efimov had stumbled across the head buried in a layer of permafrost visible in the riverbank.
The institute said that its scientists along with others in Japan had confirmed that the wolf had lived during the Ice Age and released photographs and video of the head, in which it appeared barely decayed with its fur still soft and matted.
The Russian institute said Japanese scientists at Tokyo's Jikei University conducted a tomographic study and carbon dating to establish the wolf's age. The wolf's head is 16.4 inches long, meaning it is almost half the size of the body of a large modern-day wolf, the institute said, calling the ancient animal "gigantic." The wolf would have been 2 to 4 years old when it died, they said.
Ice Age Wolf
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. Week of June 12, 2019:
1. Ed Sheeran; $4,515,983; $89.88.
2. Eric Church; $2,901,237; $94.19.
3. Post Malone; $2,379,177; $91.56.
4. Pink; $2,230,905; $138.58.
5. Justin Timberlake; $2,046,383; $134.52.
6. Cher; $1,634,099; $122.14.
7. Ariana Grande; $1,588,068; $111.82.
8. Michael Bublé; $1,501,474; $120.63.
9. KISS; $1,410,459; $110.86.
10. John Mayer; $1,349,589; $119.90.
11. Backstreet Boys; $1,301,722; $99.67.
12. André Rieu; $1,276,517; $79.15.
13. Bad Bunny; $1,160,911; $99.63.
14. Mumford & Sons; $1,049,510; $70.41.
15. Kenny Chesney; $999,124; $90.07.
16. Shawn Mendes; $955,623; $70.16.
17. Travis Scott; $916,609; $70.62.
18. Twenty One Pilots; $781,576; $56.22.
19. Rod Stewart; $758,599; $93.26.
20. Jerry Seinfeld; $720,018; $110.48.
Global Concert Tours
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
