Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Return of the Blood Libel (NY Times Blog)
There is no immigration crisis; there is no crisis of immigrant crime. No, the real crisis is an upsurge in hatred - unreasoning hatred that bears no relationship to anything the victims have done. And anyone making excuses for that hatred - who tries, for example, to turn it into a "both sides" story - is, in effect, an apologist for crimes against humanity.
Katie Rogers: Melania Trump Wore a Jacket Saying 'I Really Don't Care' on Her Way to Texas Shelters (NY Times)
Melania Trump visited immigrant children in a Texas border town on Thursday, and by the time the first lady left, she had made headlines for another reason. As the temperature climbed to 80 degrees at Joint Base Andrews near Washington, Mrs. Trump boarded her plane wearing an olive green coat that read, in white capital letters, "I really don't care. Do U?"
Brandon Katz: What We Can Learn From the 7 Biggest Box Office Opening Weekends of 2018 so Far (Observer)
The amount of money a film earns has no correlation to its quality; there are two god-awful Transformers movies among the 25 highest-grossing films worldwide while cult classics like Fight Club and 2001: A Space Odyssey were considered flops when they hit theaters. But following the money does paint a picture of the current industry landscape: …
Eric Hynes: "Bowling for Columbine: By Any Means Necessary" (Criterion)
It keeps happening. At the time of this writing, students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, are mourning the deaths of fourteen of their classmates and three faculty members, all of whom a nineteen-year-old is accused of shooting on Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2018, with a legally acquired semiautomatic AR-15 rifle. Stricken and angry, the students have begun to organize, holding rallies, marching on the Florida capitol in Tallahassee, and staying on message when talking to the media.
Mary Beard: Suffragettes at the Royal Academy (A Don's Life)
In May 1914, in the very room in which we were eating, John Singer Sargent's portrait of Henry James was attacked by a middle-aged woman known as Mary Wood 9 (almost certainly a pseudonym). It was only one of several 'incidents' at the Academy around that time; two other paintings, including one of the Duke of Wellington, were damaged in the same year, and the year before there was a mysterious fire in the ladies loos, thought to be 'suffrage related'.
Mary Beard: Jenny Saville in Athens (A Don's Life)
Don't imagine please that I was just on a jolly. I am still in the middle of examining and so I spent all the rest of my time nestled in my hotel room marking translation papers. Shhhh…it is probably again the rules to take scripts abroad. But at least you get a different view.
Mary Beard: Encaenia (A Don's Life)
No doubt an enormous amount of effort goes in to creating a ceremony that runs smoothly but without seeming to be under the iron hand of a minute by minute timetable. The speeches in Latin about each of the honorands are appropriately witty (there is a real art to devising bilingual, Latin English puns) and the oration in English manages to convey the very clear message that Oxford is the great university in the world, with sufficient humour and self-irony that even Cambridge ladies can join in the spirit of it.
Michael Gregor, MD: Marijuana Legalization & the Opioid Epidemic (Nutritionfacts.org)
What happened in states after medical marijuana laws were passed? Did opioid overdoses go up, stay the same, or go down?
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Presenting
Michael Egan
answered:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
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
PING.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and a bit cooler.
Musical Scraps Budapest Dates
Billy Elliot
The Hungarian National Opera in Budapest said Thursday it was cancelling 15 performances of the musical Billy Elliot, blaming a homophobic media campaign against the production.
"As you know, the negative campaign in recent weeks against the Billy Elliot production led to a big drop in ticket sales and for this reason we are cancelling 15 performances in line with the decision of our management," Opera director Szilveszter Okovacs said in a letter obtained by the 444.hu news website.
The musical is based on the 2000 film of the same name which tells the eponymous story of a boy growing up in a depressed northern English mining town in the 1980s who eschews boxing to pursue his passion for ballet dancing.
The musical had come under attack from the Magyar Idok newspaper, which supports right-wing populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
In an article about the musical on June 1, the paper said "the propagation of homosexuality cannot be a national goal when the population is getting older and smaller and our country is threatened by invasion".
Billy Elliot
Archives Headed to The Paley Center
Rose Marie
The daughter of the late entertainer Rose Marie has donated memorabilia from her mother's fabled career to The Paley Center for Media and to Georgia State University, it was announced Thursday.
Marie "made so many pioneering contributions to all the various entertainment art forms, I felt it was important to partner with institutions that recognized her importance, would preserve her legacy and would make her archives available to her many fans," her daughter, Georgiana Guy-Rodrigues, said in a statement.
The Paley Center will receive rare television footage that shows Marie on Scoop the Writers, as the first female game show host, and on her pilot for Just Off Broadway, made at Desilu Studios. There are also behind-the-scenes glimpses from appearances on series such as The Monkees, The Virginian and Gunsmoke; some of that was seen in the recently released documentary Wait for Your Laugh.
Marie's music archive is on the way to Georgia State's Special Collections Library, home to Johnny Mercer's collection. She worked with the composer in Top Banana on Broadway in the early 1950s and sang his songs "I Wanna Be Around" and "Come Rain or Come Shine" on The Dick Van Dyke Show.
In April, the bulk of her archive material, including scrapbooks, screen-worn costumes, scripts and one of the actress' iconic hair bows, was given to the National Comedy Center, which is opening in August in Jamestown, New York.
Rose Marie
Postpone Dates
The Monkees
The Monkees have postponed the last four dates of their tour after guitarist Mike Nesmith became ill.
The band posted on Facebook Thursday that Nesmith had "a minor health issue" before a show in Philadelphia and was advised to "rest for the next week." The 75-year-old has returned to his home in California.
Nesmith has been performing past hits in "The Monkees Present: The Mike & Micky Show" tour with 73-year-old bandmate Micky Dolenz.
The group says shows in Philadelphia, New York and New Jersey will be rescheduled.
The Monkees were formed in 1965 for a television series and included Peter Tork and Davy Jones. Their hits include "Daydream Believer," ''Pleasant Valley Sunday" and "Last Train to Clarksville."
The Monkees
Spinoffs Suspended
'Star Wars'
The "Star Wars" galaxy just shrank.
Lucasfilm has put plans "on hold" for more spinoff films like "Solo: A Star Wars Story," Collider reported Wednesday.
Citing "sources with knowledge of the situation," the entertainment news site said the franchise will laser in on "Star Wars: Episode IX" and the next trilogy that springs from the original core of movies.
That means reported plans for Obi-Wan and Boba Fett movies are apparently cosmic dust for now, according to Collider.
The "Star Wars" trend of its films making money hand over fist came to a somewhat crashing end with the release of "Solo: A Star Wars Story."
'Star Wars'
Funding Climate 'Propaganda'
National Science Foundation
Four Republican senators this week demanded an investigation of the National Science Foundation's grants, accusing the federal agency of "propagandizing" by supporting a program to encourage TV meteorologists to report on climate change.
In a letter sent to the agency's inspector general Wednesday, the senators - Ted Cruz (Texas), Rand Paul (Ky.) and James Lankford (Okla.) and Jim Inhofe (Okla.) - said the $4 million Climate Matters program, which sponsors classes and webinars for meteorologists and provides real-time data and graphics with TV stations, went beyond the scope of the National Science Foundation's mission of funding "basic research." They urged the inspector general to probe whether the grants violated the 1939 Hatch Act, which bars government agencies from engaging in partisan activity.
"It is unacceptable for federal agencies to support such research which attempts to convince individuals to adopt a particular viewpoint rather than conducting objective research examining a given topic," they wrote in the letter.
The senators cited a six-year-old opinion column in The Washington Post that described Climate Central, the group that runs the program with researchers at George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication, as "an advocacy group." They called the NSF grants "egregious" and accused Climate Central of changing "the manner in which it describes itself, perhaps due to the attention it received from The Washington Post."
In reality, the Princeton, New Jersey-based nonprofit produces original research and deeply-reported feature stories. Climate Central operated a robust news site until last August, when it laid off most of its staff reporters to focus its resources on research.
National Science Foundation
'Lack Of Compassion'
US Democracy
The UN's top expert on extreme poverty warned Thursday that contemptful and cruel US policies towards the poor were disenfranchising millions, posing a threat to democracy in the country.
People living in poverty in the United States are seeing their rights "increasingly ignored", said Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, he said a "complete lack of compassion" characterised US policies towards the poor, who are becoming ever more "invisible in the political process".
According to the latest available statistics, from 2016, some 40 million Americans live in poverty, 18.5 million live in extreme poverty, and more than five million live in "Third World" conditions.
Alston said that while no data is yet available to show developments since Donald Trump became president last year, it appears that "inequality is rapidly getting worse".
US Democracy
Workers 'Refuse' To Build Tech
Amazon
People working for Amazon have written to the company's CEO, Jeff Bezos, to protest the sale of facial recognition tools and other technology to police departments and government agencies.
The workers cite the use of Amazon technology by the US Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, which have been criticised for enforcing Donald Trump's "zero tolerance" policy, which has seen parents separated from their children at the US border.
"As ethically concerned Amazonians, we demand a choice in what we build, and a say in how it is used," the letter states. "We learn from history, and we understand how IBM's systems were employed in the 1940s to help Hitler.
"We will not let that happen again. The time to act is now."
Holocaust experts claim IBM's German subsidiary directly supplied the Nazis with technology which assisted the operation of concentration camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Amazon
NASA Astronaut
Jeanette Epps
NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps has spoken for the first time about her unexpected removal from an assignment to go to space this year.
In an interview here at the annual Tech Open Air festival Thursday (June 21), Epps said she couldn't speculate about why she was pulled from the mission just months before the launch date.
Epps, an aerospace engineer and former CIA analyst, joined the astronaut corps in 2009. She had been assigned to be a flight engineer aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for Expeditions 56 and 57. The mission would have been her first, and Epps would have made history as the first African-American crewmember to live on the ISS.
However, in January, NASA revealed that Epps had been replaced by fellow astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor. On June 6, Auñón-Chancellor launched inside a Russian Soyuz capsule from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan alongside cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev and European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst, of Germany.
Epps said other astronauts in the past had been bumped from flight assignments because of health or family issues, but those were not factors in her case. She said she had passed all of her exams and the training needed to go to space.
Jeanette Epps
Bourbon Warehouse Collapses
Bardstown Distillery
A bourbon warehouse collapsed in Bardstown on Friday.
Nelson County 911 director Milt Spalding said the collapse happened just before 11 a.m. at the Barton 1792 Distillery. The side of the building was left in pieces with dozens of bourbon barrels scattered on the ground.
The building that collapsed was filled with about 18,000 barrels of bourbon, and no more than 9,000 barrels were involved in the collapse, said Amy Preske, a spokeswoman for Sazerac Public Relations.
Spalding said the Environmental Protection Agency responded to the scene to figure out whether any alcohol is leaking into the ground or into nearby streams. Initial testing was clean.
In a news release Friday night, Preske said the warehouse was built in the 1940s and was filled with a mixture of products of varying ages. The warehouse was built with a concrete foundation with a wooden structure and aluminum siding on the outside. Engineers who work for the Barton Distillery will have to determine what happened. No one was injured in the collapse.
Bardstown Distillery
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