Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marina Hyde: Protest all you like, Susan Sarandon. In effect you work for Trump (The Guardian)
It's time the Thelma and Louise star faced the fact that she's a MAGA asset who works for the US president.
Paul Krugman: Big Business Reaps Trump's Whirlwind (NY Times Column)
The bill for decades of cynical politics is coming due.
Paul Krugman: "More on a Job Guarantee (Wonkish)" (NY Times Blog)
As I wrote the other day, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may call herself a socialist and represent the left wing of the Democratic party, but her policy ideas are pretty reasonable. In fact, Medicare for All is totally reasonable; any arguments against it are essentially political rather than economic.
Farran Smith Nehme: Where Credit Is Due (Criterion)
Film is a collaborative medium, or so people say, unless by "people" we mean Josef von Sternberg. To become a director is, more often than not, to reveal yourself as a control freak, but von Sternberg was the original micromanager, and his arrogance was legendary. Even long after his career was over, he was reluctant to discuss colleagues.
Mary Beard: Creaky knees and osteopaths (TLS)
… confronted with the creaky knee, I decided to give it a go. I still don't quite understand how it works, but the effect is like magic. I jump up the next morning like new, and stand up all through a party… It doesn't last forever, mind you. That's partly no doubt because I don't really keep up the very very simple exercises (it's rather like flossing after a visit to the dentist: you do it religiously for a few days… but it's hard to keep up the resolve). But when I start to creak again, I can just go round and get a bit more magic.
Mary Beard: Robert Harris's Cicero on stage in London (TLS)
First of all it was engagingly funny - which is totally apt for Cicero and his testimony. True, what we witness is the bloody breakdown of the Roman Republic and the awful violence of civil war. But Harris (and his adaptor Mike Poulton) get inside the skin of Cicero's own wit here. They remind us that, though he has tended to be treated in mainstream modern scholarship as a rather pompous stuffed shirt, his ancient reputation was as the funniest man ever. What was his problem? asked Plutarch. Simple, he could never keep a joke in. And he ended up in Pompey's camp in the war against Caesar making himself horribly unpopular by going round cracking gags.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
answered:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
David E Suggests
Cheapest Flights
David
Thanks, Dave!
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Wonkette addresses the insanity in Montana & the WH
Evan's column today is a good one:
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
BEN CARSON IS A STUPID MALEVOLENT JERK.
BURP!
THE TRAITORS.
LET THE GAMES BEGIN!
ENGLAND SWINGS LIKE A PENDULUM DO.
"WHAT EVIL LURKS…"
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Bit on the toasty side - 109°
Quadrupled Membership
ACLU
The American Civil Liberties Union more than quadrupled its number of paying members, from 400,000 to 1.84 million, in the 15 months after Donald Trump was elected president, according to a report in The New York Times.
Donations to the nonprofit group have also skyrocketed. According to the ACLU's executive director, Anthony Romero, the organization has raised nearly $120 million since the 2016 presidential election. Online donations in previous years had totaled just $3 million to $5 million annually.
"Until Trump most of our support came from people who have been with us since we challenged Nixon," Romero told the Times. "Now we're kind of cool. Cool's not a word generally associated with us."
The ACLU has been on the front lines of more than a hundred legal actions against Trump administration policies, including the White House's series of travel bans on the citizens of several Muslim-majority nations. The group has also challenged the Justice Department's family separation policies, Trump's voter fraud commission and the president's reversal of an Obama-era contraception mandate.
All told, the group has taken 170 "Trump-related legal actions" since he took office, including 83 lawsuits, according to the Times.
ACLU
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Pay Equity
Boston Symphony Orchestra principal flutist Elizabeth Rowe has filed a lawsuit against the orchestra, claiming that she is making substantially less each year than her closest peer - a man.
Rowe's suit was filed in Massachusetts' Suffolk County Superior Court on Monday morning, the day after a new, statewide equal pay law went into effect. Her suit may be the first gender pay equity claim filed under the Massachusetts Equal Pay Law (MEPA). She is asking for more than $200,000 in unpaid wages from the orchestra.
Rowe's lawyer, Elizabeth A. Rodgers, says that her client has met repeatedly this year with the BSO administration in hopes of resolving the matter, including providing them with documentation of MEPA. The statute passed in 2016 but did not take effect until this past Sunday, specifically so that companies had ample time to audit and remedy salary and wage gaps.
Rowe was hired for the Boston Symphony's top flutist job in 2004 - a high-profile and extremely competitive position at one of the world's foremost orchestras. According to her suit, she has been profiled as a soloist with the orchestra 27 times in the years since she was hired - more than any other BSO principal musician - and that the orchestra has repeatedly highlighted her in its marketing, publicity and social media materials.
Rowe says that she is currently the top-paid female principal player in the BSO, while the BSO's principal oboist, John Ferrillo, is the symphony's top-paid male principal musician. According to the BSO's 2016 IRS Form 990, Ferrillo was paid $286,621, the largest salary paid to any BSO principal musician. (Violinist Malcolm Lowe - the orchestra's concertmaster, who serves as something of a liaison between the symphony's musicians and its conductor - earned $415,402 in 2016.) The BSO's three other highest-paid musicians - its principal trumpet, principal viola and timpanist - are all male.
Pay Equity
Cancels Tour Dates
Elvis Costello
Singer Elvis Costello has canceled a slew of upcoming tour dates after revealing he underwent surgery for an "aggressive" form of cancer weeks ago.
Costello, 63, issued a statement on his personal website about the diagnosis and his post-surgery recovery. At first, he believed he would be able to continue his European summer tour uninterrupted.
"Six weeks ago my specialist called me and said, 'You should start playing the Lotto.' He had rarely, if ever, seen such a small but very aggressive cancerous malignancy that could be defeated by a single surgery," the British singer song-writer wrote.
But the expected three to four week recovery period proved insufficient given the demands of traveling musician who performs on a nightly basis. Before the announcement, Costello was on tour with his back-up band The Imposters across Europe with planned legs in the United States and Canada.
Under the counsel of his doctor, Costello has now decided to forgo the remaining European tour dates in order not to put his health at risk.
Elvis Costello
Cheeky Comeback
Charlie Sheen
Where has Charlie Sheen been lately? The former Two and a Half Men star, whose drug-fueled escapades relegated him to Hollywood exile, is back - and he's chosen a cheeky comeback vehicle, starring opposite Miami rapper Lil Pump in the music video for his song "Drug Addicts," which dropped late Thursday night.
The video, set in the sketchiest of hospitals, amply lives up to its name - presenting enough substance-related references to make viewers dizzy. If the obvious (Sheen himself, who plays a poker-faced physician) wasn't sufficiently blatant, "Dr. Pump" smokes, drinks, and pops just about everything in sight, all the while cheerfully delivering lines such as "I've been smoking since I was 11/ I've been popping pills since I was 7" and alluding to having a bowl of "Molly" for breakfast.
Despite the fact that Pump is a mere 17 years old, "Dr. Sheen" nods in approval, while nurses in sexy scrubs and a troupe of lively senior citizens party right along on the ward. The celebration ends up with a breakout from the hospital - old folks and all - and an epic dance-off in an empty pool.
All good things must come to an end, however, and the two "doctors" are eventually dragged off by men in white coats.
Sheen, correctly forecasting that the video would make waves, alluded to "breaking the internet" in a tweet teasing the video Tuesday.
Charlie Sheen
Second Restraining Order
Stan Lee
A judge on Friday granted a restraining order to protect Marvel's Stan Lee and his family from a memorabilia collector who allegedly embezzled assets worth more than $5 million.
The collector, Keya Morgan, is accused of isolating Lee from his daughter, J.C. Lee, and others, in an effort to assert control over Lee's business affairs.
Earlier in the day, Judge Pro Tem Ruth Kleman dismissed another restraining order, which was filed last month on Lee's behalf by attorney Tom Lallas. The judge found that Lallas, who was fired in February, does not represent Lee.
The new restraining order was filed Thursday by attorney Stephen Crump. In the application, Crump alleges that Morgan made malicious and false remarks about his daughter to Lee, and prevented Lee's financial advisers from seeing him. The order bars Morgan from coming within 100 yards of Lee, his daughter, or his brother, Larry Lieber.
According to the allegations, Morgan's last interaction with Lee was when he and his mother "abducted" Lee out of his house and took him to an apartment, in a "last-ditch effort to complete (sic) cut Stan Lee off from any meaningful communication with anyone other than himself and those he could control."
Stan Lee
To Reunite Children
DNA Tests
US officials have resorted to DNA testing on up to 3,000 detained children who remain separated from their migrant parents, a top official said Thursday as President Donald Trump's administration struggles to rapidly reunite families at the center of a border crisis.
The controversial procedures are part of government efforts to meet rapidly approaching court-imposed deadlines for reuniting children with their parents, and come as the president himself once again demanded swift action by Congress to fix the country's "insane" immigration laws.
The Department of Health and Human Services is "doing DNA testing to confirm parentage quickly and accurately," HHS Secretary Alex Azar told reporters on a conference call. His team said the procedures were "harmless" cheek swabs.
Normally a last-resort means of identifying of migrants -- if birth certificates or other documents are unavailable -- DNA testing is being used to speed the process to meet a judge's order to reunite families by July 26, and by next Tuesday for some 100 children under age five.
About 11,800 minors are currently in US custody after crossing over from Mexico, Azar said. Eighty percent are teenagers, mostly males who entered the United States on their own.
DNA Tests
Worse Than Predicted?
Global Warming
Collapsing polar ice caps, a green Sahara Desert, a 20-foot sea-level rise.
That's the potential future of Earth, a new studysuggests, noting that global warming could be twice as warm as current climate models predict.
The rate of warming is also remarkable: "The changes we see today are much faster than anything encountered in Earth's history. In terms of rate of change, we are in uncharted waters," said study co-author Katrin Meissner of the University of New South Wales in Australia.
This could mean the landmark Paris Climate Agreement - which seeks to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels - may not be enough to ward off catastrophe.
In looking at Earth's past, scientists can predict what the future will look like. In the study, the researchers looked back at natural global warming periods over the past 3.5 million years and compared them to current man-made warming.
Global Warming
Under Threat Of Extinction
Bananas
According to the BBC, a wild banana that may hold the key to protecting the world's edible banana crop has been added to the extinction list.
The banana grows in Madagascar, where there are reportedly only five mature trees left existing in the wild.
Scientists believe that saving them is crucial to saving the existence of bananas worldwide.
The vast majority of bananas sold in supermarkets are known as Cavendish bananas, named after William Cavendish, the sixth Duke of Devonshire, whose gardens are where the first plant originated before being cloned.
However, Cavendish bananas are under threat from Panama disease, a disease of the roots of banana plants, which is affecting plants across Asia.
Bananas
Statue of Liberty Stamp Mistake
U.S. Postal Service
A stamp that mistakenly featured the image of a Statue of Liberty replica in Las Vegas instead of the original New York Statue will cost the U.S. Postal Service $3.5 million in a copyright infringement lawsuit. Las Vegas sculptor Robert Davidson, who created the replica Lady Liberty in the facade at the New York-New York casino-resort on the Las Vegas Strip, sued the Postal Service five years ago over its 2011 "forever" stamp design.
The stamp featured the face of his Lady Liberty, which his attorneys argued in court filings was unmistakably different from the original and was more "fresh-faced," ''sultry" and even "sexier."
The Postal Service had been releasing the stamps for at least three months before discovering it was not an image of the New York statue.
Postal Service attorneys argued Davidson's design was too similar for him to claim copyright.
Federal Judge Eric Bruggink sided with Davidson last week and agreed his work was an original design with a more modern, feminine and contemporary face. He ordered the Postal Service to pay $3.5 million to the artist - a slice of the $70 million the service made in profit from the stamp.
U.S. Postal Service
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