Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Dreamers, Liars and Bad Economics (NY Times)
Trump and Sessions falsely justify a cruel action that hurts everyone except racists.
Josh Marshall: Why Did Trump Shiv the GOP? (TPM)
Why did President Trump shock Republicans and official Washington by abandoning his own Congressional leadership and cutting a debt-ceiling deal with Congressional Democrats? To review, Trump abruptly agreed to a Democratic proposal for a three month debt ceiling extension tied to Harvey relief aid. Democrats were so stunned they tried to go as lo-fi as they could with their victory lap, fearful that any overt celebration would prompt Trump to reconsider.
Jessica Pressler: The Thankless Task of Being Michael Moore (Vulture)
He's been right about everything before, and he really thinks you are living in a bubble.
Scott Shane: The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election (NY Times)
Mr. Redick turned out to be a remarkably elusive character. No Melvin Redick appears in Pennsylvania records, and his photos seem to be borrowed from an unsuspecting Brazilian. But this fictional concoction has earned a small spot in history: The Redick posts that morning were among the first public signs of an unprecedented foreign intervention in American democracy.
Charlotte Richardson Andrews: "Tori Amos: 'Menopause is the hardest teacher I've met. Harder than fame'" (The Guardian)
A walk in the Smoky Mountains in the footsteps of her late Cherokee grandfather helped the musician rediscover her muse - and write an album that confronts the US's rapacious violence.
Dorian Lynskey: "Randy Newman: 'I would never not play You've Got a Friend in Me'" (The Guardian)
The singer is back with his first album in nine years, complete with songs about Putin and medical research. But he still plays the Toy Story tear-jerkers too.
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David Bruce has over 80 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Presenting
Michael Egan
"Doug's Most Shared Facebook Post" Today
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
David E Suggests
Made in Florida
David
Thanks, Dave!
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
PIGBOY OINKS!
THE DEFINITION OF THE WORD "PUSSY".
WE MUST HAVE 'SINGLE PAYER' HEALTH CARE.
TAX THE BASTARDS UNTIL THEY BLEED!
EarthCam - Miami and the Beaches Cam
JAIL THIS JERK!
YOUR TRICORN IS ON MUCH TOO TIGHT.
HOW MUCH DO WE REALLY WANT TO KNOW?
"ZOMBIE DOGS."
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
If it's Friday I must be running late.
Chocolate Maker Mars
Climate Change
When Donald Trump (R-Crooked) announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, American confectionary giant Mars Incorporated was one of several major U.S. companies urging him to reconsider.
Now, the chocolate maker has taken an even bigger step in the fight against global warming, vowing on Wednesday to commit nearly $1 billion over the next few years to tackle what it described as one of "the most urgent threats facing the planet and its people."
"The only way that will happen is if we do things differently to ensure that the planet is healthy and all people in our extended supply chains have the opportunity to thrive," the statement read. "We must work together, because the engine of global business - its supply chain - is broken, and requires transformational, cross-industry collaboration to fix it."
As part of its new sustainability plan, Mars Inc. - maker of candy brands like Mars bars, M&M's, Snickers, Skittles, Starburst and Twix - said it aims to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by almost 70 percent across its value chain by 2050. The company promised increased investment in renewable energy, sustainable farming practices, as well as sustainable food sourcing.
The firm said it was also committed to improving "the working lives" of 1 million people in its value chain by "focusing on increasing income, respecting human rights and unlocking opportunities for women."
Climate Change
Was A Woman
Viking Warrior
Swedish scientists have revealed that the body of a Viking warrior long presumed to be male is, in fact, female.
A team of researchers from Stockholm University conducted a DNA analysis of the skeleton and confirmed that it belonged to a woman. The 10th-century skeleton, the researchers concluded, is the first confirmed female high-ranking Viking warrior.
Scientists had long assumed that the skeleton was male - despite early indications that she may have been female - largely because of the status symbols buried alongside her.
Early archaeologists uncovered a sword, an axe, a spear, armour-piercing arrows, a battle knife, two shields, and two horses in the grave, signifying the buried individual's status of as a "professional warrior". A set of gaming pieces found in the grave indicates the individual's "knowledge of tactics and strategy" and role as a high-ranking officer, the scientists said.
Because of this - and because no such high-ranking female Viking has been discovered before - most researchers assumed the body was male. When early analyses indicated the body was female, some suggested that the objects buried alongside her belonged to someone else.
Viking Warrior
Rescue Mission Underway
Rare Wine Collections
Swooping in ahead of Hurricane Irma's feared weekend arrival, an emergency response team is rescuing rare treasures - some of them survivors of world wars and all of them liquid - from harm's way in Florida and Louisiana.
Wine collections worth millions of dollars are being stashed out of reach of the Category 5 hurricane, moved from homes to local bunker-like storage units or shuttled to temperature-controlled warehouses as far away as New Jersey.
Many are owned by philanthropists aging the wine to perfection before donating it to a charity auction, often to raise disaster relief funds, said Adam Gungle, chief executive officer of Xpeditr, a high-end wine transporter based in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Toronto.
Hurricanes destroy wines by cutting power to carefully controlled 55-degree Fahrenheit (12.7-Celsius) storage units required by the finest vintages, whose corks pop or bottles explode if temperatures spike too quickly. Storm-fueled ocean surges are equally damaging when they flood wine cellars, peeling off signature labels and seeping into corks.
Wine fortunes ruined by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 were the impetus behind the Xpeditr Emergency Response Team, which has been contacting clients in Irma's potential path to warn that preventive steps should be taken to protect wine investments.
Rare Wine Collections
Scientists Discover Cosmic Dust
White Cliffs Of Dover
Scientists have discovered fossilised space dust embedded in the white cliffs of Dover that could provide a new source of information about the early solar system.
While the cliffs are a source of fossilised creatures that help us understand the changes that took place on Earth millions of years ago, researchers say that this new discovery sheds light on what was happening much further from home.
According to them, this cosmic dust could be used to trace the location of water-rich asteroids, which could potentially serve as pit-stops for deep-space travellers in the future.
Despite the fact that an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 tonnes of cosmic dust falls to Earth every year, given its size, it's tough to locate. However researchers say they were able to spot it this time based on the distinct Christmas tree-like shape of their crystal content.
White Cliffs Of Dover
Baker's Rights
DOJ
The Department of Justice told the Supreme Court on Thursday that a baker who is religiously opposed to gay marriage should not be forced to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples.
DOJ said that requiring Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado, to create a wedding cake for a gay couple under public accommodations laws would violate his constitutional rights.
Businesses and other places that are considered "public accommodations" are barred by law from discriminating against people on the basis of factors like race and religion. The DOJ brief suggests that such laws should not be able to compel artists to create "inherently communicative" goods, like wedding cakes.
DOJ's filing raises the possibility that if the Masterpiece Cakeshop can't refuse to bake a cake for the marriage of a same-sex couple, then a freelance graphic designer who designs flyers for Jewish affinity groups might also be forced to do so "for a neo-Nazi group or the Westboro Baptist Church."
"A custom wedding cake can be sufficiently artistic to qualify as pure speech, akin to a sculptural centerpiece," the Justice Department wrote. "In short, a custom wedding cake is not an ordinary baked good; its function is more communicative and artistic than utilitarian."
DOJ
'Trump Slump'
US Gun Makers
For one of America's largest gun manufacturers, the "Trump slump" in sales has meant a nearly $100m fall in firearms revenue compared with the same quarter last year.
American Outdoor Brands, the rebranded name of historic gun company Smith & Wesson, reported a 48.5% decrease in firearms revenue compared with the same quarter last year, when many Americans believed Hillary Clinton, a supporter of gun control, would be elected president.
Shipments of long guns were down 57% in the latest quarter, president and chief executive James Debney said in an earnings call on Thursday. The long gun category includes the military-style rifles often targeted by gun control campaigners in the wake of mass shootings. Shipments of handguns were down nearly 35%. Overall, the company's revenue dropped nearly 40% compared with the same quarter last year, according to chief financial officer Jeff Buchanan.
In the perverse dynamics of the firearms market, politicians who threaten to ban guns are very good for the industry while politicians who oppose gun control, like Donald Trump (R-Fraudster), provide no boost. Barack Obama, who reacted with grief and outrage to a 2012 mass shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut that left 20 children and six adults dead, was dubbed the "best gun salesman on the planet".
US Gun Makers
Refuses To Disclose Political Ads
Facebook
Facebook, which acknowledged this week that it sold $100,000 worth of political ads in the last two years to accounts linked to a Russian troll factory, came under stinging criticism Thursday over its refusal to release copies of the ads to the public - or to congressional investigators.
After denying for months that any Russian entities purchased ads on Facebook during last year's election, the social media giant has admitted that it belatedly discovered that some 470 phony accounts linked to a shadowy St. Petersburg media firm with ties to the Kremlin. The firm allegedly placed ads on highly charged issues in American politics, such as LGBT and gun rights - ads that in some cases explicitly mentioned Donald Trump (R-Buffoon), Hillary Clinton and the 2016 election.
Facebook officials acknowledged the existence of the ads in a closed-door briefing for investigators for the House and Senate intelligence committees. The company showed what it described as some samples of the ads, but didn't turn them over to investigators or release them to the media. Facebook said making the ads public would violate its strict privacy rules - even thought it acknowledges that most, if not all, of the accounts in question were registered under fake names and nonexistent entities and have since been removed from Facebook's platform.
"We're trying to be as transparent as possible, but there are certain restrictions on what we can disclose under our data policies," a Facebook spokesman said in a response to a request from Yahoo News for copies of the ads.
That response brought a sharp retort Wednesday from campaign finance specialists and some congressional investigators, who noted that the exact wording of the questionable ads was critical. If the ads explicitly advocated or boosted one candidate or another, they would fall squarely under a federal law that bars foreign nationals from spending money to influence a U.S. election, making the individuals who paid for the ads - and any U.S. persons who might have assisted them - subject to criminal prosecution by the Justice Department and to heavy fines by the Federal Election Commission.
Facebook
Has Gone Wrong
The Sun
If you still have your solar viewing glasses from the eclipse, now is a good time to slap them on and look up at the sun. You'll see two big dark areas visible on our star. These massive sunspots are regions of intense and complicated magnetic fields that can produce solar flares-bursts of high-energy radiation. You can just make them out with solar viewing glasses, but they're better viewed through a solar telescope.
The sun goes through 11-year cycles of solar activity. What scientists call a solar maximum is the time in the cycle when the sun is putting out the most energy. That's when we tend to see the most sunspots, solar flares and associated solar storms. Some solar maxima are larger or more active than others-such as the 1990-1991 solar max. But this last cycle, which peaked in 2014, was quite small, and there were few large geomagnetic storms.
We're heading into the bottom of solar minimum, when the sun tends to have fewer sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections-large expulsions of plasma, electrons and ions, and magnetic fields. But despite where we are in the sun's cycle, activity on the sun has dramatically picked up over the past few days. On and off, these two sunspots have been flaring and shooting out coronal mass ejections, directed toward Earth.
So what's going on with the sun? And should we be concerned about this somewhat out-of-character solar behavior?
On September 4, the sun started sputtering. A moderately large flare (classified as an M5.5) erupted at approximately 18:30 UTC. It produced a coronal mass ejection aimed at Earth.
The Sun
Now A Minority
White Christians
Christian Americans proved to be a massive voting force in the 2016 presidential election, making up at least 75 percent of voters. Majorities of Protestants, Catholics and Mormons threw their support behind President-for-now Donald Trump (R-Corrupt) ? and none so enthusiastically as white evangelicals.
But deep shifts in the racial and religious makeup of the United States led some commentators to call the election a "last hurrah" and a "death rattle" for white Christian America. Findings from a major new study by Public Religion Research Institute lend added weight to that analysis.
White Christians make up less than half of the U.S. population, according to PRRI's 2016 poll of more than 101,000 Americans across all 50 states. The survey found that just 43 percent of Americans identify as white and Christian, and only 30 percent identify as white and Protestant.
In 40 years, the population of white Christians has dropped nearly in half. A 1976 General Social Survey found that 81 percent of Americans identified as white and Christian, and a majority ? 55 percent ? were white Protestants.
PRRI also found that some of the biggest and swiftest declines in the white Christian population have occurred in recent years. In 1996, for instance, white Christians still made up almost two-thirds of the public. By 2006, that number was already down to 54 percent.
White Christians
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