Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Goodbye, Political Spin, Hello Blatant Lies (NY Times)
Now, you might imagine that Republicans would respond to the manifest unpopularity of their health care position by, you know, actually changing their position. But that would be hopelessly old-fashioned. As I said, what they've chosen to do instead is lie, insisting that black is white and up is down.
Matthew Yglesias: Trump's USA Today op-ed on health care is an absurd tissue of lies (Vox)
It's so dishonest it's debunked by fact-check links in the text itself.
Greg Sargent: If Democrats win big in 'Trump country,' what will it mean? (Washington Post)
The bottom line, I think, is that if Democrats do win big in the Rust Belt, it will be time to reevaluate the official explanation for his win in the region. I don't claim to have a better explanation - the best I've been able to do is argue that his win had many causes, and that sorting them out is impossibly complex - but neither the official one nor the one being offered by these strategists feels sufficient at this point.
Paul Waldman: The GOP has successfully liberated itself from shame (Washington Post)
Of course, Republicans lying outright about health care in particular is not new. Remember "death panels"? When Republicans made that claim about the Affordable Care Act, Democrats were at first dumbfounded both that Republicans would be so brazen as to make such a fantastical claim and that anyone would be so stupid as to believe it. It turned out, however, that with sufficient repetition, millions of people did indeed believe it.
Greg Sargent: "Memo to the media: Stop spreading Trump's fake news" (Washington Post)
It is a great irony of the current political moment: By broadcasting forth Trump's lies in tweets and headlines - while declining to inform readers that they are just that, and while burying the truth deep within accompanying articles - the organizations that Trump regularly derides as "fake news" are themselves spreading a species of fake news. That is, fake news authored by Trump himself.
Ligaya Mishan: In Literature, Who Decides When Homage Becomes Theft? (NY Times)
Appropriation goes both ways, and increasingly it's being seen as a creative freedom for writers who have been excluded from the literary canon.
Rachel Withers: Amazon Owes Wikipedia Big-Time (Slate)
Smart speakers are taking advantage of the free labor of Wikipedia volunteers.
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
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David Bruce has over 100 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Presenting
Michael Egan
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• Gay author Michael Thomas Ford once played the computer game Mortal Kombat with a nephew. Quickly, Mr. Ford discovered that one of the crushing blows that could be dealt by the fighters in the game was a fist to the genitals of opposing male fighters - he tried it once against a female opponent, but the blow had no effect.
• Lucia Rijker is a European boxing champion whose nickname is "Lady Ali." After winning a boxing match against a tough opponent, she ran over to her trainer and tried to jump into his arms, but he was a new trainer, and he was much smaller than her old trainer. So, to celebrate her victory, she picked him up and lifted him over her head.
• In 1916, a heavyweight bout held in the Manhattan Opera House in New York City featured Charley Weinert hitting Andre Anderson and knocking him through the ropes. Mr. Anderson fell into a pile of musical instruments and his rear end got stuck in the mouth of a tuba. As Mr. Anderson struggled to free himself, the referee counted to 10.
• Jackie Gleason worked in some tough clubs when he was starting in show business, and occasionally he fought some customers who didn't like his humor. Only once was he bested in a fight - heavyweight Tony Galento, who later fought Joe Louis for the championship - knocked him unconscious with one punch.
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Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Yes, there are shirts!
F John Kelly for the racist, misogynistic, incompetent, pathetic pig that he is. Yes, there are impolite arrogant woman shirts already!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
JD took the day off.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Started the evening with lots of thunder & lightning.
Seemed like there were 2 different thunders - one was low in tone and 'rolled' for 10-20 seconds. The other was sharp cracks.
And lots of rain. Well, for here, this time of year.
A Poem About Kanye
Leonard Cohen
Late poet and singer Leonard Cohen wrote a bizarre poem about Kanye West, that has only just been published in a new posthumous collection of his poetry.
In 2015, a year before his death, Cohen composed the poem "Kanye West Is Not Picasso," in which he wrote that he is the "real Kanye West."
"I am the Kanye West of Kanye West/The Kanye West of the great bogus shift of bulls**t culture," the poem reads.
Another line says: "I am the Kanye West Kanye West thinks he is."
According to the foreword for The Flame, penned by Cohen's son Adam, it "contains my father's final efforts as a poet. It was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end."
Leonard Cohen
Process Was 'A Tragedy'
Anita Hill
Anita Hill, whose landmark testimony against now-Supreme Court Justice Clarence "Slappy" Thomas helped transform the public's understanding of sexual harassment, on Wednesday lambasted Senate Judiciary Committee members for having "a tragedy" of a hearing about sexual assault allegations against now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
"It's like we find out it's almost as though none of that took place," Hill said at an event at the University of Pennsylvania, referring to her own Senate testimony on Oct. 11, 1991. Her comments were her first public remarks since the Senate confirmed Kavanaugh over the weekend.
The Brandeis University law professor has been outspoken about the Senate's handling of Christine Blasey Ford's sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh, pointing out how little has changed since she spoke out against Thomas.
Hill, who has been a leader in the Me Too movement, also said societal attitudes and systems have enabled sexual misconduct to persist. She highlighted how accused perpetrators are often protected while accusers are left vulnerable.
"Christine Blasey Ford had no support. None," Hill said, according to The Guardian. "There was no organization that was on the inside or was connected with the inside, with the decision-makers, that was going to be able to help her. We need to really understand that what we are dealing with, when we talk about these kind of abuses … we are not just dealing with behavior, we are dealing with systems that protect it, and sometimes encourage it, and sometimes reward it, and that is what you saw."
Anita Hill
Prince Estate
'Purple Rain'
Prince's estate has asked President-for-now Donald Trump (R-Crooked) to stop playing "Purple Rain" at his rallies.
Speaking on behalf of Prince's family, Omarr Baker shared a tweet that the family wishes the president would stop playing the Prince hit.
"The Prince Estate has never given permission to President Trump or The White House to use Prince's songs and have requested that they cease all use immediately," he wrote.
Prince was notoriously stingy with his own music. For most of his life, he only made his albums available to people willing to physically purchase them. Any footage of him or his songs would not live on the internet long, with Youtube videos quickly being pulled as soon as they were discovered. He famously kept his albums off of streaming services until he struck a deal with Tidal shortly after the streaming service launched.
Since his death, his family has been a bit more free with the material. His famous Paisley Park vault has been cracked open, with the estate combing through thousands of potential tracks to release. They signed a deal with Sony Music for 35 posthumous albums, unleashed his late-period work onto streaming services and released a gorgeous set of stripped-back piano tunes earlier this year.
'Purple Rain'
Leaves Funny or Die
Adam McKay
Following a number of changes at the comedy website, Funny or Die has confirmed that co-founder Adam McKay is no longer a part of the company. The "Vice" and "The Big Short" director, who established FoD with Will Ferrell and Chris Henchy in 2007, made his displeasure with a three-part series sponsored by Shell called "Glowing Up Fast" known earlier this year.
"Let me be really clear: this is the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. I'm shocked and horrified FOD did this. More to come," McKay - who frequently voices his thoughts on climate change and the corporations he believes are exacerbating the problem - tweeted in January.
"Lately, I've found myself increasingly drawn to stories and projects that mean a lot to me - big money, corporate entanglements and global warming. Given Funny Or Die is driven by ad revenues, I felt the time had come for me to step down," McKay said in a statement to Vulture, which first confirmed his departure. "I have to say I love what we created at Funny or Die and all the really fun collaborators, and I wish them the very best for the future."
Funny or Die released a statement of its own: "We remain indebted to everything Adam has done and contributed to Funny Or Die. His passion for the creative process and nurturing talent has been beyond inspiring and appreciated by everyone."
McKay won an Oscar for writing "The Big Short," for which he also received a Best Director nomination. "Vice," which stars Christian Bale as Dick Cheney, arrives in theaters on Christmas Day.
Adam McKay
Marvel Fired
Chuck Wendig
Author, screenwriter, blogger and comics writer Chuck Wendig said on Twitter Friday that he was fired from Marvel Comics for using "negativity and vulgarity" in tweets when responding to online critics and trolls of his work.
Wendig says he was taken off issues 4 and 5 of a forthcoming "Star Wars" series of comics called "Shadow of Vader" for not being "civil" in his reactions to harassment he says he received.
"Today I got the call. I'm fired. Because of the negativity and vulgarity that my tweets bring," Wendig wrote on Twitter and reposted on his blog terribleminds. "Seriously, that's what Mark [Paniccia], the editor said. It was too much politics, too much vulgarity, too much negativity on my part."
Marvel confirmed that Wendig and Marvel have "parted ways," but offered no comment. An individual with knowledge of the situation said Wendig was taken off all "Star Wars" projects, but that this had nothing to do with his political views.
Wendig says he started receiving harassment after working on the novel "Star Wars: Aftermath" and writing LGBT characters into the story.
Chuck Wendig
Could Reveal Identity
Genealogy Databases
Protecting the anonymity of publicly available genetic data, including DNA donated to research projects, may be impossible.
About 60 percent of people of European descent who search genetic genealogy databases will find a match with a relative who is a third cousin or closer, a new study finds. The result suggests that with a database of about 3 million people, police or anyone else with access to DNA data can figure out the identity of virtually any American of European descent, Yaniv Erlich and colleagues report online October 11 in Science.
Erlich, the chief science officer of the consumer genetic testing company MyHeritage, and colleagues examined his company's database and that of the public genealogy site GEDMatch, each containing data from about 1.2 million people. Using DNA matches to relatives, along with family tree information and some basic demographic data, scientists estimate that they could narrow the identity of an anonymous DNA owner to just one or two people.
Recent cases identifying suspects in violent crimes through DNA searches of GEDMatch, such as the Golden State Killer case (SN Online: 4/29/18), have raised privacy concerns (SN Online: 6/7/18). And the same process used to find rape and murder suspects can also identify people who have donated anonymous DNA for genetic and medical research studies, the scientists say.
Genetic data used in research is stripped of information like names, ages and addresses, and can't be used to identify individuals, government officials have said. But "that's clearly untrue," as Erlich and colleagues have demonstrated, says Rori Rohlfs, a statistical geneticist at San Francisco State University, who was not involved in the study.
Genealogy Databases
Final Paper Released
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking's final paper was just published by his colleagues in the pre-print journal arXiv. The team had completed the research a few days before Hawking's death in March.
It was the third in a series of papers that dealt with a concept Hawking spent decades pondering: the black hole information paradox. Here's how it goes:
Black holes are extremely dense, time-space-warping objects that can form when stars collide or giant stars collapse in on themselves. Classical physics suggests that nothing could escape a black hole, even light. But in the 1970s, Hawking proposed that black holes might have a temperature and could slowly leak out quantum particles. This "Hawking radiation" effect means that, eventually, the black hole will evaporate, leaving behind a vacuum that will look the same for each evaporated black hole, no matter what it ate during its lifetime.
This idea posed a problem: During its lifetime, the black hole swallowed a lot of information in the form of celestial objects, but where did that information go? The laws of physics dictate that no information should be lost: If information existed in the past, we should be able to recover it. Hence, the paradox.
In the new paper, Hawking and his team found a mechanism - which relies on as-yet-unproven assumptions - for counting the amount of information that soft hairs can carry. "It agreed with the famous formula now inscribed on Stephen's headstone," senior author Andrew Strominger told Live Science in an email. The formula he is referring to is known as "Hawking's equation," and it describes how black holes emit Hawking radiation.
Stephen Hawking
12-Pound Lunar Meteorite Up For Auction
'The Moon Puzzle'
A lunar meteorite dubbed "The Moon Puzzle" is expected to fetch a huge sum of money at an auction.
Boston-based RR Auction has announced that a 12-pound space rock classified as NWA 11789 will be up for sale. The rock, also known as the "Buagaba," has an estimated price of $500,000.
The large meteorite was discovered in the desert of Northwest Africa in 2017. The location where it was found is represented in the rock's scientific name. The letters of NWA 11789 stands for Northwest Africa.
Aerolite Meteorites Inc. CEO and star of the television show "Meteorite Men" Geoff Notkin, who guaranteed the authenticity of the moon rock, said that the meteorite is an important, world-class example of a lunar meteorite.
'The Moon Puzzle'
Sea Life Sydney Aquarium
Sphen and Magic
While humans call this time of year "cuffing season," to penguins it is breeding season.
One particular couple at Sea Life Sydney Aquarium has garnered a lot of attention on social media by becoming the aquarium's first gay penguin pair. And rumor has it the relationship is serious.
According to the aquarium, Sphen and Magic, gentoo penguins, were inseparable before the breeding season began and were "constantly seen waddling around and going for swims together." (#Goals - my new Tinder profile is going to read "Enjoys long waddles on the beach.")
Then the staff at the aquarium noticed that the two male penguins were more than just friends when the duo started to collect pebbles and create a nest together. Presenting these pebbles are the penguin equivalent of proposing - and Sphen and Magic have more pebbles than any other couple. According to ABC Australia, the couple would also bow to each other, which means "I love you."
They were such great penguin parents, they are now fostering a real egg from another couple that had two. Gentoo penguins can often care for only one chick at a time, and the second one will typically die - but now the second chick will have two dads.
Sphen and Magic
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