Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: The Day the Trump Boom Died (NY Times Column)
Why has business confidence collapsed? … Business interests spent a long time in denial, but now even they are facing up to the reality that Trump and his team are very strange people who have no idea what they're doing - and the uncertainty that reality implies. I mean, considering that trade confrontation with China is the centerpiece of Trump's economic policy, it's not reassuring to learn that his trade war czar, Peter Navarro, has an imaginary friend - a source named "Ron Vara" whom he has repeatedly cited in his books, but who doesn't exist, and whose name is in fact just an anagram of "Navarro."
Sam Levin: Video shows officer shooting fleeing Fresno teen in the back of the head (The Guardian)
Footage of Fresno, California, incident follows police claims that killing of unarmed Isiah Murrietta-Golding, 16, was justified.
Alexandra Petri: Wait, President Trump! Before you unsubscribe! (Washington Post)
Aw, I'm bummed you've chosen not to re-subscribe to The Washington Post - or, it looks like, the New York Times! And not just for yourself, but for federal agencies, too! Would you mind giving us some feedback? The Post is a paper for and about Washington, with a lot of good content and a very metal slogan, Democracy Dies in Darkness.
Michael Cragg: "'Britney Spears is a genius': Max Martin, the powerhouse of pure pop" (The Guardian)
The man behind two decades of hits for Britney, Ariana, Taylor and and more is 'thankful' singers still put themselves out there. Now, 30 of his songs are getting a second life from Shakespeare.
Stuart Heritage: How BoJack Horseman became a surprise, heartbreaking hit (The Guardian)
It started out as a low-stakes satire, but the Netflix comedy - whose final season begins this week - has morphed into a sweet, surreal meditation on the messiness of being alive.
Martin Scorsese on Lou Reed: 'He spoke the language of people with nothing' (The Guardian)
The director hails a songwriter who, like him, brought the wild side of New York to life, recalls the collaborations that got away, and tells what it's like to be immortalised in one of his songs.
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David Bruce has over 140 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Presenting
Michael Egan
answered:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BANDCAMP MUSIC THAT YOU PROBABLY WON'T HEAR ON THE RADIO
Music: "Punk Rock Club, R.I.P." from the album PUNK ROCK CLUB
Artist: The Unlovables
Artist Location: Brooklyn, NY
Info: "The Unlovables are a band from New York City. They played pop punk back when it was really cool, and kept playing it when it became profoundly uncool, and are still playing it now that it's relatively cool again. Current members: Hallie, Mikey, Frank, and Fid!"
The Punk Rock Club EP
"Punk Pock Club, R.I.P."- the sixth track of a six-track EP
Some Lyrics:
i guess we just thought that you'd always be around
i guess we took you for granted
since you've gone we don't know what to do with ourselves
we're just bored and disenchanted
i guess i just want to thank you for the good times
every single drop of sweat and every bruise
this town just won't be the same without you around
since you've gone the punks are all singing the blues
why'd they close the punk rock club
from The Punk Rock Club EP, released January 1, 2002
Bass & vocals: Hallie Bullit
Guitar: Christian Tattle Tale
Drums: Jordan Lovelace
Price: $1 (USA) for track; $5 (USA) for album
If you are OK with paying for it, you can use PAYPAL or CREDIT CARD.
Genre: Pop Punk
David Bruce has over 140 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
New Venture
Michael Egan
from Bruce
Anecdotes
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
The talking heads are out all over MSNBC saying nothing to worry about with Durham & his criminal investigation of the oranges of the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Sure. These are the same idiots who reassured us about Barr being professional despite his part in getting the Iran-Contra criminals pardoned, his "auditioning" memo for the AG job, and his long, published paper trail documenting his belief in an all-powerful God/King who can do no wrong not matter how many criminal acts he commits. Yeah, no worries about what Durham, at his boss's direction may do further to destroy the country I've known and loved--PAST TENSE!
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
JD is on vacation.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Still on the extra toasty side.
Latest Celebrity Arrested
Ted Danson
Jane Fonda is the girl your parents warned you about, the one that's gonna end up your cellmate if you keep sneaking out to blast cigs with them in a Target parking lot. Except, you know, replace "blast cigs" with "protest the impending death of our planet" and "Target parking lot" with the "U.S. Capitol." Yep, Fonda got arrested for protesting climate change again, but this time she brought along The Good Place's Ted Danson.
As she promised when she launched her Fire Drill Fridays protest movement three weeks ago, Fonda's closed out the last three work weeks by protesting climate change (and getting arrested for doing so) outside the capitol. Last week, she brought along her Grace And Frankie co-star Sam Waterston. Danson, whose arrest will no doubt please the members of Team Cockroach, seemed in good spirits, saying that getting arrested "sharpens the mind."
"I will be on the Capitol every Friday, rain or shine, inspired and emboldened by the incredible movement our youth have created," Fonda wrote on her personal website when she started the movement. "I can no longer stand by and let our elected officials ignore-and even worse-empower-the industries that are destroying our planet for profit. We can not continue to stand for this."
Fonda plans to continue protesting every Friday through the end of the year. Who will join her next week? Well, that's a question just slightly less burning than the one about whether the government will ever actually give a shit that the planet is dying.
Ted Danson
Feels The Love
Joni Mitchell
Love for Joni Mitchell is still in the air in the wake of Brandi Carlile's tribute concert at Disney Hall, where Carlile recently played the entirety of Mitchell's seminal 1971 album, "Blue."
So much so that Carlile assembled a new tribute video in Mitchell's honor, featuring a host of musicians and Hollywood A-listers sharing their favorite Mitchell lyrics. Some even sing their selections.
The video kicks off with Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson reciting back and forth and closes with - wait for it - Marilyn Manson, "speaking" the lyrics to the song "Blue" in a disembodied voiceover.
In between are the likes of former Mitchell beau Graham Nash, Reese Witherspoon, Elton John, Mavis Staples, Rosanne Cash, Carole King, Dave Grohl, Linda Perry, Rufus Wainwright, Courtney Barnett and Clive Davis, to name a few.
Sheryl Crow sings a few lines from "Amelia," with Emmylou Harris picking up the song at a different point in her recitation of lyrics including, "I've spent my whole life in the clouds at icy altitudes."
Joni Mitchell
Tiny Species Of Beetle
Greta Thunberg
Scientists are honoring the work of teen climate activist Greta Thunberg in a unique way - they are naming a new species of beetle after her. Nelloptodes gretae belongs to a group of some of the smallest known free-living animals, London's Natural History Museum said Friday.
The species is fitting for the Swedish 16-year-old. "Many people say that Sweden is just a small country and it doesn't matter what we do," Thunberg once said. "But I've learned that you are never too small to make a difference."
Not to mention the beetle's antennae, which resemble Thunberg's signature pigtail braids.
Michael Darby, a scientific associate at the museum who found the insect during his studies of the museum's vast collection, chose the name to honor Thunberg's contribution to saving the planet.
"I'm really a great fan of Greta," Darby said. "She is a great advocate for saving the planet and she is amazing at doing it, so I thought that this was a good opportunity to recognize that."
Greta Thunberg
Begins Final Season
BoJack Horseman
The announcement of BoJack Horseman's season six premiere was a joy swiftly undercut by the news that it would be the final season. It was the sort of bad news most Netflix subscribers have learned to brace themselves for in recent months, with Netflix swinging its cancellation axe in an ever-widening spiral against its original series-most egregiously claiming BoJack's magnificent sister show Tuca & Bertie after one season. And with reports that the decision was made by Netflix and not the creative team, it's the sort of news that could send any fan of the show on a depressed BoJack-style bender.
But much like BoJack Horseman's troubled path to find some manner of redemption and hope in his life-and BoJack Horseman's commitment to mixing the roughest emotional journeys with some of the silliest gags ever animated-there are a few bright sides to the misery. On a narrative level, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Lisa Hanawalt and company got plenty of advance notice to finish their story, an opportunity denied to a few of their stablemates. And on a practical level, it means that viewers get a few extra helpings of the series, adding four more episodes to engage and abuse our various emotions.
The other one is a more bitter pill to swallow, but BoJack Horseman is all about bringing you to unfortunate truths, and the truth here is that there should be an ending to this story sooner rather than later. The journey of BoJack Horseman and those in his orbit isn't one that's designed to drag on forever, continually asking the question of how low they can take their main character and skirting the point of no return each year. If it keeps happening over and over it turns into misery porn, and if it stops happening then it takes a large part of the show's momentum with it. Even if it's not a happy ending-a possibility I've asked about time and time again and at this point given up on-there should be an ending, a sense that this journey of self-loathing and self-discovery came to a conclusion.
The form that conclusion will take is still to be determined, but "A Horse Walks Into Rehab" is an encouraging start to it. BoJack ended "The Stopped Show" with an acknowledgment that something had to change, that he couldn't be this person anymore and poison those around him. As season six opens, the impression is that he's not going to back down from this decision, but the efforts to realize it will be harder than he's willing to admit.
BoJack Horseman
Deficit Hits $984 Billion
US Budget
The federal deficit for the 2019 budget year surged to $984.4 billion, its highest point in seven years, and is widely expected to top the $1 trillion mark in coming years.
The 26% surge from the 2018 deficit of $779 billion that the government reported Friday reflected such factors as revenue lost from the 2017 Trump tax cut and a budget deal that added billions in spending for military and domestic programs.
Forecasts by the Trump administration and the Congressional Budget Office project that the deficit will top $1 trillion in the current budget year. And the CBO estimates that the deficit will stay above $1 trillion over the next decade.
Those projections stand in contrast to Trump's campaign promises that even with revenue lost initially from his tax cuts, he would be able to eliminate the federal budget deficit with cuts in spending and increased growth generated by the tax cuts.
The budget showed that revenue rose 4% in the 2019 budget year, which ended Sept. 30, but that spending surged at twice that rate. Spending increased for defense programs and for the government's big benefit programs for the elderly, Social Security and Medicare.
US Budget
Butt-Dials
Rudy
Late in the night Oct. 16, Rudy Giuliani made a phone call to this reporter.
The fact that Giuliani was reaching out wasn't remarkable. He and the reporter had spoken earlier that evening for a story about his ties to a fringe Iranian opposition group.
But this call, it would soon become clear, wasn't a typical case of a source following up with a reporter.
The call came in at 11:07 p.m. and went to voicemail; the reporter was asleep.
The next morning, a message exactly three minutes long was sitting in the reporter's voicemail. In the recording, the words tumbling out of Giuliani's mouth were not directed at the reporter. He was speaking to someone else, someone in the same room.
Rudy
Deep Earth Discoveries
Imperfect Diamonds
Thousands of diamonds, formed hundreds of kilometers deep inside the planet, paved the road to some of the 10-year Deep Carbon Observatory program's most historic accomplishments and discoveries, being celebrated Oct. 24-26 at the US National Academy of Sciences.
Unsightly black, red, green, and brown specks of minerals, and microscopic pockets of fluid and gas encapsulated by diamonds as they form in Deep Earth, record the elemental surroundings and reactions taking place within Earth at a specific depth and time, divulging some of the planet's innermost secrets.
Hydrogen and oxygen, for example, trapped inside diamonds from a layer 410 to 660 kilometers below Earth's surface, reveal the subterranean existence of oceans' worth of H2O -- far more in mass than all the water in every ocean in the surface world.
This massive amount of water may have been brought to Deep Earth from the surface by the movement of the great continental and oceanic plates which, as they separate and move, collide with one another and overlap. This subduction of slabs also buries carbon from the surface back into the depths, a process fundamental to Earth's natural carbon balance, and therefore to life.
Knowledge of Deep Earth's water content is critical to understanding the diversity and melting behaviors of materials at the planet's different depths, the creation and flows of hydrocarbons (e.g. petroleum and natural gas) and other materials, as well as the planet's deep subterranean electrical conductivity.
Imperfect Diamonds
'Shields' Itself
Your Brain
Our brains shield us from the idea of our own deaths, making us unable to grasp our own mortality, according to a new study.
On one level, everybody knows that they are going to die, said study lead author Yair Dor-Ziderman, who was a doctoral student at the Bar Ilan University in Israel at the time of the study. But Dor-Ziderman and his team hypothesized that when it comes to our own deaths, there's something in our brains that simply can't understand "the idea of ending, of nothing, of complete annihilation."
Their research was an attempt to reconcile the brain's way of learning with the universality of death. The brain is kind of a "prediction machine," Dor-Ziderman, who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel, told Live Science. The brain uses old information to predict what might happen in similar scenarios in the future, which is an important tool for survival, Dor-Ziderman said.
It's also true that everyone who ever lives will die, so it would make sense that your brain should be able to "predict" that you, too, will die someday.
But it doesn't seem to work that way. To see why not, the researchers in the new study recruited 24 people and observed how their brains' prediction mechanisms operated when facing their own deaths.
Your Brain
Earliest Written Record of Auroras
Assyrian Tablets
Ancient Assyrian stone tablets represent the oldest known reports of auroras, dating to more than 2,500 years ago.
The descriptions, written in cuneiform, were found on three stone tablets, dating from 655 B.C. to 679 B.C. They predate other known historical references to auroras by about a century, researchers reported in a new study.
Auroras are dazzling light shows that take place when waves of charged particles from the sun collide with Earth's magnetic field. Earth was likely visited by an immense solar storm around the seventh century B.C., and the auroras described in the tablets may have been the result of that powerful solar activity, the study authors wrote online Oct. 7 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Ancient skygazing accounts, such as the ones on these Assyrian tablets, help scientists to piece together a more complete picture of Earth's cosmic tango with its solar partner. Because telescope observations have been around for a mere 400 years, they provide "only a very small snapshot at best" of how our sun behaves, said lead study author Hisashi Hayakawa, an astrophysicist at Osaka University in Japan and a visiting researcher at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom.
Earlier this year, another team of researchers found that a massive solar storm, about 10 times stronger than any in modern history, swept over Earth around 2,600 years ago. Fingerprints of this storm's intense geomagnetic bombardment were left behind as radioactive atoms trapped in Greenland's ice, Live Science previously reported.
Assyrian Tablets
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