Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: Asking for It (Creators Syndicate)
I asked her to marry me outdoors, on a sidewalk in our hometown. I did this because I figured if she said "no" I could just walk away, instead of having to finish dinner in some restaurant or rise humiliated from the couch in her living room, fumbling into my coat and shakily undoing the deadbolt on her door.
Paul Krugman: Is Growth Over? (New York Times)
… machines may soon be ready to perform many tasks that currently require large amounts of human labor. This will mean rapid productivity growth and, therefore, high overall economic growth. But - and this is the crucial question - who will benefit from that growth? Unfortunately, it's all too easy to make the case that most Americans will be left behind, because smart machines will end up devaluing the contribution of workers, including highly skilled workers whose skills suddenly become redundant.
Paul Krugman: A Double Shot of Misunderstanding (New York Times)
It's quite sad, really. And it's also an indication that Republican extremism isn't the only source of our dysfunctional response to economic crisis, that the awesome inability of Very Serious People to come to grips with either political or economic reality is another huge source of our failure.
Halloween decorations carry haunting message of forced labor (Oregonian)
"People who work here have to work 15 hours a day without Saturday, Sunday break and any holidays. Otherwise, they will suffer torturement, beat and rude remark. Nearly no payment (10 yuan/1 month)."
Esther Inglis-Arkell: What makes people come back to life after being pronounced dead? (io9)
In something called the Lazarus Phenomenon, people actually wake from apparent death - after resuscitation attempts have been stopped.
Robert T. Gonzalez: Creationist textbooks are garbage, creationist textbooks are garbage, creationist textbooks are garbage (io9)
Are the cultural wars between creationism and evolution the only thing to blame for America's academic shortfall? No. Of course not. But textbooks like this should be identified for what they are. They're an affront to critical thinking, an affront to progress.
David Dobbs: Pandemics Porn (Slate)
Delicious, smart reads about dangerous, nasty germs.
Can You Say 'Banana'? (YouTibe)
A two-year-old girl gives it her best shot.
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Bojan Suggests
Cutest Animals
Thanks, Bojan!
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Some sun, some clouds, still cold (for these parts).
New Year's List
Britain's Honors
Stella McCartney, who designed the uniforms worn by Britain's record-smashing Olympic team, and Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, who gave his name to the so-called "God particle," are among the hundreds being honored by Queen Elizabeth II this New Year.
The list is particularly heavy with Britain's Olympic heroes, but it also includes "Star Wars" actor Ewan McGregor, eccentric English singer Kate Bush, Roald Dahl illustrator Quentin Blake, and Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, the royal aide who helped organize the watched-around-the-world wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton.
All of Britain's gold medalists from this year's games were on the list, with cyclist Bradley Wiggins and sailor Ben Ainslie honored with knighthoods. Sebastian Coe, who masterminded the games as chairman of the London organizing committee, was made a Companion of Honor - a prestigious title also awarded to Higgs.
Britain's honors are bestowed twice a year by the monarch, at New Year's and on her official birthday in June. Although the queen does pick out some lesser honors herself, the vast majority of recipients are selected by government committees from nominations made by officials and members of the public.
In descending order, the honors are knighthoods, CBE, OBE, and MBE - Member of the Order of the British Empire. Knights are addressed as "sir" or "dame." Recipients of the other honors, such as the Order of the Companions of Honor given to Higgs and Coe or the Royal Victorian Order personally picked out by the queen, receive no title but can put the letters after their names.
Britain's Honors
FBI File
Marilyn Monroe
FBI files on Marilyn Monroe that could not be located earlier this year have been found and re-issued, revealing the names of some of the movie star's communist-leaning acquaintances who drew concern from government officials and her own entourage.
But the files, which previously had been heavily redacted, do not contain any new information about Monroe's death 50 years ago. Letters and news clippings included in the file show the bureau was aware of theories the actress had been killed, but they do not show that any effort was undertaken to investigate the claims. Los Angeles authorities concluded Monroe's death was a probable suicide.
Recently obtained by The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act, the updated FBI files do show the extent the agency was monitoring Monroe for ties to communism in the years before her death in August 1962.
Monroe's file begins in 1955 and mostly focuses on her travels and associations, searching for signs of leftist views and possible ties to communism. One entry, which previously had been almost completely redacted, concerned intelligence that Monroe and other entertainers sought visas to visit Russia that year.
"Subject's views are very positively and concisely leftist; however, if she is being actively used by the Communist Party, it is not general knowledge among those working with the movement in Los Angeles," a July 1962 entry in Monroe's file states.
Marilyn Monroe
Website Helps "De-Baptize"
Dutch Catholics
Thousands of Dutch Catholics are researching how they can leave the church in protest at its opposition to gay marriage, according to the creator of a website aimed at helping them find the information.
Tom Roes, whose website allows people to download the documents needed to leave the church, said traffic on ontdopen.nl - "de-baptise.nl" - had soared from about 10 visits a day to more than 10,000 after Pope Benedict's latest denunciation of gay marriage this month.
"Of course it's not possible to be 'de-baptized' because a baptism is an event, but this way people can unsubscribe or de-register themselves as Catholics," Roes told Reuters.
About 28 percent of the population in the Netherlands is Catholic and 18 percent is Protestant, while a much larger proportion - roughly 44 percent - is not religious, according to official statistics.
Roes, a television director, said he left the church and set up his website partly because he was angry about the way the church downplayed or covered-up sexual abuse in Catholic orphanages, boarding schools and seminaries.
A report by an independent commission published a year ago said there had been tens of thousands of victims of child sexual abuse in the Netherlands since 1945 and criticized the church's culture of silence.
Dutch Catholics
Hate Group
Westboro
More than 475,000 people have signed petitions asking the White House to crack down on Westboro Baptist Church after the group, known for holding anti-gay demonstrations at funerals, threatened to picket in Newtown, Connecticut.
Five petitions posted on the White House website since the shootings have asked the government to name the church, based in Topeka, Kansas, as a hate group or end its tax-exempt status. The requests were among the most popular on the White House site on Thursday.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization, has called the church "arguably the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America" because of the anti-gay signs its members have carried at hundreds of military funerals. The protests reflect their view that God is punishing America for tolerance of gays and lesbians.
The White House has a policy of responding to petitions that reach a threshold of 25,000 signatures but does not comment on certain law enforcement issues that are within the jurisdiction of federal agencies or courts, according to its website.
Westboro
Animal Rights Group Settles Lawsuit
Ringling Bros.
An animal rights group will pay Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus $9.3 million to settle its part of a lawsuit stemming from claims the circus abused its elephants.
The circus company's owners announced the settlement with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals on Friday. The animal rights group was one of several that in 2000 sued the circus' owner, Feld Entertainment Inc., claiming elephants were abused. Courts later found that the animal rights activists had paid a former Ringling employee to bring the lawsuit and that the man didn't have the right to sue the circus.
The Vienna, Va.-based Feld Entertainment then sued the animal rights groups, accusing them of conspiracy to harm its business other illegal acts. Friday's settlement covers only the ASPCA.
Ringling Bros.
8 Ex-Military Officials Charged
Victor Jara
Eight former army lieutenants have been charged in the killing of communist singer and songwriter Victor Jara almost four decades ago.
Appellate Court Magistrate Miguel Vazquez also ordered the arrest of Hugo Sanchez Marmonti and Pedro Barrientos Nunez, who lives in the U.S. state of Florida, as the authors of the killing, and the other six former military officials as accomplices. All have been detained except Barrientos, who is expected to undergo extradition proceedings.
Jara was detained along with many others at Chile's State Technical University the day after the Sept. 11, 1972 coup that toppled President Salvador Allende. His body was found several days later, riddled with bullets and bearing signs of torture. The killing transformed Jara into a symbol of struggle against Latin America's military right-wing dictatorships.
Victor Jara
Met Fred Willard's Pal
Nick Stahl
Los Angeles police say actor Nick Stahl has been arrested for investigation of lewd conduct.
The 33-year-old "Terminator 3" star was arrested about 8 p.m. Thursday on Hollywood Boulevard. He was booked on a misdemeanor count of lewd conduct and released from custody.
The Los Angeles Times reports that Stahl was arrested at an adult movie shop during a routine undercover police operation.
Stahl was a child star who performed in the 1993 film "The Man Without a Face." He also has appeared in the 2003-2005 HBO series "Carnivale'" and starred in "Mirrors 2" in 2010. An email seeking comment from his publicist was not immediately returned Friday.
Nick Stahl
Seeking Prosecution
Belgium
Scientologists may be facing their most daunting court case yet, and all it took was for someone to stop calling them a cult. After a years long legal battle, federal prosecutors in Belgium now believe their investigation is complete enough to charge the Church of Scientology and its leaders as a criminal organization on charges of extortion, fraud, privacy breaches, and the illegal practice of medicine. "The decision follows years of investigation that was triggered by a complaint by the Labour Mediation Service in the Brussels Region. Labour mediators were unhappy with a number of labour contracts," reads the report from Flanders News. "The matter ended up on the desk of examining magistrate Michel Claise, who ordered raids on Church of Scientology premises in 2008. During the raids police managed to seize a wealth of evidence," they add. And (with the help of Google translate) Belgian newspapers De Tijd and L'Echo are both reporting that the Belgian federal attorney is now seeking prosecution.
Multiple reports and the group's legal history point to one key factor here: The Belgian government won't charge Scientology for being a cult - authorities are focusing on prosecuting it as a criminal organization. Which is a new twist, as most of the group's many court battles over the years have focused on establishing its legitimacy as a religion. Scientology's well-funded legal team won very expensive cases against Time in 1991 and the Cult Awareness Network in 1996 , but the Belgian authorities have been battling Scientologists since 2007, when the country tried to label the group with cult status in a move that even received blowback from the U.S. State Department.
The Church of Scientology houses its European headquarters in Brussels, so a ban in Belgian could be crippling to the group - and authorities there seem to know it. One of the more similar recent cases against came in 2009, when the French chapter of Scientology was convicted of fraud by a Paris court and fined nearly $900,000. "But the judges did not ban the church entirely, as the prosecution had demanded, saying that a change in the law prevented such an action for fraud," reported The New York Times's Steven Erlanger. So the French chapter got saved by a legal wrinkle, but the Belgian prosecutors don't appear to be backing down.
Belgium
Warsaw Art
Praying Hitler
A statue of Adolf Hitler praying on his knees is on display in the former Warsaw Ghetto, the place where so many Jews were killed or sent to their deaths by Hitler's regime, and it is provoking mixed reactions.
The work, "HIM" by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, has drawn many visitors since it was installed last month. It is visible only from a distance, and the artist doesn't make explicit what Hitler is praying for, but the broader point, organizers say, is to make people reflect on the nature of evil.
One Jewish advocacy group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, this week called the statue's placement "a senseless provocation which insults the memory of the Nazis' Jewish victims."
However, many others are praising the artwork, saying it has a strong emotional impact. And organizers defend putting it on display in the former ghetto.
Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said he was consulted on the installation's placement ahead of time and did not oppose it because he saw value in the artist's attempt to try to raise moral questions by provoking viewers.
Praying Hitler
In Memory
Jean Harris
Jean Harris, the patrician girls' school headmistress who spent 12 years in prison for the 1980 killing of her longtime lover, "Scarsdale Diet" doctor Herman Tarnower, in a case that rallied feminists and inspired television movies, has died. She was 89.
Harris died Sunday at an assisted-living facility in New Haven, her son, James Harris, said Friday.
She had claimed the shooting of Tarnower, 69, was an accident. Convicted of murder in 1981, Harris suffered two heart attacks while serving her sentence in the Bedford Hills women's prison north of New York City. She was granted clemency by then-Gov. Mario Cuomo when she underwent heart bypass surgery in December 1992 and was released on parole three weeks later.
She later founded Children of Bedford Inc., a nonprofit organization to provide scholarships and tutoring for children of female prison inmates.
As an inmate, Harris criticized authority, chafing under what she saw as arbitrary, counterproductive rules. In books and articles she wrote and in interviews, she advocated reform, both for her own benefit and that of other imprisoned women.
Housed in the prison's honor wing, she taught mothering skills to expectant inmates and worked in the Bedford Hills children's center.
Born Jean Streuven on April 27, 1923, she grew up in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, attended private schools, graduated magna cum laude from Smith College and married industrialist James Harris.
The couple lived in Grosse Pointe, Mich., and had two sons. Harris also got her first job there, teaching first grade.
She and James Harris divorced in 1966. A few months later, the slender, blond, blue-eyed divorcee of 43 met Tarnower, 12 years her senior, at a party on Park Avenue in New York. They talked about marriage early in the relationship, but that never panned out, and Harris remained his lover.
In 1977, she left a sales administration job in New York to become headmistress of the Madeira School for girls in the Washington suburb of McLean, Va., a position that also got her listed in the capital's social register.
Weekends and vacations were spent with Tarnower, traveling or on his arm at social gatherings. She also earned a mention in the acknowledgments in his best-selling diet book, "The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet," for helping with research.
Jean Harris
In Memory
Harry Carey Jr.
Harry Carey Jr., a character actor who starred in such Westerns as "3 Godfathers" and "Wagon Master," has died. He was 91.
His daughter, Melinda Carey, said he died Thursday of natural causes surrounded by family at a hospice facility in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Carey's career spanned more than 50 years and included such John Ford classics as "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," ''The Searchers" and "The Long Gray Line." Later in life, he appeared in the movies "Gremlins" and "Back to the Future Part III."
While he lacked the leading-man stature of longtime friend and co-star John Wayne, Carey's boyish looks and horse-riding skills earned him roles in many of Ford's films.
He and fellow character Ben Johnson famously learned to stand simultaneously on two galloping horses - a trick known as roman riding - for the 1950 film "Rio Grande" starring Wayne.
Carey was the son of silent-film Western star Harry Carey Sr. and actress Olive Carey. He was born on May 16, 1921, on his family's ranch and graduated from Hollywood's Black-Foxe Military Institute.
During World War II, he served in the Navy and worked with Ford on films for the Navy.
He is survived by his wife, a son, two daughters, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Harry Carey Jr.
In Memory
Richard Rodney Bennett
British composer, pianist and arranger Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, who was nominated three times for Academy Awards, has died in New York City at age 76.
Bennett was nominated for Oscars for the scores for "Far from the Madding Crowd" in 1967, "Nicholas and Alexandra" in 1971 and "Murder on the Orient Express" in 1974.
A student of Pierre Boulez in 1957-58, Bennett's work evolved from the avant-garde to a more tonal style. As a pianist, he performed with singer Claire Martin and he recorded music by George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen.
Bennett's extensive output included more than 200 works for the concert hall and 50 scores for film and television, five operas and miscellaneous works including settings of Christmas carols.
Bennett was born March 29, 1936, in Broadstairs near the English Channel coast, but his family moved to the safer area of Devon after war broke out. His mother, who had studied with the composer Gustav Holst and had sung in the first performance of "The Planets," was an early musical influence on her son.
He moved to New York in 1979, following the end of a long relationship and feeling stifled in Britain. Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein supported his application for a green card work permit.
In New York he indulged his passion for jazz, accompanying singer Claire Martin in shows at the Algonquin Hotel and drawing praise from The New York Times as "a sensitive, truly intimate collaborator."
He helped Paul McCartney with his orchestral work "Standing Stone," commenting on sections faxed by the former Beatle.
"I sent him one, thinking it was pretty good," McCartney said. "A few minutes later, I got a fax back with the word 'feeble' scribbled across it.
"I phoned him straight back and said, 'Richard, that's what my teacher wrote on my essays. You're a sensitive artist, and if you don't like something, could you please write, 'That's a little below par?'"
Bennett coached Elizabeth Taylor to sing a nursery rhyme for the film "Secret Ceremony," for which he wrote the musical score. Prince Charles commissioned Bennett in 2005 to write "Reflection on a Scottish Folk Song" in honor of the prince's grandmother, Queen Mother Elizabeth.
Bennett was knighted in 1998. Funeral details were not announced.
Richard Rodney Bennett dies
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