Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: Swimming in the Waters of Love (Creators Syndicate)
As it happens, there is a tale of peril associated with this Valentine's Day. First of all, I love my wife. This should make Valentine's Day easier, but it does not. There is nothing easier than buying presents for someone you don't love.
Ted Rall: About Me and My Mom (Creators Syndicate)
My mom died last week. Her obituary is online. It is, as obits should be, about her. Too many women's lives are contextualized around their roles as wives and mothers. So I kept myself, and our relationship, in the background.
Mark Shields: Will We Like Mike? (Creators Syndicate)
We know that Michael Bloomberg has supported and spent generously to back candidates and initiatives that reflect his own priorities of gun control and climate change. In the eyes of some Democrats, Bloomberg's political history - his quarter-million-dollar gift to South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham; the more than $11 million the mayor donated in 2016 to Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, whose narrow win secured Mitch McConnell as senate majority leader; and his endorsement of George W. Bush for reelection - suggest his commitment to the Party in 2020 is more convenience than conviction.
Lenore Skenazy: Making It Legal to Let Kids Play Outside (Creators Syndicate)
America may be divided along partisan lines when it comes to everything from walls to wars, but in Colorado, two state representatives - one Democrat, one Republican - are co-sponsoring their first bill together. It guarantees that kids can enjoy some independence - walk to school, play outside, etc. - without it being mistaken for neglect.
Susan Estrich: How to Lose 50 States (Creators Syndicate)
Easy. Nominate Bernie Sanders. I've been through my share of blowouts. I was a kid when George McGovern won Massachusetts - and nowhere else. I was in Florida working for Jimmy Carter (on loan from Ted Kennedy's office) when we lost not only the White House but also the Senate majority in Ronald Reagan's first landslide. I was in Minnesota waiting to see if Fritz Mondale would carry any states.
Froma Harrop: Bernie Sanders Is Not Doing So Hot (Creators Syndicate)
Bernie Sanders was supposed to run away with the New Hampshire primary. This is his kind of state, where Democrats are mostly educated liberals. Yet the national celebrity from next-door Vermont bested Pete Buttigieg, recently an unknown from Indiana, by less than 4,000 votes. It appears they are both walking off with nine delegates. And that was after Buttigieg had split the moderate vote with Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who came in a strong third.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Song: "Eat My Dust" from the album BACKSTAGE STORIES
Artist: Robertas Semeniukas
Artist Location: Lithuania
Info: All music is composed, arranged and produced by Robertas Semeniukas.
Price: €1 EURO for song; €10 EURO for 20-track album.
Genre: Rock Instrumental
Links:
Robertas Semeniukas on Bandcamp
BACKSTAGE STORIES
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FREE BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATIONS PDF
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David Bruce has over 140 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
New Venture
Michael Egan
Reader Suggestion
Hiking
Hey Marty
Here's an article about the hiking essentials in great depth.
from Bruce
Anecdotes
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
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
Sunny and a bit warmer than seasonal.
Childhood Home
Barack Obama
A Craftsman-style home located in the Manoa neighborhood of Honolulu recently hit the market for $2.2 million-though, for history buffs, the house is arguably priceless. That's because one of the 1,976-square-foot home's previous residents was none other than Barack Obama, who lived there from 1964 to 1967 between the ages of three and six. At the time, Obama's mother was attending the nearby University of Hawaii at Manoa (the former president was partly raised by his maternal grandparents). Though the house could use a little sprucing up, its foundation is still very solid. Built in 1947, the three-bedroom, two-bathroom home features a 334-square-foot covered lanai, or porch, as well as a separate 292-square-foot cottage, which could easily be converted into a guesthouse or a vacation rental-it even has its own separate entrance.
Inside, the house is sweet and modest, with hardwood floors and French doors and windows in the living room adding some flair to the residence, and built-ins in the bedrooms offering up ample storage space. The kitchen walls are painted a soft pink hue, with heather gray countertops and white cabinetry. The backyard offers up ample green space to plant fruit trees or flowers or both. According to Realtor.com, the home last changed hands in 2006 for $1.3 million.
Obama's living circumstances have changed substantially since then: Late last year, the former president and his wife, Michelle Obama, reportedly purchased a home on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, for $11.75 million. The seven-bedroom, eight-and-a-half-bathroom retreat spans 6,892 square feet, and the property includes a detached garage, a barn, and a pool. The former first couple also own a nine-bedroom, eight-and-a-half-bathroom home in Washington, D.C., that they bought for $8.1 million in May 2017.
Barack Obama
Sci-Fi Film in Development
'Karn Evil 9'
Emerson, Lake and Palmer's prog-rock classic "Karn Evil 9" will serve as the inspiration for an upcoming sci-fi film.
Deadline reports that Radar Pictures has secured the rights to the centerpiece of ELP's 1973 album Brain Salad Surgery with Robopocalypse author Daniel H. Wilson on board to adapt "Karn Evil 9" into a screenplay.
Carl Palmer, the lone surviving member of ELP, confirmed on Twitter that a "sci-fi movie franchise" based on the band's 30-minute, three-suite "Karn Evil 9" is in development.
According to Radar Pictures, the studio behind the recent Jumanji reboots, the "Karn Evil 9" film will take place in "a society that has drained all its blood with a dependence on technology." The movie also "will explore the world controlled by a pervasive and dictatorial technocracy."
"The annual 'Karn Evil' - a macabre rite of passage - is a young person's once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience unbridled freedom, before subjugating themselves to the ruling class," Deadline said of the film's plot. "When people stop returning from their Karn Evil experience, fear drives a revolution to topple the status quo and the artificial intelligence discovered at its heart."
'Karn Evil 9'
Livestream
Northern Lights
Bask in nature's majesty without getting your tootsies cold with this
The natural world overflows with incredible sights-the kind of things that fill with awe and force us to view ourselves as one part of a greater whole, tiny atoms in a universe impossibly vast and beautiful in its magnificent design. Unfortunately, nature is also outside and outside can be too cold or too hot, and sometimes there are even bugs around. Fortunately, thanks to the internet, this is no longer a barrier, and natural phenomena as stunning as the aurora borealis itself can now be watched from the comfort of our climate-controlled homes.
The Northern Lights are currently at peak visibility and Explore.org, the same website that provides us with the annual Fat Bear Week, has set up a livestream that allows the entire world a chance to watch. Created with assistance from Polar Bears International and the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, the broadcast captures real-time footage of the skies above Churchill, Manitoba.
At the time of writing, there's only an expanse of grey sky and a snowy field to look at, but it's a lot more exciting overnight. Mashable's Mark Kaufman spoke to Polar Bears International's executive director, Krista Wright, who explains that the best time to watch the Lights is from 10:00 PM to 4:00 AM (EST) during February and March since "there tends to be clear, cloudless nights over Churchill this time of year." Kaufman's article also provides links to My Aurora Forecast and the Space Weather Prediction Center's Aurora forecast, which will help viewers fit witnessing one of our planet's most incredible sights from home into busy schedules already booked with The Circle marathons.
Check the stream throughout the next month and a half to watch the Northern Lights for yourself.
Northern Lights
Algorithms For Political Bias
YouTube
In August 2018, President Donald Trump (R-Fabulist) claimed that social media was "totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices." Not much was new about this: for years, conservatives have accused tech companies of political bias. Just last July, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) asked the FTC to investigate the content moderation policies of tech companies like Google. A day after Google's vice president insisted that YouTube was apolitical, Cruz claimed that political bias on YouTube was "massive."
But the data doesn't back Cruz up-and it's been available for a while. While the actual policies and procedures for moderating content are often opaque, it is possible to look at the outcomes of moderation and determine if there's indication of bias there. And, last year, computer scientists decided to do exactly that.
Motivated by the long-running argument in Washington DC, computer scientists at Northeastern University decided to investigate political bias in YouTube's comment moderation. The team analyzed 84,068 comments on 258 YouTube videos. At first glance, the team found that comments on right-leaning videos seemed more heavily moderated than those on left-leaning ones. But when the researchers also accounted for factors such as the prevalence of hate speech and misinformation, they found no differences between comment moderation on right- and left-leaning videos.
"There is no political censorship," said Christo Wilson, one of the co-authors and associate professor at Northeastern University. "In fact, YouTube appears to just be enforcing their policies against hate speech, which is what they say they're doing." Wilson's collaborators on the paper were graduate students Shan Jiang and Ronald Robertson.
From fact-checking websites Snopes and PolitiFact, the scientists were able to get a set of YouTube videos that had been labelled true or false. Then, by scanning the comments on those videos twice, six months apart, they could tell which ones had been taken down. They also used natural language processing to identify hate speech in the comments.
YouTube
Weedkiller Lawsuit
Missouri
A jury has awarded $265 million in punitive damages to a Missouri peach grower who sued Bayer and BASF over damage to his orchards that he says was caused by the weed killer dicamba drifting onto his trees.
The award Saturday came a day after the jury awarded $15 million in actual damages to Bill Bader, of Campbell.
Bill Bader, of Campbell, sued Bayer and BASF, alleging they were responsible for damage at Bader Farms, one of the largest peach farms in Missouri, which his attorneys argued would likely not survive repeated exposure to dicamba.
The jury in Cape Girardeau is scheduled to return Saturday to assess punitive damages against Bayer and BASF, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Bader's lawsuit is one of several filed against Bayer and BASF that blame the pesticide for damaging millions of acres of crops across the country.
Missouri
'Mere Membership'
Military
United States military officials testified before Congress on Tuesday, telling legislators that personnel will not be discharged from the US military for claiming membership in a neo-Nazi group.
The House Armed Services subcommittee on military personnel hearing - which featured scholars, experts, and Pentagon officials - comes on the heels of a broad uptick in white-supremacist violence that government officials are looking to curb.
"Military personnel must reject active participation in criminal gangs or other organizations that … advocate supremacist, extremist, gang-doctrine ideology or causes," said Robert Grabosky, deputy director of law enforcement at the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Any military member who actively participates, he said, is subject to investigation and potentially a discharge.
But just being in a white-supremacist group will not lead to an investigation or discharge, Grabosky told Congress members. "It is important to note that the Air Force policy dictates [that] mere membership in the organization is not prohibited."
Military
Methane Hotspots
Arctic
Scientists are taking to the skies to study methane emissions in the Arctic. In a series of more than 400 airplane rides in 2017, researchers with NASA's Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment discovered 2 million methane hotspots.
The findings point to one of the more disturbing aspects of climate change in the Arctic as frozen soil thaws, releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Frankly, I'm shook.
The team documented their findings in a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters on Monday. They equipped planes with infrared technology that can detect methane hotspots, which the team defined as an area with 3,000 parts per million of methane in the air. In total, the scientists covered 20,000 square miles of land and took roughly 1 billion observations.
The NASA scientists discovered that most of these hotspots are closest to bodies of water, which are commonly where hotspots are found since flowing water can cut into frozen soils. But the researchers found a curious quirk: Most hotspot concentrated within 44 yards of waterways, a threshold they're still working to understand. They were able to confirm this during an on-the-ground excursion in 2018 to two lakes.
This is cause for serious concern. The Arctic is warming at an accelerated rate, and it's causing frozen layers of soil-called permafrost-to melt. All this is due to climate change, but this feedback loop of melting permafrost makes things dramatic worse because that's where the Arctic's methane hides. And methane is a powerful greenhouse gas: It carries a global warming potential that is some 30 times the potential of carbon dioxide over 100 years.
Arctic
Budget Zeroes Out Funding
Stars and Stripes
The Trump administration pulled funding in its 2021 budget for Stars and Stripes, the U.S. military news organization that has published a daily newspaper continuously since World War II for troops stationed around the world.
At a Thursday press conference in Belgium, Defense Secretary Mark Esper (R-Puppet) explained the rationale behind the decision to withhold approximately $15.5 million in funding for Stars and Stripes.
"So, we trimmed the support for Stars and Stripes because we need to invest that money, as we did with many, many other programs, into higher-priority issues," Esper said.
The Pentagon's 2021 spending proposal is $705.4 billion.
Stars and Stripes
Giant Pandas
Mexico
Xin Xin and Shuan Shuan are the main attractions at the Chapultepec zoo in Mexico City but what makes them truly unique, zoo officials say, is that they're the only giant pandas in the world not owned by China.
They were born in captivity in Mexico and although they have Chinese names, "they belong to Mexico," Rafael Tinajero, a manager at the zoo, told AFP.
They are the last in the line of a panda couple -- Ying Ying and Pe Pe -- loaned to Mexico by the Chinese government in 1975.
Since 1980, China has operated a different policy in which it only lends pandas for a short time and in return for a payment towards wild panda conservation efforts.
As Ying Ying and Pe Pe arrived in Mexico before China changed its policy, Xin Xin and Shuan Shuan will stay in Mexico.
Mexico
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