Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Josh Marshall: Trump and The Problem of Militant Ignorance (TPM)
His ignorance is not endearing. We don't need to lie to him to make him feel good about himself. Still it is good to understand his condition. Ignorance is just lack of information. But there's something wrong with Trump's brain - maybe cognitive, perhaps simple entitlement or just broad spectrum derp - which appears to make it genuinely impossible not to project his own ignorance onto everybody else.
Krista Burton: I Want My Lesbian Bars Back (NY Times)
CHICAGO - "Where is everyone?" … Aside from having their basic human and civil rights taken away, nothing makes homos more nervous than an empty dance floor at a gay bar. It goes against the natural order of things, like RuPaul without big hair or Sean Spicer giving a calm and informed news conference.
T. R. Reid: Filing Taxes in Japan Is a Breeze. Why Not Here? (NY Times)
Ah, the blithe joys of springtime in the United States. Azaleas in bloom at the Masters, breezy picnics on balmy afternoons, Easter egg hunts - and the annual ordeal of tax forms, with helpful I.R.S. instructions like this: "Go to Part IV of Schedule I to figure line 52 if the estate or trust has qualified dividends or has a gain on lines 18a and 19 of column (2) of Schedule D (Form 1041) (as refigured for the AMT, if necessary)."
Molly Worthen: The Evangelical Roots of Our Post-Truth Society (NY Times)
THE arrival of the "post-truth" political climate came as a shock to many Americans. But to the Christian writer Rachel Held Evans, charges of "fake news" are nothing new. "The deep distrust of the media, of scientific consensus - those were prevalent narratives growing up," she told me.
Lenore Skenazy: All Structure and No Play (Creators Syndicate)
Every day after school and all day on weekends, kids run outside - to get in the car to get to their soccer league or ballet lesson or origami boot camp. It's all good, but here's what it isn't. Play.
Ted Rall: Confessions Of A Frequent Guest On Fox News (Creators Syndicate)
I've never worked at Fox. But I used to spend enough time there to gain insight into a dysfunctional organization.
Clive James: 'I am planning for a future in which I appear only as a shimmering outline' (The Guardian)
I am likely to proclaim that Margaret Thatcher once looked at me in silent awe.
Hadley Freeman: Successful, lairy, scary - what does a vulnerable woman look like? (The Guardian)
Given the statistics, she very possibly looks like the woman sitting opposite you on the bus right now.
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog
David Bruce's Lulu Storefront
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 80 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
wrote:
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Comment
North Korea
Since North Korea is posturing about Nuclear war, I though I would send this picture of the famous "kiss your ass goodbye" drill that kept us safe in the 50's and 60's! Perhaps it would come in handy in 2017?
Always a fan,
BSmasher
Thanks, Brain!
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
KAH-BOOM! WOW! WHAT A PRESIDENT!
PRESIDENT TRAITOR.
THE DAILY EXTINCTION.
"A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM"
A LITTLE BIRDIE TOLD ME.
PLAYING DIRTY.
IT'S A START.
WOMEN WILL LEAD THE WAY.
"CUI BONO?"
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Overcast morning, sunny afternoon.
Golf Costing The Taxpayer
T-rump
Donald Trump (R-Crooked), before he became the official resident of the White House, was openly critical of former President Barack Obama's love for golf. But according to a new report, the Secret Service has paid over $35,000 for golf cart rentals alone while guarding Trump since his inauguration.
According to purchase orders reviewed by CBS News, $35,185 was spent on renting golf carts during the president's repeated visits to Palm Beach, Florida, which houses his Mar-a-Lago resort.
After saying Obama concentrated more on golf than on making the right decisions for the country, Trump said last year he would dedicate himself to working hard on the right "deals" for the country.
In his 13 weekends as president, Trump has spent seven at Mar-a-Lago (including this one) and the cost of these trips, paid for by taxpayers, has reached $25 million, according to a new website, IsTrumpatMaraLago.org, launched Friday. That amounts to an average of about $3.5 million per trip, and given that rate of spending, Trump overtook Obama's annual travel spending average of $12.12 million during his presidency on March 4-5, when he made the fourth weekend trip to his Florida estate.
The president seems well on his way to spend more on travel in one year than his predecessor spent during his eight years in office.
T-rump
At 'Terminal Stage'
Great Barrier Reef
Back-to-back severe bleaching events have affected two-thirds of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, new aerial surveys have found.
The findings have caused alarm among scientists, who say the proximity of the 2016 and 2017 bleaching events is unprecedented for the reef, and will give damaged coral little chance to recover.
Scientists with the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies last week completed aerial surveys of the world's largest living structure, scoring bleaching at 800 individual coral reefs across 8,000km.
The results show the two consecutive mass bleaching events have affected a 1,500km stretch, leaving only the reef's southern third unscathed.
Where last year's bleaching was concentrated in the reef's northern third, the 2017 event spread further south, and was most intense in the middle section of the Great Barrier Reef. This year's mass bleaching, second in severity only to 2016, has occurred even in the absence of an El Niño event.
Great Barrier Reef
Sensenbrenner Says...
Internet Optional
As Republican lawmakers continue to defend their decision to vote to roll back a set of broadband privacy rules that would have required internet service providers to ask for permission before collecting user data, the Federal Communications Commission is readying more drastic changes to the regulatory oversight of the internet.
In a town hall appearance held on Thursday, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis. defended his decision to vote to repeal the Broadband Consumer Privacy Rules passed by the FCC last October by arguing that "nobody's got to use the internet."
When a constituent attending the event in Wisconsin's fifth district raised the issue that she has only one ISP available in her neighborhood and now has little recourse to protect her personal information from her internet provider, Sensenbrenner responded:
"You know, nobody's got to use the internet….I don't think it's my job to tell you that you cannot get advertising through your information being sold. My job, I think, is to tell you that you have the opportunity to do it and then you take it upon yourself to make the choice."
The congressman's press office doubled down on this, responding to a tweet claiming Sensenbrenner said "not to use the internet" by stating, "Actually, he said that nobody has to use the internet. They have a choice."
Internet Optional
Cases Traced to Unexpected Cause
'Elephantiasis'
A rare condition called elephantiasis, which tends to strike people in tropical parts of the world, was long thought to occur due to a parasitic infection. But a new study shows that the condition can have another cause: sharp crystals found in certain soils.
In elephantiasis, a person's limbs become discolored and swollen with fluid. They may swell to enormous sizes, resembling the limbs of an elephant. The most common cause of the condition is a mosquito-borne parasitic infection called lymphatic filariasis, in which microscopic worms invade the body's lymph nodes and vessels, causing the swelling.
But in 2014 and 2015, there were reports of two intense outbreaks of elephantiasis in western Uganda, an area that is not known to harbor these worms.
Indeed, when the Uganda Ministry of Health investigated the outbreak, the agency identified another cause of elephantiasis: a disease called podoconiosis. And what was thought to be an outbreak of a parasitic disease was far from it; rather, the symptoms of podoconiosis slowly build up over decades, gradually developing into elephantiasis, the study said.
"People can be suffering from podoconiosis, a noninfectious disease, for decades before it becomes obvious that they are developing elephantiasis," lead study author Dr. Christine Kihembo, a senior field epidemiologist at the Uganda Ministry of Health, said in a statement. "Many of the people affected in western Uganda probably had been suffering silently without help for more than 30 years."
'Elephantiasis'
US Launches Tests For Upgraded Bomb
Nuke
Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories are claiming success with the first in a new series of test flights involving an upgraded version of a nuclear bomb that has been part of the U.S. arsenal for decades.
Work on the B61-12 has been ongoing for years, and government officials say the latest tests using mock versions of the bomb will be vital to the refurbishing effort.
An F-16 from Nellis Air Force Base dropped an inert version of the weapon over the Nevada desert last month to test its non-nuclear functions as well as the plane's ability to carry the bomb.
With a mere puff of dust, the mock bomb landed in a dry lake bed at the Tonopah Test Range.
Tracking telescopes, remote cameras and other instruments at the test range recorded information on the reliability, accuracy and performance of the weapon under conditions that were meant to replicate real-world operations.
Nuke
'A Few Dozen' US Troops Deployed
Somalia
The United States is deploying "a few dozen" troops to Somalia to assist the national army and conduct unspecified security operations, a US military spokeswoman said Saturday.
The soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division, a light infantry unit trained for air assaults, will mainly train and equip Somalia's army "to better fight Al-Shabab," an Al-Qaeda linked extremist group, the spokeswoman for the US Africa Command based in Germany, Samantha Reho, told AFP.
They will also conduct "security force assistance," she said, confirming a report by Voice of America.
"For operational security issues, we will not discuss specifics of military efforts nor speculate on potential future activities or operations," she said, declining to say precisely how many troops were being sent.
The United States' most notorious military operation in Somalia was in 1993, when an ill-fated attempt to snatch militia leaders led to two Black Hawk helicopters being shot down in Mogadishu. A chaotic rescue was mounted, resulting in hundreds of deaths, including those of 18 US soldiers. The incident was made famous in the book and the movie "Black Hawk Down."
Somalia
Victim Shocked By Judge's Remark
Utah
A woman says she is shocked by a Utah judge's comments in which he called a man convicted of sexually assaulting her a "good man" during his sentencing hearing.
Julia Kirby said Friday that Judge Thomas Low appeared to care more about the person he was convicting than he did about the victims. She plans to file an official complaint against him in the hopes of getting him removed as a judge.
"The court has no doubt that Mr. Vallejo is an extraordinarily good man," Low said during the sentencing. "But great men sometimes do bad things."
A jury found Vallejo guilty of 10 counts of forcible sexual abuse and one count of object rape.
The incidents happened in Provo, a heavily Mormon area of Utah that is home to Brigham Young University.
Utah
Knew Of T-rump-Russia Contacts In 2015
British Spy Agencies
British spy agencies alerted their U.S. counterparts in 2015 about contacts between Donald Trump's (R-Grifter) election campaign and Russian intelligence authorities, the Guardian reported Thursday, citing sources. The response from Washington over the alleged contacts was, however, slow, sources told the British daily.
Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) passed on the information about contacts between Trump's team and known or suspected Russian agents as part of routine exchange of intelligence, the Guardian reported. Until 2016, spy agencies from Germany, Estonia, France, the Netherlands and Poland also alerted the U.S. about the links between the two sides, sources told the newspaper.
However, the FBI and the CIA responded slowly to the intelligence they were given ahead of the presidential election last November. This was partly because of the U.S. law that prohibits American intelligence agencies to keep a check on the private communications of U.S. citizens without warrants, people familiar with the matter told the Guardian.
"It looks like the [U.S.] agencies were asleep. They [the European agencies] were saying 'There are contacts going on between people close to Trump and people we believe are Russian intelligence agents. You should be wary of this,'" a source told the Guardian
"The message was: 'Watch out. There's something not right here,'" the source reportedly added.
British Spy Agencies
Threat To Campaign Pledges
Strong US Dollar
Donald Trump (R-Liar) takes credit for revitalizing the US economy even though he has not yet been in office for 100 days.
But the new president's boasts of breathing life into the world's biggest markets may come with an unwelcome corollary: a rising dollar and the Trump campaign promises it threatens.
Trump acknowledged as much this week in a Wall Street Journal interview.
"I think our dollar is getting too strong and partially that's my fault because people have confidence in me," he said. "That will hurt ultimately."
Strong US Dollar
In Memory
Emma Morano
Emma Morano, at 117 the world's oldest person who is also believed to have been the last surviving person born in the 1800s, died Saturday at her home in northern Italy, her physician said.
Morano, born on Nov. 29, 1899, had been living in a tidy, one-room apartment, where she was kept company by her caregiver and two elderly nieces.
Morano left her husband in 1938 because he would beat her. She "abandoned the husband in the Fascist era, when women were supposed to be very submissive," Bava said in a 2015 interview. "She was always very decisive."
Morano began working in a factory making jute bags when she was 16. Then she worked at a hotel, working way beyond the usual retirement age.
Beside work, she enjoyed herself. She was considered a good dancer with a beautiful singing voice in her youth.
Researchers from Harvard Medical School visited her in 2014 as part of a study into immunity to diseases, the Italian news agency ANSA said.
Emma Morano
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
