Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: Trade With Britain (Creators Syndicate)
And in this long history of trade and swap, the United States of America most recently sent Pres. Donald J. Trump to England. The British, whose still-very-much-unhidden class system has existed for generations, smelled him as a cheap little casino developer who is in over his head, the way one of their kings is occasionally stupid or so inbred as to be useless. The British let such a king rule, and try to keep him from breaking anything, and they hope that their institutions are strong enough to hold. So do we.
Ted Rall: Hacking Dirty Government Secrets Is Not a Crime (Creators Syndicate)
Good Samaritan laws protect people who commit what the law calls a "crime of necessity." If you save a child from your neighbor's burning house, the police shouldn't charge you with trespassing. Similarly, if the only way to expose government or corporate law-breaking is to steal confidential documents and release them to the press a la Edward Snowden, you should be immune from prosecution. That principle clearly applies to the materials Manning stole and Assange released as a public service to citizens unaware of the misdeeds committed under their name and at their expense.
Mark Shields: 'We' Once Did Fight Wars (Creators Syndicate)
This was a time when the children of privilege and power served and sacrificed: 18-year-old Stephen Hopkins - whose father lived in the White House, where he was the president's closest adviser - joined the Marine Corps and was killed in the Pacific. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the son of President Franklin Roosevelt's ambassador to England, died flying a dangerous mission in Europe. FDR had four sons: Elliott became an Army Air Corps pilot and flew 130 combat missions; Jimmy joined the Marines and, in combat against the Japanese, earned both the Navy Cross and a Silver Star. Navy Lt. John Roosevelt earned a Bronze Star while Lt. Commander Franklin Roosevelt, Jr. won the Silver Star for bravery under heavy enemy fire. One sickly young man used his father's influence to pull strings so that the Navy would permit him go into combat and captain a PT boat in the Pacific. Sixteen years later, he would be President John F. Kennedy.
Lenore Skenazy: "Fisher-Price: Unsafe at Any Speed?" (Creators Syndicate)
The recent recall of the Fisher-Price Rock 'n Play - a strange name for a device that was designed for babies to lie 'n nap - has parents outraged, even when they are on opposite sides of the issue. Many are angry that the device, a sort of baby hammock on a 30-degree angle, was on the market for 10 years before the recall, which occurred after 30 infants had died. Others are furious that a device they rely on as a godsend - because it gets their babies to sleep when seemingly nothing else works - is being recalled at all.
Susan Estrich: What Happened to Bill Barr? (Creators Syndicate)
I knew him back when we were both law clerks fresh out of school - he for one of the most conservative members of the D.C. Circuit, I for one of its leading liberals. He was a smart guy. Honorable. Someone you disagreed with but respected. … There's a simple, two-word answer for what happened to Bill Barr. Donald Trump happened.
Froma Harrop: Could We Survive As They Did? (Creators Syndicate)
Lost for 17 days in a Hawaiian jungle, all alone in only a tank top and capri yoga pans, I'm not sure what I would do. Would I work past my fractured leg, blistered wounds and terror to survive? Would I eat mystery fruit and moths and sleep in the mud or a wild boar's den? Would I do the things Amanda Eller did, or would I go crazy after two weeks and throw my emaciated body into a ravine?
Froma Harrop: Trigger Warnings for Donald Trump (Creators Syndicate)
That was a pretty stunning story about the White House asking some Navy officials to move the warship USS John McCain "out of sight" during President Donald Trump's recent visit to Japan. The obvious fear was that sharing any stage with the war hero would unhinge the president. McCain died last August from brain cancer.
Froma Harrop: Democrats, Don't Try to Impeach Trump. Please (Creators Syndicate)
Thus, we have Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times saying that, on the basis of a CNN poll, 76 percent of Democratic voters back impeachment. As she herself concedes, the poll's question did not differentiate between wanting an impeachment inquiry and an impeachment proceeding. One looks for information. The other attempts an ouster. The Republican Senate won't let the latter happen. So Trump wouldn't face eviction while being given the opportunity to play victim in a partisan struggle.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• After Chilean author Isabel Allende's first book, The House of the Spirits, was published, her agent, Carmen Balcells, threw a party for her in Madrid, Spain. Many Spanish literary celebrities attended the party, and she was bashful. How to solve the problem? Actually, she didn't solve it-she avoided it. She admitted, "I was so frightened I spent a good part of the evening hiding in the bathroom." As you would expect, she began reading at a very young age. When she finished reading Tolstoy's massive War and Peace, her uncle gave her a doll. Her family encouraged her to be creative. For example, her mother allowed her to paint murals on her bedroom walls. (Later, when she was able to drive, she painted flowers on her car. For a while, she had a job translating into Spanish romance novels that had been written in English. However, because she was a feminist, she changed the heroine's dialogue from insipid to intelligent, and she changed the endings so that the heroine became independent and did not need a hero. She got fired. In her own life, she found romance. San Francisco lawyer William Gordon spoke fluent Spanish and met her and asked her to go on a date. After they had had one date, he drove her to the airport, and she asked him if he loved her. She says, "Poor guy, he almost drove off the road. He had to pull over, and he said, 'What are you talking about? We just met.'" She responded by writing a contract and sending it to him. The contract said that they could have a relationship on two conditions: 1) He could date no one but her, and 2) She could redecorate his house. He agreed. By the way, on 17 July 1988, they married.
• Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, began reading and writing early in life. At age seven, she began writing rhyming couplets, causing her mother to tell her that she would be "as great as Paul Laurence Dunbar," the great African-American poet. To make sure that Gwendolyn had lots of time to read and write, her mother gave her only one chore each day: washing the dishes after the evening meal. A fire once broke out down the street, and Gwendolyn's mother told her about it, thinking that she would like to see it, but Gwendolyn preferred to keep on reading. When she won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Annie Allen, lots of people didn't believe it. She said, "Nobody believed it. Not even my little boy believed it. … And I guess I didn't believe it either-at first." When she learned that she had won the Pulitzer Prize, the electricity was off in her apartment because she and her husband were having a rough time financially, but her husband was trying hard to get it turned back on. When a photographer from the Chicago Tribune arrived, he plugged in his lighting equipment, making her nervous. Fortunately, her husband had managed to get the electricity turned on and the photographer's lights worked. One person who encouraged her when she was young was author Langston Hughes. Her mother pushed past an usher at a church to get to him and told him, "My daughter writes." Mr. Hughes read several of her poems and told her, "You're talented. Keep writing. Some day you'll have a book published." Sixty years afterward, Gwendolyn said, "That did mean a lot to a 16-year-old girl."
• In January 2012, a storm hit the home of 75-year-old author Peg Kehret: a log house near Mount Rainier National Park in Washington. On 21 January 2012, her driveway was covered with branches and fallen trees, and ice made it impossible for her to even walk on the driveway. Fortunately, two young men of about 21 or 22 stopped at her home. They knew who she was because everyone in the small town where she lives knows who she is and where she lives. They had even read in school her autobiography Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio. (She was paralyzed for several months, but she recovered. However, she still feels some effects of polio in her old age.) Ms. Kehret writes that they drove past her driveway and saw the branches and fallen trees, and said, "Miss Peg has polio problems. She can't deal with those trees." So they cleared her driveway for her. One tree was very heavy, so they asked a neighbor with a chain saw to cut it into pieces, and they moved it. Ms. Kehret wrote in her blog, "When they had finished, I could get my car out. They asked if I needed anything from town, and then they both wrote down their names and cell phone numbers and told me to call them if I needed any more help.I've always known from my mail that I have the best readers in the world, but I never expected that the memory of a book they read a decade ago would prompt two young men to be so caring."
• In 1957, Gypsy Rose Lee, a stripper in burlesque, wrote a sensational autobiography titled Gypsy, which many people of wit and intelligence have admired. A woman of wit and intelligence herself, Ms. Lee once told the police after a police raid, "I wasn't naked. I was completely covered by a blue spotlight." Very likely, she wasn't naked. She often wore a flesh-colored bodysuit underneath the clothing she took off. Critic Carl Rollyson once wrote, "With wit and sass, Gypsy Rose Lee transformed herself from a burlesque dancer into a nationwide celebrity. She also wrote her own life story, a masterpiece her biographers still struggle to match."
• Caitlin Moran, British author of How to Be a Woman, loves Twitter. She also finds it useful in solving emergencies. For example, in 2011 someone stole her brother's wallet while he was at Victoria station. Ms. Moran said, "I just went on Twitter and asked if there was anyone nearby who could go and give him a fiver so he could get the tube [subway] to my house. And within 12 minutes, someone had."
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Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
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In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and seasonal.
Awarded O.B.E.
Elvis Costello
Elvis Costello has been awarded an O.B.E. - the title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire - for his contributions to music as part of the annual Queen's Birthday Honours List.
"I am happy to accept this very surprising honour," Costello wrote in a long statement Friday. "To be honest, I'm pretty tickled to receive this acknowledgement for my 'Services To Music,' as it confirms my long held suspicion nobody really listens to the words in songs or the outcome might have been somewhat different."
In a post on Costello's website, the rocker wrote about his reaction upon first receiving the letter and how he was initially going to turn down the honor; now-former Prime Minister Teresa May recommended Costello for the award.
However, upon notifying his mother Lillian MacManus of the O.B.E., Costello reconsidered his stance. "I began my call by telling my Mam that the Prime Minister, Mrs. May, had put my name forward for an O.B.E. 'But she's rubbish,' Lillian cut in before I could complete the news. Well, that aside, I said, 'Of course, I won't be accepting the award,'" Costello wrote.
Costello went on to explain that his two grandfathers were both soldiers who were injured during wartime: His maternal grandfather spent three years in a P.O.W. camp during World War II while his paternal grandfather, a bugler, was "Missing, Presumed Dead" in imperial India before he was found in a military hospital and sent home.
Elvis Costello
New Campaign
Distant Worlds
A new campaign headed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) called IAU100 NameExoWorlds will allow each country in the world to name a star and its exoplanet, the IAU announced yesterday.
Nearly 100 nations are all signed up and ready to go, with the next step involving national campaigns to select names and provide the public with an opportunity to vote. The point of all this, in the words of the IAU, is to "create awareness of our place in the Universe and to reflect on how the Earth would potentially be perceived by a civilization on another planet."
A lofty aim, to be sure, but the contest does serve a practical purpose. Astronomers have detected nearly 4,000 exoplanets over the past three decades, and virtually all of them are stuck with unwieldy scientific designations like KMT-2017-BLG-1146Lb, OGLE-2013-BLG-0132Lb, and 2MASS J19383260+4603591 b, just to name three.
The IAU is the ruling body for such matters, and it's launching the new campaign to commemorate its 100th anniversary. This is the second IAU contest of its kind, the first one being the 2015 NameExoWorlds campaign, in which 31 exoplanets from 19 planetary systems got to be named by the public. Or at least, the public got to vote on a pre-selected list of 247 names proposed by astronomy groups, universities, planetariums, and the like. These were in turn vetted by the IAU. The odds of being able to vote for Planet McPlanetface or Cybertron, therefore, are slim to none. That said, some fairly unconventional and strange names were selected in the 2015 contest, including Spe, Orbitar, Poltergeist, Dagon, and AEgir.
The IAU is now doing it again, but on a much larger scale. Every participating country will have a star and its lone exoplanet (systems with more than one known planet were excluded) assigned to them. In all cases, a designated star can be seen from its assigned country and bright enough to spot with small telescopes.
Distant Worlds
Deep-Sea Weirdos
Coffinfish
No wonder this fish looks like a grumpy, inflated balloon - it's been holding onto a mouthful of water for ages.
This odd little creature is known as the coffinfish (Chaunax endeavouri), and it lives in the deepest parts of the Pacific ocean. Researchers observed this "breath-holding" behavior for the first time while combing through publicly available videos captured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) remotely operated vehicles, Science reported.
The scientists found footage of eight different individual coffinfish holding in the water they had taken in.
To get the necessary oxygen to survive, fish gulp down water (which is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen), extract oxygen and then "exhale" the oxygen-depleted water by releasing it from their gills, Science reported. But these fish held onto that water in their large gill chambers for quite a long time, from 26 seconds up to 4 minutes, rather than releasing it immediately.
As to why the fish do this, the researchers have some guesses. They said breath-holding may help the fish conserve energy. It could even protect them by making them look bigger to predators, similar to what pufferfish accomplish by pushing out their stomachs. When a coffinfish holds in water, its body volume increases by 30%, according to the study.
Coffinfish
Uh-Huh
'Automatic Chemistry'
Don-Old Trump (R-Fabulist) has claimed he shared an "automatic chemistry" with the Queen during his state visit to the UK earlier this week.
The US president praised the monarch as a "spectacular woman" and also denied fist-bumping her when he arrived for the ceremonial welcome at Buckingham Palace.
"The meeting with the Queen was incredible, I think I can say I really got to know her because I sat with her many times and we had automatic chemistry, you will understand that feeling," he said told US broadcaster Fox News.
"There are those that say they have never seen the Queen have a better time, a more animated time," he added.
He added: "We had a period we were talking solid straight, I didn't even know who the other people at the table were, never spoke to them. We just had a great time together."
'Automatic Chemistry'
Testimony Blocked
Climate Change
White House officials barred a State Department intelligence agency from submitting written testimony this week to the House Intelligence Committee warning that human-caused climate change could be "possibly catastrophic." The move came after State officials refused to excise the document's references to federal scientific findings on climate change.
The effort to edit, and ultimately suppress, the prepared testimony by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research comes as the Trump administration is debating how best to challenge the fact that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet and could pose serious risks unless the world makes deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade. Senior military and intelligence officials have continued to warn climate change could undermine America's national security - a position President Trump rejects.
Officials from the White House's Office of Legislative Affairs, Office of Management and Budget, and National Security Council all raised objections to parts of the testimony that Rod Schoonover, who works in the Office of the Geographer and Global Issues, prepared to present on the bureau's behalf for a hearing Wednesday.
The document lays out in stark detail the implications of what the administration faces in light of rising carbon emissions that the world has not curbed.
"Absent extensive mitigating factors or events, we see few plausible future scenarios where significant - possibly catastrophic - harm does not arise from the compounded effects of climate change," the document said.
Climate Change
Taxpayer-Funded Golf Tab
$105.8 Million
President Don-Old Trump (R-Charlatan) wrapped up a visit to his Ireland golf resort Friday, in the process adding at least another $3.6 million to a taxpayer-funded golf tab that totals nearly $106 million in just 2 1/2 years.
Trump played golf Friday morning and possibly also played Wednesday and Thursday evenings. The White House press corps was not allowed on the property and was instead kept at a hotel in Limerick, more than an hour away from Trump's resort in Doonbeg.
Trump also discussed his resort with Ireland's minister for trade, employment and business upon his arrival at Shannon Airport, where he met Ireland's prime minister. That 65-minute meeting was conducted at an airport lounge near the food court and the duty-free shopping because Trump did not want to travel to the nation's capital, Dublin. It was the entirety of Trump's official business in Ireland.
That meeting, in fact, was added well after the White House began planning for the visit to Doonbeg. The White House and the Irish prime minister's office announced the meeting on May 21, but a team of White House, Secret Service and State Department officials visited Shannon and Doonbeg in late April.
With the additional travel costs of flying the planes that were used as Air Force One; the need to transport U.S. Marine Corps helicopters and presidential limousines to Ireland in addition to England and France; and the State Department expenses, the Ireland excursion cost taxpayers at least $3.6 million more than if Trump had stayed in London on Wednesday night and returned to Washington from France on Thursday, according to a HuffPost analysis.
$105.8 Million
Salisbury Poisoning
Puti Says
Britain's next prime minister should "forget about" the poisoning of a former Russian double agent in Salisbury, Vladimir Putin has said.
The Russian president said he hoped whoever succeeded Theresa May would see what he described as the bigger picture and move on from the Skripal attack.
He described Sergei Skripal, a former colonel in Russian military intelligence who betrayed dozens of Russian agents to MI6, as London's spy.
"He's your agent not ours. That means you spied against us and it's hard for me to say what happened with him subsequently. We need to forget about all this in the final analysis," he said.
Mr Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury with the nerve agent novichok in March last year.
Puti Says
Pro-Rape, Pro-Incest
Texass
A Texas Republican has said women who have abortions should "absolutely" be punished and deserve to go to prison for having their pregnancy terminated.
Representative Ron Wright, who was elected in 2018, responds to questions about whether or not women who induce their own abortions should be punished with jail in a video released by abortion access advocacy group Reproaction.
When the interviewer asks if he is concerned women could be sent to prison for having abortions, he says: "As far as I'm concerned, they committed murder".
This comes after Texas proposed a law that would criminalise abortions and make it possible for women to receive the death penalty for having an abortion.
It would allow no exceptions for abortions in cases of rape, incest or when the health of the mother is at risk. But the bill appeared to have failed back in April and is currently pending in committee.
Texass
Returns To Lebanon
'Tachtouch'
A Lebanese monkey who breached the border with Israel was returned to its owner Friday by United Nations peacekeepers after cavorting for more than a week in enemy territory.
Its owner, a French nun who describes herself as a "virgin hermit", was quick to see the primate's escapade across one of the world's most tense borders as a message of peace.
Tachtouch escaped late last month, prompting its owner Beatrice Mauger who runs a peace project in southern Lebanon to launch an appeal on Facebook.
The monkey was spotted in multiple locations but evaded capture for more than a week.
The capture took five days of stalking by three women with "determination, love and faith", the post said, including a video of the three sitting with the monkey in a cage in the boot of a car.
'Tachtouch'
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