Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Robert Evans, Anonymous: 5 Insane Things I Learned About Drugs as an Undercover Agent (Cracked)
When you hear about the Department of Homeland Security, you probably picture a bunch of people in body armor swooping in on terrorist cells and forbidding you from carrying full bottles of shampoo onto airplanes. That's a small part of what they do -- the DHS has authority to bust everything from drug smugglers to child porn peddlers.
Marc Dion: The Next Horst Wessel (Creators Syndicate)
Horst Wessel was an early Nazi who was gunned down in Germany in 1930, either by a communist or by a thug, since Wessel was rumored to be both a political enthusiast and a pimp.
Deborah Orr: Richard Dawkins's lack of sympathy for those who cling to religion is a shame (Guardian)
I agree with Dawkins that religion's time of dominance now has to pass. But I don't think it's time yet to berate believers as nothing but tiresome fools.
Lucy Mangan: quiet days with Dad (Guardian)
In the runup to Father's Day every year, I promise I'm going to get to know my dad…
'Your child is going to experiment': what teenagers really think (Guardian)
By Suzanne Moore and a load of kids.
Oliver Burkeman: "This column will change your life: are you wasting your warmth?" (Guardian)
Like any attempt to split humanity neatly into two, the peach/coconut divide is absurdly oversimplified. But it's also useful.
Alison Flood: Self-publishing boom lifts sales by 79% in a year (Guardian)
18m titles bought by readers in 2013, to a value of £300m, as print sales' decline continues.
Dr. David Lipschitz: Eat the Right Fats and Reduce Your Risk of Cancer and Heart Disease (Creators Syndicate)
To stay healthy we must not only reduce fat intake but must also watch the type of fat consumed. … I suggest that you stock your kitchen with olive oil. Saute with olive oil, use it in salad dressings, add pepper, and use it on bread rather than butter. The benefits may well be huge and assure a better and perhaps even a longer life.
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 approximately 50 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
"Doug's Most Shared Facebook Post" Today
wrote:
took the day off.
has retired.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Best wishes for a speedy recovery!
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
from Marc Perkel
BartCop
Hello Bartcop fans,
As you all know the untimely passing of Terry was unexpected, even by
him. We all knew he had cancer but we all thought he had some years
left. So some of us who have worked closely with him over the years are
scrambling around trying to figure out what to do. My job, among other
things, is to establish communications with the Bartcop community and
provide email lists and groups for those who might put something
together. Those who want to play an active roll in something coming from
this, or if you are one of Bart's pillars, should send an email to
active@bartcop.com.
The most active open discussion is on Bart's Facebook page.
( www.facebook.com/bartcop )
You can listen to Bart's theme song here
or here.
( www.bartcop.com/blizing-saddles.mp3 )
( youtu.be/MySGAaB0A9k )
We have opened up the radio show archives which are now free. Listen to
all you want.
( bartcop.com/members )
Bart's final wish was to pay off the house mortgage for Mrs. Bart who is
overwhelmed and so very grateful for the support she has received.
Anyone wanting to make a donation can click on this the yellow donate
button on bartcop.com
But - I need you all to help keep this going. This note
isn't going to directly reach all of Bart's fans. So if you can repost
it on blogs and discussion boards so people can sign up then when we
figure out what's next we can let more people know. This list is just
over 600 but like to get it up to at least 10,000 pretty quick. So
here's the signup link for this email list.
( mailman.bartcop.com/listinfo/bartnews )
Marc Perkel
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny and seasonal.
Protests No-Shows By Democrats
Richard Grayson
An openly gay former college professor who lives in Arizona said on Friday he is running as the Democratic candidate for the lone U.S. House of Representatives seat in Wyoming to protest the absence of other Democrats seeking the office in the conservative state.
Richard Grayson, 63, said the fact he is a liberal activist who strongly supports same-sex marriage and abortion rights makes him a long-shot to win a general election contest against incumbent Republican Cynthia Lummis, who first won the seat in 2008.
"My winning is not within the realm of possibility, but I would rather see a hopeless campaign by a Democrat than none at all," Grayson said.
He said it would be too dispiriting to watch Lummis or her Republican primary opponent Jason Senteney, a former U.S. Marine who calls himself a "blue-collar conservative," run unopposed in November.
Richard Grayson
Special Bolivian Birthday Cake
Ban Ki-moon
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon got an unusual treat for his 70th birthday on Friday when the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, presented him with a cake made with coca leaves.
The UN chief was in Santa Cruz, Bolivia for a meeting this weekend of the G77 group of countries to discuss measures for reducing poverty.
Coca is used to make cocaine but host Morales, a former coca farmer, has long defended its legal use as an "ancestral rite" for tea, sweets and medicines, going so far as to pull coca leaves out of a small plastic bag during a UN anti-drug meeting in Vienna in 2012 and chew on a wad of them. People in the Andean region also traditionally chew on coca leaf as a source of energy or as an antidote to altitude sickness.
Ban was effusive in his thanks but stopped short of publicly taking a bite of the "torta de coca" or of endorsing Morales' position on the controversial leaf.
Ban Ki-moon
Muslim Reporter At The Texass GOP Convention
Heba Said
The Texas Republican Party's annual convention ended a week ago, but it's still managing to make headlines.
The GOP gathering first attracted national attention by fast-tracking a new platform that includes endorsing "reparative therapy" for gays. Some of the more moderate Republicans in attendance had hoped to address the matter, but the anti-gay topic was never allowed to come up for debate.
Now, a reporter who was covering the convention says she was targeted and taunted because of her Muslim headdress.
Heba Said, a senior at the University of Texas at Arlington, is the opinion editor of the school paper, The Shorthorn. The 22-year-old said she applied for media credentials and attended the convention hoping to share with her readers what it was like to sit in on panel discussions with delegates.
Instead, Said writes, "I discovered a cult-like hatred that is simply disgusting."
Heba Said
Sets Guinness World Record
Alex Trebek
As game show champ Ken Jennings wrote recently in The Hollywood Reporter, "Nothing in TV lasts, but Jeopardy! is forever."
Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek has now nabbed a bit of immortality. On Friday night, he claimed the Guinness World Record for "most game show episodes hosted by the same presenter."
Trebek, who has presided over the show since 1984, has now hosted 6,829 episodes of Jeopardy!.
"This is special in the fact that I've been around for a long time, and I've had the good fortune to be associated with a good program like Jeopardy!," Trebek said in a video accompanying the announcement. He reiterated: "It also means that I've been around a long time."
Alex Trebek
New Levels
Partisan Hatred
A new study by Pew Research verifies much we already know about political extremism in America: It's getting worse and interfering with social and economic progress. The big question is: Why?
Pew doesn't address that question, but here's a plausible answer: Voters are becoming angrier because living standards are falling and the middle class is shriveling. Prosperity breeds comity, but when it gets harder to get ahead, the natural inclination is for the losers to look for somebody to blame and the winners to feel more threatened. That's been going on for nearly 30 years.
Income inequality began to worsen in the United States starting around the early 1980s. Most of Pew's data on political polarization begins in 1994, and shows Democrats and Republicans consistently growing more distant from each other in their views and ideology. Most of the split occurred during the last 10 years, a time in which median household income dropped for the first time since the end of World War II.
The decline in economic optimism clearly coincides with an increase in polarization in the political sphere. It's always tricky to draw cause-and-effect relationships from different sets of data, but it would hardly be surprising that a consistently tougher economy made voters more bitter, and led them to blame their difficult straits on the policies of whatever party they view as the opposition.
Partisan Hatred
Battles To Stop Faroes' Dolphin 'Grind'
Sea Shepherd
Hundreds of Sea Shepherd activists are heading for the Faroe Islands for an unprecedented campaign against a traditional dolphin hunt that they call "an obsolete massacre," the conservation group said Friday.
Relays of volunteers will patrol the ocean and beaches of the remote North Atlantic archipelago, an autonomous country within Denmark, from mid-June to October to try to block the killing of pilot whales, members of the dolphin family, in a practice known locally as a "grind".
"This is a tradition that's hundreds of years old, dating from when inhabitants needed to eat dolphins to survive," Sea Shepherd director Alex Cornelissen told AFP in Amsterdam, en route for a ferry to the Faroe Islands, which lie between Iceland and Scotland and have a population of around 50,000.
The timing of the "massacre" depends on when the cetaceans are spotted offshore, and Sea Shepherd activists have intervened in the Faroes several times in the past.
The mammals are then forced into a bay by flotillas of small boats before being hacked to death with hooks and knives -- a "grind" that many locals defend as a cultural right.
Sea Shepherd
Poaching Spreads To National Forests
Redwoods
The poaching of knobby growths on ancient redwood trees has spread to national forests in Northern California and Oregon.
The growths, known as burls, appear at the base of redwood trees, where they send out sprouts. Their intricate grain is prized for furniture and decorations.
The poaching has been a problem in Northern California's Redwood National and State Parks for years. Two men recently were convicted in a case there after rangers tracked slabs cut from a tree by chain saw to a redwood burl shop.
Wendell Wood of the conservation group Oregon Wild says he was out hiking recently and found two redwood trees with burls cut off.
One was along the South Fork of the Smith River on the Six Rivers National Forest near Crescent City, California. The other was along the Winchuck River on the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest near Brookings, Oregon, in a stand that represents the northernmost reach of coast redwoods.
Redwoods
Oil Drilling Contamination
Amazon Rainforest
Peru's Amazon rainforest is extensively contaminated from decades of oil and gas drilling, researchers reported yesterday (June 12) here at the annual Goldschmidt geochemistry conference.
In the past decade, volatile demonstrations by indigenous groups and tangled lawsuits against oil companies have exposed the toxic legacy of decades of oil drilling in the Western Amazon. People living in the rainforest say they are suffering health effects from the nearby polluted drilling and waste sites, and from eating plants and wildlife laced with heavy metals and petroleum compounds.
But lax government regulations during the early years of oil exploration, combined with a lack of environmental monitoring, mean there's little data on the true extent of contamination in the richly diverse rainforest.
"I was surprised by how little has been published," said study co-author Antoni Rosell-Melé, an environmental chemist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain.
Now, using publicly available water sampling data, Rosell-Melé and his colleagues have built a comprehensive database of contamination levels during the past 30 years in Peru's remote rainforest. The team plans to publish the database so other scientists can use the data to better understand how oil exploration affects the Amazon rainforest.
Amazon Rainforest
Big Donor Retreat
Koch Bros
This weekend, at a posh California resort near Laguna Beach, energy is expected to be among the topics as Charles and David Koch and their extensive donor network hold a semiannual fundraising and policy seminar. Political allies including Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and libertarian political scientist Charles Murray are slated to speak, according to conservatives familiar with the Koch network.
The energy initiative is being created under the umbrella of the largest Koch network nonprofit in apparent response to a number of developments: the commitment by liberal billionaire Tom Steyer to steer $100 million into ads in several states to make climate change a priority issue in the elections; numerous setbacks at the state level where Koch network backed advocacy groups have been fighting against renewable energy standards; and the new EPA regulations to curb carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
The meeting will cap a frenetic fundraising season for the conservative donor network. This year the Koch network not only hosted a similar January conference, but several smaller gatherings in Palm Springs, Newport Beach, St. Louis, and other locales to attract new donors, according to an email from Koch fundraising honcho Kevin Gentry obtained by The Daily Beast In his email, Gentry called the Palm Springs event- which drew some 50 wealthy conservatives in March -a "highly successful recruitment reception" and encouraged other veteran donors to get involved by holding local gatherings in their areas.
Now, hitting the $290 million goal seems within reach: almost $170 million of that total was pledged at the last big Koch donor seminar in January this year, say two conservative sources. The hefty haul will help fund a mix of politically active nonprofits like the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, and a newer outfit called the Libre Initiative that's aimed at appealing to Hispanics with a small government, free-market message. AFP alone is expected to spend upwards of $125 million this year on a variety of political and advocacy projects including air and ground operations, according to Politico.
Koch Bros
Moves To Decriminalize
Jamaica
Marijuana possession is currently illegal in Jamaica but that could soon change.
The government of Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller has proposed to amend the Caribbean island nation's narcotics law to decriminalize possession of up to two ounces of marijuana -- known here as ganja.
The move, announced Thursday by Justice Minister Mark Golding, would mean possession of small amounts of the drug would lead to a fine.
The government has also given approval for the possession and use of marijuana for religious, medical or research purposes.
Jamaica
Oklahoma City
American Pigeon Museum
A new road trip destination in central Oklahoma focuses on the history of the domestic pigeon and its contributions to mankind for thousands of years.
The Oklahoman reports that the American Pigeon Museum and Library in northeast Oklahoma City contains numerous photographs, paintings, trophies, artifacts, collectables and much more memorabilia.
Pigeons were considered among the fastest way to send messages until the telegraph was invented. They played a tremendous role in both world wars, and they are still a way to send an undetectable message.
Pigeons come in almost 1,000 different breeds with varying types of feathers, sizes and colours.
American Pigeon Museum
In Memory
Chuck Noll
Former Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Chuck Noll, the only coach in NFL history to win four Super Bowl titles, has died at the age of 82, US media reported Friday.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Noll died at his home in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. He had been in ill health for several years, battling Alzheimers disease, a heart condition and back problems.
Noll, leader of Pittsburgh's vaunted "Steel Curtain," began his coaching career as a defensive assistant with the Chargers, and also worked for the Baltimore Colts before taking charge in Pittsburgh in 1969.
He coached the Steelers for 23 years. His first Steelers' team went 1-13, and his fifth won the franchise's first NFL title in Super Bowl 9, the first of back-to-back titles in the 1974 and 1975 seasons.
Under Noll's guidance Pittsburgh claimed two more Super Bowl crowns in the 1978 and 1979 seasons.
Noll was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1993.
Chuck Noll
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
