from Bruce
Anecdotes
Prejudice
• Groucho Marx hated prejudice. (You probably remember that when he was excluded from a beach club because he was Jewish, he asked, “Since my children are only half-Jewish, can they go into the water up to their knees?”) Once, he joined a club for Jews only. He and his brother Harpo immediately worked to change the rules so Gentiles could join. Danny Thomas was one of the first people to take advantage of the new rules.
• On June 3, 1972, in Cincinnati, Sally Priesand became the first woman ordained as a rabbi in the United States. Some congregations refused to accept her as a student rabbi after her fifth year of study, and some congregations refused to accept her as a rabbi after her eighth year of study. However, she eventually became an assistant rabbi at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York.
• Just before World War II, a Jew in Vienna wanted to emigrate to avoid the coming destruction. He went to a travel agent, who showed him a globe and asked him where he wanted to go. However, every time the Jew named a country, the travel agent replied that the country had a quota, or didn’t accept Jews, or there was a long waiting period for a visa. Finally, the Jew asked, “Do you have another globe?”
• During World War II, a French monastery hid several Jewish children, including Pierre Weiss, from the Nazis. A picture of Jesus was found under Pierre’s pillow, and he was asked why he had put the picture there. Pierre explained, “Jesus was a Jew, and in order to save him from the Gestapo, I hid him.”
• A homophobe once said to lesbian comedian Judy Carter, “I love the sinner. I just hate the sin.” She replied, “Do you really love me? Then don’t fire me from my job, don’t take away my constitutional rights, don’t take my children away from me, don’t murder me … that is, if you love me.”
• Back in 1977, Anita Bryant organized a campaign against gay men and lesbians that started in Dade County, Florida, then spread nationwide. Some supporters of the anti-gay campaign put this bumper sticker on their cars: “Kill a Queer for Christ.”
• An African-American man got on a subway, sat down, opened a Yiddish newspaper and began to read. A Jew tapped him on the shoulder and asked, “Black isn’t enough for you?”
• Danny Kaye once said that he’d emigrate to Israel if he were younger. Why? He explained, “There, if somebody calls you a dirty Jew, it’s just because you haven’t taken a bath.”
Problem Solving
• Two women asked Rabbi Saul of Tiktin to resolve a dispute. Each claimed that a 5-ruble note belonged to her. The rabbi took possession of the 5-ruble note, then asked the two women many questions, but was unable to determine to which woman the 5-ruble note really belonged. Therefore, he went into another room, leaving the door ajar so the two women could overhear him, and talked to his wife. He told her that he was having a hard time deciding to which woman the 5-ruble note belonged — for one thing, the 5-ruble note had a torn corner, and neither woman had mentioned it to him. When he returned to the two women, one of the women told him that she had just remembered that the 5-ruble note had a torn corner. The rabbi replied, “In that case, this 5-ruble note is not yours because it does not have a torn corner.” He showed the note to her, then handed it to the other woman.
• While traveling, Zen master Zenko came across a ruined temple. He examined the temple and decided to restore it. However, there was a problem: How to raise the funds necessary for rebuilding the temple? Taking thought, Zenko posted signs saying that he would burn himself to death on a certain day, and if any people cared to donate money, he would allow them to watch. On the day of the scheduled suicide, Zenko meditated silently on top of a huge mass of firewood, then he opened his eyes and told the crowd of people watching him, “While I was meditating, the saints all told me, ‘It is still too early for you to think of leaving the world. Put up with this world for a while longer, and stay here to save living beings.’ Therefore, I can’t burn myself to death today.” Zenko then took the money the crowd had donated and used it to restore the temple.
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "Cheap Whiskey"
Album: CELEBRATIONS AND REGRETS
Artist: Justin Cashion
Artist Location: Dallas, Texas
Record Company: Aldora Britain Records
Record Company Location: Rothley, UK
Info: This is another compilation of 24 tracks by various artists working in various genres by Aldora Britain Records, which releases such compilations weekly.
Justin Cashion’s motto is “Rock & Roll with a Paranoid Narrative.”
Price: £2.30 (GBP) for track; £2.30 (GBP) for 24-track album, so buy the album
Genre: Country
Links:
CELEBRATIONS & REGRETS
Aldora Britain Records
Aldora Britain Records on YouTube
Justin Cashion on Bandcamp
Other Links:
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
David Bruce's Blog #3
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 140 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Stephen Suggests
Coming to a supermarket near you
Stephen
Thanks, Stephen!
New Venture
Michael Egan
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Grand Sumo is back for the next 15 days.
Statue Unveiling
Marion Ross
Well, the day has come! Hollywood icon Marion Ross is back in Albert Lea to see a statue unveiling of her. She's known for her role in "Happy Days" from 1974 to 1984.
And, the Albert Lea community came together to make this day special.
The Marion Ross Committee raised $100,000 to make this statue come to town. One fundraising idea they had was for people to buy a brick that would be right in front of the Marion Ross Performing Arts Center.
And after the event, Marion spent some time talking to fans at Three Oak Wines.
And for the homecoming queen, she says it feels good to be back home, surrounded by people who love and care for her. Her fondest memory in town is of the lake!
Marion Ross
50 Years
Jim Morrison
Paris on Saturday was the only place to be for die-hard Jim Morrison fans.
Fifty years after his death at age 27, rock music lovers from France and across the world came to the Pere-Lachaise cemetery in eastern Paris where The Doors’ frontman is buried. Many brought candles and pictures, and some burned incense sticks near his grave as police watched nearby.
Year after year, the place has become a pilgrimage for fans of Morrison, known for his dark lyrics, wavy locks, leather pants, steely gaze and theatrical stage presence. He propelled The Doors to several major hits between 1965 and 1967, including “Light My Fire,” “Hello I Love You,” “Touch Me” and “Riders on the Storm.”
Born in 1943 in Melbourne, Florida, Morrison was the son of a U.S. Navy officer and moved constantly as a child, growing up in Florida, Virginia, Texas, New Mexico and California.
In 1965, while living in Los Angeles’ bohemian neighborhood of Venice Beach and frequently taking LSD, he and keyboardist Ray Manzarek, a fellow UCLA film student, founded The Doors. Guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore joined soon after.
Jim Morrison
Students Launch Underground Newspaper
BYU
To work for the student newspaper at Brigham Young University, you must first understand what you cannot write about.
Students aren’t allowed to report anything that’s critical of the school or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which owns it. That includes any mention of the faith’s past support for polygamy or segregation that “could cause embarrassment” now, The Salt Lake Tribune reports.
Reporters should also avoid the topics of drugs, sex education, birth control, evolution and other “claims of science,” according to rules established for the publication in the 1970s that largely remain in place today. At the time, there was also a specific ban on any stories about “acid rock music.”
(The university president then wasn’t a fan of Pink Floyd, a band he considered “evil.”)
Now, one group is trying a different approach. A few of them have left the staff at the school’s paper, The Daily Universe, and have launched their own underground, independent publication not controlled by BYU.
BYU
Terrible Study Retracted
Covid-19
A study looking at the impacts of covid-19 vaccination—condemned by other scientists as seriously flawed and irresponsible—has now sparked a mutiny of sorts. This past week, several well-respected researchers have resigned from their involvement in the journal that published the paper, which argued that vaccines are killing almost as many people as they’re saving from the pandemic. Today, the paper was retracted.
The study, titled “The Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations—We Should Rethink the Policy,” was published on June 24 in the journal Vaccines and was authored by Harald Walach, Rainer J. Klement, and Wouter Aukema. Citing several sources of data, the authors argued that covid-19 vaccination was more dangerous than commonly believed, and that the benefits of inoculation only barely outweighed the risks caused by covid-19. Most egregiously, they claimed that for every “three deaths prevented by vaccination, we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination.”
The paper was uncritically shared by some on social media at first, including members of the anti-vaccination movement. But it was quickly criticized by many other scientists for its faulty assumptions, bad math, and outright misinformation.
One of the main pieces of evidence the authors presented to support their claim that the covid-19 shots are deadly, for instance, came from the Netherlands’ adverse event reporting system for their vaccines. But as Gizmodo has discussed before, these systems are designed to record any health incident, including death, that occurs after a person receives a new drug or vaccine. They don’t demonstrate that the incident occurred due to the drug—after all, a person may die for any number of unrelated reasons after receiving a vaccine—but instead are meant to flag possible signals of undiscovered side effects that could be linked to a new drug or vaccine, signals that then have to be studied further before any judgment can be made.
It wasn’t long before scientists associated with the journal Vaccines began to protest the study’s publication. Within days, prominent scientists such as Katie Ewer, a member of the Oxford University team who helped create their now widely used covid-19 vaccine, resigned from the journal’s editorial board. A day after her resignation, the journal placed an expression of concern on the paper, meant to alert readers of the many criticisms it had received, and announced it would investigate the matter. The announcement didn’t seem to stop the bleeding, though; at last count, according to the publication Science, at least six scientists in total have resigned from positions as associate or section editors with the journal.
Covid-19
GOP Style
Fundraising
After he denied plans for a campaign fundraiser with a white nationalist who supported the Capitol insurrection, Republican US Rep Paul Gosar (R-Unindicted Co-Conpirator) told supporters in a fundraising email that “the FBI might have had a hand in planning and carrying out” the attack on 6 January.
His baseless claims have been circulating among congressional Republicans who have sought to distance themselves from the false stolen election narrative that inspired the attack in the first place.
The conspiracy theory was shared across right-wing media – amplified by Fox News host Tucker Carlson (R-Trust-Fund-Baby) – and has prompted GOP lawmakers to demand federal law enforcement to disclose whether undercover agents or informants were involved in the attack.
The Arizona congressman also said in the email that Ashli Babbitt – who was fatally shot by a US Capitol Police officer while trying to climb into the House of Representatives – “was executed in cold blood by an unidentified killer”.
During a House committee hearing, he accused the officer of “lying in wait” to “execute” her. In another hearing, he called her a “veteran wrapped in the American flag” who was “executed”.
Fundraising
Smashed Records
Death Valley
The hottest place on Earth had its warmest June on record this year.
Death Valley National Park recorded an average temperature of 102.9 degrees in June, according to the National Park Service. That’s nearly 8 degrees hotter than what’s typical.
“The heat wave that affected much of the West in mid-June peaked at 128 degrees in Death Valley on June 17, which broke the daily record by 6 degrees,” the National Park Service said Friday in a news release. “Seven days in the month set new daily records for high temperatures.”
Even the lowest temperature at the park that month was still above 100 degrees. At 3 a.m. on June 29, the temperature dropped to 104 degrees.
The park, which sits on the California-Nevada border, usually averages 18 days that hit 120 degrees or more, officials said.
Death Valley
South Dakota
Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore national memorial draws nearly 3 million visitors a year to its remote location in South Dakota. They travel from all corners of the globe just to lay their eyes on what the National Park Service calls America’s “shrine of democracy”.
Phil Two Eagle is not opposed to the fact that the giant sculpture of American presidents is a major tourist attraction but he thinks the park should have a different focus: oppression.
“It should be turned into something like the United States Holocaust Museum,” he said. “The world needs to know what was done to us.”
Two Eagle noted what historians have also documented. Hitler got some of his genocidal ideas for ethnic cleansing from 19th and early 20th century US policies against Native Americans.
Two Eagle is Sicangu Lakota and a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. He directs the tribe’s treaty council office which fights to claim sovereignty over lost homeland. He is part of a growing indigenous movement across the US and Canada that is demanding the return of Native American territory seized through broken treaties. And ground zero for the movement is Mount Rushmore.
Mount Rushmore
Fake Positive Results
Kids
Children are always going to find cunning ways to bunk off school, and the latest trick is to fake a positive COVID-19 lateral flow test (LFT) using soft drinks.
So how are fruit juices, cola, and devious kids fooling the tests, and is there a way to tell a fake positive result from a real one? I've tried to find out.
First, I thought it best to check the claims, so I cracked open bottles of cola and orange juice, then deposited a few drops directly onto LFTs. Sure enough, a few minutes later, two lines appeared on each test, supposedly indicating the presence of the virus that causes COVID-19.
It's worth understanding how the tests work. If you open up an LFT device, you'll find a strip of paper-like material, called nitrocellulose, and a small red pad, hidden under the plastic casing below the T-line.
Absorbed to the red pad are antibodies that bind to the COVID-19 virus. They are also attached to gold nanoparticles (tiny particles of gold actually appear red), which allow us to see where the antibodies are on the device.
Kids
Circle Of Life
Seafood
Call it the seafood circle of life: Shells discarded by diners are being collected, cleaned and dumped into waterways around the country and the world, where they form the basis of new oyster colonies.
One of the latest such projects is taking place in Atlantic City, where a casino and two other restaurants are saving the shells left over from their diners. The shells are then collected by the state Department of Environmental Protection, and workers and volunteers with Rutgers and Stockton universities and the Jetty Rock Foundation load them on barges and dump them into the Mullica River.
That waterway is home to one of the last self-sustaining oyster populations on the Atlantic coast, according to Shawn LaTourette, the state's environmental commissioner. The clam, oyster and other shells form the basis of new or expanded oyster colonies when free-floating baby oysters, known as spat, attach to the shells and begin to grow on them.
“You have the benefit not only of ecological restoration, but it has kept 65 tons of shells out of landfills,” said Scott Stueber, a fisheries biologist with the DEP. That helps the eateries save on waste disposal costs.
The program began in 2019 and currently collects oysters from the Hard Rock casino, the Knife & Fork restaurant and Dock's Oyster House in Atlantic City. Several other casinos have expressed interest in joining.
Seafood
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