Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Froma Harrop: Democrats, Drop Identity Politics Now (Creators Syndicate)
The public dislikes identity politics big time. Right-winger Steve Bannon rejoices when Democrats try to sell themselves through special appeals to race, gender, ethnicity or sexual identity. When Democrats dwell on identity politics, "I got 'em," he said. "(W)e can crush the Democrats."
Marc Dion: Build Those Walls (Creators Syndicate)
All these years, and we still don't know how to feel about that war, except that we don't blame anyone for not going, but we want to honor those who did with concrete, because is concrete is cheaper than a lot of other things. In Dollar Store America, we don't want to do anything, but we want to "respect the flag," and "support our troops," because those things, like concrete monuments, are cheap.
Ted Rall: Bernie's Plan to Address the Retirement Crisis: Good It Exists, But Not Nearly Enough to Solve the Problem (Creators Syndicate)
I wish progressives like Sanders would take a cue from President Donald Trump in political negotiations: Ask for the stars and you might wind up with the moon. Compromise with yourself in anticipation of your rivals' complaints, ask for the upper atmosphere and you'll likely get nothing much at all.
Mark Shields: What Presidential Debates Teach Us (Creators Syndicate)
… long-shot Democratic Brooklyn Rep. Hugh Carey would upset Samuels and the Democratic leadership in that Watergate election year with a memorable campaign slogan crafted by Carey's campaign consultant, David Garth: "This year, before they tell you what they want to do, make them show you what they've done."
Lenore Skenazy: Compassion, Not Contempt, for the Dad Who Lost His Twins (Creators Syndicate)
Juan Rodriguez, a doting upstate New York dad, forgot his 1-year-old twins in the back seat when he went to work as a Bronx social worker last Friday. When he got back to his car at the end of the day, he realized his mistake and started screaming. They were dead. I'd like to scream now, too. That's because the state has not yet decided whether it will drop the charges of manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and endangering the welfare of a child it has brought against Rodriguez. Meantime, the judge set the bail at $100,000 - as if Rodriguez is a risk to others, as if this will teach the rest of us some sort of lesson.
Susan Estrich: What If You Like Your Private Insurance? (Creators Syndicate)
Six in 10 Medicare recipients supplement Medicare with private insurance, either through retirement coverage provided by employers or by Medigap plans offered by private insurers. Among Medicare recipients, a group with the highest turnout records, those who have private supplemental insurance tend to be better educated and have higher income than other Medicare beneficiaries. Likelihood of voting increases with age, education and income. If the people on Medicare don't want to give up their private insurance and they are among the demographic most likely to vote, is this policy plan the Democrats' best path to the White House?
Susan Estrich: Death Penalty Politics (Creators Syndicate)
You can't just say, "No, I'm against the death penalty" - as Michael Dukakis did at Polley Pavillion in 1988. You can't start quoting me numbers when I'm thinking of this man killing his daughter, this pregnant woman just like me standing at the ATM machine, holding her hands over her stomach to protect her baby.
Rick Beato: KATY PERRY VS. FLAME LAWSUIT: Let's Compare! (YouTube)
In this episode we discuss and compare the songs Dark Horse by Katy Perry and Joyful Noise by Flame. The lawsuit was decided against Katy Perry and I will examine the similarities and differences between the two songs.
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Michael Egan
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May Make Cases More Common
Streaming Music
To show that Katy Perry and the team that wrote her 2013 hit "Dark Horse" may have heard his song and stole from it, Christian rapper Marcus Gray's primary evidence was that his 2009 song, "Joyful Noise" had plays in the millions on YouTube and Spotify.
Plaintiffs in copyright cases like Gray, who won a $2.78 million victory over Perry and her co-writers on Thursday, must prove that the artist who stole from them had a reasonable opportunity to hear a song that was widely disseminated, a principle lawyers simply refer to as "access."
But does access have any meaning in a streaming era when almost everyone has access to almost everything?
The question, as other issues at Perry's high-profile trial did, suggested that technology may be outpacing copyright law, and that more David vs. Goliath victories for relatively obscure artists like Gray over superstars like Perry may be the result.
"The law around it is a two-pronged test, access and substantial similarity," Michael Kelber, a Chicago attorney who specializes in intellectual property and technology, told The Associated Press on Friday. "The fact that the access prong is so much easier to show, that can be some potent evidence for a jury."
Streaming Music
Scares Off Approaching Cougar
Metallica
A woman out hiking in woods says she scared off a cougar by playing Metallica music from her phone to it.
Dee Gallant said the sound "saved the day" when the animal approached her.
The 45-year-old was walking with her dog, Murphy, in Vancouver Island, Canada, when she spotted that they were being "stalked" by a cougar, CNN reported.
As it approached, Ms Gallant yelled, and the big cat stopped moving forward but did not retreat. She waved her arms and shouted at the animal, saying things like "bad kitty!" and "get out of here!" but the cougar stood its ground.
Then she opened her phone and chose music from Metallica, the loudest band she could think of, playing a track called Don't Tread On Me.
Metallica
Now A New Fossil Species
Millennium Falcon
Paleontologists excavating a site in the Canadian Rockies known as the Burgess Shale have discovered the fossilized remains of a heretofore-unknown species of arthropod with a distinctive horseshoe-shaped upper shell. They whimsically named the species Cambroraster falcatus after the Millennium Falcon starship piloted by Han Solo in the Star Wars franchise. The discovery, reported in a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, sheds light on the diversity of the earliest relatives of insects, crabs, and spiders.
Discovered in 1909 by paleontologist Charles Walcott and dating back to the mid-Cambrian era some 508 million years ago, the Burgess Shale has since become one of the richest troves of preserved fossils from that period. The late Stephen Jay Gould immortalized its importance in his bestselling 1989 book, Wonderful Life, in which he argued (somewhat controversially) that the sheer diversity of the Burgess Shale fossils was evidence for several unique evolutionary lineages that became extinct, rather that continuing down to today's modern phyla. The Burgess Shale was declared a World Heritage Site in 1980.
In 2013, scientists discovered yet another piece of the Burgess Shale in Kootenay National Park and excavated the fossilized remains of some 50 new species in just 15 days. That's the area where a team of paleontologists affiliated with the Royal Ontario Museum discovered this latest arthropod.
"We really didn't know what to make of it," co-author Joe Moysiuk of the University of Toronto told CBC News. "We nicknamed it 'The spaceship' because we thought it looked a lot like the Millennium Falcon." And the name stuck, to the delight of Star Wars fans everywhere.
"Cambroraster is kind of showing a mish-mash of traits that we see in some modern groups," Moysiuk said of the find's significance. "It's telling us that the Cambrian ecosystems were really complex. This is not a sort of primitive, simple organism. This is a highly specialized predator."
Millennium Falcon
Not Hours
Jobs
The U.S. economy is adding lots of jobs, but a drop in the number of hours at work points to a dimmer outlook for economic growth as businesses brace for an escalating trade war with China.
Many economists think the economy only needs to add about 100,000 jobs a month to keep up with new entrants to the workforce. So data released on Friday showing 164,000 jobs were added in July suggests the historically low jobless rate might fall further.
That is, as long as the economy doesn't go into a recession.
The Labor Department's employment report for July showed an index of hours worked across the economy fell 0.2% in July. The index, which economists treat as an early indicator of economic growth, has been cooling for much of this year.
But there are worrisome signs in the economy. A significant part of the weakness in hours worked came from the manufacturing sector, which is particularly exposed to an escalating trade war with China.
Jobs
Nearing Point of No Return
The Arctic
Many of the globe's far northern regions have been experiencing extreme weather events over the past two months. Plumes of smoke have been picked up by satellites from wildfires across Alaska and Siberia and Greenland has experienced rapid ice loss as usually frigid regions have experienced heatwaves and record temperatures.
"The basic chemistry and the basic physics of how the atmosphere absorbs heat - there's no path where you can imagine that the Arctic is going to start to cool off again," says Brian Brettschneider, a climatologist and post doctoral fellow at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
"Cold air has to come from somewhere, cold air doesn't just magically appear, and that somewhere has to be accounted for in the entire energy balance of the Earth. Right now the whole Earth has just warmed up," Brettschneider tells TIME. "It would take a dramatic reversal of the chemical composition of the atmosphere."
In Alaska, 2.4 million acres of wildfire have burned through July. In the northern Russian province of Siberia, more than 7 million acres have burned. Greenland has also seen several wildfires in July, but the largest threat to Greenland is a heatwave that spread from Europe to the Arctic country, causing 197 billion tons of ice melt in July alone.
Meteorologist Eric Holthaus says the Arctic is nearing a point of no return, as the global temperature increases closer to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial era levels, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns would have destructive consequences, creating more frequent and extreme weather events and causing high sea level rise.
The Arctic
So Much Oil
The Arctic
In 2007, two Russian submarines plunged down 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) into the Arctic Ocean and planted a national flag onto a piece of continental shelf known as the Lomonosov Ridge. Rising from the center of the Arctic Basin, the flag sent a clear message to the surrounding nations: Russia had just laid claim to the vast oil and gas reserves contained in this underwater turf.
Russia's dramatic show of power had no legal weight - but it isn't the only nation that's trying to stake claims to the Arctic's vast depository of oil and gas. The United States, Norway, Sweden, Finland and China are all trying to cash in. It's no wonder: Projections show that the area of land and sea that falls within the Arctic Circle is home to an estimated 90 billion barrels of oil, an incredible 13% of Earth's reserves. It's also estimated to contain almost a quarter of untapped global gas resources.
Most of the oil that's been located in this region so far is on the land, just because it's easier to access. But now, countries are making moves to start extracting offshore, where the vast majority - 84% - of the energy is believed to occur. But long before this oil race began, how did the Arctic become so energy rich?
"The first thing you realize [if you look at a map] is that the Arctic - unlike the Antarctic - is an ocean surrounded by continents," Alastair Fraser, a geoscientist from Imperial College London, told Live Science. Firstly, this means there's a huge quantity of organic material available, in the form of dead sea creatures such as plankton and algae, which form the basis of what will ultimately become oil and gas. Secondly, the surrounding ring of continents means that the Arctic Basin contains a high proportion of continental crust, which makes up about 50% of its oceanic area, Fraser explained. That's significant because continental crust - as opposed to ocean crust, which makes up the rest of the area - typically contains deep depressions called basins, into which organic matter sinks, he said.
Here, it gets embedded in shale and preserved in 'anoxic' waters, meaning they contain little oxygen. "Normally, in a shallow sea with lots of oxygen, it would not be preserved. But if the sea is deep enough, the ocean will be stratified, meaning the oxygenated waters at the top will be separated from the anoxic conditions at the base," Fraser explained. Conserved within these oxygen-deprived basins, the matter maintains compounds that ultimately make it useful as an energy source millions of years in the future.
The Arctic
Iceland Stranding
Whales
Some 20 pilot whales have died stranded in mysterious circumstances on the south-western coast of Iceland, emergency services said Saturday, only two weeks after a similarly unexplained mass stranding had already killed dozens of the long-finned cetaceans.
The dead whales, part of a group of 50 stranded whales, were discovered late Friday near Gardur, some 50 kilometres (31 miles) from the capital Reykjavik.
According to Icelandic media, locals began rescue efforts to save the whales even before emergency teams arrived.
"Around 90 volunteers worked all night to keep the animals wet," David Mar Bjarnason, a spokesman for the Icelandic research and rescue association, told AFP.
By 08H00 GMT the last of the surviving whales were back in deep water.
Whales
Water In Volcano
Hawaii
For the first time in recorded history, a pond of water has been discovered inside the summit crater of Hawaii's Kilauea volcano, a development that could signal a shift to a more explosive phase of future eruptions.
After a week of questions about a mysterious green patch at the bottom of the volcano's Halemaumau crater, the former home of a famed lava lake, researchers confirmed the presence of water on Thursday, officials with the U.S. Geological Survey told The Associated Press on Friday.
"The question is what does this mean in the evolution of the volcano?" USGS scientist emeritus Don Swanson said.
Halemaumau has never had water since written observations began, he said, so the pond is unusual.
Scientists aren't exactly certain what will happen next, but when lava interacts with water it can cause explosive eruptions.
Hawaii
Created In China
Human-Monkey Hybrid
Scientists say they have created the world's first human-monkey hybrid in a laboratory in China.
The researchers, who want to use animals to create organs for human life-saving transplants, say creating the hybrid was an important step.
The team revealed that they had injected human stem cells capable of creating any type of tissue into a monkey embryo. The experiment was stopped before the embryo was old enough to be born.
But the scientists - who were Spanish but held the trial in China to get round a ban on such procedures at home - said a human-monkey hybrid could have potentially been born.
Human-Monkey Hybrid
In Memory
D.A. Pennebaker
D.A. Pennebaker, a cinematographer, director and master of cinema verite known for the 1967 documentary Don't Look Back, has died. He was 94.
Don't Look Back followed Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of England and picked up a string of awards. The film was deemed culturally significant and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1998.
Pennebaker's other films included the 1973 David Bowie concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, and the 2000 film Down From the Mountain about the musicians who performed the songs in the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?
The iconic filmmaker was nominated for an Oscar, along with his wife Chris Hegedus, for the 1994 doc The War Room about Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. He received an honorary Oscar in 2013.
Pennebaker and Hegedus made most of their films together over the past several decades. They shared an Emmy nomination for outstanding directing for a variety, music or comedy program for the documentary Elaine Stritch at Liberty. The film won Emmy Awards in two other categories in 2004.
Donn Alan Pennebaker was born on July 15, 1925 in Evanston, Illinois. He studied mechanical engineering at Yale and graduated in 1947. The young Pennebaker worked as an engineer and served in the Naval Air Corps during World War II, before embarking on a career in film.
D.A. Pennebaker
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