Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: The Right to Bear Vapes (Creators Syndicate)
Most governments like traditional masculinity. It fills the armed forces with young men. It makes us vote for our guns over our wallets. It ensures that we will never look at our skinny paychecks and considering joining forces with underpaid women, underpaid men, minority group members and, worst of all, gays. It ensures that we will forever have more interest in flying the Confederate flag than we have in walking a picket line to rid ourselves of our own bondage.
Ted Rall: Once Again, in Afghanistan, the U.S. Proves It Can't Be Trusted (Creators Syndicate)
Both sides say they're open to resuming talks. If and when they do, the Taliban - who, after all, didn't invade anyone and are defending their territory from foreign aggression - hold the moral high ground over the United States.
Mark Shields: No New Edition of 'Profiles in Courage' (Creators Syndicate)
Then-Sen. John F Kennedy wrote admiringly in his 1955 book, "Profiles in Courage," about Republican U.S. Sen. Edmund G. Ross of Kansas. In 1868, in a decision Ross knew would end his political career, he broke with his party to vote against the impeachment of then-President Andrew Johnson, the Tennessee Democrat who had succeeded the martyred Abraham Lincoln. By Ross's lone vote, the Republican Senate failed to convict and remove President Johnson. But Ross, who would never again win an election, understood what the vote meant for his own fate: "I almost literally looked down into my open grave," he would write.
Lenore Skenazy: I'm Hummin' It (Creators Syndicate)
How long has it been since McDonald's had a truly great jingle? Longer than it takes a nugget to turn into a rock. Allow me, then, to pen some potential McHits:
To "Send in the Clowns": Isn't it rich?/ Isn't it thick?/ Me with my straw in my shake/ You take a lick./ Send in the pounds./ We're packing on pounds/ All straight to the rear.
Susan Estrich: Watch Warren Run (Creators Syndicate)
"Work for the most liberal candidate with an actual chance of winning," my old friend and mentor Paul Tully used to say, every four years. This year, I have to believe that somewhere in heaven, he's doing the targeting for Warren.
Oliver Burkeman: Why playtime for adults won't bring your childhood back (The Guardian)
What you enjoyed about being nine wasn't playing, it was about not having a mortgage or mouths to feed.
Froma Harrop: Taking Good Money From Bad People (Creators Syndicate)
I don't anticipate there will be any "Jeffery Epstein School of" anything in the conceivable future. But if good institutions can use his money to advance good missions, go ahead.
Froma Harrop: Online Baby Pics Do Not Always Amuse (Creators Syndicate)
The least parents can do is monitor their own judgment about what they share on social media. A bad outcome would be their children growing up to resent them for turning their youth into a public spectacle.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Suggestion
Replacing John Bolton
from Bruce
Anecdotes
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
As for this AM's tweet. "stable genius" must be code for batshit crazy. Where did he even come up with that description? I'm OLD, and I've never heard of anyone being called a stable genius until he stared calling himself that. (And of course, he's the only one who calls him that.) Geniuses are temperamental or eccentric or mad. I've never heard stability and genius linked before. Only a deluded, narcissistic fool would do so.
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
JD is on vacation.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
My 'good' computer is down until Tuesday, at least.
Things may be a bit thin until then, but we'll muddle along.
Saturday's Target
Joy-Ann Reid
Trump lashes out at MSNBC's , tweets that he 'never met' the TV host but that she has 'NO talent' and a 'bad reputation'
President Don-Old Trump (R-Rancid)'s Twitter target on Saturday morning was MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid, who published a New York Times bestseller criticizing him in June.
Whether Reid's book, "The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story," incited Trump's tweet or not is unclear, but the last on-air appearance she made before the president's tweet was Friday night, when she filled in for Chris Hayes on MSNBC's "All In."
"Who the hell is Joy-Ann Reid? Never met her," Trump tweeted, but immediately contradicted his feigned ignorance of the TV host, writing, "she knows ZERO about me, has NO talent, and truly doesn't have the 'it' factor needed for success in showbiz."
Reid has hosted "AM Joy" since 2016, and as of 2018 averages 1 million viewers per episode. She also frequently fills in for Hayes and Rachel Maddow and is one of the most prominent journalists on Twitter, being the "most tweeted" at MSNBC, which ranks fourth in the list of the "most tweeted" outlets, Poynter reported.
Joy-Ann Reid
Inflicted 'Emotional Torture'
A federal appeals court on Friday revived a lawsuit against Fox News brought by the parents of slain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, concluding there are plausible claims that the conservative cable network was party to a "campaign of emotional torture."
Fox Rupert News
The long-awaited opinion by a three-judge panel in New York, reversing a lower court ruling, opens the door for the lawyers representing Seth Rich's parents, Joel and Mary Rich, to obtain internal documents and depose top Fox News executives about a May 16, 2017, story falsely alleging that the DNC staff member had leaked internal party emails to WikiLeaks prior to his murder.
"We would not wish what we have experienced upon any other parent - anywhere," Joel and Mary Rich said in a statement Friday they provided to Yahoo News. "We appreciate the appellate court's ruling and look forward to continuing to pursue justice."
The story in question, authored by Fox News staffer Malia Zimmerman, gave mainstream prominence to one of the most insidious conspiracy theories to arise out of the 2016 election. Suggesting that Rich's death was a political assassination, it was promoted at various times by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, President Trump's longtime political adviser Roger Stone and then White House senior adviser Steve Bannon.
Asked for comment, a Fox News spokeswoman emailed a statement. "The court's ruling today permits Mr. and Mrs. Rich to proceed with discovery to determine whether there is a factual basis for their claims against FOX News," it said. "And while we extend the Rich family our deepest condolences for their loss, we believe that discovery will demonstrate that FOX News did not engage in conduct that will support the Riches' claims. We will be evaluating our next legal steps."
Fox Rupert News
Titled 'America'
Solid Gold Toilet
An 18-karat solid gold toilet worth more than $1 million was stolen early Saturday morning from a British palace that was the birthplace of Winston Churchill, police said.
The Thames Valley Police department said it received a call about the burglary at the Blenheim Palace just before 5 a.m.
A 66-year-old man has been taken into custody in connection to the crime but authorities have not located the toilet, an artwork titled "America."
Detective Inspector Jess Milne said in a statement on the department's website that police believe a "group of offenders" was involved and used "at least two vehicles" to escape.
The toilet, which Blenheim Palace said was fully functional and open to the public to use, is a piece of artwork created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. According to NBC New York, it is estimated to be worth more than $1 million.
Solid Gold Toilet
Shutting Down
MoviePass
MoviePass announced on Friday it's shutting down the discount ticketing service on Sept. 14. Shares of MoviePass parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics dropped 10% Friday afternoon, though the stock trades for a fraction of a penny.
MoviePass notified subscribers that it plans to close down the service because its "efforts to recapitalize MoviePass have not been successful to date." It has formed a strategic review committee, made up of the company's independent directors, to explore "strategic and financial alternatives" for the company.
Among the options it's considering are a sale of the company in its entirety, a sale of the company's assets, including MoviePass, Moviefone and MoviePass Films, as well as the possibility of a reorganization of the company. Helios and Matheson Analytics noted that any transaction would include the "assumption or settlement" of any of its liabilities.
Prior to the service's closure, MoviePass had been struggling for more than a year. Last March, MoviePass launched a revamped version of its unlimited plan, which let users watch one movie per day for $9.95 per month, as part of an eleventh-hour attempt to revive the subscription service. However, the service saw its subscriber base plummet from more than 3 million members to about 225,000 as of April 2019.
Additionally, MoviePass last month laid off at least seven of its employees, bringing the total staff down to about 12 people, according to Business Insider. That's after the company was forced to add restrictions to the app in an effort to slow its cash burn, including limiting users to four movies per month, instead of being able to watch one movie per day. Helios and Matheson also took out sizable loans to cover its ballooning losses.
MoviePass
'International Superstars'
Hacked
A man has been arrested on suspicion of hacking "world-famous recording artists," stealing their unreleased music and selling it for cryptocurrency.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. and City of London Police Commissioner Ian Dyson announced the arrest of the 19-year-old suspected hacker in Ipswich, England, Friday in a joint press release.
The man allegedly accessed artists' websites and cloud-based accounts illegally to steal unreleased songs, before selling the stolen music in exchange for cryptocurrency. The artists were not named in the press release, however the City of London Press Office said there were more than two victims and all the artists were American, some Grammy-award winning.
The arrest comes after hackers reportedly stole unreleased music from English rock band Radiohead and asked for a $150,000 ransom earlier this year.
Band-member Jonny Greenwood took to social media June 11 to tell fans that, instead of paying the ransom, the band would make the 18 hours of music available for download.
Hacked
Poor Information Led To Fatal Blast
Colonial Pipeline
A federal lawsuit accuses a major pipeline company based in Georgia of failing to tell work crews where a major underground pipeline was located before they ruptured the line, touching off a deadly explosion in Alabama.
The workers were trying to make repairs after a Colonial Pipeline Co. line leaked gasoline southwest of Birmingham, Alabama, and was shut down in 2016, threatening U.S. gasoline supplies.
The estate of Anthony Willingham, an Alabama worker who died in the blast, filed a federal lawsuit this week against Colonial Pipeline and a partner company.
Willingham and others weren't given adequate information about the depth and location of the pipeline before they dug into the ground to make repairs, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit also said Colonial's project inspector failed to appear at the site, located in a rural area that caught fire following the explosion. Crew worked for days to extinguish the blaze.
Colonial Pipeline
A 'Turning Point'?
UFOs
For the often-ridiculed followers of ufology, the study of unidentified flying objects, there was a sense of validation when the celebrated physicist and author Michio Kaku took a break from his work on string field theory to address the Ufology World Congress here last weekend and offer some advice on how to behave aboard an alien spaceship.
"For God's sake, steal something!" he exhorted the audience of 1,000 at the Hesperia Barcelona Tower hotel, famous for its spaceship bar perched off the 29th floor. Kaku said a pocketed alien paper clip, alien fork, even a bit of "alien dandruff" would yield useful chemical and genetic information to scientists.
It is, of course, a matter of speculation whether extraterrestrials have hair, let alone dandruff. Drawings based on the descriptions of people who claim to have seen them typically depict them as bald, although there is also believed to be a race of blond humanoid aliens known as "Nordics."
Even without extraterrestrial dandruff to analyze, the field of astrobiology, the study of life outside Earth, has been invigorated recently by some provocative findings released over the past 20 months. Researchers have been poring over recently declassified videos shot by U.S. Navy pilots over the East Coast in 2015, showing mysterious flying objects that behave like no known aircraft. Thanks to newly updated radar systems in Navy jets, the videos have aided scientists by providing "testability" and previously unknown metrics about UFOs. "We now know they fly between Mach 5 and Mach 20 - five to 20 times the speed of sound," Kaku said. "We know they zigzag so fast that any pilot would be crushed by centrifugal force. That they have no exhaust that we can see." The explanations usually invoked for UFO sightings - meteors, weather balloons, even the planet Venus - can't explain these live-action high-precision shots, said Kaku, leading to either of two possible conclusions: They are of human origin, representing a technology so cutting-edge that even leading scientists are puzzled by it. Or, he said, "maybe they are evidence of an advanced outer space civilization."
UFOs
Eating a Diamond
Blackest Material Ever
On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, a team of artists and scientists have made a 16.78-carat diamond - valued at more than $2 million - disappear.
Granted, denizens of the Stock Exchange are no strangers to making vast amounts of wealth vanish, but this time the scientists are doing the heavy lifting. Working with artist Diemut Strebe, a team of researchers from MIT covered the shimmering yellow diamond in a newly discovered type of carbon nanotube coating that turns 3D objects into black, almost 100% light-free voids.
According to the researchers, who described the coating in a study published Sept. 12 in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, this newfound nanotube structure is the blackest of black materials ever created, absorbing more than 99.996% of any light that touches it.
"Our material is 10 times blacker than anything that's ever been reported," lead study author Brian Wardle, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, said in a statement.
The team created the new coating accidentally, while trying to design an improved process for growing carbon nanotubes (essentially, microscopically small strings of carbon) on surfaces like aluminum foil. One problem with working with aluminum, they found, is that a layer of oxides formed whenever the surface was exposed to open air, creating a pesky chemical barrier between the nanotubes and the foil. To eliminate these oxides, the team soaked the foil in saltwater, then moved it into a small oven where the nanotubes could grow without oxygen interference.
Blackest Material Ever
1,000 Thefts Over 27 Years
North Pond Hermit
For 27 years, a small community in the woods of Maine was burglarized more than 1,000 times before finding the culprit. Who was the culprit behind these crimes?
In the summer of 1986, a bright 20-year-old named Christopher Thomas Knight was driving his brand new Subaru Brat through his home state of Maine. He reached a remote patch of wilderness but kept driving.
Eventually, he parked the car as deep in the woods as a car could reach. He left his keys behind, and walked away - slowly getting swallowed up by the endless woods around him.
Knight ended up in the North Pond area of Maine - a community packed full of vacation homes, cabins, and a summer camp that fed many. He got lost and had no idea where he was in comparison to where he began. He ate roadkill to survive, and would take vegetables from strangers' gardens when he'd pass by. It became clear what he had to do to survive.
He began stealing from the homes, one by one. He would study the residents in the area to see when they would come and go from their homes and find the perfect time to break in. He began to memorize every step from his campsite to each of his prime locations.
North Pond Hermit
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