Recommended Reading
from Bruce
The time for deeds not words is now": Lucy Mangan on the dangers of normalising America's shock election result (Stylist)
1. Watch the language. Vocal opposition stopped admissions of pussy-grabbing being hidden under the label 'locker room talk'. Let's keep at it. Many news organisations, including the BBC, describe Trump's new chief strategist Steve Bannon as a "conservative firebrand". He is the former CEO of Breitbart News, a website which became a haven for white supremacists under his leadership. His ex-wife is on record in court saying he did not want their children to go to school with Jewish children. I understand there are libel law constraints, but there is still probably a better name for him.
Thomas E. Patterson: "Harvard study: Policy issues nearly absent in presidential campaign coverage" (The Conversation)
… journalists have paid scant attention to the candidates' platforms. That conclusion is based on three reports on the news media's coverage of the 2016 campaign that I have written for the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where I hold a faculty position.
Froma Harrop: The Zen of Thanksgiving (Creators Syndicate)
Thanksgiving is the most American of holidays. But there is something almost un-American about it. It is a day opposed to striving, to getting more. We stop adding up the numbers on the scorecard of life. We freeze in place and give thanks for whatever is there.
Froma Harrop: We Can Attack Global Warming Without Trump (Creators Syndicate)
The comforting news is that America can move past the black hole of ignorance in Trump's Washington - or New York or wherever he is. Enlightened state and city governments, as well as the private sector, can provide the leadership. As it happens, they're already on the case.
Connie Schultz: Sexism? Misogyny? So Last Week (Creators Syndicate)
… I come from the white working class. I cherish my roots, but I caution against romanticizing them. We have always had our darker side, fueled by a fear of "the other," which often includes women.
Lucy Mangan: Bob and Roberta's Excellent Protest Adventure review - all slogans, no substance (The Guardian)
Bob and Roberta Smith - AKA the artist Patrick Brill - enlisted the help of Billy Bragg, Noam Chomsky and Roger Scruton to explain how modern protest works. But his uneven, scattergun approach led to an irritating hour.
Jonathan Jones: Shakespeare's Stratford reminds us of a morbid, fantasising England (The Guardian)
The cult around Shakespeare has led to the restoration of murals in Stratford-upon-Avon, whitewashed over by his father. They're far from masterpieces, but they do show us an England in thrall to devils and death.
Clive James: 'My idea of a speed thrill is turning up the gas on a mower' (The Guardian)
Damon Hill installed me like a piece of frightened luggage in the front passenger seat of a fast saloon and headed towards the airport.
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David Bruce has over 80 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
wrote:
took the day off.
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Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Suggestion
Trump's "The Wall"
Hey, Marty ~ I found this today while listenening to a little Pink Floyd on YouTube...it's "Trump's The Wall". I loved it...check it out!
Donald Trump's The Wall - YouTube (If you want to see this, Google the title - link pulled - 11/27/16 ~m)
A faithful reader,
Tiera H.
Thanks, Tiera!
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
LET'S ROLL UP OUR SLEEVES AND GET TO WORK!
SANCTUARY.
YUCK!
THE RACIST!
TURN DOWN THE VOLUME!
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Rained all day.
Calls Election Recount A 'Scam'
T-rump
Donald Trump (R-Pendejo) called a recount of votes being prepared in Wisconsin a scam, insisting Saturday that his presidential win should be respected, not "challenged and abused."
The recount, which was requested by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who received a minute fraction of the total vote, flew in the face of an election "that has already been conceded," Trump said.
Hillary Clinton's campaign said it would join the recount although it has not seen any irregularities so far in the White House contest won by Trump.
In a statement, Trump asserted that "the people have spoken and the election is over, and as Hillary Clinton herself said on election night, in addition to her conceding by congratulating me, 'We must accept this result and then look to the future.'"
However, during the campaign Trump himself threatened to reject the result if he lost, alleging that the race was "rigged" by the media and the establishment elite.
T-rump
In A Select Group
Merrick Garland
Judge Merrick Garland will soon put on his black judicial robe for the first time in months. The bad news for President Barack Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court is that Garland's going back to hearing cases at his old job, not the high court.
Garland now joins a small group of people nominated but not confirmed to the Supreme Court, and there's no script for how to act as an unsuccessful nominee.
As the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Garland stopped hearing cases after being nominated by Obama in March to fill the seat of Justice Antonin "Fat Tony" Scalia, who died in February. Garland's chances of getting confirmed evaporated with Donald Trump's (R-Grifter) election as president, and the judge is expected to return to the bench at the federal courthouse on Washington's Constitution Avenue. It's a building that Trump's presidential limousine will pass during the inauguration parade in January.
Before Garland, the last unsuccessful Supreme Court nomination was Harriet Miers, nominated by resident George W. Bush to fill the seat of retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in 2005. Miers, who had never been a judge, ultimately withdrew as a nominee after questions from Republicans about the strength of her conservative beliefs. Now 71, she's a lawyer in private practice.
Before Miers, the two previous unsuccessful nominees to the court were, like Garland, judges on the appeals court in the nation's capital. Judge Robert H. Bork was nominated by President Ronald "Red Ink" Reagan to fill the seat of retiring Justice Lewis Powell in 1987. When liberal groups mobilized against Bork and senators voted down his nomination, he resigned his judgeship.
Merrick Garland
French 'Spiderman'
Alain Robert
French "Spiderman" Alain Robert scaled one of the tallest skyscrapers in Barcelona without a harness on Friday.
Bystanders and police watched as the 54-year-old climbed up and then descended the Torre Agbar, a glass-covered office building known for its night-time illuminations, completing the feat in around one hour.
The urban climber is famous for his daredevil, harness-free approach to scuttling up buildings with nothing more than some chalk on his hands and climbing shoes on his feet.
Robert has conquered over 100 structures worldwide including San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, Dubai's Burj Khalifa complex, the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Sydney Opera House without safety equipment.
Alain Robert
Outshines Treasures At British Museum
Makapansgat Pebble
In a corner of the British Museum's new South African exhibition, near an ancient golden rhino and a collection of apartheid-era campaign badges, sits a glass case holding a pitted, reddish-brown stone.
It is the Makapansgat pebble, on display for the first time in its three-million-year history, curators reckon - an object that, in its own way, outshines the other treasures in the museum's halls.
Experts theorise a very early ancestor of humans, Australopithecus africanus, picked up the pebble and took it home, mainly because it was interested in a pattern of lines on the surface that, even today, look startlingly like a face.
"This is an example of early curiosity, a pre-cursor to true art that some people have called the earliest piece of art of anywhere in the world, the earliest piece of found art," said John Giblin, co-curator of the show "South Africa: the Art of a Nation".
The naturally-formed pebble - also known as the stone of many faces - was found in Makapan valley in Limpopo province near some Australopithecus remains in the 1920s, several kilometres away from its likely source.
Makapansgat Pebble
'Snoopers' Charter' Becomes Law
UK
In Britain, Big Brother just got bigger.
After months of wrangling, Parliament has passed a contentious new snooping law that gives authorities - from police and spies to food regulators, fire officials and tax inspectors - powers to look at the internet browsing records of everyone in the country.
The law requires telecoms companies to keep records of all users' web activity for a year, creating databases of personal information that the firms worry could be vulnerable to leaks and hackers.
Civil liberties groups say the law establishes mass surveillance of British citizens, following innocent internet users from the office to the living room and the bedroom.
Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing World Wide Web, tweeted news of the law's passage with the words: "Dark, dark days."
UK
Loses Final Norway Appeal
Snowden
Norway's supreme court on Friday rejected a final appeal by fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden to secure assurances he would not be extradicted to the US should he travel to Norway to collect an award.
Just as was the case in an original lawsuit and the subsequent appeal to a lower court in Oslo, the supreme court said it could not evaluate an extradition request preemptively.
Former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, Snowden, who lives in exile in Russia, faces charges of espionage and theft of state secrets in his homeland that could land him up to 30 years in jail.
It's a further blow for the 33-year-old US citizen and his supporters at the Norwegian branch of the PEN Club who hoped he would be able to pick up the Ossietzky prize, which celebrates "outstanding efforts for freedom of expression."
Norway was one of the countries where Snowden sought asylum after fleeing the United States in 2013, but Oslo's response was that asylum seekers had to be physically present in the country to apply.
Snowden
Involved In Students Disappearance
Mexican Army
Mexican soldiers were involved in the disappearance and apparent massacre of 43 students two years ago, according to a leading journalist, implicating the military directly in a crime that has been blamed solely on corrupt police and drug gang members.
Anabel Hernandez, a well known investigative journalist, leveled the allegation in her soon to be published book, titled "The True Night in Iguala". The first chapters of the book, based on interviews with a drug lord and other direct sources, were released on the website Aristegui Noticias on Friday.
In one excerpt, a source had described how members of the army were tasked by a drug lord with recovering two million dollars worth of heroin that was stashed in two buses taken at random by a hundred students.
The students were seeking transportation to Mexico City for a protest, but were stopped by the police so that soldiers could search the buses, the book said.
"As the military was retrieving the drugs from the buses, the students on board must have realized what they were taking from the compartments. That would have created the unexpected need to 'disappear' them so as not to leave witnesses," it said.
Mexican Army
Organizers Reduce Number Of Riders
Grands Tours
Grands Tours organizers have decided to reduce the number of riders at their races in a move aimed at improving safety and increasing competition.
The Tour de France, Giro d'Italia and Spanish Vuelta organizers said in a joint statement Friday that the number of riders per team will decrease to eight, instead of the nine currently at their three-week races.
The decision taken by ASO - which organizes the Tour de France and Vuelta - RCS Sport and one-day races organizers Flanders Classics will come into effect for the 2017 season. It will also see a reduction of riders at the other races they organize, with teams reduced to seven riders instead of eight.
Following a meeting of the international association of cycling race organizers, they said they want to improve safety by reducing traffic on roads and make it more difficult for a team to dominate a race. The numbers of teams per race will remain unchanged.
The organizers believe that reducing the number of riders will help open up the races so that they are less controlled. Three-time Tour de France champion Chris Froome's Sky Team has been the dominant team in the peloton recently, locking down the race in the mountains and reducing suspense at cycling's biggest race.
Grands Tours
Supercolony in Ethiopian Forests
Ant Overlords?
The forests of Ethiopia are teeming with a supercharged ant that is poised to invade the globe, new research suggests.
The infamous ant species, Lepisiota canescens, is demonstrating the behavior needed for supercolony formation and for global invasion - (insect world domination, anyone?), the researchers say.
"The species we found in Ethiopia may have a high potential of becoming a globally invasive species," study author D. Magdalena Sorger, a postdoctoral researcher at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, said in a statement. "Invasive species often travel with humans, so as tourism and global commerce to this region of Ethiopia continue to increase, so will the likelihood that the ants could hitch a ride, possibly in plant material or even in the luggage of tourists.
"All it takes is one pregnant queen," she added. "That's how fire ants started."
Typically, ants form colonies made up of one nest and ruled by one queen. But about 20 different ant species - think of them as the Romans or the Incas of the insect world - have their sights set on building an empire. These ants form so-called supercolonies comprising many nests with many queens. Supercolonies can contain billions of individuals that swarm out across the landscape and wipe out their ant neighbors. The Argentine ant, for instance, has a supercolony that spans most of California and is now expanding into Mexico, researchers previously told Live Science, while the biggest supercolony on the planet spans 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) across the Mediterranean, according to a 2009 article in the journal Insectes Sociaux.
Ant Overlords?
In Memory
Ron Glass
Ron Glass, the handsome, prolific character actor best known for his role as the gregarious, sometimes sardonic detective Ron Harris in the long-running cop comedy "Barney Miller," has died at age 71.
Glass died Friday of respiratory failure, his agent, Jeffrey Leavett, told The Associated Press on Saturday.
Although best known for "Barney Miller," Glass appeared in dozens of other shows in a television and film career dating to the early 1970s.
He portrayed Derrial Book, the spiritual shepherd with a cloudy past in the 2002 science-fiction series "Firefly" and its 2005 film sequel "Serenity."
He was Felix Unger opposite Demond Wilson's Oscar Madison in "The New Odd Couple," a 1980s reboot of the original Broadway show, film and television series that this time cast black actors in the lead roles of Unger's prissy neat freak forced to share an apartment with slovenly friend Madison.
Glass was also the voice of Randy Carmichael, the genial neighbor and father of four children in the popular Nickelodeon cartoon series "Rugrats" and its spinoff, "All Grown Up."
He also made appearances in such shows as "Friends," ''Star Trek: Voyager" and "Designing Women." More recently he appeared in episodes of "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." Early credits included "All in the Family," ''Maude," ''Sanford and Son" and "Hawaii Five-0."
In "Barney Miller" his literate Detective Ron Harris was one of the few generally normal characters who populated a New York City police precinct filled with oddballs on both sides of the law. The ensemble cast included Hal Linden as precinct Capt. Barney Miller, Max Gail as Detective Stan 'Wojo' Wojciehowicz, and Abe Vigoda as Detective Phil Fish.
The show aired from 1975 until 1982, winning two Golden Globes and two Emmy Awards for best comedy series. Glass was nominated for a supporting actor Emmy in 1982.
Raised in Evansville, Indiana, Glass received a Bachelor of Arts degree in drama and literature from the University of Evansville.
After graduation he moved to Minneapolis where he worked in regional theater before coming to Los Angeles to launch his TV and film career.
He was also a member of the board of directors for Los Angeles' AL Wooten Jr. Heritage Center, an organization named for a man murdered in a gang-initiation drive-by shooting and dedicated to helping inner-city youth stay safe and receive an education.
Ron Glass
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