Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Marc Dion: Goodbye, Jesus (Creators Syndicate)
If you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you own two car washes in Austin, Texas, and you've got a house with a built-in pizza oven, Jesus thinks the homeless guy sleeping on the sidewalk in front of your car wash is better than you are. Not as good as. Better.
Connie Schultz: Time Magazine Gets It Right: We've Changed (Creators Syndicate)
It's that sleeved elbow in the Time cover photo - the one attached to an unidentified woman sitting to the right - that magnifies the message. Five elegant women - actress Ashley Judd, singer Taylor Swift, former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, Visa lobbyist Adama Iwu and Mexican agricultural worker Isabel Pascual - are pictured on the cover in all of their fierce glory. That elbow, though. She's the woman just out of view but not out of sight. She's the stand-in for every person who has feared ruin - or worse - if he or she were to speak out against a harasser, abuser or predator.
Ted Rall: Will President Trump Last Another Year? (Creators Syndicate)
As I speculated in February, I believe [Paul] Ryan wants to be president in 2020. As Speaker of the House, he's the one person who can launch impeachment proceedings. I can easily imagine the following quid pro quo: Ryan gets rid of Trump, Pence agrees not to run in 2020, Ryan runs with Pence's endorsement.
Froma Harrop: Roy Moore Poisons Alabama's Business Climate (Creators Syndicate)
In 2006, a Chicago schoolteacher was sentenced to three years in prison for molesting teenage girls. He was 34 at the time and, according to news accounts, had slipped his hands under the shirt of a 17-year-old and fondled her breasts. That's how a moral America deals with men who molest underage girls. Roy Moore apparently did the same at age 32, except that one of the girls was 14 and his hands roved down to panty level.
Susan Estrich: Is Trump Making You Sick? (Creators Syndicate)
I tried not to roll my eyes when an acquaintance, a woman I respect for her professional accomplishments, told me she thought Donald Trump had caused her cancer. "You know, the connection between stress and cancer," she said. I know. But was she really so stressed about Donald Trump that she got cancer?
Lenore Skenazy: Lock the Kids Inside? (Creators Syndicate)
Sometimes people say to me, "It's just natural to be protective of your child." And it certainly is! Yet the idea that kids can never have any unsupervised time is new. Most likely, your parents loved you just as much as you love your kids, but they didn't think that the moment they let you walk around the corner or ride your bike to a friend's house, you'd get kidnapped, raped and murdered. That belief is what today's parents have had dripped into them like morphine.
Mark Shields: Francisco Franco and the 2018 Republicans (Creators Syndicate)
… a midterm election is a straightforward referendum on the sitting president - Democrat or, in the current case, Republican. That's what it was in 2010 on President Barack Obama, who had a favorable job rating of 45 percent on Election Day, when his Democrats took a shellacking and lost the House. Four years earlier, President George W. Bush's 42 percent job approval rating on Election Day enabled the Democrats to take House majority control from his Republicans.
Mark Shields: Understanding Republicans (Creators Syndicate)
The first Democratic president elected after Ronald Reagan was confronted with then-record budget deficits and the lowest economic growth rate in a half-century. So Bill Clinton, with every elected Republican on Capitol Hill voting against him, successfully pushed through an economic plan that, heaven forfend, raised the income taxes of the richest 1.4 percent of Americans. What followed was the creation of 22 million jobs and the nation's fiscally rising from the largest budget deficits in U.S. history to the largest budget surpluses in U.S. history.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
from Marc Perkel
Marc's Guide to Curing Cancer
So far so good on beating cancer for now. I'm doing fine. At the end of the month I'll be 16 months into an 8 month mean lifespan. And yesterday I went on a 7 mile hike and managed to keep up with the hiking group I was with. So, doing something right.
Still waiting for future test results and should see things headed in the right direction. I can say that it's not likely that anything dire happens in the short term so that means that I should have time to make several more attempts at this. So even if it doesn't work the first time there are a lot of variations to try. So if there's bad news it will help me pick the next radiation target.
I have written a "how to" guide for oncologists to perform the treatment that I got. I'm convinced that I'm definitely onto something and whether it works for me or not isn't the definitive test. I know if other people tried this that it would work for some of them, and if they improve it that it will work for a lot of them.
The guide is quite detailed and any doctor reading this can understand the procedure at every level. I also go into detail as to how it works, how I figured it out, and variations and improvements that could be tried to enhance it. I also introduce new ways to look at the problem. There is a lot of room for improvement and I think that doctors reading it will see what I'm talking about and want to build on it. And it's written so that if you're not a doctor you can still follow it. It also has a personal story revealing that I'm the class clown of cancer support group. I give great interviews and I look pretty hot in a lab coat.
So, feel free to read this and see what I'm talking about. But if any of you want to help then pass this around to both doctors and cancer patients. I need some media coverage. I'm looking for as many eyeballs as possible to read these ideas. Even if this isn't the solution, it's definitely on the right track. After all, I did hike 7 miles yesterday. And this hiking group wasn't moving slow. So if this isn't working then, why am I still here?
I also see curing cancer as more of an engineering problem that a medical problem. So if you are good at solving problems and most of what you know about medicine was watching the Dr. House MD TV show, then you're at the level I was at when I started. So anyone can jump in and be part of the solution.
Here is a link to my guide: Oncologists Guide to Curing Cancer using Abscopal Effect
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
PUNCHABLE FACES.
DUCKY BOY!
WHAT A PUD!
BULLSHIT!
THE NEW REPUBLICAN PARTY EMBLEM.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
The raccoons are active again tonight.
Rips Systemic Racism
Eminem
Eminem is drawing another line in the sand with his new politically charged anthem "Untouchable."
The Detroit rapper issues a blistering critique of institutional racism, white privilege and police brutality in the second track from his upcoming "Revival" album. He shared the new single online late Thursday.
"Black boy, black boy, we ain't gonna lie to you; Black boy, black boy, we don't like the sight of you," he raps from the perspective of what appears to be a white police officer at the start of the track.
The real Slim Shady later references America's racial tensions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and NFL player Colin Kaepernick's sparking of the "Take A Knee" movement against systemic racism and police brutality.
One of the standout lines is:
"Throughout history, African-Americans have been treated like shit, and I admit there have been times where it's been embarrassing to be a white boy."
Eminem
Secret Scholar
Omar Mohammed
His mother didn't know that "her Omar" had been working as an undercover historian, documenting atrocities committed by the Islamic State group inside Mosul. But she wasn't totally surprised when her son told her his secret.
Omar Mohammed, 31, disclosed in an Associated Press story Thursday that he is the man behind the legendary and widely read Mosul Eye, the pseudonym under which he wrote the catalog of horrors that was life under Islamic State fanatics.
After Mohammed told tens of thousands of Twitter and Facebook followers that he was Mosul Eye, post after post thanked him, blessed him and welcomed him with a single word: Hero.
Anonymous for more than three years, Mohammed wandered the streets of occupied Mosul by day, chatting with shopkeepers and Islamic State fighters, visiting friends who worked at the hospital, swapping scraps of information. He grew out his hair and his beard and wore the shortened trousers required by the extremists. He forced himself to witness the beheadings and deaths by stoning, so he could hear killers call out the names of the condemned and their supposed crimes.
By night, he was Mosul Eye, and from his darkened room he told the world what was happening. If caught, he knew he would be killed.
Omar Mohammed
Sues National Enquirer
Charlie Sheen
Charlie Sheen sued the National Enquirer on Friday, alleging that the tabloid defamed him when it reported that sexually abused Corey Haim when the latter was 13 years old.
On Nov. 8, the Enquirer quoted former actor Dominick Brascia as saying that Haim - now deceased - told him of the sexual encounter. The story describes Sheen as "twisted child molester" and an "adult rapist."
In his lawsuit, Sheen calls the story part of an "egregious, hurtful and disgusting campaign of defamations."
The lawsuit alleges that Dylan Howard, the Enquirer's editor-in-chief, published the story partly out of revenge for not getting the scoop on Sheen's HIV-positive status.
The lawsuit names Howard and Brascia as defendants, along with American Media and the Enquirer.
Charlie Sheen
Delayed Ballet To Test Kremlin Tolerance
Nureyev
A Bolshoi Theatre ballet about the life of Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev set to premiere on Saturday contains tender scenes of gay romance, testing the Kremlin's tolerance for what it calls "homosexual propaganda".
The production had been due to open in July but was canceled at the last minute, with the theater's management saying it was not ready. At the time, Russian state news agency TASS quoted a source close to the culture ministry saying there were concerns about the ballet's gay themes.
Regarded as one of ballet's most gifted male dancers and an accomplished choreographer, Nureyev died in 1993 from AIDS.
At a rehearsal to which the media was admitted on Friday, Bolshoi staff said the production had undergone only minor technical changes since Serebrennikov was replaced. Serebrennikov has not commented publicly.
The ballet as performed on Friday also features a character reading official files on Nureyev from informers, alleging that in Paris he was spending time with "dubious people, some of them pederasts, among whom were clearly representatives of Western intelligence agencies."
Nureyev
The 'Wrath Of God'
Jerry Brown
California Gov. Jerry Brown warned that President-for-now Donald Trump (R-Crooked) is calling down the "wrath of God" by ignoring climate change and its catastrophic consequences.
"I don't think President Trump has a fear of the Lord, the fear of the wrath of God, which leads one to more humility ... this is such a reckless disregard for the truth and for the existential consequences that can be unleashed," Brown, who once studied to become a priest, said in an interview for "60 Minutes," which will air Sunday.
Brown and Californians are grappling with the most devastating fire season in the state's history. Nearly 200,000 peoplehave been forced to flee their homes in the current searing series of blazes in Southern California, including the 143,000-acre monster Thomas fire. The first fire-related death was reported Friday night when Virginia Pesola, 70, of Santa Paula, was found dead in a car that had been involved in an accident along an evacuation route.
Brown attributes California's hellish series of wildfires to climate change. He lashed Trump for withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, which the president said was "bad" for America. "That's a preposterous idea, not even a shred of truth in that statement," Brown said.
Jerry Brown
Serious Threats From the T-rump Administration
Solar and Wind Power
Less than a year into President-for-now Trump's (Corrupt) time in office, clean energy developers face a slew of unanticipated threats from the White House and Republicans in Congress that could slow the industry's growth in ways unimaginable just a year ago.
During Trump's presidential campaign, energy analysts were skeptical of his promise to preserve the coal industry at the expense of wind and solar. Even the most aggressive attempts at regulatory rollback couldn't reverse the market forces driving the decline in coal, they reasoned.
But the administration has not stopped at mere deregulation. From the threat of a subsidy for coal-fired power plants to a tax bill that hurts the financing of clean-energy projects, Republicans in Washington have launched a campaign against renewable energy that includes market interventions that alarm other industries, including oil and gas.
Even if these measures never come to fruition-advocates of transitioning from fossil fuels are pushing back-the changed mood in Washington threatens to undermine the confidence of companies planning to invest in renewables. Jeff Waller, of the Rocky Mountain Institute's sustainable finance practice, described the lingering threats as a "spook factor" that hangs over investment.
The tax-cut packages that passed the House and Senate represent the most immediate threat to the deployment of renewable energy. The version of the bill that passed the Senate contains a provision that would impose a new tax on many companies that finance wind and solar projects. For some companies, including large multi-national corporations, the new tax could hit 100% and make investing in clean-energy sources a money loser. That financing mechanism generated $13 billion in investment in U.S. renewable energy this year, according to energy research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
Solar and Wind Power
Archaeologists Discover 2 Ancient Tombs
Egypt
Egypt on Saturday announced the discovery of two small ancient tombs in the southern city Luxor dating back some 3,500 years and hoped it will help the country's efforts to revive its ailing tourism sector.
The tombs, located on the west bank of the river Nile in a cemetery for noblemen and top officials, are the latest discovery in the city famed for its temples and tombs spanning different dynasties of ancient Egyptian history.
"It's truly an exceptional day," Antiquities Minister Khaled al-Anani said. "The 18th dynasty private tombs were already known. But it's the first time to enter inside the two tombs."
The ministry said one tomb has a courtyard lined with mud-brick and stone walls and contains a six-meter (yard) burial shaft leading to four side chambers. The artifacts found inside were mostly fragments of wooden coffins. Wall inscriptions and paintings suggest it belongs to era between the reigns of King Amenhotep II and King Thutmose IV, both pharaohs of the 18th dynasty.
The other tomb has five entrances leading to a rectangular hall and contains two burial shafts located in the northern and southern sides of the tomb.
Egypt
Finally Proved to Exist
Excitonium
After 50 years of theories and thwarted attempts, scientists have finally proved the existence of a new form of matter. The never-before-detected condensate is called excitonium, a name first coined in the 1960s by Harvard theoretical physicist Bert Halperin. Halperin is now 76. Peter Abbamonte, the physicist responsible for the discovery, recently saw him at a party; Halperin was, apparently, excited.
"It's as close to 'proved' as you're ever going to get in science," Abbamonte, a physics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Newsweek. "You can never really 'prove' anything, but, well, people find it convincing."
Excitonium is a condensate, meaning what the researchers detected was a solid. Excitonium is made up of particles called excitons, in the same way that, say, solid aluminum is made up of aluminum particles. The exciton particles themselves, though, aren't created through quite as intuitive a process.
Let's start with something a little more conventional to compare to, like hydrogen. Hydrogen particles are made up of an electron and a proton. Exciton particles, then, are made up of an electron that's escaped and the negative space it left behind when it did so. The hole actually acts like a particle, attracting the escaped electron and bonding with it; they orbit each other the same way an electron and a proton would.
As much as previous scientists suspected that excitonium existed, they never had a good enough way of proving it. What Abbamonte and his colleagues did was invent an electron-scattering technique to detect the exciton particles' final result, excitonium. They started with a clean surface of the material in a vacuum-no air or anything else-and then scattering the electrons from its surface to make waves, like hitting the middle of a trampoline.
Excitonium
Risks His Life To Rescue Zoo Animals
Amir Khalil
Zoo animals are seldom seen at airports, but Queen Alia International airport in Amman, Jordan, is remarkable for its exotic arrivals. On 11 April, a flight landed carrying a bear called Lula and a lion called Simba, the only two surviving animals from Mosul zoo in Iraq. More than 40 other animals had died during the fight to liberate Mosul from Isil - either caught up in the bullets and blasts, or from starvation.
By the time Simba and Lula were rescued, they were emaciated, wounded and deeply traumatised. It would take two weeks for Simba to leave his shelter and explore his new home. Then, on 10 August, airport staff welcomed five lions, two tigers, two bears, two hyenas and two husky dogs from the Magic World - a zoo just outside Aleppo, Syria, which didn't look much like a zoo after six years of civil war. Around 110 animals had died, the keepers were nowhere to be seen, enclosures were filled with filth and mortar shells, and the few creatures not wiped out by the war were getting worse by the hour.
The safe arrival of these animals in Jordan marked the culmination of a particularly hard few months for Amir Khalil, 52, a vet who works for Four Paws, an Austria-based animal-rescue organisation, and the instigator of both operations. Rescuing the animals was costly and dangerous. An Isil suicide bomber blew himself up outside the zoo in Mosul, forcing Khalil - who had just arrived to save Simba and Lula - to leave again. Getting the animals out of Aleppo meant crossing through rebel-, government- and al-Qaeda-held territory.
There was machine-gun fire, and endless red tape involved in repeatedly trying (and failing) to get the animals through checkpoints. In recent years we have heard much about the human cost of war: 400,000 killed in Syria; an estimated 40,000 civilian casualties in Mosul alone. Why so much effort for a few animals? Or, as officials liked to say to Khalil, 'just' animals.
'Humans have the option to escape but animals caged in a zoo don't have this option,' he says. And yes, of course, there has been profound human suffering but animals, too, should give us pause. 'It was humans who brought animals to these places,' he says - and they depend on us to get them out. 'They cannot speak, they have no political agenda, but they are messengers from the darkness, they bring hope.'
Amir Khalil
In Memory
Steve Reevis
Actor Steve Reevis, who had supporting roles in the movies Fargo and Last of the Dogmen, has died. He was 55.
Reevis was a member of the Blackfeet Tribe in northwestern Montana.
He also appeared in the movies Dances With Wolves and the 2005 version of The Longest Yard and acted in several television episodes, including Walker, Texas Ranger, JAG and Bones.
Reevis is survived by his wife, Macile, and four children.
Steve Reevis
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