Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Helaine Olen: Another day, another Trump attack on the Affordable Care Act (Washington Post)
If this proposal goes through - and the chances are very high that this regulatory change will ultimately be finalized - it could cause enormous damage to the Affordable Care Act, while at the same time not do a thing to help people with the increasingly high cost of health insurance.
Moya Sarner: How burnout became a sinister and insidious epidemic (The Guardian)
Half a million people in the UK suffer from work-related stress, and psychological breakdown can creep up without warning. But what, exactly, is this 'state of vital exhaustion', and how can you come back from it?
Interviews by Tim Jonze and Jenny Stevens: "Standups on tour: 'Why have I left my kids to stay in a rat-infested garret?'" (The Guardian)
How do comics survive life on the road? They rob their minibars, turn roadies into bird-watchers - and read The Da Vinci Code.
Arwa Mahdawi: "Finding Mr Alt-Right: my adventures on a dating site for Trump fans" (The Guardian)
Republican singletons were excited to hear about the launch of Trump Dating. The temptation to connect with the morally bankrupt fascist of my dreams was too much to resist.
Martin Belam: "Norse code: what's the secret of the Norwegians' Winter Olympics success?" (The Guardian)
Hailing from a nation of only 5.2 million people, Norway's squad is outperforming teams from much bigger countries - and, no, it's not just because they have so much snow.
Joe Bob Briggs: Clarence Thomas and the Party House (Taki Magazine)
I think Clarence Thomas made the right decision in the Wild Party House Case before the Supreme Court, but I think maybe my reasons would be different from his reasons.
Joe Bob Briggs: Please, It's a Horror Film (Taki Magazine)
For the first couple months after Get Out was released, I was beating the drums for it, telling anyone who would listen that it was brilliant dark-comedy horror with a Rosemary's Baby vibe combined with a Roger Corman-type social-commentary subtext. The film has a third-act problem, but I would tell people, "You won't care because the rest of it is so damn brilliant."
Joe Bob Briggs: The Wasp Woman's Weapon Was a Wasp Waist (Taki Magazine)
I walked down 8th Street yesterday, past the jumble of little secondhand shops and shoe stores and stand-up lunch counters and trendy bodegas, looking for the place where Susan Cabot was discovered. It was a club called the Village Barn-little more than a restaurant with a hillbilly theme-and I'm sure she was probably the only actress ever discovered there. It wouldn't surprise me if she were singing country music long before it became fashionable, in 1949, the year a Columbia casting scout named Max Arnow walked in and fell in love.
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog
David Bruce's Lulu Storefront
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 80 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Presenting
Michael Egan
said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Comment
Current Events
Push Predator off a cliff
Cynthia in Alabama found the link below. Cathartic to push him off ledges, make him hop to his fate, etc,!
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
HE BROOKS NO INTELLIGENCE.
LOCK THE 'GATES' ON 'MANAFORT'.
"ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH".
REPUG SNOWFLAKES GET UPSET...
SEX GUNS AND ROCK & ROLL.
"THE ROD OF IRON." WTF!
USEFUL IDIOTS.
HELP!
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Gonna be tied up for a couple weeks - will talk about it when I'm allowed.
Hollywood Walk of Fame
Mark Hamill
Mark Hamill, who rose to fame as Luke Skywalker in the "Star Wars" series, will receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on March 8.
Hamill will receive the 2,630th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with the ceremony taking place at 6834 Hollywood Boulevard in front of the El Capitan Theatre at 11:30 a.m. "Star Wars" creator George Lucas and Hamill's co-star Harrison Ford will help emcee with Leron Gubler, president and CEO of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.
"'Star Wars' fans will be over the moon that hearing their idol Mark Hamill is going to be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We are proud to add this extraordinary actor on our historic Walk of Fame," said Ana Martinez, producer of the Walk of Fame ceremonies, in a statement.
Born in Oakland, Calif., Hamill was discovered in a workshop musical comedy "Anthems in E-Flat Calliope" at the Horseshoe (now Zephyr) Theatre on Melrose Avenue the summer before he studied as a Theatre Arts major at Los Angeles City College. He appeared on TV series and in television movies like "General Hospital" and "MTM's The Texas Wheelers" before landing his first feature film role in Lucas' "Star Wars." Recently, Hamill has appeared in "Kingsman: The Secret Service," reprised his roles as the Trickster in "The Flash" and Luke Skywalker in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi," and will next appear in "Con Man" with James Caan and Ving Rhames.
Hamill is also known for his voice work, especially as the Joker in "Batman: The Animated Series" in the '90s, reprising the role in the "Arkham Asylum" video games and animated film "Batman: The Killing Joke." He's also lent his voice to series like "Avatar: The Last Airbender," "Regular Show," multiple Studio Ghibli films, and "Dragons: Riders of Berk."
Mark Hamill
Szechuan Sauce May Come Back Soon
McDonald's
McDonald's got a taste of the demand for its Szechuan-themed chicken nugget sauce last fall. Now it looks like the fast food giant is going whole hog for it.
The company hasn't officially announced the sauce's return. However, Heavy unearthed documents shared on Reddit that indicate the sauce could be available in some McDonald's locations as early as Monday, Feb. 26.
The dipping sauce had briefly appeared in 1998 to help promote the Disney movie "Mulan." It became a fad of sorts last April thanks to the Season 3 premiere of animated series "Rick and Morty," where Rick declares it his life mission to get the sauce.
The interest generated by the series inspired McDonald's to bring the obscure sauce back for one day in October.
The end result: long lines, disappointed customers and tons of media exposure. Demand for the sauce was so high that one woman claimed she was able to trade a packet of it for a car.
McDonald's
Plan To Adapt To Low-Snow Seasons
Tahoe
A Lake Tahoe ski resort is developing a plan to improve skiing during low-snow seasons by removing boulders and trees from several runs.
Heavenly Mountain Resort's plan calls for widening a dozen trails and removing potentially hundreds or even thousands of trees.
The hope is to reduce skier and snowboard traffic bottlenecks on busy days at the South Lake Tahoe resort straddling the California-Nevada line. Low-snow seasons are expected to become more common due to climate change.
The Forest Service is currently reviewing the plan. It determined in a draft environmental assessment the plan would have no significant environmental impacts. The assessment is now subject to a 45-day public comment period.
Tahoe
In A Moving Van
Antimatter
Antimatter is about to go on its first road trip.
Until now, the list of things that travel in vans has pretty much included indie bands, plumbers and undercover surveillance teams. But, according to a report published online in the journal Nature today (Feb. 21), physicists are getting ready to pack up a cloud of billions of antiprotons for the journey of a "few hundred meters" between the physics lab CERN's antimatter factory and the site of an experiment designed to figure out the shapes of bulky, radioactive atoms.
Antiprotons are rare but hugely important particles. Every matter particle has an antimatter twin, like the Jekyll to its Hyde, with exactly reversed physical properties. And antiprotons are the bizarro versions of protons, the positively charged particles at the center of atoms. When they collide with protons, they annihilate each other.
In nature, antimatter particles are pretty rare. Positrons (bizarro electrons) do occur in lightning bolts and occasionally show up in outer space, but they tend to annihilate one another long before they have a chance to accumulate. So physicists at the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) physics laboratory near Geneva generate them, Nature reported, by "slamming a proton beam into a metal target, then dramatically slowing the emerging antiparticles so they can be used in experiments."
For a project called the antiProton Unstable Matter Annihilation (or PUMA), Nature reported, researchers plan to fire antiprotons at atomic nuclei and, by studying the annihilations, figure out how often those antiprotons collide with neutrons and how often they collide with protons. That will tell them a great deal about where each kind of particle lives in the nucleus. The process happens so fast that they expect to be able to study even the most short-lived nuclei - extremely heavy elements that exist only in laboratories for brief moments before decaying - Nature reported.
Antimatter
Conspiracy Theory
Code Words
On Tuesday on CNN, Parkland survivor David Hogg was asked by Anderson Cooper about the plethora of right wing websites and social media accounts spreading conspiracy theories about him.
In response, Hogg said: "I'm not a crisis actor. I'm someone who had to witness this and live through this and I continue to be having to do that."
Those with little experience of the febrile world of conspiracy theory may not fully understand what Hogg is being accused of. But the idea that mass shooting victims and witnesses are hired performers serving a dark purpose has over the last decade migrated from the farthest margins of conspiracy media.
The first thing to understand is that the "crisis actor" conspiracy theory has a slender tie to reality. Crisis actors do exist, though there is nothing underhanded about them: they are simply performers hired to play disaster victims in emergency drills or wounded combatants in military exercises. They provide a degree of realism for people practicing for real emergencies further down the line.
But in recent years, the term has been appropriated by conspiracy theorists claiming that mass shootings are staged. Social media users, broadcasters and even political staffers now routinely allege that events like the Parkland shooting are orchestrated by shadowy actors in order to effect some political goal. Lately, they are likely to nominate the "deep state" as a culprit - by which they mean segments of the intelligence community and unelected officials who are held to be working against Donald Trump and working towards the confiscation or regulation of firearms.
Code Words
Congresswoman Lies
Claudia Tenney
Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) claimed that people who commit mass shootings are often Democrats during a Wednesday discussion about the Florida school shooting.
The first-term Republican congresswoman made the comment after criticizing the government for failing to act on several tips that might have prevented the deaths of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week.
"It's interesting that so many of these people that commit the mass murders end up being Democrats. But the media doesn't talk about that either," Tenney told WGDJ Talk1300 radio.
Although law enforcement officials said there were "no known ties" between Nikolas Cruz and a particular white supremacist group, the 19-year-old suspected Florida shooter repeatedly expressed racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic views in private group chats, CNN reports.
The fact-checking site Snopes found that an online list purporting to show that assassins are more likely to be Democrats was, in fact, wildly flawed: Among other errors, it simply ignored any mass shooting known to be committed by someone with Republican or conservative views, and it identified shooters who were not Democrats as Democrats.
Claudia Tenney
Chain Migration
Melania
First lady Melania Trump's parents have become permanent US residents, their lawyer said Wednesday, apparently taking advantage of a family unification program pilloried by the president.
Viktor and Amalija Knavs, like their daughter, are from Slovenia. They appear to have taken advantage of a system that Donald Trump (R-Corrupt) has dubbed "chain migration" and has promised to end.
The program allows naturalized citizens, in this case likely the first lady, to sponsor visas for close family members.
The news, first confirmed by the Washington Post, prompted allegations of White House hypocrisy Wednesday.
The First Lady's office has for months ignored requests for comment on the status of Viktor and Amalija Knavs.
Melania
Seas To Rise
Climate Goals
Sea levels will rise between 0.7 and 1.2 meters (27-47 inches) in the next two centuries even if governments end the fossil fuel era as promised under the Paris climate agreement, scientists said on Tuesday.
Early action to cut greenhouse gas emissions would limit the long-term rise, driven by a thaw of ice from Greenland to Antarctica that will re-draw global coastlines, a German-led team wrote in the journal Nature Communications.
Sea level rise is a threat to cities from Shanghai to London, to low-lying swathes of Florida or Bangladesh, and to entire nations such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean or Kiribati in the Pacific.
By 2300, the report projected that sea levels would gain by 0.7-1.2 meters, even if almost 200 nations fully meet goals under the 2015 Paris Agreement, which include cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero in the second half of this century.
Ocean levels will rise inexorably because heat-trapping industrial gases already emitted will linger in the atmosphere, melting more ice, it said. In addition, water naturally expands as it warms above four degrees Celsius (39.2°F).
Climate Goals
Prime-Time Nielsens
Ratings
Prime-time viewership numbers compiled by Nielsen for Feb. 12-18. Listings include the week's ranking and viewership.
1. Winter Olympics (Tuesday), NBC, 20.5 million.
2. Winter Olympics (Monday), NBC, 20.3 million.
3. Winter Olympics (Wednesday), NBC, 17.1 million.
4. Winter Olympics (Friday), NBC, 16.6 million.
5. Winter Olympics (Sunday), NBC, 16.4 million.
6. Winter Olympics (Thursday), NBC, 16.2 million.
7. Winter Olympics (Saturday), NBC, 14.5 million.
8. "60 Minutes," CBS, 7.5 million.
9. "The Big Bang Theory" (Thursday), CBS, 7.4 million.
10. "Young Sheldon," CBS, 7.1 million.
11. "NCIS," CBS, 6.95 million.
12. "The Big Bang Theory"(special, Thursday), CBS, 6.1 million.
13. "The Bachelor," ABC, 6 million.
14. "Bull," CBS, 5.6 million.
15. "Big Brother" (Wednesday), CBS, 5.2 million.
16. "Big Brother" (Monday), CBS, 5.16 million.
17. "NCIS: New Orleans," CBS, 5.1 million.
18. "America's Funniest Home Videos," ABC, 5 million.
19. "Mom," CBS, 4.97 million.
20. "Big Brother" (Sunday), CBS, 4.91 million.
Ratings
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
