Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Max Boot: How the 'Stupid Party' Created Donald Trump (NY Times)
It's hard to know exactly when the Republican Party assumed the mantle of the "stupid party."
Warren Buffett endorses Hillary Clinton in Omaha, NE (YouTube)
26 minutes
Thomas M. Wells: Donald Trump Hired Me As An Attorney. Please Don't Support Him For President.(Huffington Post)
Bullies will always exist somewhere, but the White House should not be that somewhere.
Nick Penzenstadler and Susan Page: "Exclusive: Trump's 3,500 lawsuits unprecedented for a presidential nominee" (USA TODAY)
Our project found about 3,500 legal actions involving Trump, including 1,900 where he or his companies were a plaintiff and about 1,300 in which he was the defendant. Due to his branding value, Trump is determined to defend his name and reputation.
Nick Penzenstadler: N.Y. attorney general's Trump University suit going to trial (USA TODAY)
In interviews and on the site, Trump says the university had a rating of A from the Better Business Bureau. Fact-checkers have since uncovered that the BBB gave ratings between A+ and D- based on several complaints from students.
TPM ELECTORAL SCOREBOARD (Talking Points Memo)
Who seems to be leading in electoral votes?
Kerri-Ann Jennings, MS, RD: 10 Impressive Health Benefits of Apples (Authority Nutrition)
Apples are incredibly good for you, and eating them is linked to a lower risk of many major diseases. For the greatest benefits, eat the whole fruit - both skin and flesh.
Self-service checkouts: unexpected stealing in the bagging area (The Guardian)
A new study suggests that the talking tills encourage ordinary people to shoplift - and are losing supermarkets money.
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David Bruce has over 80 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
wrote:
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Comment
Lumpy
Well, I'm going to have nightmares tonight! I've been out all day and had not heard about Trump wanting to use nukes. Yikes! Not even the 3rd rate actor was that stupid!
I saw or read somewhere someone talking about how when he gets caught in stupidities, rather than apologize, he tries to weasel out by saying "Just kidding!" Like THAT'S presidential! And I wonder how well Putin or Kim Jong Un understand the phrase Just Kidding. Does one say it before or after causing nuclear Armageddon?
The link below is to a Huffington Post story proving that Lumpy has tiny little T-Rex hands.
tiny little T-Rex hands
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
WHAT A MORAN!
THE MAN WITH BAD FEET.
"I'M OUTA HERE!"
YUK!
"DERP SPIRAL"
SQUEALING LIKE A STUCK PIG!
GET A BRAIN MORAN!
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sure have been enjoying the Dick Cavett reruns on Decades TV Network.
Tonight was Mort Sahl from 1972. Last night was Carroll O'Connor from 1973.
Script Sells 2 Million Copies In 2 Days
Harry Potter
Not even "Hamilton" can keep up with these numbers.
The script to the London stage production "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One and Two" sold more than 2 million print copies in North America in its first two days of publication, Scholastic announced Wednesday.
That's well below the 8.3 million copies sold in 2007 for the first day of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," J.K. Rowling's then-presumed finale for her fantasy series. But it's still among the fastest-selling works in history and a remarkable number for the script to a play and for a project that only partially involved Rowling. A text edition of "Hamilton" has also been a best-seller this year.
Meanwhile, the British publisher Little, Brown Book Group announced that over 680,000 print copies sold in the first three days in the United Kingdom. Waterstones buying director Kate Skipper said in a statement that no hardcover had sold so quickly in the U.K. since Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" in 2009.
Reviews for the "Cursed Child" book have been mixed, but the new Potter has topped the best-seller lists of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com and brought in readers worldwide last weekend for midnight store parties celebrating the release.
Harry Potter
New Statue Replacing "Scary Lucy"
Lucille Ball
A Lucille Ball statue unveiled in 2009 and dubbed "scary" is finally being replaced with a new sculpture of the comedy icon, set to be revealed this weekend.
Artist Carolyn Palmer created the new statue for Ball's hometown of Celoron, NY.
The sculpture will be unveiled at the Lucille Ball Memorial Park at noon Saturday, in honor of what would have been Ball's 105th birthday.
Palmer won a national competition to create the sculpture, after the original was criticized as "frightening." Even the artist of the original statue, Dave Poulin, admitted to The Hollywood Reporter
Palmer spent nine months creating her bronze sculpture of Ball. She researched the project by watching episodes of I Love Lucy, hiring models to pose in '50s-style dresses and buying a red wig as inspiration.
Lucille Ball
Climate Change
White House
U.S. federal agencies should disclose whether their actions and decisions will have an impact on climate change, the White House announced on Tuesday.
The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) finalized an update after nearly six years of consultations of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a Nixon-era statute that called on officials to weigh the environmental effects of projects such as highways, dams or oil drilling.
The update takes NEPA a step further by requiring agencies such as the Interior Department to the Army Corps of Engineers to quantify greenhouse gas emissions in NEPA project reviews and to describe the potential climate change impacts.
This would prompt agencies to consider alternatives or propose measures to mitigate the climate impacts of a project, it said.
Since the CEQ first proposed to modify NEPA in 2010 to include weighing climate change impacts, Republican lawmakers have discouraged the move saying it would be a way for the Obama administration to regulate carbon emissions without congressional approval.
White House
"We Would Be Happy if America Chose a Woman"
Pussy Riot
Russian punk protest group Pussy Riot has spoken out in the wake of the controversial hack of Democratic National Convention emails.
Last month's exposure by WikiLeaks of nearly 20,000 emails - believed by U.S. intelligence services to have been the work of Russian hackers operating under orders from the Kremlin - led to the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz on July 24. The email hack also led Donald Trump to reiterate his admiration for Russian president Vladimir Putin. He then stirred further controversy when he urged Russian hackers to leak Hillary Clinton's private email.
The Hollywood Reporter asked Pussy Riot's Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova - both of whom served jail time after being convicted of "hooliganism" following an anti-Putin protest in a Moscow Orthodox cathedral in 2012 - for their take on the email hack, Trump, Clinton and Putin.
Tolokonnikova responded with a simple graphic image she had prepared for her followers on Twitter: a photograph of herself dressed in a white-trimmed black dress sitting on an electric chair in front of a banner with Trump's campaign slogan "Make America Great Again" written in spray paint. She tweeted: "Make America Great Again. 2016. Electric chair, banner. Welcome to Idiocracy!"
Asked to comment on Russia's involvement in the hack, she said she couldn't say who, specifically, was behind the cyberattack. "Luckily I am not an agent of the Russian security services," she said. "So I cannot say [to what extent] Putin's foreign intelligence was involved in the hacking."
Pussy Riot
Privatizing Space
Moon Express
A Florida-based company won U.S. government permission on Wednesday to send a robotic lander to the moon next year, the firm's founder said, marking the first time the United States has cleared a private space mission to fly beyond Earth's orbit.
The Federal Aviation Administration's unprecedented go-ahead for the Moon Express mission also sets a legal and regulatory framework for a host of other commercial expeditions to the moon, asteroids and Mars.
As approved by the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, the privately held Moon Express, headquartered in Cape Canaveral, plans to fly a suitcase-sized lander to the moon for a two-week mission in 2017, said the company founder and chief executive Bob Richards.
The spacecraft will carry a number of science experiments and some commercial cargo on its one-way trip to the lunar surface, including cremated human remains, and will beam back pictures and video to Earth, the company said.
Before now, no government agency was recognized as having authority to oversee private missions beyond Earth's orbit, though a 1967 international treaty holds the United States responsible for any flights into space by its non-government entities.
Moon Express
Ousts At Least 11 Conservative Lawmakers
Kansas
A top Senate leader and at least 10 other conservative Kansas legislators have lost their seats as moderate Republicans made GOP primary races a referendum on education funding and the state's persistent budget woes.
Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce was among the lawmakers ousted amid a backlash against Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and his allies.
The voting occurred against the backdrop not only of the state's fiscal woes but ongoing legal and political disputes over funding for public schools. The state Supreme Court could rule by the end of the year on whether the Legislature is shorting schools on their state aid by hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Kansas has struggled to balance its budget since the GOP-dominated Legislature slashed personal income taxes in 2012 and 2013 at Brownback's urging to stimulate the economy. That's created concerns among educators about future spending on schools, even as many Republicans see the $4 billion-plus a year the state now spends as generous.
Five other conservative senators lost in races that spanned the state. So did five conservative House members, all of them from affluent Kansas City-area suburbs in Johnson County, the state's most populous, where voters have cherished good public schools for decades.
Kansas
Pot Resort
South Dakota
South Dakota's top prosecutor charged two consultants who worked with a Native American tribe on its plans to open the nation's first marijuana resort with drug offenses, accusing them of having seeds shipped from the Netherlands hidden in CD cases and sewn into clothing.
The charges announced Wednesday come eight months after the Flandreau Santee Sioux destroyed their crop amid fears of a federal raid, abandoning an ambitious scheme to develop "an adult playground" that they estimated could net as much as $2 million a month in profits. Tribal leaders this week said they don't plan to revisit the proposal, and instead will use their greenhouse to grow vegetables, including tomatoes. The tribe declined immediate comment on the charges against the consultants.
Attorney General Marty Jackley, who warned against the tribe's proposal from the start, said that a range of marijuana possession charges had been brought against two top officials of Monarch America, the Colorado-based company hired to work with the tribe on the resort idea.
Eric Hagen, Monarch's chief executive, was charged by indictment with conspiracy to possess, possession and attempt to possess more than 10 pounds of marijuana. Jonathan Hunt, the vice president and cultivation expert, was charged with conspiracy to possess between a half-pound and a pound of marijuana.
Court documents say Hunt ordered marijuana seeds from a company in the Netherlands that were put in CD cases and sewn into shirts and shipped surreptitiously to the tribe's office in 2015. Authorities say Hunt and others cultivated the plants at the Flandreau grow facility before they were burned in batches - about 600 plants in all.
South Dakota
Japan, South Korea Block
U.S. Wheat
Japan and South Korea have both taken steps to block certain imports of U.S. wheat after unapproved genetically-modified (GMO) plants from Monsanto Co seeds were found growing in Washington state, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said on Monday.
Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry said it will suspend purchases of all Western White wheat from the United States for food use, and all purchases of Western White wheat from the U.S. West Coast, but not from the Gulf, for feed use until it can start testing incoming shipments, according to the USDA.
Japan has also suspended distribution of all previously purchased U.S. wheat until testing is established. It is the first time Japan has blocked U.S. wheat imports since mid-2013, when a different strain of GMO wheat - also developed by Monsanto, but never commercially released - was found on a farm in Oregon.
South Korea has suspended clearance of U.S. wheat for food use, the USDA said. South Korea, the fifth largest market for U.S. wheat, had already said it would step up quarantine measures for U.S. milling and feed wheat shipments.
Japan expects to lift its new restriction once it has a system in place to test grain for the new GMO trait seen in the Washington state wheat plants, the USDA said.
U.S. Wheat
Targets Millennials
Pro-Fracking Website
FrackFeed , a pro-fracking website from industry groups and oil and gas companies, is targeting millennials in their native tongues: Memes, quizzes and listicles.
Rihanna, Ron Burgundy, bloated toads and angry groundhogs serve as the backdrop for snarky messages extolling the virtues of hydraulic fracturing for oil and natural gas - without few other details to distract you from kitty gifs.
The website is part of a bigger campaign by North Texans for Natural Gas, an advocacy group that is seeking to drown out the "small but vocal opposition that uses the internet to spread fear and bad information," according to its website.
The organization says it counts more than 175,000 individual supporters and has the backing of four leading oil and gas producers: Devon Energy, EnerVest, EOG Resources and XTO Energy.
This week, the group launched a spoof campaign video that urges voters to choose "Fracking for President" in the November elections. It also created what it says is probably the first pro-fracking Snapchat filter.
Pro-Fracking Website
In Memory
Ahmed Zewail
Nobel prize-winning Egyptian-American chemist Ahmed Zewail, who served as a science and technology advisor to US President Barack Obama, died Tuesday in the United States. He was 70.
Zewail, a naturalised US citizen, won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1999 for his groundbreaking work in the study of chemical reactions in extremely short timescales.
He was the third Egyptian to win a Nobel prize and the country's first scientist to do so.
His work showed that it is possible with rapid laser technique to study in slow motion how atoms in a molecule move during a chemical reaction.
According to the Nobel Prize website, Zewail's work led to the birth of the research area called femtochemistry, "which enables us to understand why certain chemical reactions take place but not others".
His discoveries offered scientists greater insight into chemical and pharmacological processes with implications across a range of disciplines including human health, electronics and high precision machinery.
Born in the northern Egyptian town of Damanhur in 1946, Zewail studied chemistry at Alexandria University before moving to the US in 1969 where he gained his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974.
He taught physics and chemistry at the Californian Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he went on to oversee the university's Laboratory for Molecular Sciences.
In 2009 Zewail was appointed to Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and later that year he was named the first US science envoy to the Middle East.
Zewail was married with four children.
Ahmed Zewail
In Memory
Pinky
A Chilean flamingo named Pinky which was known for its dancing was euthanized at a Florida theme park after being badly injured by a man who reached into its pen and threw it to the ground, Tampa police said on Wednesday.
Orlando resident Joseph Anthony Corrao, 45, was arrested and jailed on a felony animal cruelty charge in connection with the incident involving the bird, police said in a statement.
Corrao was visiting an animal viewing area at Busch Gardens in Tampa with his family Tuesday night when other park patrons saw him pick up Pinky and throw it to the ground, police said.
The 19-year-old animal suffered traumatic injuries and veterinarians decided to "humanely euthanize" it as a result, said park spokeswoman Karen Varga-Sinka.
Videos previously posted online show Pinky twirling and tapping its webbed feet, a behavior the park said the flamingo loved to show off for guests.
Pinky
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