Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Mark Morford: No sex please, we're Millennials (SF Gate)
Sure, Millennial sex might be terrible. Their skills might be embarrassing, inept, all kinds of clumsy due to so many years slumped behind various screens instead of kneeling at the altar of a partner's orgasmic rapture, their gropings and comminglings of an overall quality that would humiliate a hyena in heat. But hey, at least they're trying. Most of them, anyway. The dears.
Mark Morford: Your Dunkin Donuts will kill you now (SF Gate)
Here is the titanic secret you probably already know, but which nearly everyone waiting in line in every Dunkin Donuts in America right now tacitly refuses to believe: Losing weight, staying healthy, eating well, feeling good? It's actually easy.
Andrew Tobias: ARE You Registered?
The markets hit record highs yesterday, triple their post-Bush low. Trump tells us Obama's been a disaster, our future is bleak - and only he can fix it. Investors around the world, expecting Hillary to win, seem not to agree.
Mark O'Connell: The Three Robbers and the Moral-Free Children's Books of Tomi Ungerer (Slate)
Like all the best artists, Ungerer has no interest in imparting moral lessons; he has no interest in giving children-or, more accurately, their parents-a comforting view of life. He's interested in illustrating how things are with people, how things are with the world. I don't know how comfortable I am with this as a parent, but my son seems perfectly delighted with it.
Rose George: My gold medal goes to Fu Yuanhui - for talking openly about her period (The Guardian)
The swimmer's admission of what affected her Rio Olympics performance shouldn't be a big deal, but it is. It's one more step towards stamping out a pathetic taboo.
Tara Marie: 6 Horrifying Ways The Universe Has Repaid Good Deeds (Cracked)
The universe is ruled by a blind, mad god who feasts on pain and chaos. Even if you're practically a saint, the only reward you'll get for all of your good deeds is a horrible death followed by a swift kick in the genitals as you plummet to hell. Do we sound a bit cynical? You would be too if you knew about …
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"Doug's Most Shared Facebook Post" Today
wrote:
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Comment
Lumpy
How many does it take?
At first I heard his military guy was going with Lumpy to his first classified briefing. Then this AM I heard it was the military guy and Christie. This afternoon I heard it was the military guy and Christie AND Jeff Sessions (and others??)
How many people does it take to hold his tiny hands and ask the questions he's too stupid to ask?!
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
FROM WORSE TO WORSER!
FEEL THE WARM!
SUCCESS!
In 70 Years, The Earth Could Be Too Hot For The Summer Olympics - ThinkProgress
SUSYA.
COMING TO A COUNTRY NEAR YOU?
DONALD TRUMPS NEW DEITY!
THE SUMMER OF TRUMP!
STILL BONNIE AFTER ALL THESE YEARS.
HOT DAMN!
"ODE TO SEAN HANNITY"
by John Cleese
Aping urbanity
Oozing with vanity
Plump as a manatee
Faking humanity
Journalistic calamity
Intellectual inanity
Fox Noise insanity
You're a profanity
Hannity
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
The raccoons are really at it again.
Cancellation Must Mean 'Racism Is Solved'
Larry Wilmore
Larry Wilmore says Comedy Central's cancellation of The Nightly Show must mean one thing: racism is no longer a problem in the U.S.
In an opening monologue that kicked off the final week of his show, Wilmore addressed the news by thanking Comedy Central and the show's viewers, but he also offered a more tongue-in-cheek response.
"On the plus side, I must say, our show going off the air has to only mean one thing: Racism is solved," Wilmore quipped. "We did it."
Wilmore said that his only regret was that the late-night show would not be around "to cover this truly insane election season."
The final episode of The Nightly Show will air Thursday at 11:30 p.m. Chris Hardwick's @midnight will air in the time slot for the time being.
Larry Wilmore
Original Score Goes To Auction
Gustav Mahler
A rare musical score written by classical great Gustav Mahler went on show in Hong Kong Wednesday ahead of a landmark auction by Sotheby's.
The hand-written complete version of Mahler's lauded "Resurrection Symphony" will go on sale in London later in the year with a £3.5 million ($4.5 million) price tag -- the highest ever estimate for a musical manuscript, according to the auction house.
The 19th century Austrian composer and conductor wrote 10 symphonies, but Sotheby's said none had ever gone under the hammer in its entirety.
"No complete symphony by Mahler, written in the composer's own hand, has ever been offered at auction, and probably none will be offered again," said Simon Maguire, senior specialist in books and manuscripts at the auction house.
Sotheby's said the manuscript was being offered by the estate of the American economist and businessman Gilbert Kaplan, who became "infatuated" by the work, also known as Mahler's Symphony No. 2.
Gustav Mahler
2nd-Oldest In Great Lakes
Shipwreck
The second-oldest confirmed shipwreck in the Great Lakes, an American-built, Canadian-owned sloop that sank in Lake Ontario more than 200 years ago, has been found, a team of underwater explorers said Wednesday.
The three-member western New York-based team said it discovered the shipwreck this summer in deep water off Oswego, in central New York. Images captured by a remotely operated vehicle confirmed it is the Washington, which sank during a storm in 1803, team member Jim Kennard said.
The sloop Washington was built on Lake Erie in Pennsylvania in 1798 and was used to transport people and goods between western New York, Pennsylvania and Ontario. It was placed on skids and hauled by oxen teams across the Niagara Isthmus to Lake Ontario in 1802 after being sold to Canadian merchants.
The 53-foot-long ship was carrying at least five people and a cargo of merchandise, including goods from India, when it set sail from Kingston, Ontario, for its homeport of Niagara, Ontario, on Nov. 6, 1803. The vessel was caught in a fierce storm and sank.
The Washington is the oldest commercial sailing vessel found in the Great Lakes and the only sloop known to have sailed on lakes Erie and Ontario, Kennard said. Single-masted sloops were replaced in the early 19th century by two- and three-masted schooners, which were much easier to sail, according to Carrie Sowden, archaeological director at the National Museum of the Great Lakes in Toledo, Ohio, which sponsors the New York team's explorations.
Shipwreck
Cooler Than Glass
See-Through Wood
Wood is a strong and versatile building material, but it rots, gets eaten by bugs, and blocks light.
Plain sheets of glass aren't much better. They shatter easily and let a lot of energy leak into or out of a building.
But engineers have recently figured out how to find the best of both worlds by making see-through wood.
The team, led by materials scientist Liangbing Hu at the University of Maryland, developed a patented process to turn wood translucent, make it more durable, and lend it incredible strength.
How strong is it? The engineers write in the study that it has "high impact energy absorption that eliminates the safety issues often presented by glass."
See-Through Wood
Quid Pro Quo?
Chris Christie
Trump's Atlantic City casinos reportedly owed $30 million in taxes - and settled for $5 million after Christie took office
For six years, New Jersey state auditors and lawyers battled in court for $30 million that the state said Donald Trump's Atlantic City casinos owed in back taxes.
The state eventually agreed to accept $5 million from the casinos.
The settlement came just a year after Gov. Chris Christie took office, according to an investigation by The New York Times that reviewed the casinos' bankruptcy filings.
The casinos made Trump millions, a previous Times investigation found, but were largely failed businesses with huge amounts of debt. Trump has since sold his shares in the casinos, but the casinos still bear his name.
Chris Christie
Analysis Of The NSA Hack
Edward Snowden
If anybody would know how the NSA operates, and how leaking its secrets works, it's Edward Snowden. Snowden worked with journalists to reveal the NSA's extensive domestic spying program and has been living in exile ever since. Needless to say, he's been following the enormous hack of the NSA's spying tools very closely, and he not only knows how it happened, he thinks it was a state-sponsored attack.
Snowden took to Twitter and laid out how these tools were used when he was employed there and what he believes the real motivation behind it was. In short, Snowden doesn't buy this is a bunch of cybercriminals. He thinks it's a threat from Russia to keep the U.S. intelligence community from delving too deeply into the DNC email hack. If you're unfamiliar, Russia is widely believed to have been behind a recent leak of private DNC emails, including donor lists and embarrassing personal revelations.
Snowden points out that if the files are publicly released, private companies and friendly governments can use the data to discover if the NSA has been spying on them. Keep in mind, the NSA was busted spying on German chancellor Angela Merkel and may have been spying on the Pope. If those files get out, and countries the U.S. nominally view as allies find out the NSA has been rooting through their private data, it could trigger an international diplomatic crisis.
Does that line up? It's certainly in line with how Russian interests tend to think. The flipside of that is that realistically, Russia may want to trigger an international diplomatic crisis. Russia has been campaigning to increase its sphere of influence, and igniting bridges between America and its allies is the kind of shenanigans it would pull to do that. Why the country would rather make threats than pull the trigger is something foreign policy wonks can only theorize about, but it's unlikely this will end quietly.
Edward Snowden
Tied To Undisclosed Foreign Lobbying
Manafort
Donald Trump's campaign chairman helped a pro-Russian governing party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012, in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party's efforts to influence U.S. policy.
The revelation, provided to The Associated Press by people directly knowledgeable about the effort, comes at a time when Trump has faced criticism for his friendly overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It also casts new light on the business practices of campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Under federal law, U.S. lobbyists must declare publicly if they represent foreign leaders or their political parties and provide detailed reports about their actions to the Justice Department. A violation is a felony and can result in up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.
Trump shook up his campaign organization Wednesday, putting two new longtime Republican conservative strategists as chief executive officer and campaign manager. It was unclear what impact the shakeup would have on Manafort, but he retains his title as campaign chairman.
Political consultants are generally leery of registering under the foreign agents law, because their reputations can suffer once they are on record as accepting money to advocate the interests of foreign governments - especially if those interests conflict with America's.
Manafort
Former Editor Spews
Breitbart
Former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro unloaded on the right-wing website's chairman, Stephen K. Bannon, on Wednesday after news broke that Donald Trump had appointed him as campaign CEO.
"Bannon is a legitimately sinister figure," Shapiro, who left Breitbart earlier this year in a fiery exit, wrote on his website, The Daily Wire.
The conservative pundit added: "He is a vindictive, nasty figure, infamous for verbally abusing supposed friends and threatening enemies. Bannon is a smarter version of Trump: He's an aggressive self-promoter who name-drops to heighten his profile and woo bigger names, and then uses those bigger names as stepping stools to his next destination."
"He will attempt to ruin anyone who impedes his unending ambition, and he will use anyone bigger than he is - for example, Donald Trump - to get where he wants to go. Bannon knows that in the game of thrones, you win or die. And he certainly doesn't intend to die. He'll kill everyone else before he goes," Shapiro wrote.
Shapiro was a friend of Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012. Shapiro left Breitbart earlier this year over disagreement about how the outlet addressed an incident with one of its former reporters, Michelle Fields, who was grabbed and pulled by Trump's ex-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, at an event. The website failed to stand by her, and Shapiro condemned it for not doing so.
Breitbart
Giant Pests
Goldfish
You may think dumping goldfish into a river is a harmless act, but in reality the fish can become destructively big.
Researchers from the Centre of Fish and Fisheries at Murdoch University have been trying to control goldfish for 12 years in the Vasse River, located in the southwest of Western Australia.
An invasive species, the goldfish is causing havoc for native fish and its surrounding ecosystem, which is why Stephen Beatty and his fellow researchers spent a year studying the little-known movement patterns of the goldfish in the wild. The results of the study, now concluded, has been published in a paper
Beatty told Mashable Australia that the study was conducted because of the sharp rise in aquarium species, such as the goldfish, being detected in the Vasse River in the last 15 years. That's all thanks to people letting them go in local waterways.
Goldfish are omnivores in the wild, and they can have destructive feeding habits. They deteriorate the quality of water by stirring up sediment on the bottom of river beds, dig up vegetation and also consume anything edible that comes before them - including native fish eggs.
Goldfish
In Memory
Arthur Hiller
Arthur Hiller, who received an Oscar nomination for directing the hugely popular romantic tragedy "Love Story" during a career that spanned dozens of popular movies and TV shows, died Wednesday of natural causes. He was 92.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced his death Wednesday. Hiller served as Academy president from 1993-97.
Although since dismissed by some as overly syrupy, "Love Story," with Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal as star-crossed Ivy League lovers, was one of the most popular movies of 1970. The film, based on the popular novel of the same name by Erich Segal, reduced thousands of moviegoers to tears and created a national catch phrase: "Love means never having to say you're sorry."
"Love Story" kicked off a busy two decades of work for Hiller, who had gotten his start directing such television shows as "Gunsmoke," ''Perry Mason" and "The Rifleman" in the 1950s.
He directed nearly two dozen feature films between 1970 and 1990 and was equally at ease with comedy or drama. He even helmed a musical, 1972's "Man of La Mancha" with Peter O'Toole and Sophia Loren, and a biography, 1976's "W.C. Fields and Me," with Rod Steiger and Valerie Perrine.
His more memorable comedies included "The In-Laws" with Peter Falk and Alan Arkin, "Plaza Suite" starring Walter Matthau, "The Wheeler Dealers" with James Garner and Lee Remick, "The Out of Towners" with Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis, "The Lonely Guy" with Steve Martin and Charles Grodin, and "Author, Author" with Al Pacino and Dyan Cannon. He teamed comics Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor twice, in the 1976 hit "Silver Streak" and with less success in 1989's "See No Evil, Hear No Evil."
Notable dramas were "The Americanization of Emily" with Garner and Julie Andrews, "The Man in the Glass Booth" with Maximilian Schell, "The Hospital" with George C. Scott and Diana Rigg and "Tobruk" with Rock Hudson and George Peppard.
Hiller's versatility, plus his willingness to take on projects unworthy of his talent, may have forestalled recognition of his achievements. Although he earned good reviews for his better films, his lesser ones were savaged by critics. His only Oscar nomination came for "Love Story," for which he won a Golden Globe.
He was born in Edmonton, Alberta, where his parents operated a Yiddish school and theater.
After leaving the University of Alberta to join the Royal Air Force during World War II, he studied psychology at the University of Toronto and law at the University of British Columbia. He eventually decided to go into communications, applying for a job at Canada's CBC network in Toronto.
He was hired by NBC in 1955 to direct a live drama, "Matinee Theater." He would go on to direct "Playhouse 90," ''Naked City," ''Route 66" and many other series before moving on to feature films.
His later films included 1990's "Taking Care of Business," 1992's "The Babe" and 1996's "Carpool."
Hiller married Gwen Pechet in 1948 and the couple had a son, Henryk, and daughter, Erica. They were married for 68 years until her death in June.
Arthur Hiller
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