Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Mark Morford: Obama's memoirs are going to be extraordinary (SF Gate)
This is one of the most articulate, thoughtful presidents in modern American history, able to effortlessly examine, extrapolate and personally reflect upon multiple facets of the global political miasma and his administration's place in it, all with equal parts candor, ease and beautifully measured deliberation.
Lindy West: Dear Barack Obama, thank you for not being an evil robot accountant (The Guardian)
It never occurred to me that I could like a president. Thanks for saving the economy, calling yourself a feminist and not being another old white dude.
The Daily Show | PUTTING NORTH CAROLINA'S ANTI-LGBT LAW TO THE TEST (YouTube)
Roy Wood Jr. and Jordan Klepper show what North Carolina's discriminatory HB2 law looks like when a business puts it into effect.
Mark Morford: "Wells Fargo, Game of (Very Dumb) Thrones" (SF Gate)
Word has it Stumpf will now return something like $45 million of his massive bonus, which is a lot - but also not really, given that it only amounts to a mere 25 or 30 percent of his annual take, an amount which, for execs like him, merely translates into holding off on having new toilet seats made out of endangered rhino horn for his Lear Jet for a few more months.
Jamelle Bouie: This Wasn't a Debate. This Was a National Gaslighting (Slate)
Despite the obvious truth, Pence's response was to call these quotes-taken almost verbatim from Trump-a kind of "insult" against the GOP ticket.
Gaslighting (Urban Dictionary)
A more psychological definition of gaslighting is "an increasing frequency of systematically withholding factual information from, and/or providing false information to, the victim - having the gradual effect of making them anxious, confused, and less able to trust their own memory and perception.
Scott Burns: "The (Rising) Hazards of Saving" (AssetBuilder)
As if saving money wasn't difficult enough, it's now looking hazardous to boot.
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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
David E Suggests
Interview Preparation
David
Thanks, Dave!
Team Coco
CONAN
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
THE DAY THAT THE CLOWNS CAME.
WE ARE NOT ALONE AFTER ALL.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
I use two monitors to put the page together, but neither work with my bifocals, so I squint and lean a lot.
Saw the commercial for 'Dial Lenses' on late night TV, and after debating about it for a few days, broke down and ordered them.
They were in the mail today, and while the style makes me look like a near-sighted Frida Kahlo, they work!
Way cool to be able to sit properly and still see the coding.
Nobel Winner "I'm Not Very Smart"
Fraser Stoddart
The Scottish-born winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry took a jab Wednesday at US presidential candidate Donald Trump (R-Pendejo), who has bragged that he was "smart" to avoid paying taxes.
"I am not very smart. The IRS (Internal Revenue Service) will run off with a third of it," said Northwestern University professor Fraser Stoddart, referring to his portion of the eight million Swedish kronor (around $933,000 or 832,000 euros) award, which he shares with Jean-Pierre Sauvage of France and Bernard Feringa of the Netherlands.
In the first presidential debate on September 26 Democratic nominee Hillary Clintonsuggested that Trump is hiding "something terrible," and suggested that he had not paid any federal income tax.
Trump's answer: "That makes me smart."
Stoddart, who said he has lived in the United States for 20 years, did not press any deeper into politics, but said he wants to use whatever is left of his prize money to help others.
Fraser Stoddart
Abortion Protests Rattle Ruling Party
Poland
Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has looked firmly in control since sweeping to power a year ago but it may have pressed its conservative agenda too far by initially backing a virtual ban on abortion.
Now, rattled by nationwide protests on Monday by up to 100,000 women dressed in black, Prime Minister Beata Szydlo's government is trying to distance itself from a draft proposal backed by the powerful Roman Catholic Church.
Worryingly for PiS, the protesters included women who voted for the party in last October's election but say they may no longer do so over its attempt to tighten the abortion law.
Poland already has restrictive rules on abortion that allow it only in cases of rape, incest or if the mother or baby have serious health problems. The new proposal, brainchild of the anti-abortion campaign group Ordo Iuris, would limit abortion to cases where the mother's life was deemed in direct danger.
Women and doctors could face prison if convicted of causing what the proposed rules call "death of a conceived child". Critics say doctors would be discouraged from doing prenatal testing, particularly if that carried the risk of miscarriage.
Poland
Chemistry Prize
Nobel
A trio of European scientists has won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing molecular machines that could one day be injected to fight cancer or used to make new types of materials and energy storage devices.
Frenchman Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Scotland's J. Fraser Stoddart and Dutchman Bernard Feringa developed molecules that produce mechanical motion in response to a stimulus, allowing them to perform specific tasks, the Nobel Academy said on Wednesday in awarding the 8 million Swedish crown ($931,000) prize.
Such molecular machines can be developed in smart medicines that seek out disease or damage and deliver drugs to fight or fix it, and in smart materials that can adapt in response to external triggers such as changes in light or temperature.
"There are endless opportunities," Feringa, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, told reporters when asked to predict what his work could eventually be used for.
"Think of a tiny micro-robot that a doctor in the future will inject into your blood and that goes to search for a cancer cell or goes to deliver a drug, for instance."
Nobel
World's Deepest Underwater Cave
Hranická Propast
Man and robot teamed up to discover the world's deepest underwater cave in the Czech Republic.
The cave, called Hranická Propast, reaches a dizzying depth of 1,325 feet (404 meters). It is about 39 feet (12 m) deeper than what is now the world's second-deepest cave, Italy's Pozzo del Merro.
Polish diver Krzysztof Starnawski first explored Hranická Propast in 1999. The type of limestone formation he found led him to believe that the cave could extend a greater distance than his dives had taken him. So Starnawski led a Czech-Polish expedition to explore the cave, supported in part by a National Geographic grant, which included numerous dives over the past two years to collect more data. The limestone abyss was recently measured with the assistance of a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV), and determined to be the world's deepest.
During a 2014 dive, Starnawski reached 656 feet (200 m) deep, which he believed to be the bottom of the underwater cave. However, he found a narrow opening that led to another vertical tunnel extending beyond the probe Starnawski was using to measure the cave's depth - the line ran out at 1,260 feet (384 m), just shy of Pozzo del Merro, which measures 1,286 feet (392 m) deep.
A dive on Tuesday (Sept. 27) finally determined the cave's actual, record-breaking depth. The expedition team used ROV technology to reach the base of the cave, because depths past 400 meters are beyond the limits of scuba diving, Jamkowski said.
Hranická Propast
Denies Surveillance Claims
Yahoo
Yahoo on Wednesday rejected allegations of mass email surveillance amid an outcry from privacy activists over a report that it created a special scanning program at the behest of US intelligence.
The report, which said the US internet giant secretly scanned hundreds of millions of email accounts to help American intelligence, was "misleading," Yahoo said.
A report Tuesday by Reuters news agency, citing former employees of the internet firm as sources, said Yahoo had built a custom program in 2015 which scanned all its emails to help the National Security Agency (NSA) and the FBI.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that Yahoo had been ordered by a federal judge to search its emails for a digital "signature" in an investigation seeking information about a state-sponsored entity linked to attacks.
According to the Times' report, the government request was unusual because it required Yahoo to systematically scan all of its users' emails -- rather than hand over data from specific users.
Yahoo
Fox "News" Video Criticized as Racist
Chinatown
A recent O'Reilly Factor "Watters World" segment on Chinatown is being widely criticized as anti-Asian and racist. In introducing the field piece, which aired on Monday, Oct. 3, in which Jesse Watters, who often does man-on-the-street interviews, ventures to the New York City neighborhood, Bill O'Reilly said that because China was mentioned so much at the first presidential debate, he wanted to "sample political opinion" in New York's Chinatown.
In his piece, Watters is shown asking people questions like "Am I supposed to bow to say hello?" and "Is it the Year of the Dragon?"
After asking one street vendor if the watches he was selling were "hot," meaning "stolen," the segment cut to a clip of Mr. Miyagi - who was Japanese - in The Karate Kid.
He asked one elderly woman a question, and when she was silent with her answer a clip was interspersed of Madeline Kahn's character in Young Frankenstein shouting, "Speak! Speak! Why don't you speak?!"
At the end of the segment, O'Reilly and Watters laughed about the interviews. O'Reilly said that people didn't walk away from Watters because they are patient and "don't have anything else to do."
Chinatown
Tumbles Down Rich List
T-rump
It seems running for president is hurting Donald Trump's finances big time. The Republican nominee's fortune fell $800 million last year -- sending him tumbling 35 spots on a list of richest Americans, Forbes said Tuesday.
The business magazine said the New York real estate mogul is worth $3.7 billion -- down from an estimated $4.5 billion in March -- and just over a third of the $10 billion that Trump has bragged of amassing.
Trump, who has made his fabulous wealth a key selling point in his bid for the White House, plummeted to number 156 on Forbes' annual list of the richest 400 Americans.
Of 28 Trump assets scrutinized by the magazine, Forbes said 18 fell in value, including his Trump Tower headquarters on New York's Fifth Avenue and Mar-a-Lago, his beachfront club in Palm Beach, Florida.
In a further dig at the most loathed US presidential candidate in modern times, Forbes chose this year to highlight immigrant success stories and said a record 42 naturalized Americans made this year's annual list.
T-rump
Who Wants To Live Forever?
Life Expectancy
No one might ever challenge the 122-year record of the longest-living person in documented history, said a study Wednesday which claimed to have found a "ceiling" to maximum human lifespan.
Sifting through demographic data from more than 40 countries around the world, New York-based researchers found that an end to the long-running rise in maximum lifespan "has already been attained", in the 1990s.
The plateau was reached in about 1997 -- the year that Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment died at the unbeaten age of 122 years and 164 days.
"The trend since then has been for the oldest person in the world to be around 115 years old," study co-author Brandon Milholland of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine told AFP.
In other words, more people are living into old age these days, but exceptionally long-lived individuals were not getting quite as old as before.
Life Expectancy
Roman Bullets Tell Story of Attack on Scottish Fort
Burnswark Hill
A bloody assault by Roman legions on a hill fort in Scotland around 1,800 years ago is being pieced together using the remains of Roman missile weapons that were used in the attack.
The excavations at Burnswark Hill, in the Dumfries region of southwest Scotland, have unearthed the largest cache of Roman lead sling bullets yet discovered - part of the huge arsenal of missile ammunition used by the attacking legions to subdue the native defenders of the hilltop fort.
So many sling bullets and other Roman missiles have now been found at Burnswark Hill that archaeologists think the raid was staged as a warning to anyone who resisted Roman rule: an act of "exemplary violence" designed to terrorize the Scottish tribes into submission, the researchers said.
The researchers estimate that up to 5,000 Roman soldiers took part in the attack, based on the size of two Roman army camps that were built to the north and south of the hilltop fort.
Burnswark Hill lies just a few miles north of the chain of forts and ramparts known as Hadrian's Wall, which was built across southern Scotland during the reign of Emperor Hadrian (A.D. 117 to 138) and served for many years as the northern border of the Roman Empire.
Burnswark Hill
In Memory
Rod Temperton
Rod Temperton, a British-born musician and songwriter with a singular knack for pop-funk who wrote the Michael Jackson classics "Thriller," "Rock With You" and many other hits, has died of cancer in London at 66.
His music publisher said in a statement Wednesday that Temperton had died last week of an "aggressive" cancer. No other details were provided.
Jon Platt of Warner/Chappell said Temperton was the sole writer of "Thriller," "Off the Wall," "Rock with You" and other major songs.
Temperton started his career in the disco band Heatwave and collaborated with Aretha Franklin, Herbie Hancock, Anita Baker and many others.
He was best known as a songwriter and worked closely with producer Quincy Jones on groundbreaking tracks for Jackson's mega-selling "Off the Wall" and "Thriller" albums.
Temperton was a native of the seaside town of Cleethorpes, 180 miles (290 kilometers) north of London. He had been working in a frozen fish factory in the mid-1970s when he responded to an ad and joined Heatwave, an international group for whom he played keyboards and wrote two major hits, the disco favorite "Boogie Nights" and the ballad "Always and Forever."
"Always and Forever" attracted wide attention and was later covered by Luther Vandross, among others.
In a 2009 interview with The Telegraph, Temperton said "Thriller" was originally called "Starlight" until Jones asked him to find a new title.
"I went back to the hotel, wrote two or three hundred titles and came up with 'Midnight Man,'" he recalled. "The next morning I woke up and I just said this word (thriller). Something in my head just said, 'This is the title'. "You could visualize it at the top of the Billboard charts. You could see the merchandising for this one word, how it jumped off the page as 'Thriller"'.
His success went beyond the worldwide smash that "Thriller" became. Numerous other artists would have hits with his work, including George Benson with "Give Me the Night" and Donna Summer with "Love Is in Control (finger on the Trigger)."
Temperton also received an Oscar nomination as a co-writer of "Miss Celie's Blues (Sister)," from the soundtrack of "The Color Purple," and contributed several songs to the Billy Crystal-Gregory Hines comedy "Running Scared."
Rod Temperton
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