Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Andrew Tobias: Did I Mention The CFPB?
If the young woman described in this must-listen Planet Money podcastdidn't read the fine print before she borrowed $900 on-line from Golden Valley Lending, how can she complain that Golden Valley scooped $3,735 out of her bank account in less than a year to settle the debt?
Joe Bob Briggs: Just How Naive Is Robert Mueller? (Taki's Magazine)
This indictment makes me think Robert Mueller has nothing. This is the best he can do? He's so far from making a case against Trump that he's running behind Stormy Daniels.
Matthew Yglesias: Trump-era politics is a surreal nightmare and we can't wake up (Vox)
I spent last week in Madison as "writer-in-residence" at the University of Wisconsin. While it was hardly an off-the-grid experience, it did take me out of the daily news cycle for the first time in a while. Diving back in kind of reminds me of Charlton Heston waking from his space travel to discover that he's on a planet run by orangutans. Except instead of orangutans*, we have the Republican Party.
Sean Illing: Americans why they're so pissed off (Vox)
Hint: it's not about the economy.
A letter to ... my uncle, the convicted paedophile (The Gurdian)
'I can't believe you've positioned yourself as the victim': the letter you've always wanted to write.
Pamela Stephenson Connolly: My boyfriend has difficulty climaxing. Is it because he masturbates too much? (Guardian)
He says he used to masturbate very regularly and believes he has become desensitised. The situation is taking its toll on him and I would dearly like to do something to help.
Uki Goņi: When nature says 'Enough!': the river that appeared overnight in Argentina (The Guardian)
A new watercourse is playing havoc with farmland and roads and even threatening a city - but also highlights the potential cost of the country's dependence on soya beans.
Giulia Rhodes: "'I was a caricature of my worst traits' - how brain cancer can affect the mind" (The Guardian)
When neuroscientist Barbara Lipska was diagnosed with brain cancer, she thought she knew about the physical toll. But she was unprepared for its effect on her behavior.
Joe Bob Briggs: Going Pink (Taki's Magazine)
NEW YORK-There's this moment in every production meeting-I don't care if you're making a movie, a TV show, a YouTube video, a reality show about shark hunters, or a 30-second promo for the cat shelter-when somebody blurts out, "We need a strong female character for this."
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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
CRAZY LIKE A POX!
THE TOP TEN REASONS.
WHAT A MORON!
THE 'JEFF SESSIONS'.
WE'RE DOOMED!
THIS IS DANGEROUS TO DEMOCRACY.
TESTILYING!
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Marine layer rolled in and hung around til mid-afternoon.
Letters Offer Candid Takes
Harper Lee
Around the same time "To Kill a Mockingbird" made Harper Lee a best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winner, she was still fighting for creative control.
"I must say it's increasingly difficult for magazine articles to be written any other way than a magazine editor standing over your shoulder telling you what to write. You know how well that sets with me," the Monroeville, Alabama, native wrote to her New York friend Harold Caufield (affectionately referred to as "Darling Aitch"). The 1961 letter - the year after the book was published - told of Esquire's turning down a piece she had been asked to write.
"I didn't confirm to their Image (or the one they wish to project) of the South. My pastiche had some white people who were segregationists & at the same time loathed & hated the K.K.K. This was an axiomatic impossibility, according to Esquire! I wanted to say that according to those lights, nine-tenths of the South is an axiomatic impossibility."
Lee's letter is among six donated to Emory University by a California-based book collector and being made public Monday. The typed correspondence dates from the mid-1950s, when she began writing "Go Set a Watchman," the precursor to "Mockingbird" that unexpectedly came out in 2015, through the early '60s and the release of "Mockingbird." They touch upon everything from politics and writing to religion and dating. They also describe her caring for her ailing father, Amasa Coleman (A.C) Lee, the lawyer and newspaper man who was the basis for one of literature's most famous characters, Atticus Finch.
Harper Lee
Fewer Opioid Prescriptions
Legal Marijuana
Can legalizing marijuana fight the problem of opioid addiction and fatal overdoses? Two new studies in the debate suggest it may.
Pot can relieve chronic pain in adults, so advocates for liberalizing marijuana laws have proposed it as a lower-risk alternative to opioids. But some research suggests marijuana may encourage opioid use, and so might make the epidemic worse.
The new studies don't directly assess the effect of legalizing marijuana on opioid addiction and overdose deaths. Instead, they find evidence that legalization may reduce the prescribing of opioids. Over-prescribing is considered a key factor in the opioid epidemic.
Results showed that laws that let people use marijuana to treat specific medical conditions were associated with about a 6 percent lower rate of opioid prescribing for pain. That's about 39 fewer prescriptions per 1,000 people using Medicaid.
And when states with such a law went on to also allow recreational marijuana use by adults, there was an additional drop averaging about 6 percent. That suggest the medical marijuana laws didn't reach some people who could benefit from using marijuana instead of opioids, said Hefei Wen of the University of Kentucky in Lexington, one of the study authors.
Legal Marijuana
Climate Change
Arctic Sea Ice
Even if humanity stops global warming in its tracks at two degrees Celsius, long seen as the guardrail for a climate-safe world, Arctic sea ice will still disappear in some years, scientists have warned.
Holding the line at 1.5 C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), however, would make a huge difference, according to two separate studies published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
In a 2C (3.6F) world, the Arctic Ocean would be ice-free roughly one-in-four years, whereas if warming does not exceed 1.5C, the odds drop to one-in-40, the researchers concluded.
"I didn't expect to find that half-a-degree Celsius would make a big difference, but it really does," said Alexandra Jahn, author of one of the studies and an assistant professor at Colorado University in Boulder.
With one degree of warming so far, Earth has already seen a crescendo of droughts, heatwaves, and storms ramped up by rising seas.
Arctic Sea Ice
Passes Bill
New York
New York's governor has condemned the Trump administration's inaction on gun control as the state passed legislation banning anyone convicted of domestic violence from owning a firearm.
The law will require domestic abusers to hand over any rifles, shotguns and other firearms and comes after 17 people were killed in a school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
It extends gun restrictions from a 2012 bill which prohibits abusers from owning handguns. That law was itself passed in the wake of the school massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary.
"The recent wave of mass shootings is horrifying, and the federal government's failure to act on any form of meaningful gun safety laws is unconscionable," said governor Andrew Cuomo.
The governor's website notes that, in nine of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in US history, the shooter had an existing record of committing violence against women, threatening violence against women, or harassing or disparaging women.
New York
Arbitration Sought
Stormy
President-for-now Donald Trump (R-Crooked) asked a federal judge on Monday to order private arbitration in a case brought by a porn actress who claimed she had an affair with him.
Trump and his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, filed papers in federal court in Los Angeles asking a judge to rule that Stormy Daniels' case involving a non-disclosure agreement must be heard by an arbitrator instead of a jury.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has been seeking to invalidate the agreement she signed days before the 2016 presidential election. She has offered to return the $130,000 she was paid as she tries to "set the record straight."
She's said she had sex with Trump once in 2006 and their relationship continued for about a year. Trump married his current wife, Melania Trump, in 2005, and their son, Barron, was born in 2006.
Daniels argues the agreement is legally invalid because it was only signed by her and Cohen, not by Trump.
Stormy
Another Defamation Lawsuit
Alex Jones
Alex Jones may soon learn that ruining the lives of innocent people comes with serious consequences.
On Monday, attorneys for Marcel Fontaine - a 24-year-old Boston man whom Jones' website, Infowars, incorrectly identified as the Parkland, Florida, school shooter in a Feb. 14 article - filed a defamation lawsuit against Jones and his publication.
What's more: Fontaine plans to take his case against Jones' conspiracy-laden site to a jury instead of settling the matter behind closed doors, Fontaine's lawyer Mark Bankston, of the law firm Farrar & Ball, told HuffPost.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Travis County, Texas, names Jones, Infowars, Free Speech Systems and author Kit Daniels as defendants in the case.
This is the second major defamation lawsuit that has come out against Jones and Infowars in the last month. In March, Jones and his program were hit with a suit by plaintiff Brennan Gilmore, who recorded the vehicular attack that left a counter-protester dead during the violent far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year. Jones labeled Gilmore a "deep state shill" and "CIA asset" who helped organize the car attack (he's not, and he didn't).
Alex Jones
Largest Oil Discovery In Its History
Bahrain
Bahrain on Sunday announced it has discovered the largest oil and gas field in the history of the small kingdom, which unlike its Gulf neighbours is not energy-rich.
"The new resource is forecast to contain highly significant quantities of tight (light crude) oil and deep gas, dwarfing Bahrain's current reserves," said the country's Higher Committee for Natural Resources, which is chaired by Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad.
The find in the Khaleej al-Bahrain, off the west coast, was "the largest discovery of oil in the country's history", it said in a statement.
Bahrain currently has only one oilfield with several hundred million barrels of crude reserves.
The field was the first to be discovered in the Gulf and the first to start production.
Bahrain
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