Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Frances Perraudin: Photo of woman defying EDL protester in Birmingham goes viral (The Guardian)
Photograph of young woman becomes symbol of city standing up to far-right group English Defence League during demonstration.
Suzanne Moore: In dark times, this image has a glorious message - resistance is not futile (The Guardian)
The picture of Saffiyah Khan standing up to an EDL protester in Birmingham is not just joyful - it is an uplifting reminder that one person can make a difference.
Jessica Elgot: "Macedonia's lipstick protester: 'I saw the policeman smile very slightly'" (The Guardian)
Jasmina Golubovska, who planted crimson kiss on riot shield, says it is a civic duty to continue demonstrating against government.
Lindsey Rupp, Lauren Coleman-Lochner, and Nick Turner: America's Retailers Are Closing Stores Faster Than Ever (Bloomberg)
The battered American retail industry took a few more lumps this week, with stores at both ends of the price spectrum preparing to close their doors.
Lascaux Othello: cuck (Urban Dictionary)
A word used by White Supremacists to solicit sex. Because they believe people whom they call cucks would want to fuck them. White Supremacists have no preference whether to be fucked by a flesh penis or a plus-sized strap-on, but black leather is mandatory. …
Paul Krugman: Publicity Stunts Aren't Policy (NY Times)
Andrew Tobias: Fareed: Trumps Long Been RIGHT On Health Care
Hint: Winning news cycles is no substitute for the real thing.
Trump has now taken up the call to repeal Obamacare. But until recently, healthcare was actually one of the rare public policy issues on which Trump had spoken out consistently for 20 years. In his 2000 book, the America We Deserve, here is what he said: "I'm a conservative on most issues, but a liberal on this one. We should not hear so many stories of families ruined by healthcare expenses. We must have universal healthcare. We need, as a nation, to re-examine the single-payer plan as many individual states are doing."
How to pronounce Backpfeifengesicht in German (YouTube)
There is no real translation, but a few meanings you can find are: "a face that cries out for a fist" or "that person whose face is just begging to be introduced to fist."
Michele Hanson: What's the point of keeping Gibraltar? Let's make life easier, and give it back (The Guardian)
The Spanish are charming - I'm sure we can work something out. Besides, shouldn't nationalism be a thing of the past?
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took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
David E Suggests
10 Reasons
David
Thanks, Dave!
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Contributor Suggestion
color palette
Hi Marty,
Here is a comparison of the color palette that I noticed most fascist authoritarians seem to prefer:
Thanks,
The Monkey Buddha
Thanks, Paul!
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
SUCK ON IT DONKEYCRATS.
LOCO GRINGO!
FAREWELL?
JUST FOLLOWING GOVERNMENT ORDERS.
THEY SAW THE LIGHT!
"LET'S BLOW UP SOME SHIT!"
THE FASCIST CREEP.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
The skunk is back for what seems to be his annual spring visit.
Apparently, something distressed him, and it got really aromatic in the backyard, then it wafted, gently into the house, where it hung heavy all night.
OTOH, at least none of the kitties were sprayed.
Buying Ads On Fox "News" Again
John Oliver
Ever since John Oliver found out Donald Trump was an avid viewer of Fox News, Oliver has been using that information for the good of the people. And the president.
On Sunday's episode of Last Week Tonight, Oliver announced that he would be buying ad time during Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor in an effort to send a message to Trump about the inappropriateness of sexual harassment.
This action comes after Fox News had to settle five sexual harassment lawsuits all leveled against O'Reilly Factor host Bill O'Reilly. In the wake of this news, the show has been hemorrhaging advertisers but there's still one person who stands behind O'Reilly: Trump.
Trump told the The New York Times, "He's a good person… I know Bill. Bill's a good person… I don't think Bill would do anything wrong."
So Oliver has called on the familiar catheter cowboy, who has already starred in ads about everything from the nuclear triads to American healthcare, to help teach Trump why sexual harassment is something you should not stand behind.
John Oliver
Washington Post, NY Times Win
Pulitzers
The Pulitzer Prizes on Monday honored The Washington Post for hard-hitting reporting on Donald Trump's presidential campaign and The New York Times for revealing Vladimir Putin's covert power grab, praising their probing of powerful people despite a hostile climate for the news media.
The Daily News of New York and ProPublica, a web-based platform specializing in investigative journalism, won the prize for public service journalism for coverage of New York police abuses that forced mostly poor minorities from their homes.
Other winners included an international consortium of more than 300 reporters on six continents that exposed the so-called Panama Papers detailing the hidden infrastructure and global scale of offshore tax havens used by the high and mighty.
Reporter Eric Eyre of Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia took the prize for investigative reporting for exposing a flood of opioids in depressed West Virginia counties with the country's highest overdose death rates.
The staff of the East Bay Times of Oakland, California, won the breaking news award for coverage of the "Ghost Ship" fire that killed 36 people at a warehouse party, exposing the city's failure to take actions that might have prevented the disaster.
Pulitzers
Most Valuable U.S. Car Maker
Tesla
Tesla Inc on Monday became the most valuable U.S. car maker, reaching a market capitalisation of $50.887 billion and edging past General Motors which produces many more cars.
Helped by an analyst's recommendation, the luxury electric car maker's stock rose 3.26 percent to a new record high close of $312.39, and its market value exceeded GM's, which ended at $50.886 billion.
Over the past month, Tesla has surged 35 percent as investors bet that it and Chief Executive Elon Musk will revolutionise the automobile and energy industries.
Tesla's market capitalisation is now equivalent to $102,000 for every car it plans to make in 2018, or $667,000 per car sold last year. By comparison, GM's market capitalisation is equivalent to $5,000 per car it sold in 2016.
Proponents believe Tesla will become a carbon-free energy and transportation heavyweight and they argue its valuation is reasonable based on long-term expectations for Tesla's growth.
Tesla
Ancient Concession Stands Found
Roman Gladiator Arena
Just like spectators at modern-day sporting events, people who attended ancient Roman gladiator fights would have gotten hungry and might have even wanted to shop for little souvenirs.
Archaeologists in Austria say they have detected the remains of the bakeries, fast-food stands and shops that would have served spectators at the ancient Roman city of Carnuntum.
Today, Carnuntum is a sleepy town on the southern bank of the Danube, outside Vienna. But in its heyday, it was the fourth-largest city in the Roman Empire, and it was home to as many as 50,000 people, including, for a few years in the second century A.D., the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius.
If you visit the site today, you can see some of the ruins, like the monumental Heathen's Gate and the amphitheater. But much of Carnuntum's sprawling remains are still hidden underground beneath pastures, and in recent decades, the site has been threatened by plowing, construction and looting by treasure hunters.
To study the underground city without disturbing it, Wolfgang Neubauer, director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology (LBI ArchPro), has been using noninvasive methods, such as aerial photography, ground-penetrating radar systems and magnetometers.
Roman Gladiator Arena
Ending Forensic Science Commission
Justice Departmen
Attorney General Jeff Sessions (R-Racist) said Monday he is ending an Obama-era partnership with independent scientists that aimed to improve the reliability of forensic science, as longstanding concerns remain about the quality of such evidence in court cases.
The Justice Department will not renew the National Commission on Forensic Science, a panel of judges, defense attorneys, researchers and law enforcement officials that had been advising the attorney general on the use of scientific evidence in the criminal justice process. The department will instead appoint an in-house adviser and create an internal committee to study improvements to forensic analysis, Sessions said.
Their tasks will include a broad look at the personnel and equipment needs of overburdened crime labs.
The Obama administration formed the commission in 2013 to address wide-ranging concerns about problematic forensic techniques.
The Justice Department also is reconsidering an effort launched last year to review forensic sciences practiced by the FBI. That review sought to determine whether other scientific disciplines have been tainted by flawed testimony, a problem that surfaced in 2015 when the Justice Department revealed that experts had overstated the strength of their evidence in many older cases dating back decades involving microscopic hair analysis.
Justice Departmen
Things Could Get Worse
Border Agents
Over the last year, the risk that border agents will search and detain U.S. citizens' personal devices has increased dramatically. Arriving foreigners, meanwhile, now have to contend with the possibility that they will not only be asked to list their social media accounts but also provide the passwords for them before they can enter the United States.
A new bill in Congress could address US citizens' fears of having their phones or other devices confiscated. But even if that bill passes, the Trump administration may still choose to gather foreigners' social media passwords, a policy known as extreme vetting. In turn, Americans may become anxious that other countries will subject them to the very same treatment.
The usual rules don't apply to your devices - There's always been a risk that your phone or laptop could be searched upon your return to the States - and that you can't do anything about that. Customs and Border Protection agents can also temporarily confiscate your device to search its data.
That's because, as an August 2009 Department of Homeland Security paper states, your Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures of your property don't apply until you officially enter America.
That 2009 DHS document says CBP should spend no more than five days on an initial inspection of a "detained" device, while more-in-depth investigations should last 30 days at most.
Border Agents
Drilling Deeper Than Ever Before
Earth
It might come as a bit of a surprise, considering we walk around on it all day long, but science hasn't really ever seen fit to find out what's inside of our planet. Thanks to volcanic eruptions we know it's a molten mix of various elements, with the pressure of gravity having turned it into an extremely hot liquid stew, but what exactly it is made of has remained a mystery simply because nobody has ever had the right combination of funding and technology to actually drill deep enough to make a solid conclusion. By 2030, Japan wants to be the first to do it, by digging deeper into Earth than anyone ever has before.
The plan, cooked up by the Japanese Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology - JAMSTEC for short - is to send an extremely long drill rig down through the depths of the ocean and straight through the crust. The drill will splash through nearly 2.5 miles of water before hitting rock, at which point it'll still have nearly 4 miles to bore through before it reaches the mantle.
The researchers will use the hole to examine the area between the mantle and the ocean floor to get a better sense of exactly how the crust of our planet formed. Scientists also hope to determine the maximum depth into the crust at which microbial life continues to exist, and to take samples of the mantle in order to figure out its composition.
The expedition will be carried out by Japan's deep sea drilling rig called Chikyu, and JAMSTEC plans to start the extremely pricey project - it'll cost over half a billion dollars - by 2030 at the absolute latest.
Earth
Dead Bat Found In Prepackaged Salad
Florida
US health authorities on Monday studied the remains of a dead bat discovered inside a prepackaged salad mix sold in Florida for possible traces of the deadly rabies virus.
The Fresh Express company, a subsidiary of Chiquita Brands, announced a "precautionary recall of a limited number of cases" of their prepackaged Organic Marketside Spring Mix, which had been distributed to Walmart stores across the southwestern United States.
The company issued the recall on Saturday when it learned "that extraneous animal matter was allegedly found" in a salad container.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) said it was working with the Florida health department and the US Food and Drug Administration "to support an investigation of a dead bat" found in the packaged salad sold at "a grocery store in Florida."
The bat carcass however was in poor condition.
Florida
Found in Sewage Plant
Frankenstein of Giant Viruses
New giant viruses found at an Austrian wastewater treatment plant probably evolved from a smaller virus that piced up bits of genome from its hosts and incorporated it, Frankenstein-like, into its own genetic code.
The viruses - four species in a new group dubbed the Klosneuviruses - are a type of Mimivirus. The giant viruses in the Mimivirus group were discovered just in 2003. Giant viruses live up to their name: They can reach sizes of up to 500 nanometers in diameter, compared to a few dozen nanometers for typical viruses. Giant viruses also have more complicated genetic machinery than their tinier cousins.
"Since protein synthesis is one of the most prominent hallmarks of cellular life, it shows that these new viruses are more 'cell-like' than any virus anyone has ever seen before," study co-author Eugene Koonin, a computational biologist at the National Institutes of Health, said in a statement.
The discovery of the new viruses was accidental - but enlightening. The research team was combing through genetic sequences from a wastewater treatment plant in the town of Klosterneuburg, Austria, trying to understand bacteria that convert ammonia to nitrate during the treatment process.
The enormous genomes of the new viruses allowed the researchers to compare them to other giant viruses and to the lineages of the Mimivirus group. The analysis showed that the Klosneuviruses were a patchwork of genetic information, much of it picked up from host cells over long periods of time. This piecemeal approach to building a giant virus suggests that these viruses arose from smaller viruses, not from the paring down of ancient cells, which has also been suggested.
Frankenstein of Giant Viruses
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