Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Rupert Neate: Generation wealth: how the modern world fell in love with money (The Guardian)
Lauren Greenfield has spent years photographing the world's richest people. Now she's made a documentary on society's obsession with extreme wealth - and its cost to us all
Joe Bob Briggs: Heckle Nation (Taki's Magazine)
Back in the '80s I worked comedy clubs, and, depending on the night, the venue, the crowd, and the level of alcohol consumption, you could sometimes get absolutely eviscerated by hecklers.
Joe Bob Briggs: I Got Your Gluten Right Here, Pal (Taki's Magazine)
Okay, the next person who tells me he's gluten-free is gonna get kicked in the gluten. There's a restaurant here trying to sell me gluten-free enchiladas. I mean, really? STOP IT. PLEASE. ENOUGH. There's no such thing as gluten-free enchiladas. If it doesn't have gluten in it, it's not an enchilada!
Joe Bob Briggs: Surrounded by Whiners (Taki's Magazine)
One way to gauge how serious people are about their beliefs is to measure their willingness to die for them. The average military enlistment rate for the nation is 1.6 recruits for every 1,000 able-bodied citizens between the ages of 15 and 24. But there are some parts of the country where rates go as high as six, ten, or even twenty enlistees for every thousand eligible citizens. In fact, of the top fifty counties that send soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines into battle, eleven are in the state of Texas alone and nine are in Georgia. (The South as a region provides 46 percent of our rank-and-file military.)
Steve Sailor: "Review: The Incredibles 2" (Taki's Magazine)
What proportion of the top creative artists in Hollywood, the heavyweight auteurs, are men of the right? This old question has come up again with the box office triumph of the anti-egalitarian Brad Bird's The Incredibles 2 and the comments about Donald Trump by David Lynch, director of Twin Peaks and Eraserhead.
Matthew Yglesias: Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels's lawyer and potential presidential candidate, explained (Vox)
That's ridiculous, right? Right? Right. Maybe.
Deborah Orr: I've had two abortions. I don't want or expect sympathy, but this is what I want you to know (iNews)
The girl, she was doing such a hard thing, and the law of her land made it so much harder for her. The law didn't stop her. It didn't make her decide that she must put her baby up for adoption, like my ex-boyfriend's mother had. The law just made her squander time and energy, and money on facing a psychologically and occasionally physically grueling procedure completely alone. She was so pale, so tired, so bitter at the hoops her country had made her jump through, and so very, very full of relief that she was no longer pregnant. Abortion is hard enough. Why make it so very much harder?
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Presenting
Michael Egan
'
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
David E Suggests
Customer Service
David
Thanks, Dave!
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Team Coco
CONAN
Reader Comment
Current Events
2 photographs of the Southern Cow
Janet shared the "then" photo; I found the "now."
China hits Predator where it hurts
This would work. Notice that in real life they haven't hit any of Ivanka's trash products:
China Slaps Two-Thousand-Per-Cent Tariff on Tanning Beds
(The Borowitz Report)-In the latest salvo in its escalating trade war with the United States, China has slapped all tanning beds slated for export to the U.S. with a two-thousand-per-cent tariff.
By artificially hiking up the cost of its tanning beds, China succeeded in sending the price of tanning beds worldwide soaring in overnight markets.
In what some experts regarded as a related move, China also placed a four-thousand-per-cent tariff on all spray-tan products headed for the U.S., as well as instant-tanning lotions, makeup foundation, and several popular hues of orange paint, including butter rum and burnt sienna.
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
RIGHT WING JESUS FREAKS.
WHAT A SUCK ASS!
PRESIDENT TRAITOR!
CLOSER TO CHAOS.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
FWIW, may have take some time off to go back east.
Not sure when, but it's kinda inevitable.
Scientists Discover World's Oldest
Colors
Scientists have unearthed the world's oldest colors, or pigments, from deep beneath the Sahara.
Researchers found 1.1 million-year-old pink pigments inside ancient rocks dredged from beneath Africa's Great Desert. The colors are more than 500 million years older than the next oldest pigments.
"The bright pink pigments are the molecular fossils of chlorophyll that were produced by ancient photosynthetic organisms inhabiting an ancient ocean that has long since vanished," Nur Gueneli, an earth scientist at Australia National University, said in a news release.
When diluted, the pigments appear a light pink. When concentrated inside ancient marine shales, the pigments take on a variety of tints, from blood red to deep purple.
Researchers described their discovery of ancient pigments in the journal PNAS.
Colors
Pieces of 'Fireball' Meteor Found
Botswana
Meteorite hunters have recovered a fragment of a small asteroid that fell to Earth on June 2, burning up in the sky over Botswana just hours after it was detected hurtling through space.
Now known as 2018 LA, the asteroid broke into several pieces after smacking into Earth's atmosphere, where it created a spectacular display as the "shooting star" blazed through the sky. Once it hit the atmosphere, the asteroid exploded and became what's known as a "fireball" meteor, creating a bright flash of light as it streaked across the sky.
After skywatchers and several security cameras spotted the falling space rock, teams of meteor experts began searching for any meteorites, or pieces that survived the fiery plunge and made it to the ground.
The first piece was found five days later by a group of geoscientists from local universities and research institutes in Botswana. Then some international researchers from the U.S., Finland and South Africa joined the search and helped to recover a second piece of the asteroid in Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
Peter Jenniskens, an astronomer and meteor expert with NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and experts from the Finnish Fireball Network helped narrow down the search area by gathering footage from surveillance cameras in the nearby Botswanan towns of Rakops and Maun.
Botswana
Fraud Lawsuit Dropped
Stan Lee
Stan Lee and Pow! Entertainment said today that the comics legend has dropped his fraud lawsuit against the company he co-founded. Read details of the case below.
"The whole thing has been confusing to everyone, including myself and the fans, but I am now happy to be surrounded by those who want the best for me," Lee said in a statement. "I am thrilled to put the lawsuit behind me, get back to business with my friends and colleagues at POW! and launch the next wave of amazing characters and stories."
Said Pow! CEO Shane Duffy: ""We are ecstatic that this ill-founded lawsuit has been dismissed, and we look forward to working with Stan again to develop and produce the great projects that were put on hold when the lawsuit was filed. We recently got together with Stan to discuss our path forward and we and Camsing are pleased with his overwhelmingly enthusiastic reaction."
PREVIOUSLY, May 15: Stan Lee is 95, but a little thing like that doesn't stop him from aggressively protecting his name and likeness. The legendary superhero comics creator has filed a $1 billion - with a B - lawsuit against Pow! Entertainment, claiming that the media and entertainment company he co-founded conspired with a pair of its employees to steal his identity.
Stan Lee
Rejects Invitation
Emmanuelle Seigner
The wife of Roman Polanski, French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, said Sunday she had rejected an invitation to join the body that awards the Oscars in protest at its decision to expel her husband over his historic statutory rape conviction in the US.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences last month announced that it had swelled its ranks by more than 900 members, as part of its drive for a more inclusive Hollywood.
The Oscar-awarding body announces a round of invitations every year, and has been bolstering its ethnic and female representation following criticism over its predominantly white, male membership.
But in an open letter published by France's Journal du Dimanche, Seigner said: "How can I pretend to ignore that the Academy a few weeks ago kicked out my husband, Roman Polanski, to satisfy the zeitgeist. The same Academy that rewarded him with the Oscar for best director for "The Pianist" in 2003. Curious amnesia!
"This Academy probably thinks that I am an actress sufficiently arriviste, without character to forget that she has been married for 29 years to one of the greatest directors," she added.
Emmanuelle Seigner
Personal Driver
Unpaid Overtime
Donald Trump's (R-Delusional) personal driver for more than 25 years says the billionaire real estate developer didn't pay him overtime and raised his salary twice in 15 years, clawing back the second raise by cutting off his health benefits.
Noel Cintron, who is listed in public records as a registered Republican, sued the Trump Organization for about 3,300 of overtime that he says he worked in the past six years. He's not allowed to sue for overtime prior to that due to the statute of limitations.
"In an utterly callous display of unwarranted privilege and entitlement and without even a minimal sense of noblesse oblige," Trump and his businesses exploited the driver, Cintron says in the complaint.
Cintron says he was required to be on duty for Trump starting at 7 a.m. each day until whenever Trump, his family or business associates no longer required his services. He worked as long as 55 hours per week, but was paid a fixed salary of $62,700 in 2003, $68,000 in 2006, and $75,000 in 2010, according to the complaint.
The wage bump in 2010 came with a catch, Cintron said. He was induced to surrender his health insurance, saving Trump approximately $17,866 per year in premiums, according to the lawsuit.
Unpaid Overtime
Trial Opens
Monsanto's Roundup
A lawyer for a California groundskeeper dying of cancer took aim at Monsanto Monday as a jury began hearing the lawsuit accusing the chemical giant of ignoring the health risks of its top-selling weed killer Roundup.
"For the past 40 years, Monsanto has known the primary ingredient in Roundup can produce tumors in lab animals," attorney Brent Wisner told the jury in a California state court hearing the case brought by Dewayne Johnson, a 46-year-old father of two.
Diagnosed in 2014 with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer that affects white blood cells, Johnson used Roundup repeatedly in his job at a school in Benecia, California.
In his opening statement, Wisner said Monsanto opted against warning consumers of the risks and that instead "they have fought science" by playing down the suspected link between the chemical herbicide and cancer.
The case in California Superior Court is the first trial in which Roundup is said to have caused cancer, a claim repeatedly denied by the chemical company.
Monsanto's Roundup
Towering Iceberg Splits
Greenland Glacier
Scientists in eastern Greenland captured an incredible scene on video: the moment an iceberg measuring 4 miles (6 kilometers) long, separated from the Helheim Glacier and drifted away.
The event, which began at 11:30 p.m. local time on June 22, unfolded over 30 minutes, but the footage is sped up so the calving happens in just 90 seconds, according to a statement released by the researchers. The video shows a wide, flattened iceberg parting from the glacier, and so-called pinnacle bergs - tall, thin icebergs - detach from the larger mass of floating ice and invert in the water, the researchers reported.
When large masses of ice part from glaciers, quantities of water are shunted into the ocean and contribute to sea-level rise. But there is much that scientists have yet to learn about how and why this large-scale breakage happens, which makes it difficult to predict when glaciers will fall apart, and how much that glacier disintegration will affect sea levels over time, David Holland, leader of the research team and a professor at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematics and NYU Abu Dhabi, told Live Science.
Earth's biggest glaciers are in frozen Antarctica, and their breakup would be catastrophic for sea level rise; the loss of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would release enough water to raise global sea levels by nearly 10 feet (3 meters). But while there are abundant satellite observations of Antarctica's ice sheets, it's extremely challenging to gather data from the surface of the remote continent, Holland said.
Greenland's glaciers are more accessible, so Holland and his colleagues have spent a decade collecting data and observing glacier behavior in Greenland - and this time they just happened to be perfectly positioned to witness an iceberg splitting away, research team member Denise Holland, the logistics coordinator for NYU's Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and NYU Abu Dhabi's Center for Global Sea Level Change, told Live Science.
Greenland Glacier
In Memory
Tab Hunter
Tab Hunter, the actor, musician and novelist, has died at the age of 86.
Hunter, born Arthur Andrew Kelm, shot to stardom in the 1950s, appearing in a host of movies including The Sea Chase, opposite John Wayne, and Track of the Cat, with Robert Mitchum.
He also hit number one in the Billboard chart around the same time with the song Young Love.
But though he was often cast as a shirtless heartthrob in romantic movies pitched by the studios at a female audience, he was leading a 'double life' as a gay man, still a taboo at that time in Hollywood.
Tabloids would often report of his relationships with the likes of Debbie Reynolds and Natalie Wood, a practice actively encouraged by the studio's publicity departments.
In fact, Hunter had a number of affairs with high profile men, including Psycho star Anthony Perkins and Ronnie Robertson, the champion figure skater.
It wasn't until 2005, in his autobiography Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star, that he publicly confirmed his sexuality.
He was also the subject of the Netflix documentary Tab Hunter Confidential from 2015, produced by his partner of 35 years Allan Glaser, in which he discussed his life and career.
In later years, he took on acclaimed roles in movie's like John Waters' Polyester, and several others with feted drag artist Divine.
A movie, Tab and Tony, which is to tell the story of his relationship with Perkins, was announced last month, with Star Trek's Zachary Quinto in the lead, and produced by J.J. Abrams.
Tab Hunter
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