Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: La Trahison des Clercs [The Betrayal of the Clerics], Economics Edition (NY Times Blog)
[I]n other words, the foreign-policy neocon intellectuals, however wrongheaded I may find their ideas, turn out to be men and women with real principles. I wish I could say the same about conservative economists. But I can't.
Steve Benen: During tax debate, Republican questions funding for children's health (MSNBC)
The price tag for the GOP tax plan is roughly $1.5 trillion. Meanwhile, there's the Children's Health Insurance Program, which needs $15 billion. In other words, CHIP costs literally 1% of the overall cost of the Republican tax package. And yet, there was Orrin Hatch, a supporter of his party's tax cuts, making the case on the Senate floor that CHIP's "having trouble" because "we don't have money anymore."
Mary Papenfuss: GOP Senator [Chuck Grassley] Implies Those Who Aren't Millionaires Waste Money On 'Booze, Women' (Huffington Post)
"He's a pleasant man, isn't he? I spend every penny I make and it sure isn't on women, booze or movies. Fun stuff like electricity, house payment, insurance, etc. etc. What the hell? I guess the rich don't drink, date or go to movies? That must be how they got rich! Wow!" - Madlyn Stewart
Marina Fang: Donald Trump Endorses Roy Moore For Senate (Huffington Post)
Moore is accused of sexually harassing or assaulting several women, including some who were teenagers at the time.
Rebecca Shapiro: "Billy Bush: I Believe The Women Accusing Donald Trump Of Sexual Misconduct" (Huffington Post)
"He said it," Bush wrote. "'Grab 'em by the pussy.' Of course he said it."
Justin McCurry: "Sonic attack: why South Korea bombards the North with news, K-pop and good times" (The Guardian)
All along the demilitarised zone that separates the two countries, the South torments its northern enemy with hidden giant speakers that hurl out anything from propaganda to weather reports at ear-splitting volume.
Peter Bradshaw: The Man Who Invented Christmas review - bah, humbug! (The Guardian)
Dan Stevens plays Charles Dickens in this tin-eared, saccharine, entirely terrible comic fantasy about the writing of A Christmas Carol.
Josiah Hesse: "'Our business is men, and men are not toxic': Colorado strip club sign raises ire" (The Guardian)
Deborah Dunafon is unapologetic about the sign she posted saying 'Toxic Masculinity Welcome Here' despite unsurprising outrage on social media.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
answered:
took the day off.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
David E Suggests
Expensive Transfers
David
Thanks, Dave!
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Team Coco
CONAN
Reader Comment
Current Events
Good one:
Trump's Lawyer Claims to Be Voice on "Access Hollywood" Tape
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)-Hoping to put to rest a mystery that has long bedeviled the nation, Donald J. Trump's personal lawyer, John Dowd, revealed on Monday that it is actually his voice that appears on the notorious "Access Hollywood" tape.
Speaking to reporters, Dowd said that the so-called locker-room talk attributed to Trump had actually been carefully crafted by the former reality-show host's legal team and then read aloud by Dowd himself.
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
"KEEP CALM AND GOBBLE ON."
SWAMP THINGS DECEND ON WASHINGTON.
WHAT A GEEK!
"HE IS NO ALLY OR FRIEND OF OURS."
"...THEY ARE LEADING US TO RUIN."
"THANK GOD FOR TRUMP! THAT'S WHY WE LOVE HIM!"
WHAT ARE THEY HIDING?
HOW MUCH SHIT CAN A MAN WALK IN BEFORE YOU CAN SAY THAT ...
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Butt-deep in Valentine's day at work.
Final Season Will Go Forward
'House Of Cards'
It's Claire's turn.
Netflix will move forward with the sixth and final season of "House of Cards," even after firing star Kevin Spacey.
Robin Wright, who plays newly inaugurated President Claire Underwood, will take over the political drama's lead role. Conveniently enough, the fifth season of the show ended with Wright's character looking into the camera and declaring, "My turn."
"We were really excited we could get to an agreement" to provide "closure of the show for fans," Ted Sarandos, Netflix's chief content officer, said Monday while confirming the news.
The final season is expected to consist of eight episodes, compared to the 13 episodes of earlier seasons. It's unclear how Spacey's character, Frank Underwood, will be written out of the show.
'House Of Cards'
Believes The Women
Billy Bush
Billy Bush penned a sobering op-ed published in the New York Times Sunday night, in which the former "Access Hollywood" host said he believed the women accusing President-for-now Donald Trump (R-Oink) of sexual misconduct.
He also slammed the president for engaging in "revisionist history" after reports indicated that Trump has been questioning the authenticity of the "Access Hollywood" tape in recent months. The tape, which features Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, derailed Bush's career but had no bearing on Trump being elected president.
"He said it," Bush wrote. "'Grab 'em by the pussy.' Of course he said it."
Bush added that he recently went back to an October 2016 article that detailed the personal accounts of 20 women accusing Trump of sexual harassment and misconduct, including groping, unwanted advances and kissing them without their permission.
"To these women: I will never know the fear you felt or the frustration of being summarily dismissed and called a liar, but I do know a lot about the anguish of being inexorably linked to Donald Trump," he wrote. "You have my respect and admiration. You are culture warriors at the forefront of necessary change."
Billy Bush
Dutch Court Scraps Fine
Andre Rieu
A Dutch court Monday scrapped a 116,000-euro fine slapped on celebrated violinist Andre Rieu for allegedly allowing children to perform past a late night limit set by law.
"The court finds the reasons for the fine unfounded," the Limburg District Court said, adding "there are too few indications that Rieu employed the children."
Rieu's lawyers in October said they were appealing the "absurdly high" fine after a group of young Romanian pan flute players were on stage until midnight during a series of concerts in 2015.
Rieu had invited the children, together with Romanian pan flute virtuoso Gheorghe Zamfir, to play in his hometown of Maastricht.
Dutch law states that minors cannot perform after 11:00 pm. Rieu's lawyers said the children were on stage "for only a few minutes" to wave at the crowd at the end of the concert, which they said "was a standard practice" for Rieu.
Andre Rieu
Plan To Smear Accusers Backfires
O'Really
In an attempt to defend himself after numerous women accused him of sexual misconduct, Bill O'Reilly (R-Wife Hitter) tried to paint the women as liars out for fat settlement checks. It's an argument also employed by President Donald Trump and countless other men accused of misconduct over the years.
But the former Fox "News" host is the one doing the lying, according to Rachel Witlieb Bernstein, a former Fox producer who filed suit against O'Reilly Monday in the Southern District of New York.
Bernstein settled her original case against O'Reilly back in 2002. The terms of the settlement prohibited either side from talking about the case. But Bernstein says O'Reilly violated those terms in April and throughout the rest of the year, in talking to The New York Times and other outlets about the millions of dollars in settlement payouts he and Fox made to several women over harassment claims.
Not only should O'Reilly have kept his mouth shut, Bernstein says in the lawsuit, the things he said about these women were also lies.
We want an apology and an acknowledgement that what he said was false. Rachel Witlieb Bernstein's lawyer on what her client wants from the lawsuit against Bill O'Reilly
O'Really
Mass Puerto Rican Immigration
Florida
Cristina Sanchez is one of thousands of Puerto Ricans fleeing their hurricane-ravaged island for Florida, a mass migration set to shape the southern US state as much as migrants from communist Cuba in the late 20th century.
Sanchez left the island with three suitcases, her small dog -- and no plans to return.
After the hurricane, Sanchez's home was left without running water or electricity. A diabetic, she could not keep her life-saving insulin refrigerated without power.
Sanchez headed to Orlando, a central Florida city best known for its amusement parks, including Disney World and Universal Studios.
Florida is a delegate-rich swing state in US electoral politics, a state that can hold the key to who wins the White House or which party controls Congress. And Puerto Ricans are overwhelmingly Democrats.
Florida
Double Standard
Netflix
One of actor Danny Masterson's alleged sexual assault victims says a Netflix executive told her this weekend that higher-ups at the company don't believe the four women who have accused Masterson of rape.
Netflix confirmed in a statement that Andy Yeatman, its director of global kids content, made those "careless" and "uninformed" comments, but noted that he was not initially aware that the woman he was speaking to had accused Masterson of rape.
Masterson stars in the Netflix program "The Ranch," alongside his former "That '70s Show" co-star Ashton Kutcher ("That '70s Show" is also streaming on Netflix). Although four women have accused Masterson of raping them and the Los Angeles County District Attorney and Los Angeles Police Department are investigating the allegations, Netflix has not taken any action against the actor, not even a suspension pending investigation.
The lack of action on Netflix's part - even though the company moved quickly to suspend and then fire Kevin Spacey after BuzzFeed published a report detailing an allegation of sexual misconduct against the actor - has led to outrage on Twitter, an online petition that had gained over 36,000 signatures by Monday morning, and a Daily Beast story titled "Netflix's Disturbing Sexual-Assault Hypocrisy."
Victim B said she asked Yeatman why Netflix was not taking action against Masterson in light of the district attorney's investigation and the multiple accusations of rape. According to Victim B and another witness, Yeatman said Netflix takes sexual misconduct allegations seriously but that "we don't believe them," referring to Masterson's four accusers.
Netflix
Fastest Melting Glacier in Antarctic
Pine Island Glacier
Antarctica's fastest-melting glacier had an iceberg break off more than two months ago. That iceberg-around 100 square miles-disintegrated into several smaller icebergs in a pattern scientists did not expect.
An animation using satellite images of the iceberg reveals that the iceberg likely got stuck by thick sea ice before it disintegrated into smaller icebergs. Previously, scientists expected the iceberg to drift far out into the ocean before breaking up. The iceberg calved from Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica back in September. The calving event followed a different pattern than is typical of calving events, and scientists attribute the difference to thinning ice over the past few decades.
"What we're witnessing on Pine Island Glacier is worrying," Robert Larter, a marine geophysicist at British Antarctic Survey who flew over the glacier last season with the German Alfred Wegener Institute, said in a statement."We're now seeing changes in the calving behavior of the ice shelf, when for 68 years we saw a pattern of advance and retreat resulting in the calving of a single large iceberg which left the ice front to approximately the same place."
Pine Island Glacier-from which the most recently disintegrated iceberg calved from-is the fastest-melting glacier in Antarctica. It is responsible for a quarter of ice loss on Antarctica-shedding 45 billion tons of ice each year. Other iceberg calving events occurred in 2001, 2007 and 2013.
"Each calving event returned the ice front to more or less the same position and the ice shelf flowed into the sea again," Larter said. "But with continuing thinning it was clear that sooner or later there would have to be a change to this pattern-and this is what we are witnessing now."
Pine Island Glacier
Sign Language Interpreter Delivered Gibberish
Florida
Hearing-impaired people tuning in to a news conference about the arrest of a suspected serial killer got a message of gibberish from an American Sign Language interpreter.
As Tampa police Chief Brian Dugan announced the arrest of Howell Donaldson Wednesday night, interpreter Derlyn Roberts was there beside him, making signs that made no sense.
"She sat up there and waved her arms like she was singing Jingle Bells," Rachell Settambrino, who is deaf and teaches American Sign Language at the University of South Florida, told the Tampa Bay Times through an interpreter.
Among the things Roberts signed, according to Settambrino, was the following: "Fifty-one hours ago, zero 12 22 (indecipherable) murder three minutes in 14 weeks ago in old (indecipherable) murder four five 55,000 plea 10 arrest murder bush (indecipherable) three age 24."
Tampa Police Department spokesman Steve Hegarty said Monday that Roberts just showed up and told him she was there to provide the sign language interpretation at the Nov. 28 news conference. He assumed that someone else at the department called the service it uses for interpreters.
Florida
Weapons And Jewelry
Bronze Age Best
How could people living during the Bronze Age pull off the difficult process of making iron? They didn't, concludes a new study; instead, they got the iron for the rare iron artifacts discovered from the period in an easy-to-use form: meteorites hitting Earth.
The logic behind names of prehistoric periods is breathtakingly straightforward: Archaeologists have found lots of artifacts made of bronze from the Bronze Age, but then, when the Iron Age begins, suddenly metal implements are made of iron instead. But there have always been a few exceptions, rare objects made of iron long before the Bronze Age faded. Archaeologists have been stumped by these objects because iron is much more difficult to process than bronze, and they didn't think any Bronze Age civilizations had the skills needed to do so.
Albert Jambon, a mineralogist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in France, tackles these weird early iron exceptions in a paper, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Jambon wanted to determine plausibility that there was some, as he describes it in the paper, "precocious smelting" of iron during the Bronze Age.
In order to turn iron from Earth's surface into something usable, you have to be able to smelt it. That's notoriously hard to do because you need particularly high temperatures and a series of persnickety steps. Prior to that point, bronze ruled the world, since it is technologically easier to produce.
Pre-smelting iron artifacts made from meteorites have been discovered around the world, including in Greenland, eastern North America and Tibet.
Bronze Age Best
In Memory
Shashi Kapoor
Bollywood icon Shashi Kapoor -- a star of 1970s Indian cinema and a member of the Hindi film industry's famous Kapoor family -- died on Monday aged 79 after a long illness, his family said.
Kapoor died at a hospital in Mumbai on Monday evening, his nephew Randhir Kapoor told the Press Trust of India news agency. Another family member confirmed the death to AFP.
Shashi -- the youngest son of Prithviraj Kapoor, a pioneer of Hindi film and theatre -- was born in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata in 1938.
He began his career early, assisting in his father's travelling theatre company and appearing on stage in a production of "Shakuntala", a classic Hindu love story, at the age of six.
His Bollywood career also began in childhood and he grew into a matinee idol, appearing in more than 150 films and winning over fans with his charm and suave good looks.
He debuted as a leading man in "Dharmputra" in 1961, and his most memorable roles were in such films as "Jab Jab Phool Khile" (Whenever The Flowers Bloom, 1965), "Kabhi Kabhie" (Sometimes, 1976), and "Kalyug" (Age of Downfall, 1981).
Shashi's eldest brother Raj Kapoor, who died in 1988, was also a famous Hindi cinema actor. Randhir is Raj's son.
Shashi Kapoor
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