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Trump Exposes Trump (YouTube)
In his own words, Donald Trump reveals his hypocrisy about Iraq, immigration, health care, abortion, Libya, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and more.
Tom Danehy: Tom muses on Conventions and that guy from 'KNS' radio (Tucson Weekly)
Three things for which Republicans should be thankful:
1. Barack Obama is constitutionally barred from running for a third term. President Obama would squish Donald Trump like a bug. 2. Joe Biden had to deal with the death of his son and couldn't mount a primary campaign. 3. Michelle Obama isn't interested in running for anything...yet.
Dr. Michael Gregor: What's the "Natural" Human Diet? (YouTube)
Mostly Plants.
"When did crowdfunding get so selfish?" Lucy Mangan on why she dislikes online fundraising(Stylist)
If she had spent hours honing it with the single, laser-focused intention of pushing all my buttons, she couldn't have done better. The email from my (not close, and about to become very much uncloser) friend asked for crowdfunding contributions towards her start-up homeopathy business.
Jonathan Jones: "The great art cover-up: Renaissance nudity still has power to shock" (The Guardian)
Sistine Chapel buttocks are veiled, while Leonardo's Leda was so saucy she was destroyed. But prudish censorship only confirms the pulling power of art.
Steve Rose: From Suicide Squad to Batman v Superman, why are DC's films so bad? (The Guardian)
While rivals Marvel go from strength to strength with their superhero movies, DC's are being slated by critics. Why? The answer is Zack Snyder.
Cole Delbyck: "Here Are The Most Savage 'Suicide Squad' Reviews Before You Waste Time And Money" (Huffington Post)
Holy "Batman v Superman" these are bad.
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THEY FINALLY FLUSH THE TOILET!
THE CALL OF DOODIE!
AMERICA'S WAKE-UP CALL!
"MEALY MOUTHED REPUGS!
ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST!
"PAWS FOR LIFE."
THE GREAT WALL OF TRUMP!
UNRAVELING!
THE RECKONING!
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SAG Life Achievement Award
Lily Tomlin
Lily Tomlin will be the recipient of this year's SAG Life Achievement Award.
The honor will be an addition to the actress' already impressive list of accolades, which includes multiple Emmys and American Comedy Awards, two Tony Awards, two Peabody Awards and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
Tomlin began her long career on the sketch variety show Laugh-In, where she debuted characters such as the philosophical 5-and-a-half-year-old Edith Ann. Her other television roles include playing the voice of Ms. Frizzle in the animated kid's TV series The Magic School Bus and the president's executive assistant, Deborah Fiderer, on Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing.
Currently, she stars opposite Jane Fonda on Netflix's Grace & Frankie, a role that has garnered her two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.
Tomlin will receive the honor during the 23rd Screen Actors Guild Awards, which will be simulcast live nationwide on TNT and TBS on Sunday, Jan. 29, 2017.
Lily Tomlin
Comedy Central Roast
Lumpy
At Donald Trump's Comedy Central Roast in 2011, comics poked fun at the now Republican presidential nominee on a number of issues, including his hair, wife, family, sex life, and failed businesses.
But, according to Aaron Lee, a writer for the roast, there was only one topic that Trump made off-limits.
Lee posted on List a series of joke subjects that Trump "allowed" - ones that actually made it onto the program - with Trump's only objection being the one topic he explicitly held "sacred."
"The only thing we got from Trump was the request not to say he exaggerates his wealth," Lee wrote, adding that it's standard for Comedy Central Roast subjects to deem certain things off-limits.
As Vulture points out, Trump allowed comedian Jeff Ross to say, "The Donald and I have a lot in common: We both live in New York, we both play golf, we both fantasize about his daughter."
Lumpy
Donald Trump Roast Best Bits | The Roast Of Donald Trump - YouTube
Science Unmasks Model
Edgar Degas
Researchers used super-X-ray vision to peer beneath the surface of a portrait by impressionist Edgar Degas and gaze upon the model whose likeness he painted over nearly 140 years ago, they reported Thursday.
The woman, whose image Degas turned upside down before using it as a base for a new painting, was probably Emma Dobigny -- a favourite model of 19th century French artists, the team announced.
"This has been a very exciting discovery," said David Thurrowgood, conservator at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, where the painting hangs.
"It is not every day that a new Degas painting is found, in this case, hidden in front of us."
The existence of the "underpainting" has been known since about 1920.
Edgar Degas
First Evidence Of Legendary Flood
China
Geologists have found the first evidence for China's Great Flood, a 4,000-year-old disaster on the Yellow River that led to birth of the Xia dynasty and modern Chinese civilization, researchers said Thursday.
The findings in the journal Science may help rewrite history because they not only show that a massive flood did occur, but that it was in 1920 BC, several centuries later than traditionally thought.
This would mean the Xia dynasty, led by Emperor Yu, may also have started later than Chinese historians have thought.
Yu gained fame as the man who was able to gain control over the flood by orchestrating the dredging work needed to guide the waters back into their channels.
Restoring order after chaos earned "him the divine mandate to establish the Xia dynasty, the first in Chinese history," said the study, led by Wu Qinglong, professor in the department of geography at Nanjing Normal University.
China
DiseaseSpreads Across the U.S.
Bats
A deadly fungal disease called white-nose syndrome is wreaking havoc on North American bat populations, spreading farther and faster last year than ever before, according to a new report by the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center.
The result: a severe, accelerated loss of bats in the United States, with populations in some caves falling 90 to 100 percent.
That could have significant consequences for both the United States economy and its food supply, according to David Blehert, a U.S. Geological Survey white-nose syndrome researcher based in Madison, Wisconsin.
White-nose syndrome is caused by the fungus P. destructans (Pd) and is named for the distinctive white fungus that tends to collect along infected bats' muzzles. It has killed more than 6 million hibernating bats in North America since the winter of 2006-2007, when it was first detected on a bat in a cave near Albany, New York.
White-nose syndrome has spread to 29 states-up four states since fall 2015-as well as five Canadian provinces. This year scientists have detected Pd in 32 states and five Canadian provinces and in more caves than ever.
Bats
Orders Climate Change U-Turn
Australia
Australia's re-elected conservative government has announced a U-turn in its climate change policy, reinstating climate science as the bedrock of its peak science body just months after slashing its funding and axing hundreds of jobs.
"It's a new government and we're laying out a direction that climate science matters," new Science Minister Greg Hunt told Australian radio on Thursday.
Scientists and climate change advocates cautiously welcomed the news, but remained concerned about the commitment to fight climate change, which could threaten Australia's food security and its ability to feed Asia's growing, affluent middle class.
Severe cuts to the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) climate change division were announced in February as a result of budget cuts imposed by the previous climate change skeptic prime minister, Tony Abbott.
Hunt said the new policy would see 15 new climate science jobs and research investment worth A$37 million ($28.08 million) over 10 years, but scientists and advocates remained concerned about the CSIRO.
Australia
Siberia
Anthrax
An outbreak of anthrax that has killed more than 2,000 reindeer and sickened 13 people in Siberia has been linked to 75-year-old anthrax spores released by melting permafrost.
It's an event of the sort many scientists have warned about: Warming temperatures reviving dormant diseases, perhaps even pathogens long-thought extinct. There are, however, ways to protect both livestock and humans from an anthrax infection, and the current outbreak is likely to end quickly, said George Stewart, a medical bacteriologist at the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine.
The anthrax currently infecting reindeer and people in western Siberia likely came from the carcass of a reindeer that died in an anthrax outbreak 75 years ago and has been frozen ever since - until an unusually warm summer thawed permafrost across the region this year, according to local officials.
Bacillus anthracis, the bacteria that cause anthrax, are capable of surviving in the soil for centuries, so it's no surprise that melting permafrost could resurrect a long-dormant plague, Stewart said. Anthrax spreads through soil. Grazing animals pick up the bacteria, which quickly gain a toehold and start reproducing like mad in the animals' blood. Unlike many pathogens, which aim to keep the host alive long enough to reproduce, anthrax wants to kill, and it produces toxins to do so, Stewart said. That's because anthrax demands a dead and decomposing host to spread: Once oxygen enters the rotting animal, the bacteria transform into spores.
Because anthrax is so hardy, it's no surprise that it could survive in permafrost. Researchers warned in 2011 in the journal Global Health Action that outbreaks such as this one could become common as the remains of livestock killed in earlier outbreaks thaw. There are also fears that other pathogens may lurk in the frozen soil of Siberia. In 2015, researchers discovered that a 30,000-year-old virus isolated from permafrost was still infectious (though, fortunately, not dangerous to humans).
Anthrax
2016 Resource 'Budget' Already Used Up
Nature
In just over seven months, humanity has used up a full year's allotment of natural resources such as water, food and clean air -- the quickest rate yet, according to a new report.
The point of "overshoot" will officially be reached on Monday, said environmental group Global Footprint Network -- five days earlier than last year.
The gloomy milestone is marked every year on what is known as Earth Overshoot Day.
In 1993, the day fell on October 21, in 2003 on September 22 and last year on August 13.
In 1961, according to the network, humankind used only about three-quarters of Earth's annual resource allotment. By the 1970s, economic and population growth sent Earth into annual overshoot.
Nature
Melting Ice Sheet
Greenland
In 1967, the U.S. decommissioned a military base that had been constructed underneath the Greenland Ice Sheet. In doing so, the military removed a portable nuclear reactor that had helped power the 200-person base, but left the rest of the waste there, from gasoline to PCBs and nuclear coolant water.
At the time, the U.S., along with their Danish partners who had authority over Greenland, assumed the waste would be entombed for eternity beneath a perpetually deepening snow cover.
However, what once was buried, global warming is poised to unearth. According to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the melting ice sheet could begin spreading the hazardous waste across the surface of the ice sheet and into the ocean in as little as 75 years from now.
Such waste poses a threat to ecosystems and human populations, the study found. More importantly, though, the research calls attention to an issue that could complicate relations between the U.S., Denmark and the newly autonomous territory of Greenland.
The waste, says Liam Colgan, a climate scientist at York University in Toronto and lead author of the study, is "... An unexpected liability due to climate change that potentially undermines the goodwill between the U.S., Denmark and Greenland."
Greenland
In Memory
David Huddleston
David Huddleston, the burly comic actor who specialized in playing blustery characters like the Big Lebowski in the legendary Coen Brothers 1998 film, has died. He was 85.
Huddleston, who portrayed another blowhard - Mayor Olson Johnson, one of the many Johnsons in town - in the Mel Brooks comedy classic Blazing Saddles (1974), died Tuesday of heart and kidney disease in Santa Fe, N.M., his wife Sarah told The Hollywood Reporter.
In The Big Lebowski, inspired by the noirish work of Raymond Chandler, Huddleston played a multimillionaire (or so he appeared) who shared the last name of the film's protagonist, the hippie Jeff "the Dude" Lebowski (Jeff Bridges). Julianne Moore portrayed his daughter.
In a career of more than 60 films, his breakthrough role came as a vicious gang leader with a sense of humor in Robert Benton's first film, the Civil War-set Bad Company (1972).
Huddleston also appeared opposite John Wayne in Rio Lobo (1970) and McQ (1974), with Jimmy Stewart in Fools' Parade (1971), opposite Bette Davis in the telefilm Family Reunion (1981) and with Gregory Peck in Billy Two Hats (1974). He also played the title role in Santa Claus (1985).
He once said that Blazing Saddles was "probably the most fun I have ever had on a set."
Huddleston also appeared as a judge in the 2005 film version of Brooks' The Producers.
Huddleston received an Emmy Award nomination in 1990 for his guest-starring stint as Grandpa Arnold on The Wonder Years; produced and starred in his own series, 1979's Hizzonmer, for NBC; and played a senator on NBC's The West Wing.
On the stage, he said that his crowning achievement was playing Benjamin Franklin on Broadway in 1998 in a revival of 1776 and again at Ford's Theatre in Washington in 2003. He also received a Drama Desk nomination in 1984 for his portrayal of Charlie in Death of a Salesman, and he portrayed Chef James Beard in a one-man show at the Rainbow & Stars.
A native of Vinton, Va., Huddleston spent a year at Fork Union Military Academy and four years in the U.S. Air Force. He took advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where he graduated in 1957 and made his professional theatrical debut.
In addition to his wife of 32 years, survivors include his son Michael and daughter-in-law.
David Huddleston
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