Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Ezra Klein: Donald Trump's winning argument in 2016 is his key weakness in 2020 (Vox)
On November 4, 2016, the Washington Post and ABC News released one of their final polls of the race. It found that voters trusted Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump to handle terrorism, immigration, health care, and national security. It found the two candidates equally trusted on jobs and the economy. The lone bright spot for Trump was his 9-point lead on corruption in government - the largest margin either candidate enjoyed on any issue. If there was any issue that won Trump the election, it was government corruption.
John Holbo: Epistemic Sunk Costs and the Extraordinary, Populist Delusions of Crowds?
… Trump himself makes it the case that there are really only two options. Either Trump is the greatest US President - the only one with the genius to penetrate the Matrix of Canadian lies - or else he is, at best, totally ridiculous. There really isn't a third way, so take your pick. And tomorrow it will be some other damn thing. As a result, there is no way to conceptualize the red-blue divide except as a red pill-blue pill divide, so to speak. The reason Trump talks constant lies is, in part, to ensure the debate frame can only be: which side is constantly lying? He can't grow his base that way, but he can lock it in.
Jason Linkins: "Politifact Has Decided That A Totally True Thing Is The 'Lie Of The Year,' For Some Reason"(from 2011; The Huffington Post)
Oh, you say that the program has "dramatically changed" for people who are not currently 55 or older, in that "the program" would no longer be "the program," but, in fact, be a totally different program based on a totally different idea? Okay then! That new idea ends Medicare, full stop.
Michael Hiltzik: A Koch-funded think tank tries hard to pretend that it didn't find savings from Bernie Sanders' Medicare plan (LA Times)
In any case, "never gonna happen" is the weakest and laziest argument anyone can make in a public policy debate. The assertion that provider reimbursements will never, ever be reduced is based on nothing but hot air. Not very many years ago, after all, legalization of gay marriage was unimaginable in the U.S. political system. In 1859, slavery looked like it was with us to stay; that assumption ended Jan. 1, 1863. On the morning of Nov. 8, 2016, it was widely assumed that no one as crass and unfit as Donald Trump could become president; by 9 p.m. that night it was reality.
Job Brodkin: Verizon throttled fire department's "unlimited" data during Calif. wildfire (Ars Technica)
Fire dep't had to pay twice as much to lift throttling during wildfire response.
Helaine Olen: A record-breaking [stock] market doesn't matter to most Americans (Washington Post)
In recent years, many have wondered why what appears to be good economic news like a record-breaking stock market and a falling unemployment rate has failed to either make much of an impression with the public. But it should not be such a mystery at all. We know better now than we did 20 years ago that this rising tide doesn't lift all boats. Only about half the population is invested in the markets. And even among those with money in the markets, many aren't exactly investing riches.
Helaine Olen: "Elizabeth Warren is right: Corruption is rotting the U.S. from within" (Washington Post)
Warren's bill […] would: 1) increase salaries for congressional staffers, so they will be less tempted to "audition" for lobbying jobs while working for government, 2) ban the "revolving door" for elected officials, 3) expand how lobbying is defined to include anyone who is paid to lobby the federal government as well as halt permitting any American to take money from "foreign governments foreign individuals and foreign companies" for lobbying purposes, 4) prohibit elected officials from holding investments in individual stocks, and 5) require that presidential candidates make their tax returns public.
Paul Waldman: Trump's chickens may be coming home to roost. But the system has already failed. (Washington Post)
We all knew who Trump was, but it didn't matter.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
replied:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
WORK Anecdotes
• Studs Terkel knows his history, and he uses it in arguments. Because he lives in Chicago, he never learned how to drive; after all, buses go everywhere he needs to go in Chicago. At the bus stop one day, he sees a middle-class couple. She is beautiful, wears Neiman-Marcus clothing, and carries Vanity Fair. He wears Gucci shoes and has a copy of The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Terkel talks to all kinds of people, and he speaks to this couple. He says to them, "Tomorrow is Labor Day: the holiday to 'honor the unions.'" This couple's attitude toward what he says shows that they don't like unions. Mr. Terkel asks, "How many hours do you work a day?" The man replies that he works eight hours per day. Mr. Terkel asks, "How come you don't work 18 hours a day, like your great-grandparents?" The man doesn't know history, so he can't answer the questions. Mr. Terkel does know history, and he answers his own question: "Because four men got hanged for you." Mr. Terkel tells the man that he is referring to the 1886 Haymarket Affair, in which four men ended up being hung. Mr. Terkel then asks, "'How many days a week do you work?" The man's answer is five days a week. Mr. Terkel says, "Five-oh, really? How come you don't work six and a half?" The man doesn't know history, so he can't answer the questions. Mr. Terkel does know history, and he answers his own question: "'Because of the Memorial Day Massacre. These battles were fought, all for you." He then informs the man about the 1937 massacre of workers in Chicago. The bus comes then, and the history lesson ends-much to the couple's relief.
• Artist John Buscema worked for a while creating comic books, but he began to work in advertising after comic books came under attack in the mid- and late 1950s as a result of a psychologist named Fredric Wertham, who published a book titled Seduction of the Innocent after noticing that the juvenile delinquents he worked with read comic books. (So did the author of this blog post, and so probably did the reader of this blog post.) A problem with Mr. Buscema's advertising job was that he had to commute a long distance and work long hours, with the result that he seldom saw his son awake during his son's first year of life. Mr. Buscema says that "I would get home, and he'd be asleep. I would leave, and he'd be asleep. The weekends would come around, and I could go home, but I'd be working. It was a real cutthroat business." In 1966, his old boss at Marvel Comics, Stan Lee, called him with a job offer. Because Mr. Buscema could work at home and could see his son while his son was awake, he accepted the job offer and started working on such comics as The Fantastic 4, Spider-Man, The Silver Surfer, Conan the Barbarian, The Incredible Hulk, The Mighty Thor, and The Avengers. As a result, he earned a nickname: The Michelangelo of Comics.
• Comedian Jimmy Durante started out in show business as a piano player. Singer and comedian Eddie Cantor was the first person to urge Jimmy to get up on stage and away from the piano: "Piano playing is going to get you nothing. You'll be a piano player till you're a hundred years. You gotta look further than that. People like you a whole lot. So why don't you get up on the floor and say something to the people?" Eventually, of course, Mr. Durante took Mr. Cantor's advice. However, his immediate reaction was, "Gee, Eddie, I wouldn't do that. I'd be afraid that people would laugh at me."
• Lon Chaney, Sr., aka the Man with a Thousand Faces, worked hard in his early days in movies. He sat in a room (called the bullpen) with many other bit-part actors. At times during the day, a director would come along and say something like "I need a college boy. Can anybody here play a college boy?" or "I need a Chinese man. Can anybody here play a Chinese man?" Whatever the director asked for, Mr. Chaney would say, "Yeah, I can play that." In this way, he made appearances in three or four movies each working day.
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Stuart shared this link. It shows Trump's super crappy week in memes. Most amusing, but then his schadenfreude makes me laugh a lot:
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
WHAT A DOPE.
"…A GIANT DEBT SCAM?"
THE 'TRAITOR'.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Another lovely marine layer.
Traffic Stops
Burning Man
The Burning Man organization has written a letter to top federal officials threatening a federal lawsuit in the wake of continuing traffic stops slowing vehicles headed to the 80,000-person event, which begins midnight Sunday.
The organization called for an immediate stop to the "improper and apparently unconstitutional behavior" and also demanded that all involved federal agencies preserve all records related to the traffic stops in a letter obtained by the Reno Gazette Journal.
The projected end of the law enforcement operation is Sept. 5, according to Pyramid Lake Police Department Lt. Michael Durham. Burning Man lasts for a week, through Sept. 3.
Burners have experienced dozens of stops in the area of Nixon, a small town halfway between Reno and the Burning Man site in Northern Nevada's Black Rock Desert. The town is on Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribal land, as is a long stretch of State Route 447, which passes through Nixon and is the only main road to the site.
Burning Man organizers argued in the letter that the stops have not only slowed internal preparations for the event, but the stops could affect their ability to provide ice, portable toilet maintenance and public services at the event. Law enforcement have been stopping vehicles for having a tire touch the center line, for going 3 mph over the posted speed limit and having a partially blocked license plate.
Burning Man
Foundation
Isaac Asimov
Apple has greenlit a drama series based on Isaac Asimov's epic classic sci-fi trilogy Foundation.
Moreover, the show will have two heavy-hitter writers as showrunners: David S. Goyer (The Dark Night) and Josh Friedman (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) will run the series.
The series "chronicles the thousand year saga of The Foundation, a band of exiles who discover that the only way to save the Galactic Empire from destruction is to defy it."
Robyn Asimov will be among those serving as executive producers.
Isaac Asimov
Gets 5 Years
Reality Winner
A former government contractor who pleaded guilty to mailing a classified U.S. report to a news organization was sentenced to more than five years Thursday as part of a deal with prosecutors, who called it the longest sentence ever imposed for a federal crime involving leaks to the media.
Reality Winner, 26, pleaded guilty in June to a single count of transmitting national security information. The former Air Force translator worked as a contractor at a National Security Agency's office in Augusta, Georgia, when she printed a classified report and left the building with it tucked into her pantyhose. Winner told the FBI she mailed the document to an online news outlet.
In court Thursday, Winner apologized and acknowledged that what she did was wrong.
Authorities never identified the news organization. But the Justice Department announced Winner's June 2017 arrest the same day The Intercept reported on a secret NSA document. It detailed Russian government efforts to penetrate a Florida-based supplier of voting software and the accounts of election officials ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The NSA report was dated May 5, the same as the document Winner had leaked.
U.S. intelligence agencies later confirmed Russian meddling.
Reality Winner
Hid Damaging Stories
National Enquirer
The National Enquirer kept a safe containing documents on hush money payments and other damaging stories it killed as part of its cozy relationship with Donald Trump (R-OfPutin) leading up to the 2016 presidential election, people familiar with the arrangement told The Associated Press.
The detail came as several media outlets reported on Thursday that federal prosecutors had granted immunity to National Enquirer chief David Pecker, potentially laying bare his efforts to protect his longtime friend Trump.
Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty this week to campaign finance violations alleging he, Trump and the tabloid were involved in buying the silence of a porn actress and a Playboy model who alleged affairs with Trump.
Five people familiar with the National Enquirer's parent company, American Media Inc., who spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements, said the safe was a great source of power for Pecker, the company's CEO.
The Trump records were stored alongside similar documents pertaining to other celebrities' catch-and-kill deals, in which exclusive rights to people's stories were bought with no intention of publishing to keep them out of the news. By keeping celebrities' embarrassing secrets, the company was able to ingratiate itself with them and ask for favors in return.
National Enquirer
Soil Not Freezing At All
Arctic
Some of the ground in the Arctic region is typically frozen most of the year round, but there is new evidence some of it may not be freezing at all, not even in the winter.
The new research was reported Wednesday by National Geographic. If confirmed, scientists say, this could be yet another sign of climate change in a sensitive environment, and the thawed earth could have other troubling consequences.
Father and son scientists Sergey and Nikita Zimov found surprising slushy and muddy turf near the far eastern Russian town of Cherskiy, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, when the ground should have been frozen.
The top few layers of earth in the Arctic freeze in the winter and thaw out in the spring. But at a certain depth, the earth remains frozen solid year-round. This is aptly named "permafrost." Some permafrost has been frozen for up to hundreds of thousands of years.
But the Zimovs' research suggests the winter re-freeze in 2017-2018 did not penetrate all the way to the permanently frozen ground beneath, leaving an intermediate layer of thawed ground sandwiched between the surface and the permafrost.
Arctic
Mixed-Species Child
DNA
Denny was an inter-species love child.
Her mother was a Neanderthal, but her father was Denisovan, a distinct species of primitive human that also roamed the Eurasian continent 50,000 years ago, scientists reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Nicknamed by Oxford University scientists, Denisova 11 -- her official name -- was at least 13 when she died, for reasons unknown.
"There was earlier evidence of interbreeding between different hominin, or early human, groups," said lead author Vivian Slon, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
"But this is the first time that we have found a direct, first-generation offspring," she told AFP.
DNA
Top 20
Global Concert Tours
The Top 20 Global Concert Tours ranks artists by average box office gross per city and includes the average ticket price for shows Worldwide. The list is based on data provided to the trade publication Pollstar by concert promoters and venue managers.
1. Taylor Swift; $11,238,382; $127.21.
2. The Rolling Stones; $8,968,275; $155.26.
3. Jay-Z / Beyoncé; $6,575,209; $111.42.
4. Guns N' Roses; $4,127,170; $96.46.
5. U2; $3,617,679; $140.39.
6. Eagles; $3,367,148; $157.66.
7. Kenny Chesney; $2,814,150; $88.38.
8. Justin Timberlake; $2,765,043; $127.95.
9. Pink; $2,709,783; $138.67.
10. Roger Waters; $2,100,337; $99.94.
11. "Springsteen On Broadway" ; $2,031,600; $508.63.
12. Dead & Company; $1,851,279; $71.04.
13. Foo Fighters; $1,826,787; $89.70.
14. Iron Maiden; $1,748,291; $80.16.
15. Journey / Def Leppard; $1,558,021; $92.14.
16. Katy Perry; $1,481,306; $78.56.
17. Paul Simon; $1,451,357; $101.41.
18. André Rieu; $1,414,093; $90.57.
19. Luis Miguel; $1,366,759; $113.35.
20. The Killers; $1,190,141; $81.13.
Global Concert Tours
In Memory
Ed King
Ed King, a former lead guitarist for the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd who co-wrote one of the group's best known hits, "Sweet Home Alabama," has died at age 68, a founding member of the band said on Thursday.
King joined Lynyrd Skynyrd in 1972 not long after the band formed, and with two other lead guitarists, Gary Rossington and Allen Collins, helped create the group's powerful triple-guitar sound prominent on such rock classics as "Free Bird."
King left the group in 1975, two years before a plane crash killed two of the band's members and a backup vocalist.
King returned to Lynyrd Skynyrd when the band regrouped in 1987, and stayed until 1996. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of the band in 2006.
During his original stint, King co-wrote several songs, including 1974 hit "Sweet Home Alabama". The song was a response to Neil Young's songs "Southern Man" and "Alabama," which focused on the Southern white man's rise on the back of slavery.
The song is now considered a Southern anthem played often at sporting events and was used for a time on Alabama license plates.
King was also an original member of the California psychedelic group Strawberry Alarm Clock, which had a hit that King co-wrote called "Incense and Peppermints" in 1967.
Ed King
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