Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Oh, What a Trumpy Trade War (NY Times Column)
We could be on the way back to the bad old days of corrupt tariff policy. Trump likes that.
Paul Krugman: Krugman's Taking Your Questions on Trade (NY Times Blog)
And as it happens, this topic is right up my alley. So I'm going to be taking reader questions. You can leave questions in the comment section of this post or at NYT Opinion's Facebook page. I'll respond to selected questions early next week.
Josh Marshall: "Some Pro-Stormy Advocacy (or Trump Put a Gag on Stormy in Arbitration)" (TPM)
Still, it was a fatal error to say repeatedly that President Trump had "won" the case in secret arbitration. Let's look at specifically what she said.
Josh Marshall: "'Angel Ryan' Is Jessica Drake" (TPM)
We now know the fourth person who either knows details of Stormy Daniels' sexual relationship with Donald Trump or has seen or is in possession of the text logs, "certain still images" and possible dick pics. The woman referred to in the agreement as "Angel Ryan" is Jessica Drake. Who is Jessica Drake? She is another porn actress. But that's not at all. She was also one of Trump's accusers back in October of 2016.
Emma Jones: Why don't superhero films win awards? (BBC)
From sci-fi and fantasy to comedy and horror - there are some genres that get overlooked come awards season - but is this about to change?
Stuart Klawans: Night of the Living Dead: Mere Anarchy Is Loosed (Criterion)
Like one of its ghoulish "things," Night of the Living Dead gnawed its way into popular culture beginning in the late 1960s, transmitting an unstoppable urge toward mindless, flesh-chewing destruction. Each imitator's poisonous nip seemed to incite qyet another tale of the famished dead, as if in a morbid game of tag, until encircling legions of zombie entertainments today shamble across the world's screens. As of this writing, a keyword search for zombie online returns 2,955 titles. The walking dead enjoy their own long-running (or long-staggering) television series, and an army of the dead, blue eyes glowing like LED lights, menaces the otherwise peaceful realms of Game of Thrones.
Amy Taubin: "The Silence of the Lambs: A Hero of Our Time" (Criterion)
When Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs opened in theaters on Valentine's Day 1991, it was clearly one of those rare movies that are at once of their moment and ahead of their time. Many years later, it remains both of these things.
Jason Fagone: The Lottery Hackers (Huffington Post)
Gerald Selbee broke the code of the American breakfast cereal industry because he was bored at work one day, because it was a fun mental challenge, because most things at his job were not fun and because he could-because he happened to be the kind of person who saw puzzles all around him, puzzles that other people don't realize are puzzles: the little ciphers and patterns that float through the world and stick to the surfaces of everyday things.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
replied:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
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 MAKES A CONSERVATIVE MAY BE FEAR ITSELF."
"PHARMA BRO" GOES TO JAIL.
THE STUPIDEST GOVERNMENT APPOINTMENT BY TRUMP YET.
CHRISTIANS NO LONGER BELIEVE IN THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS.
AIN'T HAD NO NUN-BERG! DON'T WANT NO NUN-BERG!
IF THIS ONLY BRINGS DOWN ERIC PRINCE IT WILL BE A HUGE SUCCESS!
"FULL MAGA." MAKE AMERICA GAG AGAIN.
THE MADNESS OF DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME.
NRA DIRTBAGS WITH GUNS.
THE 'GIGO' WHITE HOUSE!
QUACK, QUACK! SQUEAK, SQUEAK!
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Overcast but no rain - yet.
New York Times Publishing Obituaries
'Overlooked' Women
Novelist Charlotte Bronte died in 1855, poet Sylvia Plath in 1963 and photographer Diane Arbus in 1971.
The New York Times published their obituaries on Thursday.
The belated tributes to Bronte, Plath and Arbus were part of a project called "Overlooked" launched by the Times to "provide obituaries to significant women not previously chronicled" by the newspaper.
The newspaper said that in looking back at its archives it found that the "vast majority" of obituaries over the years "chronicled the lives of men, mostly white ones."
"Even in the last two years, just over one in five of our subjects were female," it said.
'Overlooked' Women
Original Manuscript Heads To Auction
Alcoholics Anonymous
The original manuscript that launched what became Alcoholics Anonymous will be auctioned off after nearly a year of legal wrangling, a California auction house said on Wednesday.
The so-called "Big Book" from 1939, which lays out the organisation's famous 12-step alcoholism recovery program, is expected to fetch $2 million to $3 million at a May 5 auction in Los Angeles, auctioneers Profiles in History said.
The auction comes as Alcoholics Anonymous agreed to let bidding go ahead after suing last year to block the manuscript's sale. Terms of the agreement were not released.
The organisation had asked a New York court for the rights to the original Big Book after owner Ken Roberts declared his intention to sell. Roberts bought the manuscript for $992,000 at Sotheby's in 2007.
The original Big Book is a 161-page working draft filled with handwritten edits by the AA's founders, some by main writer and co-founder William Wilson, better known as Bill W.
Alcoholics Anonymous
Collection Of Diamonds Exposed As Fakes
Czech National Museum
Diamonds and other precious stones forming part of a Czech National Museum collection thought to be worth millions of pounds have been exposed as fakes during a routine audit.
The inspection of supposed 5-carat diamonds and a 19-carat sapphires has left curators scratching their heads as to how the real things went missing over the last 50 years.
Around half the museum's collection, acquired by the museum during communist times, has already been found to be fake.
One sapphire that cost CZK200,000 (£7,070 at current rates) in the 1970s, and would be worth tens of millions today, said Ivo Macek, director of the Museum of Natural History, which houses the collection.
Just 400 of the museum's 5,000 precious stones and minerals have been audited thus far, but all the most valuable have been checked. The full audit will take until 2020.
Czech National Museum
2nd Century
Ancient Rome
Italian archaeologists have found the remains of a barracks that they believe may have been used by ancient Rome's equivalent of the secret service.
The discovery was made during deep excavations for a new metro station in Rome, named Amba Aradam after a mountain plain in Ethiopia where Italian forces fought a pitched battle in 1936 during the Abyssinian War.
The main part of the 2nd century barracks was discovered in 2016, but new areas have now been uncovered, including the home and office of a centurion who would have commanded a militia.
The barracks, which include a dormitory for legionaries, were part of a huge imperial military complex that was built during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian.
The complex included cavalry barracks, which now lie beneath the Basilica of St John Lateran, one of the capital's largest churches.
Ancient Rome
Weaker For Consumers
Bank Bill
While a piece of legislation wending its way through the U.S. Senate would do favors for banks big and small, the bill also has several little provisions benefiting consumers.
Republicans, however, are apparently watering down at least one of those provisions, according to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee.
The original bill would have required credit monitoring companies like Equifax to offer free credit freezes to all consumers, and to exclude medical debt for one year from the credit reports of U.S. veterans. An amended version of the bill, introduced late Wednesday, would also give free credit monitoring to active-duty members of the military.
The main provisions of the bill would ease regulations on community banks, as well as on some of the biggest banks in the country. Crapo's office did not immediately respond to HuffPost's request for comment.
Other consumer protections in the bill would require credit reporting companies to let people freeze their credit information for free, and would require the firms to set up a website for doing so.
Bank Bill
Sea Level Rise
San Francisco
A large swathe of the San Francisco Bay Area will become especially susceptible to flooding as climate change pushes sea levels higher, while subsidence causes land levels to drop, according to a new study.
Previous research has already established that densely inhabited coastal areas are at risk as sea levels rise, a phenomenon that shows signs of accelerating.
But a study conducted by scientists from Arizona State University and the University of California, Berkeley found the effects of rising waters will be magnified in parts of the Bay Area where the land is also sinking.
Subsidence is in part a function of geology, with areas built on landfill more prone to sinking. But it can be exacerbated by pumping groundwater - an issue California contended with in recent years when a withering drought drove a spike in the number of new wells being drilled.
When taking into account sinking land, the authors found, a much larger area is at risk of ending up underwater. The area at risk jumps from between 51 and 413sq km to between 125 and 429sq km. Among the locations at elevated risk are San Francisco's international airport, Foster City and Treasure Island.
San Francisco
Blocking People
Twitter
Not only is Donald Trump (R-Crooked) the first American president to aggressively use Twitter, he's also the first to invite a possible constitutional crisis because of it.
In the question of whether Trump can legally block people from seeing and commenting on his account, a judge now has a possible solution.
Ever since Trump assumed the presidency, there have been legal questions around whether it is OK for him to block users from viewing his Twitter account. He is the president, after all, and his tweets are largely accepted to be official statements from the White House. To deny citizens the option of seeing them would potentially a violation of their rights.
That's the view from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and seven people blocked by Trump, who brought a lawsuit against Trump in a New York district court for this very thing.
The suit was brought after First Amendment lawyers sent a letter to the White House social media and communications teams last summer, demanding that the president unblock the users. The Trump administration contends that his Twitter account is a personal platform and not a public one.
Twitter
Long-Lost North American Viking Settlement
Canada
A long lost Viking settlement that featured in sagas passed down over hundreds of years, may have been located on the east coast of Canada.
Birgitta Wallace, an award-winning specialist in Norse archaeology and Viking evidence in the West, said she had uncovered evidence that the new site known as Hop - meaning tidal lagoon - is in the province of New Brunswick, on the country's east coast.
If she is proved correct, it would be the second Viking settlement to be discovered in North America.
Experts have known from Norse sagas that there was a settlement in North America of 11th-century Europeans, who grew wild grapes, ate salmon and made canoes out of animal hides.
The first site uncovered is at L'Anse aux Meadows, a United Nations (UN) World Heritage site, on the northern tip of Newfoundland.
Canada
Not to Worry
Siberia
A fisherman in Siberia made a grim discovery yesterday (March 8) while walking near the icy Amur River: 27 pairs of human hands, severed at the wrist and stuffed into a bag. Russian authorities said the hands were likely disposed of by a local forensics lab, bucking proper protocol.
According to the Siberian Times, the fisherman found the bag of hands on a small river island near the city of Khabarovsk, Russia, located in the country's far southeast about 18.6 miles (30 kilometers) from the Chinese border. The Amur River is a popular local fishing destination, the Times reported.
Initially, the fisherman saw only one hand sticking up out of the snow there, and discovered the full bag soon after. Photos taken at the scene and shared anonymously to Russian media reveal the discovery in brutal detail. In one image, the 54 hands lie in a haphazard pile in the snow like leathery catcher's mitts, seemingly upended from the bag; in another photo, the hands have been lined up in neat rows.
While many social media spectators (naturally) suspect foul play, officials from the Investigative Committee of The Russian Federation - a government agency responsible for criminal investigations - have said that the hands appear to have been improperly disposed of by a forensics lab in Khabarovsk.
Indeed, medical bandages and plastic hospital-style shoes were discovered near the hands. According to the Siberian Times, it's not unheard of for forensics labs in Russia to cut off the hands of unknown corpses in order to retain fingerprint information after the rest of the body has been discarded. Despite this possible explanation, investigators have been able to lift fingerprints from only one of the 27 pairs of hands. Little is known about the hands' previous owners.
Siberia
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