from Bruce
Anecdotes
Friends
• One of the things that Molly Ringwald most admires about very young children is their ability to easily make friends. At a playground where her daughter, Mathilda, was playing, Molly saw a young girl tap Mathilda on the shoulder and ask, “What’s your name?” Mathilda told her, and asked the young girl her name, which turned to be Elle. Mathilda then said, “I like cats.” Elle replied, “Me, too. Let’s be friends!” And they were friends.
Good Deeds
• Richard Semmler, who teaches calculus and algebra at Northern Virginia Community College, is dedicated to giving money to charity. In 2005, he reached approximately $770,000 in the total amount of charitable donations he had made since graduating from college, and he hoped to give $1 million to charity before he retired. He is able to donate so much money to charity by living simply and working additional part-time jobs so that he can give away half or more of his income. He said, “If I didn’t do all of the things I was doing, I would probably have a new car every two years and I would have a huge house with a huge pool. But I would not do it that way. I want to do it this way.” In 2004, Mr. Semmler made $100,000 and donated $60,000 to charity. His main employer is a beneficiary of his generosity; he has donated $355,000 to fund scholarships there. Another beneficiary of his generosity is his alma mater, Plattsburgh State University of New York, to which he has donated $200,000. Other beneficiaries of his generosity include various evangelical Christian organizations. He knows where his money goes. For example, he donated $100,000 for a Habitat for Humanity house that he helped build. He said, “Most of my dollars go to very specific projects, so I know what I’m funding. I want to see my dollars at work.” By the way, his generosity started with a $25 donation to his alma mater after he graduated in 1968. He said, “That’s the snowball that started rolling. As it did, it got bigger and bigger and bigger.”
• In 1978, the car of Catherine Ryan Hyde caught fire in a bad neighborhood in Los Angeles. Two men began running toward her, and she thought that she was about to die. But instead of killing her, the two men used a blanket to put out the fire. In part as a result of that act of kindness, she wrote a novel that she titled Pay It Forward, which was published in 2000 and which became a 2001 movie starring Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt, and Haley Joel Osment. One woman who was inspired by Ms. Hyde’s novel is Christina Van Blake. After Ms. Van Blake lost her job in February 2009, she became depressed. As a way to fight depression, she offered to design a room free of charge, provided that the recipient of the free design do three good deeds. In six months, she had 80 clients, and she documented 240 good deeds done by those clients. She also created a Design It Forward Web site and passed her idea on to other interior designers. Martinha Javid and Joyce Heathcote formed the Rhode Island chapter of Design It Forward. Ms. Javid said, “When you come home to a space that’s beautiful, you just feel good.” Ms. Heathcote added, “I think we all hope as designers that maybe this will lead to business for us, but it’s not our main goal. Our main goal is to change people’s perspective and have them recognize opportunities to do something for someone else.”
• In Buffalo, New York, Waldemar Kaminski, ran a food stand in Broadway Market for over 50 years. He invested his money in the stock market, grew rich, and without publicity gave away millions of dollars. After his death in 2006, many recipients of his charity came forward. Anne Gioia, co-founder of the Roswell Park Alliance Foundation, a medical facility to which Mr. Kaminski gave many millions of dollars, said, “He didn’t want anyone to know him, but I just had to thank him. Now I think we should shout it from the rooftops.” Mr. Kaminski donated $1 million for an endowed chair in pediatrics for the facility; he also donated $1 million to build a two-acre park for the campus of the facility. Ms. Gioia said, “He felt that if you died a wealthy person, you had not lived a worthwhile life.” He gave to many other charities as well, and he also helped individual families with college tuition and with mortgage payments. One of his nieces, Marsha Kaminski, who lives in Oakland, CA, said, “It wasn’t a handout. He was supportive and helped them maintain their dignity. If they were helping themselves, he wanted to help, too.” She added, “He didn’t need the material things for happiness. He enjoyed just being with people and doing what he could for them.”
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Presenting
Michael Egan
has returned to semi-retired status.
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BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Track: "Movin’ On"
Single: This is a one-sided single.
Artist: Danny B. Harvey
Artist Location: Austin, Texas
Info:
This is a fast-tempo Guitar Instrumental.
“Danny B. Harvey is best known as the lead guitarist, and founding member of Headcat, Lemmy Kilmister's ‘other band.’ However he has also played guitar with Wanda Jackson, Nancy Sinatra, Levi Dexter, Linda Gail Lewis, The Rockats, 69 Cats, Bow Wow Wow, 13 Cats & Annie Marie Lewis. He is also a noted film composer having competed the soundtrack to THE RAGE CARRIE 2 for MGM.”
Price: $1.99 (USD) for one-track single
Genre: Guitar Instrumental. Rockabilly.
Links:
“Movin’ On”
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Ukraine
Ukraine Is Going To Be Around A Lot Longer Than Vladimir Putin" - Sec. Antony Blinken
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken makes his first visit to The Late Show for a three-part interview with Stephen Colbert, which begins with Sec. Blinken's assertion that an independent Ukraine will long outlast the rule of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
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Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
May Gray - overcast til mid-afternoon. Quite nice, but the defective rooster can't quite puzzle it out, so he had a very busy day.
Kremlin Sanctions List
Rob Reiner
The Russian government announced sanctions against nearly 1,000 Americans Saturday, effectively banning them from entering the country due to their support of Ukraine during the ongoing invasion. However, among the hundreds of politicians, journalists, intelligence officers and professors, a pair of names stand out on the Kremlin’s list: Rob Reiner and Morgan Freeman.
Any chance that Reiner might film the upcoming Spinal Tap sequel in Moscow has been dashed as the filmmaker has been barred from the country for his role as “one of the creators of the Internet resource Investigate Russia.” Reiner has also long pushed the Russiagate theory, going as far as stating that Donald Trump was Vladimir Putin’s “asset.”
While Morgan Freeman has not tweeted about the Ukraine invasion, the actor was penalized over his voiceover work in a 2017 video messaged that accused “Russia of conspiring against the United States and calling for a fight against our country,” the Russian Foreign Ministry claims; at the time, Russia’s state-controlled media lashed out at Freeman for lending his voice to the Reiner-produced Investigate Russia video, the BBC reported.
The Kremlin’s perfunctory list of 963 sanctioned people includes politicians from both sides of the aisles, and complete opposite ends of the spectrum: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Maxine Waters, Katie Porter and Adam Schiff are listed alongside Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Paul Gosar. President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have also been sanctioned by Russia, but as the Washington Post notes, the list excludes one prominent name: former president Donald Trump.
Other sanctioned standouts include George Soros, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, movie producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, Good Morning America’s George Stephanopoulos (co-anchors Robin Roberts and Michael Strahan remain unsanctioned) and former Utah senator Orrin Hatch, who is dead.
Rob Reiner
Son Of Biggie Smalls
C.J. Wallace
C.J. Wallace, the son of the late Biggie Smalls, is beaming with pride after New York City declared a proclamation to honor the legendary rapper, recognizing the impact he made in the music industry. Wallace accepted the honor on behalf of his father on Thursday as the city celebrated Biggie Smalls, who would have turned 50 this weekend.
“Ever since I was 14, 15, when I really had to realize how important this family legacy was, I made it my life. This is all I can do. I can’t go a day without thinking about who my father is and the impact that he was able to make, and it inspires me to continue to do the same thing in my own way, but continue to obviously keep Brooklyn first, keep New York first.” Wallace said according to CBS News.
While he now lives in Los Angeles, Wallace said his ties are in his hometown forever.
Biggie, whose legal name was Christopher Wallace, died at the age of 24 in 1997 when he was shot in a drive-by shooting in Los Angles.
C.J. Wallace
'Out Of A 007 Movie'
License-Plate Flipper
Irvine police located and pulled over a Mercedes-Benz sedan that was possibly involved in a series of vehicle burglaries -- and unexpectedly discovered a spy-type device that flipped the license plate.
A man and a woman were arrested in the case, suspected of using the car that authorities described as "something out of a 007 movie."
The Irvine Police Department on Wednesday released a video clip that shows how the license-plate flipper on the white 2003 Mercedes C300 operates -- at the push of a button.
"Having it be sophisticated in that way, I've never seen that," police Sgt. Karie Davies told ABC7. "The license-plate flipping device, that's a new one. In 19 years I've never seen that used in this way."
On Tuesday, an Irvine resident spotted the suspicious vehicle and contacted police. Along with the license-plate gadgetry, officers discovered "an elaborate gas-siphoning device that transferred fuel directly into the vehicle's gas tank," a news release said.
License-Plate Flipper
Extremist Audio
Europol
The European Union’s law enforcement agency said Friday that authorities in six countries have worked with music streaming service SoundCloud to detect and delete hundreds of files containing extremist propaganda.
Europol said that the plan was initiated by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office and the EU Internet Referral Unit, and that authorities in Denmark, Hungary, Portugal, Spain and the U.K. were also involved.
Law enforcement authorities “detected and assisted the company to scour illegally uploaded jihadist, right wing terrorist and violent extremist propaganda,” Europol said in a statement. Around 1,100 profiles and audio files deemed to be illegal were flagged to SoundCloud, which “deleted the reported files that were considered a breach of its terms and conditions.”
The content that was flagged included jihadist chants in several languages and audio promoting right-wing extremist groups. Some of the material had already gathered several thousand hits, Europol said. It added that the action was part of an ongoing partnership between SoundCloud, Europol and law enforcement agencies.
Europol
Twisting U.S. Justice
MAGA Law
The hard right’s takeover of the Supreme Court is real, and is having real consequences. But despite that leaked decision that would overturn Roe, this takeover isn’t just about abortion, and it’s not just about the Supreme Court. In fact, Trump-appointed judges at all levels of the judiciary are remaking nearly every aspect of American law, from voting rights to environmental regulations, police accountability to LGBTQ and women’s equality.
There are also a lot of these judges. In four years, the Trump administration put a record 226 life-tenure federal judges on the bench. And while these judges don’t make the headlines like the Supreme Court does, they are already transforming our country, a little bit at a time.
Perhaps most important, they will be there many, many years. Because Trump’s minions chose the youngest cohort of judges in recorded history, some of these people are in their thirties and forties. That means they could still be on the bench in 40, even 50 years — if climate change hasn’t flooded their courtrooms by then.
Well, for a start, they’re 84 percent white and 76 percent male, well out of proportion to the population, which is 58 percent non-Hispanic white, and 50 percent male. (At the appellate-court level, the slant is even greater: 43 of Trump’s 54 appointees are men.) Keep that in mind the next time a court decides something about women’s rights to control their bodies.
And they were, statistically speaking, remarkably less qualified than usual. In four years of Trump, the nonpartisan, nonpolitical American Bar Association rated 10 of his nominees as “not qualified,” something they’d done only 12 times in the previous 27 years. (True to form, Republicans have attacked the American Bar Association itself.)
MAGA Law
Starts Earlier
Puberty
Marcia Herman-Giddens first realized something was changing in young girls in the late 1980s, while she was serving as director for the child abuse team at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. During evaluations of girls who had been abused, Herman-Giddens noticed that many of them had started developing breasts as young as 6 or 7.
“That did not seem right,” said Herman-Giddens, who is now an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. She wondered whether girls with early breast development were more likely to be sexually abused, but she could not find any data keeping track of puberty onset in girls in the United States. So she decided to collect it herself.
A decade later, she published a study of more than 17,000 girls who underwent physical examinations at pediatricians’ offices across the country. The numbers revealed that, on average, girls in the mid-1990s had started to develop breasts — typically the first sign of puberty — around age 10, more than a year earlier than previously recorded. The decline was even more striking in Black girls, who had begun developing breasts, on average, at age 9.
The medical community was shocked by the findings, and many were doubtful about a dramatic new trend spotted by an unknown physician assistant, Herman-Giddens recalled. “They were blindsided,” she said.
But the study turned out to be a watershed in the medical understanding of puberty. Studies in the decades since have confirmed, in dozens of countries, that the age of puberty in girls has dropped by about three months per decade since the 1970s. A similar pattern, though less extreme, has been observed in boys.
Puberty
Proposed Legislation
Oklahoma
An Oklahoma state rep proposed an idea for legislation that would make vasectomies mandatory for young men in the state.
Speaking before a floor of legislators, state Rep. Mickey Dollens said on Thursday that he is thinking about introducing the legislation next year.
"I would invite you to co-author a bill that I'm considering next year that would mandate that each male, when they reach puberty, get a mandatory vasectomy that's only reversible when they reach the point of financial and emotional stability," he told GOP lawmakers.
"If you think that's crazy then I think that maybe you understand how 50 percent of Oklahomans feel, as well," the Democrat said.
Dollens' remarks were made as the Oklahoma legislature debated HB 4327, a restrictive law that effectively bans abortion from the moment of "fertilization." The legislature on Thursday passed the bill, and Gov. Kevin Stitt is expected to sign it into law.
Oklahoma
Gene-Editing Surprise
Hamsters
A team of neuroscience researchers was left "really surprised" after a gene-editing experiment unexpectedly created hyper-aggressive hamsters, according to a statement by Georgia State University (GSU).
The GSU research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), set out to find more about the biology behind the social behavior of mammals.
The scientists used Syrian hamsters and CRISPR-Cas9 — a revolutionary technology that makes it possible to turn on or off genes in cells. The technology knocked out a receptor of vasopressin — a hormone associated with enhanced aggression.
The scientists anticipated that doing so would "dramatically" alter the social behavior of the Syrian hamsters, making them more peaceful. It did change their behavior, but not how they had expected.
"We anticipated that if we eliminated vasopressin activity, we would reduce both aggression and social communication," Albers continued. "But the opposite happened."
Hamsters
Mainly Vegetarian
Medieval England
The long-held assumption about Medieval rulers has been that they ate copious amounts of meat, but new research shows that England's pre-Viking social elite more likely had a "flexitarian" diet.
According to a pair of papers in the Anglo-Saxon England journal, the food consumed by early Medieval England's high society was largely cereal and vegetable-based.
Feasts of mutton and beef, a team of bioarcheologists have concluded, were reserved for special occasions.
Royals and nobles occasionally gorged on meat at "massive barbecues" hosted by free peasants and farmers, according to the Cambridge University research. At the 300-person feasts, the studies say individual guests were sometimes offered up to 2.2 pounds of meat and 4,000 calories worth of food.
Medieval rulers' diets were low in animal protein, according to the isotopic analysis of 2,023 people buried in England from the fifth to the 11th centuries.
Medieval England
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