Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Mike Scarcella: "'Turn that Plane Around' and Other Times Judge Emmet Sullivan Was Outraged" (National Law Journal)
Yes, like many judges, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in D.C. has been outraged before by U.S. government action. Here are three other moments when he found himself troubled.
David G. Lloyd: A beginner's guide to Terry Pratchett's Discworld (The Conversation)
The moral of this tale is that you can step onto the Discworld anywhere you like. If you enjoy wit, humour and fastly-paced plot, you will enjoy yourself immensely. Just don't feel obliged to begin at the beginning. The beauty of it is that with forty-one books to enjoy, you can always go back around again for more - and such is the depth of Pratchett's craft, you'll likely find something you've previously missed on every re-read.
Christopher Mathias: GOP Congressman Shares Vile Meme About Christine Blasey Ford (Huffington Post)
Rep. Steve King's Facebook page shared a meme disparaging the woman who accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.
Paul Waldman: Kavanaugh finally showed us who he really is. And he's unfit for the court. (Huffington Post)
Confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justices, left and right agree, are just a show. The nominee is cagey and evasive, the senators grandstand for the cameras, and we don't get anything like a true picture of who the potential justice really is. Until Thursday. The extraordinary performance by Brett Kavanaugh was not just unusual, it may have been the most revealing testimony we've ever gotten from a Supreme Court nominee. If you wanted to know who this man really was, he sure showed you.
Jonathan Chait: Kavanaugh Would Be the Trumpiest Supreme Court Justice (NY Magazine)
Forget about the sexual-assault charge for a moment. Suppose another Supreme Court nominee - Elena Kagan, say - had appeared before the Senate and delivered a snarling, unhinged partisan rant, like Brett Kavanaugh did on Thursday. Suppose Kagan had charged "The behavior of several of the Republican members of this committee at my hearing a few weeks ago was an embarrassment," and then proceeded to accuse Republicans, without any evidence, of having concocted an elaborate partisan plot.
Marc Dion: Crying With Rudyard Kipling (Creators Syndicate)
I have a good education. I got it at a state university, at a suburban high school, and, most importantly, from the Sisters of the Holy Union of the Sacred Heart, at a red brick, square grade school with two-family houses across the street. So, I read, because one of the ways you can tell you have a good education is that you continue to read even after you're all done with school.
Connie Schultz: A String of Hope (Creators Syndicate)
Every morning in our home, one of the first things I see is a necklace I cherish but have never worn. It is too delicate for that, too meaningful - 264 reminders of what a woman can do when she dares to hope.
Connie Schultz: Nothing Normal About Allegations Against Teenager Kavanaugh (Creators Syndicate)
I am just as certain that my son and I talked about what men should and shouldn't do to women. I was a mother and a feminist, and I did not leave to chance what my children would learn about such boundaries.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Comment
NorCal Weather
Skies open up in the Bay Area as it rains for the first time in nearly six months - SFGate
Rain in the north bay! Not 50 miles inland, but yay for rain!
I'm sure the east coast and other areas are not feeling this. In CA, every drop counts. I think I'll make that a new hashtag.
We can put men on the moon, and a Rover on Mars. Why can't we get rainwater from places overwhelmed with it, to places that desperately need it? It seems easy enough, but then, I don't know the costs. And it all comes down to money. CA peeps, check your PG&E notifications: they don't need an extra-hot day to enact the formerly-known as "Smart Day" charges. Bastards. And as much good as J-Bro has done for us, his Train to Nowhere and allowing PG&E to pass their costs to consumers for fires caused by their negligence is criminal. I fucking hate that. It's akin to Bush and Obama give the big banks a pass on their complicity in the last housing crisis/recession. Wrong! They should have been allowed to fail. Yes, our landscape would look much different, but the looming rescission is worse.
Okay, I'm harshing my own buzz, so I'm done. But seriously.
Deborah
Thanks, Deborah!
Yeah, Jerry disappointed me, too.
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• R' Chaim of Sanz owned a gold goblet that had been given to him by a rich man so that the Rabbi could use it when saying kiddush in memory of the rich man. However, R' Chaim eventually gave the gold goblet away to a poor man. When asked how he could justify giving the goblet away, R' Chaim replied, "I'm sure that the dead man would agree with what I did. After all, he wished me to make kiddush in his memory so that the merit of the good deed would benefit his soul. I am sure that keeping a Jew alive will be of much greater benefit to his soul."
• When Sharon Salzberg entered Burma and began to practice meditation, she experienced a great deal of discomfort, in part because of a persistent cough. She complained to the leader of the retreat, Sayama, who replied, "Well, I guess this will be good practice for when you die." This made Ms. Salzberg realize that spirituality is not just for when you feel well. It also made her realize that for many people, dying involves pain. After all, a dying body is a malfunctioning body, and dying people don't feel fine.
• In 1968, baseball player Bob Uecker's father had a major heart attack - a Code Four - in a hospital. He almost died, but the physicians and nurses worked on him and saved his life by giving his heart an electric shock and by pounding on his chest. But when his father regained consciousness, he was angry. Everything had been really soft, pleasurable, and mellow - then suddenly a bunch of physicians and nurses had started pounding on him.
• Martin Luther King, Jr. was discouraged by the violence he saw in the world. Just two months after four little African-American girls were killed in a church bombing, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Reverend King told his wife, Coretta, "That's the way I'm going to go. I told you this is a sick society." Five years later, on April 4, 1968, Reverend King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
• Hector Gray visited his friend, ventriloquist Ray Scott, who was dying of throat cancer, on his deathbed. After the visit, Mr. Gray said, "Good night. I'll see you tomorrow." Mr. Scott replied, "Perhaps you will, but I won't be seeing you." Mr. Scott was right - he died during the night.
• Even after Monty Python member Graham Chapman died, he was not forgotten by the other members of the comedy group. At a recent meeting, he was given a vote - his spirit was asked to rap once for yes, twice for no. (Mr. Graham abstained.)
• Wilson Mizner was capable of black humor. After getting dressed one morning, Mr. Mizner learned from his brother Addison that another brother, Lansing, had died. Mr. Mizner replied, "Why didn't you tell me beforeI put on a red tie?"
***
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Current Events
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'The Twilight Zone'
Anne Serling
"This is ridiculous and from the Twilight Zone."
When Brett Kavanaugh pushed back against his third accuser, Julie Swetnick, in a Wednesday statement, the Twilight Zone quote is the one that made the rounds. Now, the daughter of series creator Rod Serling has made it clear that she doesn't approve of the comparison.
In a Friday tweet, Anne Serling - an author herself - pointed out that her father wouldn't have appreciated the present day face of the GOP, which has descended into mudslinging and a partisan gaming of the system. She added that if the Kavanaugh matter had been written as a Twilight Zone episode, it would have played out much differently.
"My father believed in decency, integrity, and justice," Serling wrote. "Had he written this, I assure you-there would indeed be a further FBI investigation along with some cosmic justice."
The cosmic justice she spoke of may still come, now that the FBI has reopened its background check on Kavanaugh. (Serling's tweet posted just a few hours before that happened.)
Anne Serling
Breaks Tradition
ACLU
In an unusual break with their own policy, the American Civil Liberties Union announced that it was opposing Judge Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court.
The ACLU is nonpartisan - it does not oppose or support candidates for judicial or political office - but the group said in a release Saturday afternoon that its board held an "extraordinary meeting, and has chosen to make an exception to that policy."
The group said they did so because it believes there are credible sexual assault allegations against the candidate.
"This is not a decision taken lightly," the organization said in a resolution passed by the board of directors. "We cannot remain silent under these extraordinary circumstances about a lifetime appointment to the highest court of the land. The standard for such an appointment should be high, and the burden is on the nominee. That burden is not met as long as there are unresolved questions regarding the credible allegations of sexual assault."
This is the fourth time the group has opposed a nominee to the Supreme Court in its 98 years of existence, they said in a release, but the group noted they did not take a stand on Justice Neil Gorsuch's nomination.
ACLU
Calls For Immediate Pardons
Amal Clooney
Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney has called for immediate pardons for two journalists jailed after reporting the alleged massacre of 10 Rohingya Muslims.
Ms Clooney is representing Reuters reporters Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, and Wa Lone, 32, who were locked up earlier this month after uncovering extrajudicial killings in Myanmar's western Rakhine state.
Clooney, wife of Hollywood actor George, called on Myanmar head of government and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to grant the men pardons during a press freedom event at the United Nations on Friday.
She said the reporters' wives wrote "a really heartfelt letter" to the government pleading for a pardon, not because their husbands had done anything wrong, but because it would allow them to be released from prison.
In a message directed at Suu Kyi, Ms Clooney told Reuters: "You fought for so many years to be freed from the same prison where they now sit and now you have the power to actually remedy this injustice today if you wanted to.
Amal Clooney
Calling Out "Manels"
Germany
Calling out "manels"-all male panels at meetings-has been one way researchers concerned about gender equity have called attention to the frequent imbalance of men and women on scientific conference programs. Now, organizers of a meeting at a leading cancer institute in Germany have gone a step further. At the Frontiers in Cancer Research meeting early next month, 23 of the 28 invited speakers-or 82%-are women.
"We invited women who are driving the field. … The ratio is the opposite of what it usually is," says Ursula Klingmüller, a systems biologist at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg and chair of the center's Executive Women's Initiative, which is organizing the meeting, which will run from 9 to 11 October.
The aim of the meeting, hosted by DKFZ, is to "show that we have really outstanding researchers around the world doing excellent work." Organizers briefly considered inviting only women as speakers, Klingmüller says, but decided that wasn't the approach they wanted to take. Instead, the organizers invited a man to speak at each session. "No one is excluded," she says.
Indeed, she says, the organizers will be pleased if, at first glance, no one notices anything unusual about the names on the program. So far, she says, the response has been overwhelmingly positive, with nearly 250 participants registered so far. "People are impressed with the speakers we were able to invite," she says.
Efforts to consider gender equity at meetings can be eye-opening for both organizers and attendees, says Yael Niv, a computational neuroscientist at Princeton University and a member of Biaswatchneuro, a consortium of neuroscientists that works to point out gender imbalanced meetings and journal authorships. In 2016, she and a colleague organized a conference on the neuroscience of addiction. "As usual, we made up a list of invitees and then said, 'Oh. We don't have enough women [speakers],'" she says. Her co-organizer came up with a list of potential female candidates, "and they all were completely relevant to the topic … I felt like doing the opposite for once-inviting a whole bunch of women and then padding it out with men." So the researchers invited all the women on their list, ending up with 12 women and nine men.
Germany
Evasive Testimony
Kavanaugh
Whether inside a federal courtroom or an Ivy League classroom, US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh (R-Toast) assumes multiple roles. They all demand respect; in each, he sets the rules.
Yet the Yale-educated Harvard law professor, who has occupied the federal bench for more than 10 years, seemed to forget the basics of legal procedure and courtroom decorum during his Thursday testimony about an allegation of sexual assault from his teenage years.
Mr Kavanaugh's performance in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee was histrionic. He was frequently hostile and overly emotional, behaving in a manner he would likely not tolerate in his own courtroom. He also offered the committee evidence that, in a court of law, he would know to be inadmissible.
His behaviour could be consistent with two scenarios, according to former US attorney and Georgetown law professor Paul Butler: someone who is wrongly being prosecuted, or someone afraid of a truth-seeking process.
The difference, obviously, is that Kavanaugh is a judge on a high federal court, a position that requires a nonpartisan temperament and respect for the judicial confirmation process.
Kavanaugh
'Given Up'
People
'Give-up-itis' is a real and potentially fatal condition which sees people simply tire of life, according to research.
John Leach, a senior research fellow at the University of Portsmouth, said the genuine medical condition occurs when people simply give up on life.
Leach said the condition usually occurs when a person has suffered a trauma and believed there was no escape, with death being the "only rational outcome".
He said if the condition was not overcome then death normally occurred three weeks after the first stage of withdrawal.
Dr Leach said: "Psychogenic death is real. It isn't suicide, it isn't linked to depression, but the act of giving up on life and dying, usually within days, is a very real condition often linked to severe trauma."
People
'Medicane' Zorba
Greece
A powerful Mediterranean storm has lashed southern Greece with torrential rain and winds up to 55mph.
Called Zorba it has been dubbed a medicane - a combination of the words Mediterranean and hurricane - although that is not a technical weather term.
It moved past the southwestern tip of the Peloponnese on Saturday and civil protection services remained on alert across most of the country, despite news the storm's intensity had weakened as it moved eastward.
Zorba was expected to bring heavy rainfall to greater Athens as it rolls towards islands in the Aegean Sea and Turkey's coast.
Bad weather from a previous low-pressure front toppled trees, caused power outages in parts of Athens and disrupted suburban rail services on Friday, when schools in the Greek capital and several other parts of the country were also closed.
Greece
$20 A Kilogram (Plus Shipping)
Experimental Martian Dirt
This is not fake news. A team of UCF astrophysicists has developed a scientifically based, standardized method for creating Martian and asteroid soil known as simulants.
The team published its findings this month in the journal Icarus.
"The simulant is useful for research as we look to go to Mars," said Physics Professor Dan Britt, a member of UCF's Planetary Sciences Group. "If we are going to go, we'll need food, water and other essentials. As we are developing solutions, we need a way to test how these ideas will fare."
UCF's formula is based on the chemical signature of the soils on Mars collected by the Curiosity rover. Britt built two calibration targets that were part of Curiosity rover. Researchers currently use simulants that aren't standardized, so any experiment can't be compared to another in an apples-to-apples kind of way, Britt said.
As a geologist and a physicist, he knows his dirt. Like a recipe, the ingredients can be mixed in different ways to mimic soil from various objects, including asteroids and planets. And because the formula is based on scientific methods and is published for all to use, even those not ordering through UCF can create dirt that can be used for experiments, which reduces the uncertainty level.
Experimental Martian Dirt
'Thunderclap at Dawn'
Ledumahadi mafube
If any rock bands are looking for a cool name, they might draw inspiration from a newly identified long-necked Jurassic giant whose moniker means "a giant thunderclap at dawn."
This colossal dinosaur was the largest beast alive during the Early Jurassic. And it walked in a peculiar way, a new study finds.
Unlike the later long-necked dinosaurs and even today's elephants, the "giant thunderclap" dinosaur didn't walk on straight limbs. Rather, the 13-ton (12 metric tons) dinosaur moved with "a more crouched posture," study senior researcher Jonah Choiniere, a reader in dinosaur paleontology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, told Live Science.
Researchers initially unearthed fossils of the 200-million-year-old dinosaur in the late 1980s near South Africa's international border with Lesotho. But it took them until 2017 to excavate all the beast's remains, including a wristbone that helped the team determine how the dinosaur walked.
They drew from Southern Sotho, a Bantu language spoken in the region, to dub the dinosaur Ledumahadi mafube, which (as mentioned) is a nod to the beast's giant size. The genus name (Ledumahadi) means "a giant thunderclap" in recognition that size, whereas the species name (mafube) means "dawn," as a reference to the animal's existence during the Early Jurassic.
Ledumahadi mafube
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