Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Garrison Keillor: We've Never Been Here Before (Washington Post)
Anxious times in America.
Frank Bruni: The Week When President Trump Resigned (NY Times)
Trump resigned the presidency already - if we regard the job as one of moral stewardship, if we assume that an iota of civic concern must joust with self-regard, if we expect a president's interest in legislation to rise above vacuous theatrics, if we consider a certain baseline of diplomatic etiquette to be part of the equation.
1 big thing: Why they stay (AXIOS)
"You have no idea how much crazy stuff we kill": The most common response centers on the urgent importance of having smart, sane people around Trump to fight his worst impulses. If they weren't there, they say, we would have a trade war with China, massive deportations, and a government shutdown to force construction of a Southern wall.
Josh Marshall: Thoughts on Trump's Speech (TPM)
I confess my standards are so low for Trump at this point that it's hard for me to have quite the shock that I'm seeing from some of the TV commentators right now. Let's be honest. He's done worse. He's done worse in the last week. This is the President. It's who he is. It's like letting an addict who's been clean for a couple days hang out with his friends at the crack house. It'll go downhill fast. And so it did.
Tim Parks: The Books We Don't Understand (New York Review of Books)
What is going on when a book simply makes no sense to you? Perhaps a classic that everyone praises. Or something new you're being asked to review, something a publisher has warmly recommended.
April Bernard: "Eloise: The Feral Star" (New York Review of Books)
Eloise, the children's literature star-she of the Plaza, Paris, and Moscow-was born of Kay Thompson, not otherwise an author. Thompson (1909-1998) was a musician, singer, and comedian, most widely remembered for her brassy, bossy turn as a magazine editor in the film Funny Face ("Think Pink!"). She was also a behind-the-scenes force for years as a voice coach (for Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra, among others) and vocal music arranger in Hollywood.
MAGGIE HABERMAN and MIKAYLA BOUCHARD: Mnuchin's Wife Mocks Oregon Woman Over Lifestyle and Wealth (NY Times)
The wife of the Treasury secretary on Monday night took a page from President Trump's social media playbook for punching down. Louise Linton, the labels-loving wife of Steven Mnuchin, replied condescendingly to an Instagram poster about her lifestyle and belittled the woman, Jenni Miller, a mother of three from Portland, Ore., for having less money than she does.
Mark Morford: 10 ways of looking at the eclipse (SF Gate)
Million Air is whisking customers to remote airports where the moon will totally block the sun's rays for a time on Aug. 21. Passengers will watch from lawn chairs near the wings of the plane while an astronomer offers expert commentary and views of solar flares through a telescope.
Michael Gregor: The 3 Vitamins that Prevent Brain Loss (NutritionFacts.org)
By our seventies, one in five of us will suffer from cognitive impairment. Within five years, half of those cognitively impaired will progress to dementia and death. The earlier we can slow or stop this process, the better. Although an effective treatment for Alzheimer's disease is unavailable, interventions just to control risk factors could prevent millions of cases. An immense effort has been spent on identifying such risk factors for Alzheimer's and developing treatments to reduce them.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
replied:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Reader Contribution
Eclipse
eclipse shots Sweetwater Tennessee .....
gary from PA
Thanks, Gary!
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
The question above the Obama one is "Miss him yet?"
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
from Marc Perkel
Patriot Act
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
"FREAKED OUT YET?"
"THE GOD WHISPERER."
HOME OF THE BRAVE AND LAND OF THE FREE!
THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF FASCISM.
"I'M JUST ONE PERSON,WHAT CAN I DO?"
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Pulled out the old cooler, loaded it with ice, then filled it with beverages and snacks, hoping it will discourage anyone from opening the refrigerator (& freezer) during the planned power outage.
Sure hope they have the electricity restored by supper time.
US Academic Resigns As Science Envoy
Daniel Kammen
Another week, another resignation.
This time it is one of the State Department's science envoys who has publicly resigned over Donald Trump's (R-Crooked) response to violence at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, and like some other resignations it came with a not-so-hidden message in the text.
Daniel Kammen, a professor at the University of California, Berkely, posted a letter to Twitter saying Mr Trump's failure to denounce neo-Nazis and the far-Right was part of a disturbing pattern .
"Your failure to condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis has domestic and international ramifications," he wrote.
"Particularly troubling to me is how your response to Charlottesville is consistent with a broader pattern of behaviour that enables sexism and racism, and disregards the welfare of all Americans, the global community and the planet."
Prof Kammen also criticised the decision to leave the Paris climate accords and offered a more subtle message buried in the words. The first letters of each paragraph spelled out the word "IMPEACH".
Daniel Kammen
Boy Scouts Covertly Recruiting Girls?
Girl Scouts
Inflaming a century-old and mostly cordial rivalry, the president of the Girl Scouts of the USA is accusing the Boy Scouts of seeking to covertly recruit girls into their programs while disparaging the Girl Scouts' operations.
"I formally request that your organization stay focused on serving the 90 percent of American boys not currently participating in Boy Scouts ... and not consider expanding to recruit girls," wrote GSUSA President Kathy Hopinkah Hannan in a letter sent this week to the president of the Boy Scouts of America, Randall Stephenson.
The tough tone of her letter dismayed Boy Scout leaders, said BSA spokeswoman Effie Delimarkos.
"We are disheartened to see the Girl Scouts pull away from the possibility of cooperation to help address the needs of today's busy families," she said Wednesday.
The Boy Scouts have some coed programs dating back nearly 50 years, but this year there has been extensive discussion within the BSA community about expanding opportunities for girls beyond existing coed programs, such as Venturing and Sea Scouts.
Girl Scouts
U.S. Erred In Declining Protections
Grizzly Bears
U.S. wildlife managers erred when they declined to list as endangered a small population of grizzly bears in the remote reaches of Idaho and northwest Montana, a federal judge has ruled in what conservationists on Wednesday hailed as a huge victory.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2014 determined the fewer than 50 grizzlies that roam the Cabinet Mountains and Yaak River drainage in the Northern Rockies were not in danger of extinction and did not warrant re-classifying as endangered or threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.
The Montana conservation group Alliance for the Wild Rockies sued, arguing the so-called Cabinet-Yaak population of grizzlies would go extinct unless U.S. wildlife managers tightened restrictions on logging, mining and other activities in bear habitat, all safeguards that would come with endangered status.
On Tuesday a federal judge in Missoula, Montana, sided with the conservation group in a ruling that found that the Fish and Wildlife Service had violated U.S. law in determining that the number of outsized, hump-shouldered bears in the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem could reach a targeted recovery goal of 100 without added protections.
In the ruling, U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen found that the agency had long recognized that population of grizzlies was warranted for listing as an endangered species because of human-caused mortality and other threats.
Grizzly Bears
Mystery Deaths Of Submarine Crew Solved
HL Hunley
The mystery of how the crew of one of the world's first submarines died has finally been solved - they accidentally killed themselves.
The HL Hunley sank on February 17 1864 after torpedoing the USS Housatonic outside Charleston Harbour, South Carolina, during American Civil War.
She was one of the first submarines ever to be used in conflict, and the first to sink a battleship.
It was assumed the blast had ruptured the sub, drowning its occupants, but when the Hunley was raised in 2000, salvage experts were amazed to find the eight-man crew poised as if they had been caught completely unawares by the tragedy. All were still sitting in their posts and there was no evidence that they had attempted to flee the foundering vessel.
Now researchers at Duke University believe they have the answer. Three years of experiments on a mini-test sub have shown that the torpedo blast would have created a shockwave great enough to instantly rupture the blood vessels in the lungs and brains of the submariners.
HL Hunley
Researcher 'Stands By' Explosive Allegations
'Pee Tape' Dossier
Glenn Simpson, whose firm compiled an infamous and salacious dossier about Donald Trump's (R-Corrupt) ties to Russia, told Senate investigators Tuesday that he "stands by" its findings. The private investigator and former reporter spent more than 10 hours being questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee after Chairman Chuck Grassley withdrew a subpoena when Simpson agreed to testify behind closed doors.
Simpson co-founded the private research firm Fusion GPS, which was hired to produce a report on Trump. The dossier, largely prepared by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, alleges collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia. Among other explosive claims about the president's links to the country are that the Kremlin has a compromising video of Trump getting prostitutes to urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel in which Barack and Michelle Obama once stayed.
"Now that was totally made-up stuff.... I know a lot about those guys, they're phony guys," Trump told The New York Times last month. "They make up whatever they want. Just not my thing. Plus, I have witnesses, because I went there with a group of people."
Yet the dossier has been treated with a degree of reverence by others. Last December, U.S. intelligence officials passed a summary of the report onto then-President Obama and President-elect Trump. It was then obtained and published in full by Buzzfeed News. It has since been reported that the FBI has used it to bolster its own investigation into the Trump campaign's links to Russia, which is currently being headed by special counsel Robert Mueller.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is not the main body responsible for investigating links between the Trump campaign and Russia and is nominally looking into Simpson's alleged failure to register as a foreign lobbyist. However, headed by Grassley, a Republican, it is also seeking to find out the motivations for Fusion GPS's research and who funded it. Fusion GPS has alleged that the investigation is an attempt to discredit the research.
'Pee Tape' Dossier
'Misled' The Public About Climate Change
ExxonMobil
Fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil "misled the public" about the risks posed by climate change, an analysis of its public and private announcements on the subject by two Harvard University academics has concluded.
While the company's scientists and senior executive largely accepted the scientific consensus that global warming is real and poses significant risks, it spent thousands of dollars on regular advertorials in The New York Times (NYT) and other newspapers, in which it sought to cast doubt on the science.
In some cases, the firm, led by the current US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson (R-Vulture), from 2006 to 2016, even contradicted itself.
While at the company, Mr Tillerson used an email account with a fake name, "Wayne Tracker", to discuss climate change and, since becoming a member of the Trump administration, has advised American diplomats to dodge questions about the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change.
The researchers pointed out that, as long ago as 1979, an internal ExxonMobil document discussed the "most widely held theory" that burning fossil fuels would cause "a warming of the Earth's surface" with "dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050".
ExxonMobil
'Fighting Against The Hand Of God'
Paula White
Paula White, a televangelist and spiritual adviser to Donald Trump (R-Hypocrite), appeared on television Tuesday to defend the president amid recent controversy using an unlikely Biblical comparison.
While speaking on a panel on "The Jim Bakker Show," White said that Trump's presidential victory was similar to a story from the Hebrew Bible where a woman named Esther was chosen to be queen, since both parties were unlikely to be selected for their roles.
As the scripture goes, Esther was a young, orphaned Jewish woman living in exile who, through her wits and good looks, ends up being selected by the Persian king to be his queen at a time when Jews were widely persecuted.
Because of her new position of power, Esther was able to stop a plot to murder all the Jewish people in Persia. The Bible concludes that Esther was placed in her position as queen by God to fulfill this important mission.
On Tuesday, White compared Trump to Queen Esther, saying that he, too, was selected by God to carry out a divine plan.
Paula White
Claims Slavery Is 'Good History'
Katrina Pierson
Slavery is good history are not four words one often hears uttered in the same sentence but Donald Trump's (R-Buffoon) former campaign spokesperson appears to think it is a plausible clause.
Katrina Pierson, who was national campaign spokeswoman for Trump during the election, made the assertion while attempting to defend the continued existence of Confederate statues in the US.
"Pelosi wants to help these anarchists and these violent protestors tear down pieces of America, American culture and American history," she said.
Fellow guest Wendy Osefo, a Johns Hopkins University professor, interjected to say the monuments were not "a symbol of patriotism" but instead stood for "hatred and division" and should be kept in museums rather than on state grounds.
But Ms Pierson hit back, saying: "It absolutely deserves a place because bad history is still good history for this country."
Katrina Pierson
Publishes Provocative Islam Cartoon
Charlie Hebdo
French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo published a provocative front-page cartoon about Islam and the recent terror attacks in Spain on Wednesday, sparking fears that it could encourage Islamophobia.
The latest edition of the magazine, which was targeted by Islamist gunmen in 2015, shows two people lying in a pool of blood after being run over by a van next to the words, "Islam, eternal religion of peace."
Critics of Charlie Hebdo saw its front-page cartoon as tarring an entire religion, practised by around 1.5 billion people worldwide, by implying it is inherently violent.
As the cartoon became one of the top trending topics on Twitter in France -- with more than 15,000 tweets praising or criticising it -- prominent Socialist MP and former minister Stephane Le Foll called it "extremely dangerous".
Charlie Hebdo editor Laurent "Riss" Sourisseau defended the choice in an editorial, saying that experts and policy-makers were avoiding hard questions out of concern for moderate law-abiding Muslims.
Charlie Hebdo
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