Elsewhere posts are what are often described as link round-up posts. Categorized, curated links to posts elsewhere with titles, brief descriptions, quotations, and sometimes, commentary. These are posts that I read and think others might find them interesting, possibly provocative, but worth the time and energy to read. They were in some ways why we started Floccinaucical.com in the first place; to curate and annotate posts that deserved some time, traffic and attention. The Elsewhere categories have changed and will likely continue to change with time, but books, language, history, art, and food are always present. Since the U.S. election of 2016, we have included a section regarding the antics of # 45. We hope soon to be able to stop including that section as it is soul-wearying.
Scientists say portable air cleaners (also called air purifiers) with HEPA filtration can remove virus particles that cause COVID-19
Portable HEPA (high efficiency particulate air) rated air filters remove more than 99 percent of airborne particles regardless of the particle size. Dr. Miller’s team partnered with Harvard University to created a calculator to help you find the right air cleaner for your room size and type. Look for a certification from the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM). You can find a list of verified units here. You will also want to make sure the clean air delivery rate (CADR) matches or exceeds the square footage of the room you are trying to clean.
. . . [W]hen, like most of us, I ran low on white flour in April, I used whole wheat instead and discovered that the recipe wasn’t just as good as it was with white flour, but better. Crunchier, more flavorful, and even nuanced.
This Classic Tomato Soup is rich with a velvety texture. It’s easy to make with canned tomatoes, and perfectly suited for all of your grilled cheese dipping needs. Better than a can of Campbell’s and just about as easy!
The dun sands of southern Peru, etched centuries ago with geoglyphs of a hummingbird, a monkey, an orca – and a figure some would dearly love to believe is an astronaut – have now revealed the form of an enormous cat lounging across a desert hillside.
On Aug. 6, 2020, the world’s first successfully cloned Przewalski’s horse was born in Texas at the veterinary facility of a ViaGen Equine collaborator, Timber Creek Veterinary. The foal, born to a domestic surrogate mother, is a clone of a male Przewalski’s horse whose DNA was cryopreserved 40 years ago at the San Diego Zoo Global (SDZG) Frozen Zoo®. The colt’s birth revives genetic diversity that had been lost to the world and has now been recovered due to this important partnership between Revive & Restore, ViaGen Equine and San Diego Zoo Global.
Googling didn’t used to require so much … scrolling. On some searches, it’s like Where’s Waldo but for information.
Without us even realizing it, the Internet’s most-used website has been getting worse. On too many queries, Google is more interested in making search lucrative than a better product for us.
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The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey.
Even so, these results highlight the need to wash hands as well as touchscreens regularly and to avoid touching one’s face in order to minimise the risk of infection.
The drug, made by the US biotech firm Gilead, has been talked up as a potential cure and was taken by Donald Trump. A trial in the US had previously showed it reduced the length of stay in hospital. But the gold-standard Solidarity WHO trial, which was based on a far larger sample – 3,000 people on the drug, compared with as many who were not – showed remdesivir had little effect on deaths over 28 days.
podcasting is a creative form available to anyone who has a computer, a microphone, and an internet connection. We spoke to Andrew Marino, audio engineer and producer at The Verge, to find out what he recommends for those who want to try this out as well.
To anyone who feels overwhelmed or apathetic about this election, there is nothing I relate to more than desperation to escape corrosive political discourse. As a child, I saw firsthand the kind of cruel, selfish politics that Donald Trump has now inflicted on our country. It made me want to run as far away from them as possible. But trust me when I tell you: Running away does not solve the problem. We have to stand and fight. The only way to end this nightmare is to vote. There is hope on the horizon, but we’ll only grasp it if we elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
The warnings were based on multiple sources, including intercepted communications, that showed Giuliani was interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence during a December 2019 trip to Ukraine, where he was gathering information that he thought would expose corrupt acts by former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
This is what Apollo 17 astronauts saw in December of 1972 as they came around the farside of the Moon: the blue and white crescent Earth rising above the stark lunar horizon. And now image editing guru Kevin Gill has sharpened the image, giving it more texture, color and contrast. I can imagine this sharp, spectacular view must be close to what the astronauts saw with their own eyes.
Schadenfreude was our top lookup on October 2nd, by a very considerable margin, following President Trump’s announcement that he and the First Lady had tested positive for COVID-19.
A Cornell University study of more than 1 million news articles concluded that “the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of [a] covid-19 misinformation ‘infodemic.’ ”
How We Survive the Winter “The coming months of the pandemic could be catastrophic. The U.S. still has ways to prepare.”
This pandemic has shone a glaring light on a lot of inequalities. The federal government estimates that more than a third of rural America has little or no Internet. In numerous recent interviews, educators have told NPR they’re concerned the rural-urban divide will only worsen if kids can’t get online to learn.
Morning Brew newsletter — a free daily morning newsletter that’s a well-written, intelligent round-up of business news that’s actually interesting: Morning Brew Referral link .
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lived through the end of a civil war — I moved back to Sri Lanka in my twenties, just as the ceasefire fell apart. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens.
This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.
If there’s one word that can perfectly describe Jaime Harrison in his first debate against Sen. Lindsey Graham, it’s “prepared.”
On Saturday, Harrison — South Carolina’s Democratic Senate candidate — spent the debate masterfully discussing key issues such as the Supreme Court nominee, COVID-19, and more with the Republican senator. But Harrison didn’t stand out solely for his words. His actions, one in particular, also made quite a statement.
We are scared and we are exhausted and we are often by ourselves. We know better than to complain too much because no one besides the women like us seem to want to hear it.
Mechanics in New York drew out the dismantling and removal of mail-sorting machines until their supervisor gave up on the order. In Michigan, a group of letter carriers did an end run around a supervisor’s directive to leave election mail behind, starting their routes late to sift through it. In Ohio, postal clerks culled prescriptions and benefit checks from bins of stalled mail to make sure they were delivered, while some carriers ran late items out on their own time. In Pennsylvania, some postal workers looked for any excuse — a missed turn, heavy traffic, a rowdy dog — to buy enough time to finish their daily rounds.
“I can’t see any postal worker not bending those rules,” one Philadelphia staffer said in an interview.
In the seven months since the outbreak first spread across the U.S., he has flouted seemingly every basic health guideline put forth by his own government in response.
He repeatedly refused to wear a face mask, and held large rallies with hundreds of supporters who did the same, often in violation of local ordinances. He allowed the White House to continue its daily operations with scant social distancing, exposing himself to dozens of people who had taken few protections against the virus.
Last month, Winston Wolkoff told The Washington Post’s Jada Yuan that the first lady used private email accounts, iMessage, and Signal, an encrypted messaging app, while at the White House. Critics said the finding was hypocritical considering the president’s attacks on Hillary Clinton, who used a private email server while she was secretary of state.
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Trump suggests that the migrant children are treated well at the border and have a higher quality of life than they did in their home countries.
“The kids, they say, ‘Wow I will have my own bed? I will sleep on the bed? I will have a cabinet for my clothes?’ It’s so sad to hear it, but they didn’t have that in their own countries, they sleep on the floor,” she said. “They are taken care of nicely there. But you know, yeah, they are not with parents, it’s sad. But when they come here alone or with coyotes or illegally, you know, you need to do something.”
— People said this about slavery, too. It’s still wrong, and yes, still untrue.
If the outcome of the election is not clear by Jan. 6, the decision goes to the House. But the vote is not as straightforward as Democrats having the majority of seats overall. Each state would get a single vote, which would be determined by the party that has the majority of members from that state.
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Hours after the editorial published, the University announced Monday a reversal to move to all-remote learning, starting Wednesday. School officials announced the change after testing showed rapid spread of the virus — 177 cases of covid-19 were confirmed among students, out of hundreds of tests.
The N95 shortage America can’t seem to fix “Nurses and doctors depend on respirator masks to protect them from covid-19. So why are we still running low on an item that once cost around $1?”
. . the H1N1 flu epidemic depleted 85 million N95s from the national stockpile — and the supply was never replenished. In 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2017, public health officials published alarming reports warning of a “massive gap” in what remained. Even more concerning, they said, the vast majority of N95s and the materials needed to manufacture them were now being made in Asia.
Even so, 3M and Honeywell haven’t been able to make enough masks as the pandemic wore on and demand only increased.
“We’re not tens of millions of masks short. We’re hundreds of millions of masks short of where we need to be,” Paul said. “It would make complete sense to want to scale up some small and mid-sized manufacturers to help fill in this massive gap.”
But the federal government has no plan to help small- and mid-sized manufacturers move into PPE.
“This administration has really had a big firm focus,” said Gary Gereffi, a professor at Duke University and the founding director of the Duke Global Value Chains Center.
For months, scientists and public health experts have warned of mounting evidence that the novel coronavirus is airborne, transmitted through tiny droplets called aerosols that linger in the air much longer than the larger globs that come from coughing or sneezing.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agrees. The CDC recently changed its official guidance to note that aerosols are “thought to be the main way the virus spreads” and to warn that poorly ventilated indoor spaces are particularly dangerous.
But then Monday, September 21, the CDC changed their site again. As The Washington Post reports:
But the update only lasted a few days. On Monday morning, the CDC edited the website to remove the guidance and said the Friday update was posted in error. “Unfortunately an early draft of a revision went up without any technical review,” said Jay Butler, the CDC’s deputy director for infectious diseases. “We are returning to the earlier version and revisiting that process. It was a failure of process at CDC.”
Experts were thrilled to see the original update. Many have stressed for months that the virus can travel through tiny particles that float more slowly through the air, not just through the larger droplets that fall to the ground. That’s why both ventilating indoor spaces (to clear out residual virus) and wearing masks (to help block any exhaled particles) are just as, if not more, important than keeping six feet of distance.
This does look like once again GOP politics are interfering with the science and mission of the CDC.
While it’s commonly known that people from Siberia crossed over a land bridge known as Beringia at the end of the last Ice Age and were the first to settle in North America, scientists were never sure if it was one migration of a single population or multiple peoples who came in waves. This is what makes Sunrise Girl-Child’s DNA so incredible. The genetic analysis demonstrates that a single ancestral Native American group split from East Asians around 35,000 years ago. This group then split again in two about 20,000 years ago—one population being the Ancient Beringians and the other being the ancestors of all Native Americans.
Domestic horses likely did not originate in Anatolia as previously suspected, according to a new study of ancient remains dating as far back as 9000 BCE.
Instead, they may have been introduced to the peninsula – which makes up most of modern-day Turkey – and the nearby Caucasus region from the Eurasian Steppe by about 2000 BCE, during the Bronze Age.
The findings, presented in a paper in the journal Science Advances, also suggest imported domestic horses were bred with local wild Anatolian horses and donkeys and provide the earliest genomic evidence for a mule in southwest Asia, dating to between 1100 and 800 BCE.
The problem for Jay was never how babies are made, and fostering and adoption were options. The problem was that he wanted kids and also wanted a co-parent to help him raise kids, but wasn’t interested in romantic partnership. Before exploring single parenthood, he was curious whether there might be another way to form the family he wanted.
“We looked at the number of fingerprint ridges and the distance between them and compared them with fingerprints from the present day,” he told the Guardian.
“Those ridges vary according to age and sex but settle by adulthood, and you can distinguish between those of men and women. You can also tell the age of the person from the ridges.”
The Two Noble Kinsmen, written by Shakespeare with John Fletcher, was found by a researcher investigating the work of the Scots economist Adam Smith.
The 1634 volume could be the oldest Shakespearean work in the country.
The health department’s politically appointed communications aides have demanded the right to review and seek changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly scientific reports charting the progress of the coronavirus pandemic, in what officials characterized as an attempt to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals.
. . .
The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports are authored by career scientists and serve as the main vehicle for the agency to inform doctors, researchers and the general public about how Covid-19 is spreading and who is at risk. Such reports have historically been published with little fanfare and no political interference, said several longtime health department officials, and have been viewed as a cornerstone of the nation’s public health work for decades.
But since Michael Caputo, a former 💩🔥💰 campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department’s new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with 💩🔥💰’s statements, including the president’s claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.
That single event on 7 August is linked to coronavirus outbreaks in at least two other locations in Maine, with more than 170 people contracting the virus and seven deaths since.
. . .
The “superspreader” event started with wedding attendees in the Katahdin region and spread to the community at large and to a nursing home in Madison.
An attendee worked at the York county jail, 220 miles away, where there are more than 70 cases. The state is also investigating an outbreak at a church in Sanford, home of the wedding’s officiant.
But for those who want to get a little more experimental and expand your horizons past fruits and vegetables, growing your own oyster mushrooms can be a fairly low-budget and simple avenue to pursue.
One cultivating method used by a number of urban farmers and “do-it-yourself” growers involves taking freshly used coffee grounds and a little bit of boiled straw as substrate (the soil) and mixing it with spawns of the mushrooms to grow into a new batch.
Coffee Is Under Attack “Coffee plants were supposed to be safe on this side of the Atlantic. But the fungus found them.”
It was a Viking saga written in genes. In 2008, construction work on an isolated Estonian beach near the town of Salme uncovered the skeletons of more than 40 powerfully built men. They were buried around 750 C.E. in two ships with Viking-style weapons and treasure—apparently the aftermath of a raid gone wrong. DNA from the bones has now added a poignant detail: Four of the men, buried shoulder to shoulder holding their swords, were brothers.
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The results tell dramatic stories of individual mobility, such as a pair of cousins buried in Oxford, U.K., and Denmark, separated in death by hundreds of kilometers of open ocean. The genetic details may also rewrite popular perceptions of Vikings, including their looks: Viking Age Scandinavians were more likely to have black hair than people living there today. And comparing DNA and archaeology at individual sites suggests that for some in the Viking bands, “Viking” was a job description, not a matter of heredity.
The DNA has raised new questions, too. Study co-author and National Museum of Denmark archaeologist Jette Arneborg says DNA recovered from burials in Greenland shows a mix of Scandinavian men from what is now Norway and women from the British Isles. Yet the artifacts and burials look completely Scandinavian. The women “have British genes but we can’t see them in the archaeology,” she says. “The DNA is going to make us think more about what’s happening here.”
n Chicago, postal employees say backlogged mail is stacked so high in some facilities that workers barely have space to walk by. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, mail handlers tell NBC News first class and priority mail is still running several days a week behind schedule on average.
And in Tacoma, Washington, multiple postal workers said new mandates mean many mail trucks per week are being ordered to set out on their routes five minutes early — often entirely empty.
Zuckerman goes on to say that toxic positivity can take many forms, including but not limited to: a friend or family member who scolds you for expressing frustration about something instead of actually listening to why you’re upset; or comments like “look on the bright side,” “be grateful for what you have,” “it could actually be much worse,” “if you stay positive, something good will come your way.” (There are so, so many.)
. . . for the month in which Sturgis took place, the rally was responsible for a fifth of the cases in the entire country
. . .
If we conservatively assume that all of these cases were non-fatal, then these cases represent a cost of over $12.2 billion, based on the statistical cost of a COVID-19 case of $46,000 estimated by Kniesner and Sullivan (2020). This is enough to have paid each of the estimated 462,182 rally attendees $26,553.64 not to attend.”
The number of patients complaining of coughs and respiratory illnesses surged at a sprawling Los Angeles medical system from late December through February, raising questions about whether the novel coronavirus was spreading earlier than thought, according to a study of electronic medical records.
The authors of the report, published Thursday in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, suggested that coronavirus infections may have caused this rise weeks before U.S. officials began warning the public about an outbreak.
. . .
The study authors searched outpatient and emergency department reports that used the word “cough,” and tallied the number of people hospitalized for acute respiratory failure.
That approach revealed an uptick in patients that began the week of Dec. 22 and remained elevated for 10 weeks. The number of extra people exceeded the researchers’ predictions by 50 percent, totaling about 1,000 more patients compared with the previous five flu seasons.
Judge Dabney L. Friedrich ruled that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and the U.S. Department of Education violated the clear language of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act in issuing a regulation that would illegally divert desperately needed funds away from public school students for the benefit of private schools.
If a teen talks about harming themselves or wanting to disappear, a parent should ask directly, “Is that something you think you might really do or you think about doing? Or are you just letting me know that you’re very upset right now?” And, she adds, hear them out without dismissing what they’re saying.
She also says parents should look out for anger: “In teenagers, uniquely, depression can take the form of irritability. That depression in teenagers sometimes looks like a prickly porcupine. Everybody rubs them the wrong way. And that is easy to miss because sometimes we’ll just dismiss that as being a snarky teenager.”
5 Comforting Dinners to Make this Fall Recipes use canned tomatoes to make Quick & Easy Hamburger Soup, Slow Cooker Taco Soup, Tomato Tortellini Soup with Italian Sausage, and Fettuccine with Creamy Tomato Italian Sausage Sauce.
History and Archaeology
Maeshowe— the 5,000-year-old Neolithic passage tomb in Orkney
In late July, America was briefly enthralled with “Unsolicited Seeds from China,” which started showing up in mailboxes in all 50 states. These mystery seeds prompted warnings from the USDA, which said people should not plant them, and should instead alert their state agricultural authority and mail them to the USDA or their local officials.
Many Americans heeded this advice. Many more decidedly did not.
“Joe is honest, he’s courageous, he’s well-informed and experienced, and most of all, he’s rational, all things that Trump isn’t. One of Joe’s greatest strengths, I think, certainly a natural attribute is that he’s normal. He really is the well-informed guy off the street and in an age when voters are looking for authenticity, he is the real thing.”
Under the current system, costly resources are used to hold on to records that no longer require classification resulting in an unnecessary waste of taxpayer dollars. The cost of the government’s classification system now exceeds $18 billion annually. Additionally, when records are kept classified for reasons that have nothing to do with national security, historians, journalists, public watchdogs and all Americans are denied their right to research historical events or examine the actions of their government to hold it accountable. As the line between classification for national security and pointless secrecy is blurred, public trust in government erodes.
Chandwaney’s [resignation] letter is full of links citing specific incidents of Facebook’s failures, such as the company obstructing an investigation into genocide in Myanmar and failing to remove an event encouraging people to shoot and kill protesters in Kenosha. [They] also referred to President Donald Trump’s infamous “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” post from May 29, which Facebook has still refused to remove. In contrast, Twitter hid a post from Trump that used the same phrase for “glorifying violence.”
n Anglo-Saxon times women made beer at home at the same time as baking bread. They were known as brewsters, and the best in the village turned their homes into an early version of a pub.
Hester Parnall, head of the St Austell Brewery in Cornwall from 1916 to 1939. Photograph: St Austell Brewery
“Only in the 18th and 19th centuries did we see big commercial brewers dominated by men to meet demand for a new beer called porter,” said Protz. But then [the first world] war came, and the men who managed and worked in the breweries went off to fight, leaving women to step into the breach.
“Watching Trump I could see that he knew exactly how to appeal to the evangelicals’ desires and vanities – who they wanted him to be, not who he really was. Everything he was telling them about himself was absolutely untrue.”
To deceive the evangelicals, Cohen writes, Trump would “say whatever they wanted to hear.”
In light of the threat to our postal service, at a time that could jeopardize the democracy of the country, let’s join forces for this collective postcard art demonstration
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On September 8th, CBS All Access is holding an all-day streaming event to commemorate the 54th anniversary of the premiere of the original Star Trek television show. I’ll admit I skimmed the email announcement until I found what I was looking for: yes, Patrick Stewart aka Captain Jean-Luc Picard will be part of the Star Trek panel discussions and will even reunite with Jonathan Frakes aka William Riker aka Number One aka Ensign Babyface.
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The event will stream free on the Star Trek website, and doesn’t require a CBS All Access subscription.
But] what I would say to Disney is do not bring out a black character, market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are and then have them pushed to the side. It’s not good. I’ll say it straight up.”
This year, perhaps as never before, our reading habits reflect our precarious reality. As the country has muddled through a deadly pandemic and a racial reckoning under a cloud of exhaustion and dread, we’ve used books to escape the present, inform our beliefs and educate our homebound children. We’ve found catharsis in apocalyptic science fiction and comfort in romance; advice in self-help guides and a moment of peace, thanks to children’s activity books. Most strikingly, since the death of George Floyd in May, we’ve flocked to books about race and social justice.
New research from Brazil has found that people who are unconcerned with adhering to measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 tend to display higher levels of traits associated with antisocial personality disorder, also known as sociopathy. The findings have been published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
The inn hosted a wedding reception on August 7, which has now been linked to 87 COVID-19 cases across the state. The Millinocket outbreak has also been linked to smaller outbreaks at the Maplecrest Rehabilitation Center in Madison, as well as at the York County Jail complex
Georgia State has not been pummeled. In fact, its graduation rate this spring hit a record high. So did the grade-point average of its graduating class. Not only did attendance not drop in the hurried shift to remote learning; it went up – to a dizzying 98.5% by the final week of the spring semester.
How? The answer is that Georgia State is a special sort of university, one that, for the past decade, has overturned received wisdom about the viability of lower-income, minority, and first-generation students. It has proven that such students do not fail because they are not capable; they fail because, at most universities, the bureaucracy throws obstacles in their way instead of helping them fulfill their potential.
. . .
In the first two weeks of remote learning, advisors were able to identify more than 8,000 students who either were not logging on or weren’t performing as expected. Some needed laptops or iPads, which the university was able to provide. Others were overwhelmed and needed financial or psychological guidance.
These students figured out their tests were graded by AI — and the easy way to cheat This is a waste of time, technology, and student’s efforts to learn. This kind of online instruction is pointless. It’s the digital equivalent of watching my peers (who could see) look up the work sheet answers in the “self- programmed textbooks” we had in the seventies.
A 5th-century chalice covered in religious iconography has been discovered in Northumberland, to the astonishment of archaeologists, who describe it as Britain’s first known example of Christian graffiti on an object. With its complex mass of crosses and chi-rhos, angels and a priestly figure, as well as fish, a whale and ships, it is believed to be without parallel in western Europe.
Made of lead and now in 14 fragments, it was unearthed at the Vindolanda Roman fort, one of Europe’s foremost archaeological sites, near Hadrian’s Wall, during an excavation that has also discovered the foundations of a significant church of the 5th or 6th century.
Bronze age Britons remembered the dead by keeping and curating bits of their bodies, and even turning them into instruments and ornaments, according to new research on the remains.
Archaeologists found that pieces of bone buried with the dead were often from people who had died decades earlier, suggesting their remains had been kept for future generations, as keepsakes or perhaps for home display.
. . .
“Our research demonstrates that excarnation – the exposure of fleshed bodies to the elements – was in fact common throughout the bronze age, and evidence for the manipulation of partially fleshed bodies in a variety of ritual practices indicates that bronze age people had a quite different attitude to death and the dead than we have today,” Bruck said.
Science and Nature
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope depicts a small section of the Cygnus supernova blast wave, located around 2400 light-years away.
“The name of the supernova remnant comes from its position in the northern constellation of Cygnus (The Swan), where it covers an area 36 times larger than the full moon. The original supernova explosion blasted apart a dying star about 20 times more massive than our Sun between 10 000 and 20 000 years ago. Since then, the remnant has expanded 60 light-years from its centre. The shockwave marks the outer edge of the supernova remnant and continues to expand at around 350 kilometres per second. The interaction of the ejected material and the low-density interstellar material swept up by the shockwave forms the distinctive veil-like structure seen in this image.”
And there’s more than enough real-time postal pain to go around, since Postmaster General Louis DeJoy began instituting cost-cutting measures in July. DeJoy has since put the brakes on any new cuts — including slashing overtime, ripping out mail-sorting machines, getting rid of blue mailboxes that grace so many street corners. The damage, however, has already been done. Critical prescriptions are being delayed, placing many Americans’ health in jeopardy. New credit cards, rent checks, stimulus payments from the Internal Revenue Service — all have been stalled. Small-business owners who sell goods through Etsy and EBay are being hammered with customer complaints because packages do not arrive when promised.
They’re obsessed above all with sexual behavior, ignoring and subverting the core message of Christianity—humility and compassion for the downtrodden—while embracing “prosperity gospel,” which is to say the gospel of greed above all other values.
They support Republican politicians eager to gut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare and other programs designed to do what Jesus Christ strived for: the reduction of human suffering in this vale of tears. They live in multimillion-dollar mansions and fly around in private jets, while fleecing their flock for “prayer donations” guaranteed to cure incurable diseases and afflictions. They forget that Jesus Christ only lost his temper and acted violently once: when driving the money-lenders from the temple. But they are not troubled in the least by the banksters on Wall Street, who hoovered up millions from middle-class Americans, granting the 1 percent a get-out-of-jail-free card to do it all over again. Instead, these evangelists reserve the whip for gays, women who want to control their own bodies, pot smokers, and other “heretics” who are only trying to lead fulfilling lives. They actually work to increase the sum of human suffering. They are peddlers of religious snake oil.
Social media has reminded us of the most intriguing yet exhilarating fact about feminism: there is no feminist bible. Feminism isn’t a science. It’s just an idea; a completely freelance, voluntary, crowd-sourced and brilliant idea, in which women and, yes, sometimes men, go about identifying, then trying to solve the problems of girls and women. And, one of the things I feel we sometimes forget , celebrating their brilliance. Although it might occasionally feel like it, being a woman isn’t just a set of difficult questions. The female population of the Earth is also a set of answers. It’s a billion seeds of potential. It is a field of blossom, just waiting.
It so happens the Sky TV cameras are due at Doyle’s home on Monday, but not for her; her boyfriend and fellow jockey Tom Marquand is to give an interview. Told of this, Doyle smiled wryly and said: “I’d better get the cleaning done, then…”
Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks had asked to be allowed to vote by proxy on a housing bill Monday, but her request was denied. The speaker of California’s State Assembly, Anthony Rendon, decided she would have to vote in person or not at all. Only those who are considered at higher risk of COVID-19 are allowed to have a legislative leader, a proxy, vote on their behalf, according to Assembly rules introduced in July. As a new mother, Wicks didn’t cut it in Rendon’s eyes.
As Wicks is being commended for showing up with her newborn to make the vote — even by Hillary Clinton, no less (Wicks supported her presidential run) — there’s a deeper frustration here.
She shouldn’t have been forced to drive more than 80 miles from her Oakland home with her baby in tow to do it. She shouldn’t have had to stop feeding her one-month-old to run to the floor and vote. She shouldn’t have had to soothe a cranky baby as she pleaded with her colleagues.
The previously unreported episode is one of a series of examples of how Trump’s insistence on traveling and holding campaign-style events amid the pandemic has heightened the risks for the people who safeguard his life, intensifying the strain on the Secret Service.
BREAKING: In a late-Friday filing, Trump and @GOP ask Federal Court to BLOCK the counting of mail-in ballots cast in Pennsylvania via drop boxes, that lack inner envelops, or have been delivered via third party.
In a heretofore unpublicized recent memo, the Pentagon delivered an order to shutter Stars and Stripes, a newspaper that has been a lifeline and a voice for American troops since the Civil War. The memo orders the publisher of the news organization (which now publishes online as well as in print) to present a plan that “dissolves the Stars and Stripes” by Sept. 15 including “specific timeline for vacating government owned/leased space worldwide.”
I increasingly use my face-blindness as a sorting device. I tell people about it on our first meeting, and the way they behave after that reveals a lot. Some are touchingly helpful – one friend always finds a way to shoe-horn her name into the first sentence while I orient myself – but I’m surprised at the number of people who don’t think I’ll be blind to their face, uniquely. They seamlessly translate my face-blindness into a failure to love them enough, rather than a neurological difference. Disclosing it has become a reliable measure of people’s kindness, their neediness, their ability to put their ego aside.
Buy me a Coffee! If you find this site interesting, and would like to see more, buy me a coffee. While I may actually buy coffee, I’ll probably buy books to review.
One of my favorite Earle performances is an acoustic cover of Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” which he recorded in 2017 for Hamburger Küchensessions, a German series in which musicians perform from the corner of a kitchen. Take a breath before you watch it. His eyes are fluttering, and he appears unshaven, a little jittery. But his voice is beautiful—fragile and strong.
Indeed, what is perhaps most depressing about Jackson’s swollen Hobbit enterprise is the way it retrospectively diminishes his Lord of the Rings trilogy. The latter were genuinely good films—better, I think, than any Tolkien fan (and I count myself decidedly among them) had any reason to hope for. It seems a very long time ago now, but all three were nominated for Best Picture and the third film actually won.
I saw the first of the Peter Jackson Hobbit films in a theater; it broke my heart sufficiently that I haven’t seen the other two. I’m not alone in that, apparently. I still love the 1977 Rankin and Bass directed animated The Hobbit, despite its many and obvious flaws.
This is yet another instance where the idea/expression dichotomy of copyright law comes into play. This dichotomy dictates that copyright can be afforded to specific expression, but not to a general idea. And certainly not to an idea comprised essentially of real life scientific discovery. So, if Discovery told the same story about the same tardigrade creature, merely having a tardigrade in its plot is not somehow infringement just because both works are set in space.
While “[t]he distinction between an idea and its expression is an elusive one,” Crichton, 84 F.3d at 587-88, Abdin’s space-traveling tardigrade is an unprotectible idea because it is a generalized expression of a scientific fact -namely, the known ability of a tardigrade to survive in space.
But Michael Dempster, the director of the Scots Language Centre based in Perth, takes a more ameliorative approach and says he is now in conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation about the prospect of properly re-editing the teenager’s contributions.
“We know that this kid has put in an incredible amount of work, and he has created an editable infrastructure. It’s a great resource but it needs people who are literate in Scots to edit it now. It has the potential to be a great online focus for the language in the future.”
Dempster, a first-language Scots speaker himself, says that he is assessing how to put together a team of volunteers to undertake a mammoth re-editing task.
“Whichever librarian managed to get not just the “The Twits” but also “Betrayed”; “Resistance” and “Fahrenheit 451” in the shot behind Johnson has my admiration,” tweeted Sam Freedman, a former senior policy advisor at the DfE. Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel by American writer Ray Bradbury about a society where books are banned.
“It was a message for the management team, not for Boris Johnson. I did feel sorry for him,” said the 48-year-old librarian from Leicestershire, who wants to remain anonymous.
She said she had left the Coalville school six months ago after requests for more support in the library were not acted upon and admitted displaying the titles along the top shelves during her last week at the school in February.
By the meeting’s end on Feb. 27, the infection had infiltrated many more people: a research director, a photographer, the general manager for the company’s east division. They took the virus home with them to the Boston suburbs, Indiana and North Carolina, to Slovakia, Australia and Singapore.
The FDA commissioner appeared to have mixed up absolute risk reduction and relative risk reduction, which are basic concepts in economics and in the presentation of data from clinical trials.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised its guidance for coronavirus testing this week. It now says that many people who have been exposed to the virus through close contact with someone who later tested positive “do not necessarily need a test” if they are not experiencing symptoms. Experts are expressing concern about the change, noting that people without symptoms are responsible for a large share of transmissions.
The CDC is clearly caving in to pressure from 🤥🤥👖🔥. Because asymptomatic transmission is so high, people who think they may have been exposed to COVID-19 absolutely should be tested. We must have more testing, not less. We need free, fast, and readily available testing for at least two years to put this thing to rest.
Part of the problem is that a lot of the instructional technology, especially in K-12, where the technology is deployed in an emergency, is at best poorly implemented in terms of pedagogy. I would much rather see less reliance on streaming live video Zoom et al, and more on text, audio, and two way or multiple voice audio. Less reliance on large video streams and lectures, and more on small group sessions. I’d prefer Discord over Zoom, in other words. Use Zoom or other live streams for specific purposes, and for short periods of time. Hours of live-stream is really not a good choice for students or teachers. It’s crucial to have a pedagogical reason for using a tool, not just using the tool because it’s what’s there. Don’t forget analog still works with digital transmission, and there’s always asynchronous text (chat and discussion) as well as generic HTML with images.
Colleges and universities that brought students back to campus are expressing alarm about coronavirus infections emerging as classes have barely started, raising the possibility everyone could be sent home.
Before we freestyle, know there’s one nonnegotiable: For a tomato to shine no matter how ripe, it needs salt. Cut the tomatoes in any way that moves you, then put them in a bowl and gently sprinkle them with salt (sugar, too, if they really need help).
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The evidence shows the colony left Roanoke Island with the friendly Croatoans to settle on Hatteras Island. They thrived, ate well, had mixed families and endured for generations. More than a century later, explorer John Lawson found natives with blue eyes who recounted they had ancestors who could “speak out of a book,” Lawson wrote.
The two cultures adapted English earrings into fishhooks and gun barrels into sharp-ended tubes to tap tar from trees.
For the past five years, Maine’s growers had begun to export frozen wild berries to China, as reported by US broadcaster NBC last year. This was a very useful new market, as growers had been struggling to sell all their crop due to the cheaper cultivated berries in a saturated US market.
However, sales to China basically halted in April 2018 when Beijing imposed 80% tariffs on US frozen blueberries in response to President Trump’s levies on Chinese imports.
Teams have found thousands of artifacts 4-6 feet below the surface that show a mix of English and Indian life. Parts of swords and guns are in the same layer of soil as Indian pottery and arrowheads.
At the center of this drama was an official of the Vatican curia who, as we now know from other newly revealed documents, helped persuade Pope Pius XII not to speak out in protest after the Germans rounded up and deported Rome’s Jews in 1943—“the pope’s Jews,” as Jews in Rome had often been referred to. The silence of Pius XII during the Holocaust has long engendered bitter debates about the Roman Catholic Church and Jews. The memoranda, steeped in anti-Semitic language, involve discussions at the highest level about whether the pope should lodge a formal protest against the actions of Nazi authorities in Rome. Meanwhile, conservatives in the Church continue to push for the canonization of Pius XII as a saint.
. . .
The newly available Vatican documents, reported here for the first time, offer fresh insights into larger questions of how the Vatican thought about and reacted to the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, and into the Vatican’s mindset immediately after the war about the Holocaust, the Jewish people, and the Roman Catholic Church’s role and prerogatives as an institution.
DeJoy does not know basic facts about postal prices or even about voting by mail. “I’m glad you know the price of a stamp, but I am concerned about your understanding of this agency,” Porter said matter-of-factly. “And I am particularly concerned about it because you started taking very decisive action when you became postmaster general. You started directing the unplugging and destroying of machines, changing of employee procedures and locking of collection boxes.” When asked about the changes under his watch that have impacted service, he insisted they were not his and he did not know who was responsible.
There is an alternative to corporate bubbles online — it’s called the IndieWeb. Build your own personal websites, control your online presence, and learn on your own terms.
This is what the NFL gets for not scraping Daniel Snyder off its shoe before now. “The good bits” is the phrase that will haunt the league. That’s the description of the soft porn videos of cheerleaders; outtakes of nipples and crotches inadvertently exposed and intentionally collected, allegedly for the enjoyment of some of the juvy little pervs in the Washington football club’s upper management.
Among those who depend on the service are vulnerable residents: patients with chronic health issues, rural residents, veterans and the elderly.
“People who depend on this vital service to get their medications have a very significant potential for having negative health outcomes,” says Dr. Rob Davidson, an emergency physician in Michigan and the executive director of the Committee To Protect Medicare, a nationwide group of physicians advocating for health care affordability.
Who are the people who came forward to say that Trump treated them exactly as he described: as fungible collections of body parts to paw at whenever it suited his purposes? Why did the women decide to tell their stories, and what has life been like since? Carroll’s lawsuit remains in progress; the president has denied all of the women’s allegations, and the White House declined to comment for this story.
Natasha Stoynoff, the subject of this first installment, likens herself and her fellow accusers to the proverbial canaries in the coal mine: among the first to warn the world about the essential nature of the 45th president of the United States.
“The president said to the senior leadership of the Department of Homeland Security, behind the scenes, ‘We should not let anyone else into the United States,’ ” Taylor says in the video. “And even though he’d been told on repeated occasions that the way he wanted to do it was illegal, his response was to say, ‘Do it. If you get in trouble, I’ll pardon you.’ ”
Shields Up, Nichelle Nichols ! “Sadly, many well-known celebrities, including Rosa Parks, Stan Lee, Mickey Rooney, and Casey Kasem reportedly suffered elder abuse in their later years. Unfortunately, this has also happened to Nichelle.” The actual legal complaint is linked, but Nichols’ family is helping her sue to regain her property and control over her finances.
• The unemployment rate for workers with a disability peaked in April at 18.9%. It was 14.3% for workers without a disability.
* By July, unemployment for workers with a disability had fallen to 14.3%, while it hit 10.3% for workers with no disability.
Now, competing for limited open positions, disabled workers have to combat misperceptions that they are higher risk and more expensive.
In addition to those 100-plus sketchbooks you’ve seen, a page at a time, on this blog, I also have another couple dozen sketchbooks that I keep at my desk. About half of those pages are filled with still lives (like all those primary triad apples and product review test sketches) and other studies I make in the studio. The other half are experiments, scribbles, notations, color swatches and who knows what else. They are not the kinds of things I would typically share unless they are related to a review. These reference pages bristle with Post-its that I use as tabs.
I’m a journal-keeper. With over a hundred notebooks filled since 1982, it’s become part of who I am. I couldn’t have expected or anticipated all the ways my new habit would enrich my life.
Even if we never reread what we write in our journals, the act of writing changes us. It shapes our perceptions and memory. Over time, opening the notebook and picking up the pen becomes like resuming a long-running conversation with a friend. We develop a voice, even though there’s no one on the other end to hear it — or rather, our self is listening.
lauren nichols has been sick with COVID-19 since March 10, shortly before Tom Hanks announced his diagnosis and the NBA temporarily canceled its season. She has lived through one month of hand tremors, three of fever, and four of night sweats. When we spoke on day 150, she was on her fifth month of gastrointestinal problems and severe morning nausea. She still has extreme fatigue, bulging veins, excessive bruising, an erratic heartbeat, short-term memory loss, gynecological problems, sensitivity to light and sounds, and brain fog.
I mean, when you’re in something that’s so stressful, you have to worry about despair setting in. Like, “My God, I’m in a hopeless situation.” It’s not. It will end. We will get out of this and we will return to normal. Don’t give up. Don’t despair. Don’t throw caution to the wind. We can end this. The combination of pulling together with public health measures and the scientific advances of vaccines and therapies and preventions. I will guarantee you that.
Oxburgh Hall was built by Sir Edmund Bedingfield in the late 15th century. The Bedingfields were once rising stars at the Tudor royal court but they were also devoutly Catholic and were ostracised and persecuted as a result.
Curators believe the manuscript parchment and other objects may well have been used in illegal masses and hidden deliberately by the family.
Science and Nature
A mother wolverine and her kits ascend a tree in Ranier, WA Photo Credit: NPS/Cascades Carnivore Project
COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand.
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The American president lives to cultivate resentments, demonize his opponents, validate hatred. His main tool of governance is the lie; as of July 9th, 2020, the documented tally of his distortions and false statements numbered 20,055. If America’s first president, George Washington, famously could not tell a lie, the current one can’t recognize the truth. Inverting the words and sentiments of Abraham Lincoln, this dark troll of a man celebrates malice for all, and charity for none.
Rouse, who is among scholars working to “queer the suffrage movement” — which she described as “deconstructing the dominant narrative that has focused on the stories of elite, white, upper-class suffragists” — uses “queer” as an umbrella term to describe suffragists who challenged gender and sexual norms in their everyday lives.
They did this by choosing not to marry, for example, or by living a life outside the rigid expectations placed on women in other ways. The suffragist Gail Laughlin demanded that pockets be sewn into her dresses, a radical request at the time.
Allies coddled 💩🔥💰 by telling him the reason he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 was widespread mail-in balloting fraud — a conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence — and the president’s postal outrage coarsened further.
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Trump has fixated again on the Postal Service, this time trying to make it a tool in his reelection campaign by slowing mail service, blocking an emergency infusion of federal funds and challenging the integrity of mail-in balloting. The president acknowledged last week that his opposition is rooted in his desire to restrict how many Americans can vote by mail.
Trump is by far the most corrupt, self-dealing president of the modern era. And the Russia probe uncovered important truths about a foreign attack on our democracy that actually happened, to his benefit, an accounting he corruptly tried to derail.
If anything, Michelle Obama’s account was charitable. She declared that Trump is “clearly in over his head” and “cannot meet the moment.” That’s all true, but it undersells his malevolent intent.
In Amy Pollien’s garden, there are no well-defined borders, no straight and tidy rows. Angelica, dahlias, poppies, and milkweed overflow irregularly shaped beds. The green beans, zucchini, and kale flourish in scattershot arrangements. “It’s a cheerful mess,” says Pollien, as she leads me along a narrow path signposted by random mounds of decomposing branches, dead leaves, hay, and clippings.
It’s also an intentional mess: “It disguises the plants,” she explains. “The bugs that like broccoli want nothing more than to find 60-foot-long rows of broccoli. The things that want to gnaw on carrots want to find the carrots. If I hide them here and there, I get much less nibbling.”
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Something Wonderful
H/T Less: Pandas being pandas, while a zoo-keeper tries to rake some leaves:
Thus, the “wine windows,” or buchette del vino, of Tuscany. They are just as they sound: pint-size hatches, carved into the concrete walls of urban wineries and shops, where beverage merchants would serve sips at a safe social distance.
First introduced in the 1600s, their true purpose went untapped for centuries after the plague — that is, until a new one came along this year.
Poach Your Corn in a Buttery Milk Bath The next time I cook corn on the cob for more than two people, I’m poaching the corn in a butter and milk bath. Cooking corn in butter and milk makes amazing corn on the cob.
Large blue butterfly Maculinea arion Image: PJC&Co Wikimedia
Years of painstaking work by Prof Jeremy Thomas and David Simcox led to the butterfly being successfully reintroduced to sites in Somerset and more recently Gloucestershire.
To do so, they first had to understand its unique lifecycle, with tiny caterpillars dropping off wild thyme and being taken underground by the red ant, Myrmica sabuleti, which is duped into believing that the parasitic larva is one of their own.
. . . CBS’s Paula Reid, who challenged a lie President Trump has told about 150 times, namely that he signed the Veterans Choice Act. President Barack Obama did . . . (I will note that by and large in the White House news conferences, it has been women who have rattled Trump: Yamiche Alcindor, Weijia Jiang, April Ryan and Abby Phillip. One need look no further for evidence that Trump cannot deal with non-docile women.)
She was hailed as a hero. But the story behind what happened that night was more complicated.
Did Nooria shoot Taliban attackers, or her husband? Or both?
The happy-hour scene just steps from the golf course was orchestrated by 💩🔥💰, who decided late Friday to hold an impromptu news conference and invite his club members to gather indoors in defiance of state restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
With coronavirus cases nearing 5 million in the United States and average daily deaths topping 1,000, 🤥🤥👖🔥‘s retreat to the confines of his private club offered him an opportunity to create a kind of alternate reality in which his presidency is not being beset by numerous crises.
Trump’s efforts include a massive restructuring of the United States Postal Service which centers power around Postmaster General and Trump fanboy Louis DeJoy. A man who, as Meyers notes, has up to $75 million invested in the post office’s competitors.
As a result of the recent changes, Karol told NPR’s Noel King on Morning Edition, a mail processing machine was removed from her facility in Waterloo and others have been removed across Iowa.
Of the policy to leave some letters behind for the following day, another postal worker told NPR last month: “I am sick to my stomach,” knowing that means medication could be delayed in getting to recipients.
The US Mail Not for Sale is a worker-led campaign sponsored by the American Postal Workers Union and the National Association of Letter Carriers. They have some ideas for ways Americans can save our Constitutionally mandated USPS. Save the Post Office You can follow APWU on Twitter.
Animaniacs reboot coming to Hulu! With Spielberg producing and the original cast
