Sunday Reads: Book Rainbows
Posted: July 3, 2016 Filed under: 2016 elections, Afternoon Reads, Foreign Affairs, open thread, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: Climate change, Olivia de Havilland, Stephen Hawking 13 CommentsGood Afternoon
What a beautiful image….
On Friday, Dak gave you lovely works from artist known for their use of color. Particularly Georgia O’Keefe… she also wrote about women bloggers….don’t you love when a post focuses on women doing extraordinary things. (As compared to what the misogynist male establishment would rather see us do.)
Yesterday, Boston Boomer treated us all with images of beautiful people. (Paul Newman and Steve McQueen…who doesn’t want to look at those gorgeous faces and bodies?)
Today I bring you pictures of books. Rainbow colored books. Although, I am not sure if anyone of us has enough books with colorful covers to do anything like this….but it sure is pretty to look at.
Slow Show – Chris Cobb
Chris Cobb, an artist based in San Francisco, has created an amazing installation in bookshop called Adobe Books- he catalogued every single one of the 20,000 books by color. The project is titled There is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World. They were arranged by hand over a 10 hour period, and he enlisted the help of 16 volunteers. Such beautiful results, they transformed the bookshop overnight.
So enjoy the lovely books.
Here are you links for today.
I am going to post this horrible news first…Nearly 120 killed in overnight Baghdad bombings claimed by Islamic State | Reuters
Nearly 120 people were killed and 200 wounded in two bombings overnight in Baghdad, most of them in a busy shopping area as residents celebrated Ramadan, police and medical sources said on Sunday.
The attack on the shopping area of Karrada is the deadliest since U.S.-backed Iraqi forces last month scored a major victory when it dislodged Islamic State from their stronghold of Falluja, an hour’s drive west of the capital. It is also the deadliest so far this year.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi had ordered the offensive after a series of deadly bombings in Baghdad, saying Falluja served as a launchpad for such attacks on the capital. However, bombings have continued.
A convoy carrying Abadi who had come to tour the site of the bombings was pelted with stones and bottles by residents, angry at what they felt were false promises of better security.
A refrigerator truck packed with explosives blew up in the central district of Karrada, killing 115 people and injuring at least 200. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement circulated online by supporters of the ultra-hard line Sunni group. It said the blast was a suicide bombing.
Along with this attack on Friday: Bangladesh Attack Marks Tactical Shift by Islamic State Militants – WSJ
When assailants armed with guns and explosives stormed an upscale cafe in the Bangladeshi capital Friday, shouting “Allahu akbar,” it represented a sharp escalation by extremist followers of Islamic State in South Asia, a region where the terror group had previously gained little traction.
By the time security forces retook the restaurant after an assault backed by armored vehicles early Saturday, 20 civilians, two police officers and six militants had been killed. Brig. Gen. Nayeem Ashfaq Chowdhury, the army’s director of military operations, said 13 people held hostage were freed.
Among the dead were two students from Emory University, which is based in Atlanta. Abinta Kabir, a U.S. citizen who was an undergraduate student at the school’s Oxford College campus in Georgia, was killed, along with another student, Faraaz Hossain, spokesmen for their families said Saturday. Mr. Hossain’s nationality hasn’t been confirmed.
Tarushi Jain, an 18-year-old Indian national who attended the University of California-Berkeley, also perished in the attack, the Associated Press reported.
Friends mourn Emory students killed in Bangladesh terror attacks | www.myajc.com
When Raquel Jeanette Solla learned two of her Emory University friends were being held hostage in a café in Bangladesh, she clung to the hope they would survive.
“I really believed they’d be okay because they’re such good people, and seemed too sweet to have something so horrible happen to them,” said Solla, a student at the Oxford campus, in an e-mail to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
She found out about the terror attack, about her friends, Abinta Kabir and Faraaz Hossain, being trapped inside a popular cafe in Dhaka, through a Facebook group message. When the stream of updates stopped, she feared the worst early Saturday morning. A Facebook post soon confirmed it.
Abinta and Faraaz were well-known in the tight-knit group of students at Emory University’s Oxford University campus, both sharing a reputation of being bright, enthusiastic, and really, really nice. Bengali students at Emory often get together for pickup soccer games, to talk about some cricket match or share news of home, a place they say rarely makes it into international headlines.
Till now, when Bangladesh was added to the the rapidly escalating list of places devastated by Islamic terrorism. Only days after the attack in Istanbul, and weeks away from the Orlando tragedy, this latest blood bath delivered an extra blow to the Atlanta region. It took the lives of two of our own.
More at the links…
And while you ponder on that, remember….52 still hospitalized after deadly Istanbul airport attack – World – CBC News
Fifty-two people are still in the hospital four days after suicide bombers attacked Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, killing at least 44 others, the city’s governor said Saturday.
The governorate said 184 airport victims have been discharged from hospitals so far, including 13 people released Saturday. It said 20 people were still in intensive care.
Three militants armed with assault rifles and suicide bombs attacked one of the world’s busiest airports on Tuesday night. Although no one has claimed responsibility for the attack, Turkish officials say they believe it was the work of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group.
However according to Reuters: Around 20 Islamic State members in custody over Istanbul airport attack: Erdogan | Reuters
Around 20 Islamic State militants, mainly foreigners, are in custody in connection with an attack last week on Istanbul airport that killed 45 people, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday.
Two Russian nationals have been identified as suspected Islamic State suicide bombers in the attack that is thought to have been masterminded by a Chechen, Turkish media said on Friday.
“The latest findings point to the Daesh (Islamic State) terrorist organisation,” Erdogan told Reuters at the Istanbul Ataturk airport, where he visited the attack site.
Video at the link.
Take a deep breath after that section of the thread. Go and get something to drink…The rest of the links are not so violent.
There was a warning from the UAE recently, which urged its citizens to avoid dressing in their customary outfits while traveling in the US: UAE tells citizens to avoid national dress while abroad after man held in U.S. | Reuters
The United Arab Emirates has urged men to avoid wearing the white robes, headscarf and headband of the national dress when traveling abroad, after a businessman visiting the United States was wrestled to the ground and held as an Islamic State suspect.
UAE media reported that the Emirati man was detained in Avon, Ohio, last week after a female clerk at a local hotel called 911 to report what she had described as a man affiliated to Islamic State, according to the Arabic-language al-Bayan newspaper. It only identified him by his initials.
The English language The National said the receptionist at the Fairfield Inn hotel called the police after she heard the man talking on his phone in the hotel lobby.
Gulf News, another UAE newspaper, published photos of the Emirati man in white robes being wrestled to the ground and handcuffed before being led away by police.
In a message on a Foreign Ministry Twitter account focusing on citizens traveling abroad, the ministry said on Saturday:
“For citizens traveling outside the country, and in order to ensure their safety, we point out not to wear formal dress while traveling, especially in public places,” the message dated July 2 stated, without referring to the Avon incident.
It is frightening stuff…when you think about it. Isn’t it enough that so many US citizens already are worried for their lives because they look a certain way? The hateful rhetoric is only getting worse…at what point does the US become a High Risk Travel Warning to other nations abroad? When a racist misogynistic fascist asshole is elected president?
Stephen Hawking: Greed And Stupidity Are What Will End The Human Race | The Intellectualist
Physicist Stephen Hawking says pollution coupled with human greed and stupidity are still the biggest threats to humankind.
During an interview on Larry King Now, the science superstar told King that in the six years since he’s spoken with the talk show host people haven’t cleaned up their act.
“We certainly have not become less greedy or less stupid,” Hawking said. “The population has grown by half a billion since our last meeting, with no end in sight. At this rate, it will be eleven billion by 2100.”
You can read the rest of the USA Today article here, including some video: Stephen Hawking: Humankind is still greedy, stupid and greatest threat to Earth
In connection with Hawking’s climate prediction: ‘Unprecedented’: Scientists declare ‘global climate emergency’ after jet stream crosses equator
And meanwhile in Florida: Toxic algae bloom crisis hits Florida, drives away tourists (w/video) | Tampa Bay Times
It’s going to be a long, stinky Fourth of July weekend on Jensen Beach.
Instead of red, white and blue, the color of the day is green. Thick, putrid layers of toxic blue-green algae are lapping at the sand, forcing Martin County officials to close the beach as a health hazard.
“I’ve seen Jensen Beach closed for sharks,” said Irene Gomes, whose family has run the Driftwood Motel since 1958. “I’ve never seen it closed for an algae bloom before.”
As bad as it looks, the stench is far worse, driving away Gomes’ motel customers, chasing off paddleboard and kayak renters and forcing residents to stay indoors.
“It smells like death on a cracker,” said Gomes’ friend Cyndi Lenz, a nurse. Morgues don’t smell as bad, she added.
The toxic algae bloom afflicting Jensen stretches for miles along the Martin County shoreline on the state’s Atlantic coast near Palm Beach. It’s also coating the water in the Indian River Lagoon and the St. Lucie River. It’s thick in Lake Okeechobee, where the toxicity is 200 times what the World Health Organization says constitutes a human health hazard.
And now it’s apparently showing up over on the state’s west coast, too, forcing the closure of a popular park on the Caloosahatchee River and flopping onto Fort Myers Beach.
That is a long article, so give it a look.
But with all this bad news on the environmental front…how about something positive?
For the first time in 30 years, the gaping hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica is showing signs of healing.
Every year since it was discovered in 1985, scientists have watched the hole grow bigger from one Antarctic spring to the next, eventually covering 10.9 million square miles in 2015.
Now researchers are noting an encouraging trend. Though the hole still exists and reached a record size last year, it is forming at a slower rate, according to a reportpublished Thursday in the journal Science.
Thanks to human actions to curb the use of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, the hole has started growing later in the spring, the study’s authors said, and they can foresee a time, around the middle of the century, when it’s gone.
“We are starting to see signs of improvement over Antarctica,” said Paul Newman, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who monitors the hole but was not involved in the study.
Whatever you do, be sure to click on that link and go see the images on the LA Times site. It is very interesting…especially with all those little earths spinning next to each other.
Now for some political news links:
Dolly Parton endorses Hillary Clinton: ‘I think a woman would do a great job’ – DeadState
The Utter Inconsequence of Hillary’s Veep – The New York Times
Poll reveals young remain voters reduced to tears by Brexit result | Politics | The Guardian
One more link for you, this one…from my area of the backwoods of Georgia…in the county next door to Banjoville. Fannin County to be exact, where the phrase…
“We have deep mountains.”
Means exactly what you would think it means if it was uttered by some mafia dude to another mafia dude talking about what to do with a body after icing someone in the local fried chicken joint.
Georgia publisher jailed after filing open records request | www.myajc.com
‘Retaliation for use of the Open Records Act will inhibit every citizen from using it.’
A North Georgia newspaper publisher was indicted on a felony charge and jailed overnight last week – for filing an open-records request.
Fannin Focus publisher Mark Thomason, along with his attorney Russell Stookey, were arrested on Friday and charged with attempted identity fraud and identity fraud. Thomason was also accused of making a false statement in his records request.
» READ THE INDICTMENT
Thomason’s relentless pursuit of public records relating to the local Superior Court has incensed the court’s chief judge, Brenda Weaver, who also chairs the state Judicial Qualifications Commission. Weaver took the matter to the district attorney, who obtained the indictments.
Thomason was charged June 24 with making a false statement in an open-records request in which he asked for copies of checks “cashed illegally.” Thomason and Stookey were also charged with identity fraud and attempted identity fraud because they did not get Weaver’s approval before sending subpoenas to banks where Weaver and another judge maintained accounts for office expenses. Weaver suggested that Thomason may have been trying to steal banking information on the checks.
But Thomason said he was “doing his job” when he asked for records.
“I was astounded, in disbelief that there were even any charges to be had,” said Thomason, 37, who grew up in Fannin County. “I take this as a punch at journalists across the nation that if we continue to do our jobs correctly, then we have to live in fear of being imprisoned.”
Thomason and Stookey are out on $10,000 bond and have a long list of things they cannot do or things they must do to avoid going to jail until their trials. On Thursday, for example, Thomason reported to a pretrial center and was told that he may have to submit to a random drug test – a condition of the bond on which he was released from jail last Saturday.
Alison Sosebee, district attorney in the three counties in the Appalachian Judicial Circuit, and Judge Weaver say the charges are justified. Weaver said she resented Thomason’s attacks on her character in his weekly newspaper and in conversations with her constituents.
“I don’t react well when my honesty is questioned,” Weaver said.
You can read more at the link…
Colorful books, how about a colorful nation. Babies Of Color Are Now The Majority, Census Says : NPR Ed : NPR
Today’s generation of schoolchildren looks much different than one just a few decades ago. Nonwhites are expected to become the majority of the nation’s children by 2020, as our colleague Bill Chappell reported last year. This is now the reality among the very youngest Americans: babies.
Babies of color now outnumber non-Hispanic white babies (1 year or younger), according to new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The newest estimate shows that on July 1, 2015, the population of racial or ethnic minority babies was 50.2 percent.
Which of course, makes me think of that song Cartman sings from South Park…about the Minorities are the Majorities….at his waterpark.
Not My Waterpark – Video Clip | South Park Studios
Cartman sings a heartfelt ode about how his water park isn’t the way he remembered it.
But you know, some things never change: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest families in Florence — Quartz
These next few links are interesting, from a scientific background, first a look at an old article published in 1879:
Compare it to this:
Can the Ancient World Save Us from the Antibiotic-Resistant Suberbug Apocalypse? – The Daily Beast
Marijuana Compound Removes Alzheimer’s Plaque From Brain Cells, Study Finds | Popular Science
Looking back to find a cure and looking forward to find a solution?
Since we have books on display, we need to have a couple of book list to go with them:
29 Books That Will Enrich Your Inner Literati | TIME
The 75 Best Books of the Last 75 Years: Today in Critical Linking
And finally, a tribute to a lady who is 100 this weekend!
100 Years Of Olivia De Havilland Handling Sexism, Her Sister, And Scarlett O’Hara : NPR
Actress Olivia de Havilland, the last surviving star of the most popular film of all time, retired from showbiz decades ago, apparently feeling that 49 films, two best actress Oscars, and a best-selling memoir were accomplishment enough for one career.
Friday in Paris, she celebrates her 100th birthday, which seems a good moment to reflect on the mix of sparkle and resilience that marked her public life.
De Havilland’s career spanned more than five decades. Thanks to a lawsuit she filed against Warner Bros., she even has a landmark judicial ruling named after her — the de Havilland law limits the terms studios can impose up on actors.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Celebrating the Centenary of Olivia de Havilland – Olivia de Havilland – Lady of the Classic Cinema
Here is the video that Robert Osborne has done for Olivia de Havilland over at TCM:
If you cannot see the embedded video click here: “I’m certainly relishing the idea of living a… – Turner Classic Movies: TCM
Robert Osborne on Olivia De Havilland
I confess it: as a Brit would say, I have been one very lucky bloke. It has never ceased to amaze me that a fellow with no connections whatsoever to show business and who grew up in a small farm community in the Northwest (population: 2500), could end up on a national television network with the dream job of talking about classic movies as I get to do on TCM. Something else which constantly reminds me of how lucky I am is the 40-year friendship I’ve had with TCM’s Star of the month for this July, Olivia de Havilland.
[…]
We’ll be sharing many of Olivia’s stories with you on Friday nights this month as we also celebrate a great landmark birthday for her–her 100th. It is her birthday but we’re the ones who get the presents. Every Friday we’ll be toasting Olivia, showing 39 de Havilland films in all, including all the biggies such as To Each His Own(1946, Oscar® #1), The Snake Pit, (1948, Oscar® nomination #3), The Heiress (Oscar® #2) and several which are lesser known, such as when she played France’s Queen Mother in the era of the Three Musketeers in the rarely shown The 5th Musketeer (1979) with Rex Harrison, Jose Ferrer and Cornel Wilde. And just for the fun of it, you can see 1939’s Wings of the Navy and decide if you agree with Olivia’s assessment of it.
Through the years, in addition to all the many assets that are such an integral part of her, she’s also proven to be someone who always makes good on promises. The night she celebrated her 80th birthday in Paris in 1996, Olivia told me she’d just made a vow to live to be 100. And she’s done it. During a more recent phone chat, she said, “I’ve changed my goal. I’ve decided I want to live to be at least 110.” That’s the best birthday present this amazing woman from Hollywood’s golden era could give us. I have no doubt she’ll make it. Bravo, Olivia!
by Robert Osborne
This month on TCM they are celebrating Olivia’s birthday by featuring her as the star of the month with her films: Olivia de Havilland – Fridays in July
OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND – FRIDAYS IN JULY
- FEATURED FILMS
- RAFFLES (1940)
- GONE WITH THE WIND
- THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD
- THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX
- CAPTAIN BLOOD
- ANTHONY ADVERSE
- THE IRISH IN US
- ALIBI IKE
- IN THIS OUR LIFE
- THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON
- SANTA FE TRAIL
- DODGE CITY
- THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE (1936)
- IT’S LOVE I’M AFTER
- THE GREAT GARRICK
- CALL IT A DAY
- THE SNAKE PIT
- THE HEIRESS
- TO EACH HIS OWN
- DEVOTION (1946)
- WINGS OF THE NAVY
- HARD TO GET
- GOLD IS WHERE YOU FIND IT
- A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (1935)
- MY COUSIN RACHEL
- THE PROUD REBEL
- THE AMBASSADOR’S DAUGHTER
- HOLD BACK THE DAWN
- THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE
- MY LOVE CAME BACK
- THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS
- FOUR’S A CROWD
- THE FIFTH MUSKETEER
- THE SWARM
- LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA
- LIBEL
- THE MALE ANIMAL
- GOVERNMENT GIRL
- PRINCESS O’ROURKE
You know I will be taping many of these…especially The Heiress and Hold Back the Dawn!
Anyway, that is my post for the day, have a wonderful and safe 4th of July!
Sunday Reads: Percy, I must know…going to hell in a handbasket?
Posted: May 4, 2014 Filed under: abortion rights, Affordable Care Act (ACA), Discrimination against women, education, Environment, Environmental Protection, morning reads, Religious Conscience, Republican politics, Revisionism, science, the GOP, The Right Wing, Violence against women | Tags: Armenian Orphan Rug, artisan bullshit, “fresh cracked”, “Will you wear my pin… and be my bitch?”, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Floyd Mayweather, going to hell in a handbasket?, RIP Bob Hoskins, Stephen Hawking, The Vatican library, title IX 24 Comments
Good Morning
It has been a busy week…Bebe has her first official boyfriend, that means she went on an official date where he drove and everything.
So you can see why I have been a little distracted.
All this back and forth reminded me of this old skit from Saturday Night Live, that aired on March 30, 1985.
I saw this episode live when it aired all those years ago and one of the lines remained in the back of my mind…I quote it quite frequently. In fact, I used it on Bebe to find out her relationship status just a few hours ago.
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE — Episode 15 — Pictured: (l-r) Christopher Guest as Bull, Martin Short as Percival Dickerson, Jim Belushi as cellmate during ‘House of Shame’ skit on March 30, 1985 — Photo by: Alan Singer/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank
Here is a description of the scene with a couple of photos I could find, it sucks there is no video clip available.
SNL Archives – Season 10 Episode 15
Number one: Fin-de-Siecle Prison Homosexuality. As I recall, the title of the bit when it aired was Shame Of The Prisons. Martin Short plays a terrified new prisoner named Percival, and his cellmate is the threatening Jim Belushi. Belushi doesn’t ravage him immediately, because he says, “I can’t have you until The Bull has had you.”
Guest plays The Bull as a gallant Gaylord Ravenal sort of character, and the first date is just a walk in the moonlight, with genteel idle chit-chat, until The Bull finally turns and asks “Percy? I must know this. Will you wear my ring… and be my bitch?”
“Sweetheart of Sigma-Chi” by Edward Eggleston, circa 1919
Short goes back to his cell and he and Belushi start acting like high school girls, thrilled to discuss the particulars of a date.
Bold quote is my emphasis, and actually I believe what Guest says to Short is “Will you wear my pin… and be my bitch?” Which goes along with the old fashioned idea of short getting “pinned” by the Bull…it was funny as hell.
I tried so long to find pictures of just that set-up. Like that first image up top, but no luck. The rest of the illustrations are various couples. Meh…
Ah…now we will just move on to the links for this morning’s post. They start with the South and move through child rearing to fruit and hand-baskets. Hopefully the stories will be new to you…
This first link should be introduced with the joke…if your local Waffle House is held up by a man in overalls wielding a pitchfork…you might be a redneck. Man accused of robbing Waffle House with pitchfork
He’s accused of using a weapon to force Waffle House employees into the back of a restaurant so he could steal money.
But it’s the weapon he used that really caught witnesses’ attention. The suspect was carrying a pitchfork.
The suspect, identified as Jeffrey Willard Wooten, 50, was wearing coveralls and a ski mask when he entered the Buford Highway breakfast eatery Thursday night, according to Norcross police. After forcing employees into a back room, Wooten went after cash, police said.
“When he realized he couldn’t get the cash register open, he took the whole cash register and exited the store . . with his pitchfork,” Norcross police Chief Warren Summers told Channel 2 Action News.
I think the best part of the story however is that the employees got a piece of him, uh…see here:
Outside of the Waffle House, Wooten allegedly dropped his pitchfork, according to police. But he held on to the cash register.
Two restaurant employees than grabbed the pitchfork and used it to smash the back window of Wooten’s truck, police said. Wooten may have been injured while attempting to leave the restaurant.
“It wouldn’t be an offensive weapon in your garden, but it was in a Waffle House,” Summers said.
It also is a deadly weapon when used during riots in Transylvania.
But if that seems crazy to you, then you ain’t seen nothing yet. Y’all ready for a WTF moment? Alabama’s chief justice: Buddha didn’t create us so First Amendment only protects Christians
Speaking at the Pastor for Life Luncheon, which was sponsored by Pro-Life Mississippi, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment only applies to Christians because “Buddha didn’t create us, Mohammed didn’t create us, it was the God of the Holy Scriptures” who created us.
“They didn’t bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship,” he continued. “Let’s get real, let’s go back and learn our history. Let’s stop playing games.”
He then noted that he loves talking to lawyers, because he is a lawyer who went to “a secular law school,” so he knows that “in the law, [talking about God] just isn’t politically correct.” He claimed that this is why America has “lost its way,” and that he would be publishing a pamphlet “this week, maybe next” that contained copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, thereby proving that all the people “who found this nation — black, white, all people, all religions, all faiths” knew that America was “about God.”
Oh, the batshit nutjob’s speech gets worse, look at this jewel:
Chief Justice Moore later defined “life” via Blackstone’s Law — a book that American lawyers have “sadly forgotten” — as beginning when “the baby kicks.” “Today,” he said, “our courts say it’s not alive ’til the head comes out.”
“Now,” he continued, “if technology’s supposed to increase our knowledge, how did we become so stupid?” Discussing Thomas Jefferson’s use of “life” in the Declaration of Independence, he said that “when [Jefferson] put ‘life’ in there, it was in the womb — we know it begins at conception. Why aren’t we going the right way instead of the wrong way?”
He later said the “pursuit of happiness” meant following God’s law, because “you can’t be happy unless you follow God’s law, and if you follow God’s law, you can’t help but be happy.”
Video at the link. It all is too ridiculous to even discuss. Makes me think of Chris Rodda who wrote the book Liars for Jesus. Wonder what she would say about Moore’s bullshit.
Next up, another In Deep South where GOP Rejected Obamacare, tens of 1000s die Unnecessarily every Year | Informed Comment
The Center for Disease Control house found that 900,000 people a year die of five leading causes every year in the US, and that 20% to 40% of these deaths are preventable (i.e. 180,000 to 360,000 needn’t die). The five are heart disease, cancer, lung disease, stroke and unintentional injury. Smoking cigarettes contributes to several of them.
What is striking is that the preventable diseases occur at a much higher rate in the Deep South than in the rest of the country, especially in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama. AJC.com notes that only 2% of Oregon’s heart attacks are considered to be “preventable” by the CDC, but 58 percent of Mississippi’s are.
Graphs and picture goodies at the link, plus lots more, so go read it.
More news and “stuff” after the jump.
Wednesday Reads: The Mini-Series Begins
Posted: May 8, 2013 Filed under: academia, Crime, Foreign Affairs, Great Britain, Israel, Italy, morning reads, Palestine, Real Life Horror | Tags: Academic boycott of Israel, Amanda Berry, Ariel Castro, Charles Ramsey, Cleveland abductions, language, Shimon Peres, Stephen Hawking 32 Comments
Good Morning
Well, since Dak is off flying the friendly skies (lets hope her TSA agent buys her a drink first) and Boston Boomer is babysitting her nephews all day, you will be stuck with me for the duration.
😉
(Ah, should I say the next few posts at least…)
So……let the series of posts begin…
The little girl born in captivity to Amanda Berry is named Jocelyn, and according to ABC news, she seems to be doing okay. They have released a picture of her from the night of her escape that shows her face, and she is smiling. Cleveland Girl Born in Captivity ‘Smiling,’ Eating Popsicles – ABC News
The little girl, named Jocelyn, ate popsicles in the hospital room in which she and her mother were examined after all four females were takes to Metro Medical Center, said Cleveland Police Deputy Chief Ed Tomba.
“She looks great, happy, healthy and ate a popsicle last night,” Tomba said of the little girl, who may have been born and raised in the very house in which her mother was a captive.
“Seeing her mother smile made her smile,” Tomba said.
FBI Special Agent Vicki Anderson told ABC News that Jocelyn is missing a front tooth and that Berry had been schooling her daughter in the home.
Police said the women knew each other in the home, and while in the hospital asked to visit one another. It was DeJesus who proudly showed off to investigators a drawing the little girl had made.
CNN has full coverage here: Charges expected Wednesday in missing women case – CNN.com
But if you have 7 plus minutes to spare, please click here to see Anderson Cooper’s interview with the amazing Charles Ramsey…this man is a treasure.
Did you know that in the academic world there is a boycott of Israel? Yeah it is creating a stink over in Europe: Stephen Hawking joins academic boycott of Israel
A statement published with Stephen Hawking’s approval said his withdrawal was based on advice from academic contacts in Palestine. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPAProfessor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fifth annual president’s conference, Facing Tomorrow, in June, which features major international personalities, attracts thousands of participants and this year will celebrate Peres’s 90th birthday.
Hawking is in very poor health, but last week he wrote a brief letter to the Israeli president to say he had changed his mind. He has not announced his decision publicly, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking’s approval described it as “his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there”.
Hawking’s decision marks another victory in the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions targeting Israeli academic institutions.
This started with The Teachers Union in Ireland, followed by the United States members of the Association for Asian American Studies. Take a look at that Guardian article to read more about it. If it was mention here on the blog earlier, I may have missed it…but perhaps it was lost in the shuffle of all the breaking news of late.
Meanwhile, in Italy: Deaths as Genoa ship hits control tower
At least six people have died and four are missing after a container ship crashed into a control tower in the Italian port of Genoa, officials say.
The Jolly Nero smashed into the 50m (164ft) concrete and glass tower late at night, reducing it to rubble.
Three of those who died are believed to have been trapped inside a lift as the tower collapsed.
Rescue workers have been searching in the rubble for survivors while divers scoured the water around the dock.
The accident occurred at about 23:00 on Tuesday night (21:00 GMT), when a shift change was taking place in the control tower and about 13 people were thought to be inside.
All that remained of the tower on Wednesday was rubble.
One report I saw says they believe the total to be nine dead, but that is not confirmed.
Finally, this article about the origin of language should be very interesting to many of you: English May Have Retained Words From an Ice Age Language
Map showing approximate regions where languages from the seven Eurasiatic language families are now spoken. Image: Pagel et al./PNAS
If you’ve ever cringed when your parents said “groovy,” you’ll know that spoken language can have a brief shelf life. But frequently used words can persist for generations, even millennia, and similar sounds and meanings often turn up in very different languages. The existence of these shared words, or cognates, has led some linguists to suggest that seemingly unrelated language families can be traced back to a common ancestor. Now, a new statistical approach suggests that peoples from Alaska to Europe may share a linguistic forebear dating as far back as the end of the Ice Age, about 15,000 years ago.
I’ve just given you the first paragraph of that article, you need to go read the entire thing at the Wired link and see just how important and ancient the word Mother really is….
That should get things rolling today, see y’all later…comments down below.
Thursday Reads: Mitt Romney, Casino Capitalist, and Other News
Posted: July 5, 2012 Filed under: Barack Obama, Corporate Crime, medicine, Mental Health, Mitt Romney, morning reads, The Bonus Class, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bain Capital, Britain's Atlantis, casino capitalists, Dr. Drew, Drew Pinsky, gilded age, GlaxoSmithKline, Higgs boson particle, money laundering, Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., Social Darwinism, Stephen Hawking, tax evasion, tax shelters, Wellbutrin 25 Comments
Good Morning!
I hope everyone had a nice, relaxing holiday. There wasn’t a whole lot of news breaking yesterday, but I read some good reactions to the Vanity Fair Story on the many overseas tax shelters that Mitt’s Romney uses to hide his money.
Mitt Romney, Casino Capitalist
At the Nation, Ben Adler worked up an excellent summary of the VF article, highlighting the main points. Here’s his summary of a particularly disturbing part–the possibility that Bain was laundering money money for some questionable people.
§ Did Bain serve as a tax haven for foreign criminals? As Shaxson explains, “Private equity is one channel for this secrecy-shrouded foreign money to enter the United States, and a filing for Mitt Romney’s first $37 million Bain Capital Fund, of 1984, provides a rare window into this. One foreign investor, of $2 million, was the newspaper tycoon, tax evader, and fraudster Robert Maxwell, who fell from his yacht, and drowned, off of the Canary Islands in 1991 in strange circumstances, after looting his company’s pension fund. The Bain filing also names Eduardo Poma, a member of one of the ‘14 families’ oligarchy that has controlled most of El Salvador’s wealth for decades; oddly, Poma is listed as sharing a Miami address with two anonymous companies that invested $1.5 million between them. The filings also show a Geneva-based trustee overseeing a trust that invested $2.5 million, a Bahamas corporation that put in $3 million, and three corporations in the tax haven of Panama, historically a favored destination for Latin-American dirty money—’one of the filthiest money-laundering sinks in the world,’ as a US Customs official once put it.”
Politico seemed disapproving of the Obama campaign calling attention to the VF piece. The headline seems to suggest that it is somehow unseemly to refer to an opponent’s tax evasion methods.
From Obama campaign spokseman Ben LaBolt, on a call with Ohio reporters:
“Today we’re learning more about Mitt Romney’s bets against America. Vanity Fair’s raising important questions about Romney’s offshore accounts in foreign tax havens, including his mysterious corporation in Bermuda, his funds in the Cayman Islands, and the Swiss bank account he opened. The question is, why? Was he avoiding paying his fair share of U.S. taxes? Was he hedging against the dollar? Until he releases his tax returns from that period, Americans will never know. This raises serious questions. If he has nothing to hide, why doesn’t he just release his tax returns?”
And from Bill Burton, at Priorities:
“Today’s Vanity Fair article confirms what the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported but the Romney campaign falsely denied. Unlike the vast majority of Americans who pay their fair share of taxes, Mitt Romney is avoiding taxes by stashing millions of dollars in the Cayman Islands. This matters in the presidential campaign because it is just these types of loopholes for the wealthy that Romney would protect, forcing more of the tax burden onto the middle class.
Those seem like pretty good questions to me.
RalphB posted this AP article in the comments yesterday: Mystery Bermuda-based company and other undisclosed Romney assets hint at larger wealth
For nearly 15 years, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s financial portfolio has included an offshore company that remained invisible to voters as his political star rose.
Based in Bermuda, Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd. was not listed on any of Romney’s state or federal financial reports. The company is among several Romney holdings that have not been fully disclosed, including one that recently posted a $1.9 million earning — suggesting he could be wealthier than the nearly $250 million estimated by his campaign.
The omissions were permitted by state and federal authorities overseeing Romney’s ethics filings, and he has never been cited for failing to disclose information about his money. But Romney’s limited disclosures deprive the public of an accurate depiction of his wealth and a clear understanding of how his assets are handled and taxed, according to experts in private equity, tax and campaign finance law.
Romney reported this holding on his 2010 tax form, but he did not disclose it when he ran for governor in 2001-02, even though he was required to do so. Pretty sleazy. Unfortunately, the statute of limitations on this ethics violation has expired.
Paul Krugman blogged about Romney yesterday: Off And Out With Mitt Romney.
It appears that the Obama campaign has decided to ignore the queasiness of Democrats with Wall Street ties, and go after Mitt Romney’s record at Bain. And rightly so!
After all, what is Romney’s case – that is, why does he want us to think he should be president? It’s not about ideology: Romney offers nothing but warmed-over right-wing platitudes, with an extra helping of fraudulent arithmetic, and it’s fairly obvious that even he himself doesn’t believe anything he’s saying.
Instead, his thing is competence: supposedly, his record as a successful businessman should tell us that he knows how to create jobs….[but] even if Romney were a true captain of industry, a latter-day Andrew Carnegie, this wouldn’t be a strong qualification.
In any case, however, Romney wasn’t that kind of businessman. He didn’t build businesses, he bought and sold them – sometimes restructuring them in ways that added jobs, often in ways that preserved profits but destroyed jobs, and fairly often in ways that extracted money for Bain but killed the business in the process….
Or put it a different way: Romney wasn’t so much a captain of industry as a captain of deindustrialization, making big profits for his firm (and himself) by helping to dismantle the implicit social contract that used to make America a middle-class society.
I particularly want to recommend a brilliant essay in The Nation by Robert Reich: Mitt Romney and the New Gilded Age. Reich has really dedicated himself to standing up for the 99% this year, and this piece really brings it all together and holds Romney up as the perfect symbol of “casino capitalism.”
Connect the dots of casino capitalism, and you get Mitt Romney. The fortunes raked in by financial dealmakers depend on special goodies baked into the tax code such as “carried interest,” which allows Romney and other partners in private-equity firms (as well as in many venture-capital and hedge funds) to treat their incomes as capital gains taxed at a maximum of 15 percent. This is how Romney managed to pay an average of 14 percent on more than $42 million of combined income in 2010 and 2011. But the carried-interest loophole makes no economic sense. Conservatives try to justify the tax code’s generous preference for capital gains as a reward to risk-takers—but Romney and other private-equity partners risk little, if any, of their personal wealth. They mostly bet with other investors’ money, including the pension savings of average working people. You can check out easyslots.com.
Another goodie allows private-equity partners to sock away almost any amount of their earnings into a tax-deferred IRA, while the rest of us are limited to a few thousand dollars a year. The partners can merely low-ball the value of whatever portion of their investment partnership they put away—even valuing it at zero—because the tax code considers a partnership interest to have value only in the future. This explains how Romney’s IRA is worth as much as $101 million. The tax code further subsidizes private equity and much of the rest of the financial sector by making interest on debt tax-deductible, while taxing profits and dividends. This creates huge incentives for financiers to find ways of substituting debt for equity and is a major reason America’s biggest banks have leveraged America to the hilt. It’s also why Romney’s Bain and other private-equity partnerships have done the same to the companies they buy.
These maneuvers shift all the economic risk to debtors, who sometimes can’t repay what they owe. That’s rarely a problem for the financiers who engineer the deals; they’re sufficiently diversified to withstand some losses, or they’ve already taken their profits and moved on. But piles of debt play havoc with the lives of real people in the real economy when the companies they work for can’t meet their payments, or the banks they rely on stop lending money, or the contractors they depend on go broke—often with the result that they can’t meet their own debt payments and lose their homes, cars and savings.
Reich notes that if Romney were to win the White House, he would be very different from past wealthy presidents.
We’ve had wealthy presidents before, but they have been traitors to their class—Teddy Roosevelt storming against the “malefactors of great wealth” and busting up the trusts, Franklin Roosevelt railing against the “economic royalists” and raising their taxes, John F. Kennedy appealing to the conscience of the nation to conquer poverty. Romney is the opposite: he wants to do everything he can to make the superwealthy even wealthier and the poor even poorer, and he justifies it all with a thinly veiled social Darwinism.
Obama should be holding Romney up as the personification of all that brought the economy to its knees in 2008. Why aren’t the Democrats screaming from the rooftops about it?
Part of the answer, surely, is that elected Democrats are still almost as beholden to the wealthy for campaign funds as the Republicans, and don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them. Wall Street can give most of its largesse to Romney this year and still have enough left over to tame many influential Democrats (look at the outcry from some of them when the White House took on Bain Capital). But I suspect a deeper reason for their reticence is that if they connect the dots and reveal Romney for what he is—the epitome of what’s fundamentally wrong with our economy—they’ll be admitting how serious our economic problems really are. They would have to acknowledge that the economic catastrophe that continues to cause us so much suffering is, at its root, a product of the gross inequality of income, wealth and political power in America’s new Gilded Age, as well as the perverse incentives of casino capitalism if you bother to check out these no deposit mobile casinos and connect the dots.
Please go read the whole thing. You won’t regret it.
In other news,
The Sun has been very active lately.
(SPACE.com) The sun is unleashing some powerful solar flares today (July 4) in an impressive celestial fireworks display just in time for the U.S. Independence Day holiday.
The latest solar flare erupted at 5:47 a.m. EDT (0947 GMT) and hit its peak strength eight minutes later. The flare fired off from the active sunspot AR1515 and registered as a class M5.3 solar storm on the scale used by astronomers to measure space weather, according to the Space Weather Prediction Group operated by NOAA.
Class M solar flares are powerful, but still medium-strength, sun storms that can supercharge northern lights displays on Earth. The weakest of the sun’s strong solar flares are C-class storms.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft currently watching the sun also captured another solar flare this morning that reached M2 on the sun storm scale.
“As the United States is observing Independence Day, active region 1515 unleashed another M2-class solar flare,” SDO scientists wrote in an announcement posted to the mission’s Facebook and YouTube sites. The flare peaked at 12:37 a.m. EDT (0437 GMT), they added.
Here’s a video of solar flares that took place on July 4, 2012.
Breathtaking!
TV doctor Drew Pinsky, AKA Dr. Drew, is being looked at by the Feds in the GlaxoSmithKline case.
One of Glaxo’s blockbuster drugs was Wellbutrin, which was approved by the FDA to treat depression. Starting in 1999, the Justice Department says, the company “engaged in a nationwide scheme” to promote the drug to treat other conditions including weight problems, addictions, and sexual dysfunction. Pinsky was one of the experts paid to tout Wellbutrin, according to the complaint filed against Glaxo by government prosecutors….
The federal complaint says Cooney Waters, a public-relations firm hired by Glaxo to promote Wellbutrin, “hired Dr. Drew Pinsky from MTV and Loveline as a spokesperson to deliver messages about WBSR [Wellbutrin] in settings where it did not appear that Dr. Pinsky was speaking for WBSR.”
Apparently Pinsky hasn’t specifically been accused of any crime. He told The Daily Beast that he was paid $275,000 to discuss “intimacy and depression” in a number of settings and media. He claims that all of his “comments were consistent with my clinical experience.”
Here’s one example from the federal complaint:
Pinsky said one of the ingredients in Wellbutrin “could explain a woman suddenly having 60 orgasms in one night.” The complaint against Glaxo says “Dr. Pinsky explained that one of the things he advocates for people experiencing diminished libido or arousal” is Wellbutrin.
Stephen Hawking said that he had to pay off a $100 bet that the Higgs boson particle would never be discovered. He says Peter Higgs should get the Nobel Price for predicting it.
A sunken land bridge that once was home to “tens of thousands” of people has been discovered in the North Sea between Scotland and Denmark.
‘Britain’s Atlantis’ – a hidden underwater world swallowed by the North Sea – has been discovered by divers working with science teams from the University of St Andrews.
Doggerland, a huge area of dry land that stretched from Scotland to Denmark was slowly submerged by water between 18,000 BC and 5,500 BC.Divers from oil companies have found remains of a ‘drowned world’ with a population of tens of thousands – which might once have been the ‘real heartland’ of Europe.
A team of climatologists, archaeologists and geophysicists has now mapped the area using new data from oil companies – and revealed the full extent of a ‘lost land’ once roamed by mammoths….
The area was once the ‘real heartland’ of Europe and was hit by ‘a devastating tsunami’, the researchers claim. The wave was part of a larger process that submerged the low-lying area over the course of thousands of years.
Those are my recommendations for today. Now it’s your turn. What are you reading and blogging about?
SDB Evening News Reads 010512: Insane? Is it just a state of mind?
Posted: January 5, 2012 Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, abortion rights, fetus fetishists, immigration, PLUB Pro-Life-Until-Birth, SDB Evening News Reads | Tags: ICE, Jon Huntsman, Stephen Hawking 17 Comments
Good Evening!
The have caught a suspect in Florida in connection with the abortion clinic that burned down in an arson fire last week. Florida – Man Held After Fire at Abortion Clinic
The authorities arrested a man on Thursday on federal charges of setting a fire on Sunday that gutted a Pensacola abortion clinic that has faced violence in the past. Bobby Joe Rogers, 41, of was being held at the Escambia County Jail, the authorities said. Investigators said tips from the community led to the arrest. In an affidavit, prosecutors said he told investigators that he made a fire bomb and threw it at the clinic early Sunday. Mr. Rogers said he was pushed to action after he saw a young woman enter the clinic for an abortion while he was standing outside the clinic with a group of protesters recently, it said. The same clinic was bombed on Christmas Day in 1984, and in 1994 a doctor and a volunteer were shot to death as they arrived.
Makes me think of the last episode of the new Beavis and Butt-Head series… Whorehouse / Going Down
Oh, just seeing these “whores…fornicators” walking into a clinic “pushed” this guy to commit a federal crime. Is this the makings of an insanity plea?
Speaking of the insane, you may remember that Breivik, the Norwegian man who committed that mass murder last year, was found to be insane by a court hearing. Well, now it seems that decision/finding has been overturned. Doctors overturn Breivik insane ruling
Wow…imagine this guy manipulating the doctors into finding him insane….or is he manipulating the experts into thinking he is sane. Sometimes when I read these articles, I find myself having to read them over again.
Sticking with the question of sanity, Santorum has Raked In $2 Million In Two Days
Enjoying a wave of momentum from his near-win in the Iowa caucuses, Rick Santorum’s campaign is raising money faster than ever before. Donors have added $2 million to his campaign’s war chest in the last 48 hours alone.
And a Santorum aide tells ABC News that in the space of 10 hours — between midnight Thursday and 10 a.m. — the campaign took in $250,000 of that $2 million total. The quarter-million figure total represents online contributions only.
Other than the obvious wingnuts, who would send this guy any money? 2 million…that figure is staggering. There are some mighty rich PLUBs out there, and you know that none of them would be willing to raise that much money to help teenage mothers…
Which reminds me, yesterday I wrote about the young teenager that was “mistakenly” deported to Columbia. I posted an update in the comments but I just wanted to bring it to the front page: Teenager Mistakenly Deported To Colombia
She is pregnant…and still being held by Columbia, but what is worse…the news and media are blaming the child.
Now she is pregnant, being held in a detention facility in Bogotá. God knows what has happened to that child after she was deported and now, but whatever it is, it shouldn’t ever have happened. ICE likes to brag about their numbers and say they’re deporting criminals and repeat offenders, but it seems that they’re a bit sloppy about how they’re doing it. They fingerprinted this child, for heavens’ sake! How hard would it have been to compare her fingerprints to those of the person whose name she used before sending her out of the country? I wonder if they ever thought the absence of a Columbian accent would have been a clue? Evidently not.
Even if the Houston police screwed up, and I believe they did, the responsibility and ultimate screwup sits firmly with this administration’s immigration authorities. An apology and restitution is the least they should do.
Step up, DHS. Get this girl home. Now.
Update: CNN just ran this report at 9 AM this morning. Note how the entire story is being twisted now to blame the victim. It’s HER fault she’s in Colombia. Somehow she plotted to use someone’s name who was never in the ICE system? According to CNN, she jacked the whole system to get from Texas to Colombia. They can’t imagine why, of course, but it’s clearly this 14-year old (now 15) African-American teenager’s fault that she is being held in the system in Colombia after being deported from this country.
Lavandera makes her sound like some kind of drug dealer:
So basically, what we know so far is this 14-year old girl — 15 now — was able to fool local authorities, also the ICE agents and ICE officials and the immigration process and on top of that the Colombian government to get the necessary paperwork to get deported back into Colombia without any of her own identification.
[…]
…and then at the point of being deported, at the very last minute, why not raise her hand and say “whoa whoa whoa I’m not who I’ve been saying I am.” They don’t understand that.
[…]
The big story here is that this girl has fooled many people on many different levels and it’s absolutely bizarre.
Here’s what I think is bizarre. That a CNN reporter who admits to not having all the facts ready or at his fingertips thinks it’s just fine to go on national television and trash a 14-year old girl who might — MIGHT — have had a student identification card as her sole ID. If she ran away, she could easily have been victimized by human traffickers who told her to use that name if she were arrested. Who knows? None of us know right now. What we DO know is that a 14-year old girl who is a United States citizen was deported. That’s what we know, and Lavandera’s effort to paint her as some kind of con artist was unwarranted and simply victimizes her all over again.
It was a reprehensible report and one that seems to have had ICE agents’ fingerprints on it in an effort to cover their own behinds. Really, we can do better than this.
According to the local TV station that broke the news:
Thursday afternoon, the family had a conference call with members of the National NAACP, congressional Black Caucus leaders and her attorney. They are all demanding the U.S. Embassy gets a chance to visit Jakadrien where she is being held, and to allow her to call her family, which the Colombian government has refused to do.
“I’m looking forward to that,” Turner said. “I just want to hear my baby’s voice.”
The biggest question now is how all this happened – something civil rights leaders are also asking.
Earlier today The Boston Globe endorsed Jon Huntsman for GOP nominee. For vision and national unity, Huntsman for GOP nominee – Editorials – The Boston Globe
Most of the editorial is bashing Romney…looks like Boston Boomer isn’t the only one who really doesn’t want a Romney presidency.
And for your last link of the night, Cosmic Log – What mystifies Dr. Hawking? Women
As famed physicist Stephen Hawking turns 70, the subject that most occupies his thoughts is not how the universe arose from nothing, or how he’s been able to live with neurodegenerative disease for so long. Here’s what he thinks about most: “Women. They are a complete mystery.”
That’s the bottom line from New Scientist’s interview with Hawking, timed to coincide with this weekend’s birthday celebration at Cambridge. The theorist is almost completely paralyzed due to his decades-long struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and had to provide his answers by laboriously twitching his cheek to operate a computerized speech-translation system.
Hawking also listed what he saw as his “biggest blunder in science” (his now-repudiated insistence that information was destroyed in black holes), the most exciting development in physics during his career (the discovery of the big bang’s imprint in cosmic microwave radiation) and the potential discovery that would do the most to revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos (discovery of supersymmetric particles at the Large Hadron Collider).
But it’s his brief comment on women that attracted the most attention: How could it be that a scientist who has plumbed the deepest mysteries of the cosmos finds himself mystified by women?
Hmmm…I guess the man is brilliant enough to discover the origins of the cosmos…
The saga of the super-smart professor who is flummoxed by interpersonal relations, particularly with the opposite sex, is at least as old as Sigmund Freud (who famously wondered, “What does a woman want?”), Jerry Lewis’ fictional “Nutty Professor” and the stereotype we have of Albert Einstein. It’s as up to date as the TV astrophysicist on “The Big Bang Theory” who can’t say a word to women unless he’s under the influence.
Somehow, folks get a satisfying sense of karma from the idea that geniuses are socially stupid. But the stereotype doesn’t really hold true, particularly in Hawking’s case.
Like the real-life Einstein, Hawking has had an active romantic life, marked by two marriages. (Einstein’s second marriage ended with the death of his wife and cousin Elsa; Hawking’s ended in an ugly divorce.) Hawking’s disease does not affect his sexual ability or his potency, and the fact that he’s fathered three children is evidence of that.
“The disease only affects voluntary muscle,” Hawking’s been quoted as saying.
The article goes on to say that Hawking is an incurable flirt, and has a thing for Marilyn Monroe, who he says is the one person he would want to meet if he could go back in time.
Even as he approaches the age of 70, Hawking seems to have kept his playful, pleasant, mischievous character. That may help explain his latest comment about the mystique surrounding women, as well as his own mystique.
Here’s a classic example: Actress Jane Fonda was clearly won over last year when Hawking came backstage after her performance in a play about a woman musicologist in the early stages of neurodegenerative disease. “I took his hand and carefully uncurled the fingers one by one, wanting to see how they felt and looked … soft, pale, safe,” she recalled in a blog posting.
When Fonda asked Hawking what he thought of her performance, Hawking typed out a short response: “You were my heartthrob” — which got a big laugh. Fonda came away starstruck. “This man who cannot move or speak, can, nonetheless, comprehend the incomprehensible,” she wrote.
Hmm … Maybe women aren’t such a complete mystery to Hawking after all.
That is all for tonight…catch ya later in the comments.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
grayslady
mablue2
JJ Lopez aka Minkoff Minx
NW Luna
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments