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Monday, October 30, 2017

Controlling Black Athletes

An excerpt from the Washington Post -

Bob McNair, other NFL owners demonstrate their true intent: Controlling black athletes
By Kevin B. Blackistone

Control of black athletic talent in this country was then, before and now — as Houston Texans owner Bob McNair reminded not once but twice over the past few days — of paramount concern to ownership and management. There was, for example, the concerted effort of white lawmakers to wrest the heavyweight championship of the world over a century ago from boxer Jack Johnson, the first black man to hold it, to restore the fallacy of white superiority. There was reduction of college athletic scholarships from four-year contracts to single-year agreements at the start of the 1970s, which just so happened to coincide with teams ramping up through integration, reducing the power of new stars, primarily of color, from managing their destinies. There was the NBA under commissioner David Stern in 2005 managing to impose a dress code on the predominantly black league to rebut an increasingly urban image that Stern was worried might have made it less marketable to advertisers and white fans.

And there is the NFL’s response to free agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick and those players who have dared use the national anthem as a stage to protest grievances against police lethality vs. black men or the dog-whistle (if not foghorn) firebrand of this country’s latest president.

What the upper echelon of the NFL began reacting to earlier this year, with its conspiratorial defrocking of Kaepernick, wasn’t about the anthem, per se. It wasn’t about the massive flags it so often unfurls before games. It wasn’t about the military it recognizes at almost every game with a presentation of the colors or an expensive flyover of armed forces weaponry.

It was about, as McNair allowed his subconscious to let slip, corralling the players and returning them to their place.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/nfl-bob-mcnair-demonstrate-their-true-intent-controlling-black-athletes/2017/10/29/437685d4-bcd2-11e7-959c-fe2b598d8c00_story.html?utm_term=.d247ebd2aeb9

Sunday, October 29, 2017

This 580-ton monster machine is building bridges across China

Why Photos of the Eiffel Tower at Night are Illegal

Life in the future!!!

10 INVENTIONS THAT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND

Lessons From a Toni Morrison Short Story

From the New Yorker -

The Work You Do, the Person You Are
The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound. I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to feed.
By Toni Morrison

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/the-work-you-do-the-person-you-are

Remembering Charles Kuralt

Pretty Proud

Years ago, 36 to be exact, I started a needlepoint project when I was pregnant with my oldest son, Ben.  I completed about half of it before he was born, but was way too busy to deal with it after his birth, so I put it in a box and forgot about it.

When I moved recently, I discovered this long-lost project and decided to finish it.  I was so proud of the end result, I had it framed and it's now hanging prominently in my new home.  Here it is below.


A little background.

My degree is in pharmacy and I was working as a pharmacist when I started this.

You don't have to look too hard to see that it's not perfect, but that's OK.  It's finished.  It's done.  It's complete.

And for that, I'm most proud.



Tombstones

From Stumbleupon -

50+ Brilliant Tombstones By People Whose Sense Of Humor Will Live Forever
By​ Šarūnė Mac

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/55Ff0Y/:12T1w86Dl:ns$+w71./www.boredpanda.com/funny-tombstones-epitaphs

If You Ever See A Quarter Resting On Top Of A Grave Stone, Don’t Touch It !

Iyanla Explains Why She Ended Her 14-Year Relationship | Iyanla: Fix My ...

Donald Trump is 'unfit to run the United States': Andrew Sullivan

Saturday, October 28, 2017

Quote

“The Democratic party is too male,” said Letitia James, public advocate for the City of New York and the first woman of color to hold citywide office in the city. “It’s too pale and too stale.” 
(Bold is mine)

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/at-the-womens-convention-a-clear-message-follow-black-women-in-2018_us_59f4939ce4b03cd20b81e45f?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

Thai kings lavish $90 million cremation ceremony

The Makers, the Shakers, the DIY-ers

Solve Tough Data Problems. Get Flooded With Job Offers.

An excerpt from Wired -

SOLVE THESE TOUGH DATA PROBLEMS AND WATCH JOB OFFERS ROLL IN
By Tom Simonite

LATE IN 2015, Gilberto Titericz, an electrical engineer at Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras, told his boss he planned to resign, after seven years maintaining sensors and other hardware in oil plants. By devoting hundreds of hours of leisure time to the obscure world of competitive data analysis, Titericz had recently become the world’s top-ranked data scientist, by one reckoning. Silicon Valley was calling. “Only when I wanted to quit did they realize they had the number-one data scientist,” he says.
Petrobras held on to its champ for a time by moving Titericz into a position that used his data skills. But since topping the rankings that October he’d received a stream of emails from recruiters around the globe, including representatives of Tesla and Google. This past February, another well-known tech company hired him, and moved his family to the Bay Area this summer. Titericz described his unlikely journey recently over colorful plates of Nigerian food at the headquarters of his new employer, Airbnb.

Titericz earned, and holds, his number-one rank on a website called Kaggle that has turned data analysis into a kind of sport, and transformed the lives of some competitors. Companies, government agencies, and researchers post datasets on the platform and invite Kaggle’s more than one million members to discern patterns and solve problems. Winners get glory, points toward Kaggle’s rankings of its top 66,000 data scientists, and sometimes cash prizes.

https://www.wired.com/story/solve-these-tough-data-problems-and-watch-job-offers-roll-in/?mbid=nl_102817_daily_list1_p1

Adding Insult to Injury



https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/columnist/bell/2017/10/27/nfl-owners-texans-bob-mcnair-need-sensitivity-training-race/807958001/

Halloween Do's & Don'ts

Autism Breakthrough?

An excerpt from the Sacramento Bee -

UC Davis researchers test drug that may reverse symptoms of autism
By Molly Sullivan

Researchers at UC Davis MIND Institute may have found a drug that can reverse symptoms of a rare genetic condition associated with autism.

The 16p11.2 deletion syndrome – caused by the deletion of a small piece of chromosome 16 – is present in one-third of people with autism. People who have this condition are missing certain genes, resulting in impaired communication and social skills and delayed intellectual development, said Jacqueline Crawley, the lead researcher in the study.

The drug that may help is called R-baclofen. It interacts with a specific kind of neurotransmitter to inhibit neurons from firing, she said.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/health-and-medicine/article181379671.html#emlnl=Breaking_Newsletter#storylink=cpy

How to Be a CEO

An excerpt from the New York Times -

How to Be a C.E.O., From a Decade’s Worth of Them
Adam Bryant has interviewed 525 chief executives through his
years writing the Corner Office column. Here’s what he has learned.
By ADAM BRYANT

It started with a simple idea: What if I sat down with chief executives, and never asked them about their companies?

The notion occurred to me roughly a decade ago, after spending years as a reporter and interviewing C.E.O.s about many of the expected things: their growth plans, the competition, the economic forces driving their industries. But the more time I spent doing this, the more I found myself wanting to ask instead about more expansive themes — not about pivoting, scaling or moving to the cloud, but how they lead their employees, how they hire, and the life advice they give or wish they had received.

That led to 525 Corner Office columns, and weekly reminders that questions like these can lead to unexpected places.

I met an executive who grew up in a dirt-floor home, and another who escaped the drugs and gangs of her dangerous neighborhood. I learned about different approaches to building culture, from doing away with titles to offering twice-a-month housecleaning to all employees as a retention tool.

And I have been endlessly surprised by the creative approaches that chief executives take to interviewing people for jobs, including tossing their car keys to a job candidate to drive them to a lunch spot, or asking them how weird they are, on a scale of 1 to 10.

Granted, not all chief executives are fonts of wisdom. And some of them, as headlines regularly remind us, are deeply challenged people.

That said, there’s no arguing that C.E.O.s have a rare vantage point for spotting patterns about management, leadership and human behavior.

After almost a decade of writing the Corner Office column, this will be my final one — and from all the interviews, and the five million words of transcripts from those conversations, I have learned valuable leadership lessons and heard some great stories. Here are some standouts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/business/how-to-be-a-ceo.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Thursday, October 26, 2017

Brown Corn Pop

Powerful Videos

From the New Yorker -

We Are Witnesses
A portrait of crime and punishment in America today.
In partnership with The Marshall Project

The impact of America’s punishment policies is often measured in numbers: there are now 2.2 million people in our jails and prisons; one in a hundred and fifteen adults is confined behind bars; our inmate population is four times larger than it was in 1980. “We Are Witnesses,” a collection of short videos, offers a very different sort of calculation: the human cost of locking up so many citizens for so many years. The project comprises nineteen videos, each between two and six minutes long. Taken together, they present a rare 360-degree portrait of the state of crime and punishment in the United States.

“We Are Witnesses” eschews politicians and professors in favor of other kinds of experts: people who have had firsthand experience with the criminal-justice system. Two police officers, a prison guard, two judges, two parents of a murder victim, four ex-prisoners—each one stares straight at the camera, recounting his or her story. Created and produced by the Marshall Project, a newsroom covering the criminal-justice system, “We Are Witnesses” delivers first-person testimonials that are intimate, honest, and revelatory.


https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/we-are-witnesses-portrait-of-crime-and-punishment-in-america-today#video

Use a screwdriver with one hand.

Roasted!

SuperSoul Short: Kidada Jones, School of Awake | SuperSoul Sunday | Opra...

Monday, October 23, 2017

The Amazon’s Boiling River Kills Anything That Enters

High Tech Boot Camp

An excerpt from Axios -

In a bet against college, WeWork acquires a coding bootcamp
By Steve LeVine

WeWork, the office leasing giant, has acquired the New York-based Flatiron School, a private coding academy, in a gamble on 15-week, $15,000 vocational education as opposed to far more expensive four-year college degrees. The companies did not disclose the precise value of the cash-and-stock deal. At $20 billion, WeWork is tied for the sixth most-valuable startup in the world.

Why it matters: At a time many experts and politicians are questioning the assumption that college is for everyone, the deal bets on a fashionable form of vocational education — coding — as a route to well-paying software jobs. The plans are to expand Flatiron from its single location in New York's financial district into most of WeWork's approximately 170 offices, which would further test the growing idea of bypassing college, at least in the U.S. tech world.

https://www.axios.com/in-a-bet-against-college-wework-acquires-a-coding-bootcamp-2500013575.html

McCain Indirectly Slams Draft Dodging Trump

Why Difficult Discourse Matters

An excerpt from the NY Times -

America’s Best University President
By Bret Stephens

Several years ago Robert Zimmer was asked by an audience in China why the University of Chicago was associated with so many winners of the Nobel Prize — 90 in all, counting this month’s win by the behavioral economist Richard Thaler. Zimmer, the university’s president since 2006, answered that the key was a campus culture committed to “discourse, argument and lack of deference.”

~~~~~~~~~~

“Our commitment to academic freedom,” he wrote, “means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/opinion/robert-zimmer-chicago-speech.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share

Thursday, October 19, 2017

At Notre Dame, Football Goes Robotic

Your Body Is Amazing Pt. 2

Inside Take: Charley's Brown Sugar Festival | Queen Sugar | Oprah Winfre...

Another Life For Grouchy Cats

An excerpt from the AP News -

For ornery shelter cats, 2nd chance is a job chasing mice
By KRISTEN DE GROOT

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Gary wasn’t used to being around people. He didn’t like being touched or even looked at. If anyone came too close, he’d lash out.

He was perfect for the job. Because at the Working Cats program, no manners is no problem.

Philadelphia’s Animal Care and Control Team established the program about four years ago to place unadoptable cats — the biters and the skittish, the swatters and the ones that won’t use a litter box — into jobs as mousers at barns or stables.

https://apnews.com/ddaf915aaf19413ebc122be3afe20c2f

Detroit


Take Note Parents

An excerpt from the Atlantic -

Why Parents Make Flawed Choices About Their Kids' Schooling
A new study shows that families act on insufficient information when it comes to figuring out where to enroll their children.
By GAIL CORNWALL

A person trying to choose their next set of wheels might see that car A made it farther than car B in a road test and assume it gets better gas mileage. But that’s only true if the two tanks are filled with the same substance. Putting high-octane gas in one and water in the other, for example, provides little useful information about which car makes the most of its fuel. A new working paper titled “Do Parents Value School Effectiveness?” suggests that parents similarly opt for schools with the most impressive graduates rather than figuring out which ones actually teach best. The study joins a body of research looking critically at what it means for a school to be successful.

Take the work of Erin Pahlke, for example. The assistant professor of psychology at Whitman College saw research showing that girls who attend school only with other girls tend to do better in math and science. The trick, she said, is that those studies didn’t analyze “differences in the students coming into the schools.” As it turns out, those who end up in same-sex schools tend to be wealthier, start out with more skills, and have parents who are more proactive than students who attend co-ed institutions. In a 2014 meta-analysis, Pahlke and her colleagues reviewed the studies and found when examining schools with the same type of students and same level of resources—rather than “comparing [those at] the public co-ed school to [their counterparts at] the fancy private school that’s single-sex down the road”—there isn’t any difference in how the students perform academically. Single-sex schooling also hasn’t been shown to offer a bump in girls’ attitudes toward math and science or change how they think about themselves. In other words, it often looks like single-sex schools are doing a better job educating kids, but they aren't. It's just that their graduates are people who were going to do well at any school. They’re running on high-octane gas.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/10/can-parents-really-pick-the-best-schools-for-their-kids/543201/

The fastest path from aisle to checkout to fridge.

Pole Dancing in the Olympics

From the Washington Post -

Pole-dancing in the Olympics? International sports federation recognition helps pave the way.
By Marissa Payne

No strip club necessary. Pole-dancing now stands on its own as a provisionally recognized sport thanks to the Global Association of International Sports Federation, which granted the activity’s international governing federation “observer status” earlier this month.

“Pole Sports is a performance sport combining dance and acrobatics on a vertical pole,” GAISF writes on its website. “Pole Sports requires great physical and mental exertion, strength and endurance are required to lift, hold and spin the body. A high degree of flexibility is needed to contort, pose, demonstrate lines and execute techniques.”

Observer status is the first step international federations must achieve before becoming full GAISF members, which serves as a great boost for any sport hoping to one day land in the Olympics. And that is exactly pole-dancing’s goal, according to International Pole Sports Federation President Katie Coates, who lauded the day the decision was made on Oct. 2 as “historical.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/10/18/pole-dancing-in-the-olympics-international-sports-federation-recognition-helps-pave-the-way/?utm_term=.05ed0cf96c12&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1

Bill - 0 Jake - 1


Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Remy Shows Ralph Angel Some Love | Queen Sugar | Oprah Winfrey Network

With $100K in Student Debt, He’s Helping Others Avoid It

Oculus' John Carmack Explains Virtual Reality in 5 Levels of Difficulty ...

Pandas

Chicago

The Original Kneelers


Latin Ladies

From Buzzfeed -

A Bunch Of Badass Latinas In Hollywood Got Together And It Warmed My Cold, Dead Heart
Icons supporting icons!
By Pablo Valdivia

https://www.buzzfeed.com/pablovaldivia/icons-helping-icons?utm_term=.xnMw8bEY9#.lkWeO0wy5

A post shared by Gina Rodriguez (@hereisgina) on

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Vox Borders: Life at the edge of nations

Christian Hogwarts

An excerpt from Buzzfeed News -

Meet The "Young Saints" Of Bethel Who Go To College To Perform Miracles
How a school that calls itself "Christian Hogwarts" is upending a small city in California's Trump country.
ByMolly Hensley-Clancy

It’s the first day of Prophecy Week at the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry. Or, as students here like to call the place, Christian Hogwarts.

The auditorium of the civic center in Redding, California, where first-year students have class, is so full of eager, neatly dressed young people that it’s initially impossible to find a seat. The roomful of some 1,200 students hums with expectant energy: People talk in clusters, clutching their books to their chests and stealing eager glances at the stage. There are so many languages spoken here it’s hard to keep track: English of all flavors, spoken with Australian and British and South African accents; Chinese; Korean; Portuguese. It’s a strange medley for a place like Redding, an economically depressed rural outpost about 200 miles north of San Francisco, in the heart of Northern California’s Trump country.

The students are waiting for today’s lecturer, Kris Vallotton, one of the school’s founders and a prophet so prolific he literally wrote the book on it — Basic Training for the Prophetic Ministry, a combined textbook and workbook used by Bethel students to learn how to hear, and speak, God’s words. (“Name the five things that distinguish a false prophet from a true prophet.” “What is the difference between a vision and a trance?”)

The basic theological premise of the School of Supernatural Ministry is this: that the miracles of biblical times — the parted seas and burning bushes and water into wine — did not end in biblical times, and the miracle workers did not die out with Jesus’s earliest disciples. In the modern day, prophets and healers don’t just walk among us, they are us.

To Bethel students, learning, seeing, and performing these “signs and wonders” — be it prophesying about things to come or healing the incurable — aren’t just quirks or side projects of Christianity. They are, in fact, its very center.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/mollyhensleyclancy/meet-the-young-saints-of-bethel-who-go-to-college-to?utm_term=.msoanVm7X#.vkgnLql7y

Friday, October 13, 2017

The World's Deepest Buildings (That We Know About) | The B1M

Warming the Feet (and Hearts) of Canada’s Homeless

Go-Kart Racing With the Emirati Speed Sisters

Gregory Porter - L-O-V-E

Gregory Porter - Smile

Woz U.

An excerpt from the Daily Good -

Apple Co-Founder’s Next Venture Could Revolutionize Education
by Britni Danielle

It’s hard to imagine a world without tech behemoth Apple in it, but when Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded the company in 1976, the personal computer was rare. With the creation of the Apple I, and the more advanced Apple II model, Wozniak helped to revolutionize the tech computing industry and pave the way for innovations like laptops, smartphones, and high-tech gaming systems. Now, Wozniak is hoping to transform the industry once again by training a generation of workers for high-paying jobs.

Recently, Wozniak announced he was launching Woz U, an online educational institute that aims to train students and connect them to companies looking for high-skilled workers. And with more than 600,000 unfilled jobs in the tech industry, Wozniak’s goal to “get people into the workforce quickly and affordably” could be a game-changer.

“Our goal is to educate and train people in employable digital skills without putting them into years of debt,” the innovator said in a press release announcing Woz U’s launch. “People often are afraid to choose a technology-based career because they think they can’t do it. I know they can, and I want to show them how.”

https://education.good.is/articles/woz-u

Thursday, October 12, 2017

Goodbye Christopher Robin Trailer #1 (2017) | Movieclips Trailers

The Only Black Late Night Host

Restoring Havana’s Classic Neon Signs

Be Inspired

An excerpt from Acorns -

7 Wildly Successful People Who Started From the Bottom
By Molly Triffin

Howard Schultz

Starbucks executive chairman and former CEO

Growing up, Schultz would have had to save his pennies to afford a grande latte. Raised by his truck driver father and stay-at-home mom in a Brooklyn housing project, Schultz described his family as “pretty much destitute.”

“I knew the people on the other side [of the tracks] had more resources, more money, happier families,” he told the Mirror. “I wanted to climb over that fence and achieve something beyond what people were saying was possible.”

Well, mission accomplished. Schultz was the first in his family to go to college. Later, during a stint working for a housewares company, he was introduced to a small coffee chain in Seattle that he eventually purchased and transformed into the Starbucks empire.

https://grow.acorns.com/7-wildly-successful-people-who-started-from-the-bottom/?utm_source=October&utm_medium=newsletter/

You Can Buy a House From Amazon!

From Gizmodo -

The 11 Best Tiny Houses You Can Buy on Amazon
By Adam Clark Estes

https://gizmodo.com/the-11-best-tiny-houses-you-can-buy-on-amazon-1819377589

Wi-Fi Ballons For Puerto Rico

An excerpt from Atlas Obscura -

The Plan to Launch Giant Wi-Fi Balloons Over Puerto Rico
Alphabet’s Project Loon aims to help get the heavily damaged island back online.
BY ERIC GRUNDHAUSER

As Futurism is reporting, Project Loon has received expedited approval from the FCC to launch wireless data-providing balloons over Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands as soon as possible. The goal of Project Loon is to provide internet coverage to inaccessible or less developed parts of the world by floating large balloons in the stratosphere, at about 65,000 feet. The balloons carry signal relay points capable of communicating with service providers on the ground—in a sense they are more or less floating cell towers. According to Project Loon’s website, the balloons can stay up for as long as 190 days at a time.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/google-balloon-puerto-rico-loon-cell-internet

Star Wars Lego Mania

Eminem Rips Donald Trump In BET Hip Hop Awards Freestyle Cypher

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Young Commercial Airline Pilot Jonathan Strickland makes History by film...




https://blackamericaweb.com/2017/10/11/25-year-old-jonathan-strickland-is-the-youngest-pilot-ever-hired-by-ups/?omcamp=es-baw-nl&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Campaign%2010-11-2017&utm_term=BAW%20Subscribers%20%28Daily%29

Meet the 2017 MacArthur Fellows

Helping Students Acclimate

An excerpt from the LA Times -

At UCLA, a dorm floor dedicated to first-generation students
By Teresa Watanabe

Desiree Felix didn’t make her way to UCLA with the help of helicopter parents who hired tutors, hounded teachers or edited her application essays.

Her father is a handyman with a sixth-grade education. Her mother finished high school and helps manage apartments.

At Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, Felix had to figure out most of the nuts and bolts of preparing for and applying to colleges on her own. She didn’t know anything about Advanced Placement classes until her sophomore year, and she came close to missing UC’s application deadline.

In her freshman year, Felix has chosen to live on a newly created dorm floor just for students like her who are the first in their families to attend college.

“I wanted to be around people who understood and shared my experiences so I could connect with them,” she said on move-in day as she unpacked her bags and arranged her new desk.

The dedicated dorm floor is UCLA’s latest effort to support its first-generation students, who make up 32% of undergraduates — a strikingly high number for an elite university.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ucla-first-gen-students-20171002-story.html#nws=mcnewsletter

In Case of Emergency

An excerpt from KQED News -

Here’s What You Should Have in Your Emergency Bag
By Erika Aguilar

We reached out to San Francisco’s Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT) to get tips on what should be in your emergency “go bag”:

Q: What should be in my go bag?

“Things you cannot live without,” said Capt. Erica Arteseros of San Francisco’s Fire Department. She is the training coordinator for the NERT team of volunteers. Here’s a list of things to get started:

Medication
An extra set of keys
Eyeglasses or contact lenses
Hearing aids
A change of clothes
Some water and snack bars
Cash in small bills
A first-aid kit
Flashlight
A portable radio
Charging cables for your cellphone and a portable cellphone battery pack
A copy of your ID

https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/10/10/heres-what-you-should-have-in-your-emergency-bag/

IQ Explained

From Vox -

IQ, explained in 9 charts
By Brian Resnick

https://www.vox.com/2016/5/24/11723182/iq-test-intelligence


Saturday, October 7, 2017

Roman J. Israel, Esq. Trailer #1 (2017) | Movieclips Trailers

Why we still need courtroom sketch artists

The Supreme Court's Ruling on the Anthem

An excerpt from Rolling Stone -

What the Supreme Court Says About Sitting Out the National Anthem
Some public schools are telling student-athletes they can't kneel during the anthem – but that's unconstitutional
By David S. Cohen

The Supreme Court very forcefully declared that punishing students for not participating in the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional. The decision had nothing to do with the students' religion and everything to do with their constitutional right to freedom of speech. As the Court wrote, in language that has become one of the most important principles of modern free speech law:

"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/what-the-supreme-court-says-about-sitting-out-the-national-anthem-w507503?utm_source=rsnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=100617_17


Lin-Manuel Miranda - Almost Like Praying feat Artists for Puerto Rico [M...

Silicon Kidneys

An excerpt from Wired -

SILICON ISN'T JUST FOR COMPUTERS. IT CAN MAKE A PRETTY GOOD KIDNEY, TOO
By MEGAN MOLTENI

Now, after more than 20 years of work, one team of doctors and researchers is close to offering patients an implantable artificial kidney, a bionic device that uses the same technology that makes the chips that power your laptop and smartphone. Stacks of carefully designed silicon nanopore filters combine with live kidney cells grown in a bioreactor. The bundle is enclosed in a body-friendly box and connected to a patient’s circulatory system and bladder—no external tubing required.

The device would do more than detach dialysis patients—who experience much higher rates of fatigue, chronic pain, and depression than the average American—from a grueling treatment schedule. It would also address a critical shortfall of organs for transplant that continues despite a recent uptick in donations. For every person who received a kidney last year, 5 more on the waiting list didn’t. And 4,000 of them died.

There are still plenty of regulatory hurdles ahead—human testing is scheduled to begin early next year1—but this bioartificial kidney is already bringing hope to patients desperate to unhook for good.

https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-kidneys?mbid=nl_100617_daily

Apply to Work for the President

An excerpt from InStyle -

This Is Not a Drill! You Can Now Apply to Work for Former President Barack Obama
By Lara Walsh

Whether you've dreamt of a career in politics, hoping to someday make a significant difference in your community, or are just a big fan of Barack Obama, look no further, because a select group of 20 applicants will now have the opportunity to work alongside the former commander in chief.

On Thursday, the former president took to Instagram to encourage politically-minded individuals to apply to his Obama Foundation Fellowship Program. The two-year program seeks to help future leaders work through hot public issues in innovative ways, with governmental institutions and beyond traditional establishments.

http://www.instyle.com/news/obama-foundation-fellowship-program-application

Thursday, October 5, 2017

Tell 'Em Todd

Hilarious Tweets

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/marriage-tweets-that-are-just-plain-funny_us_59d56a16e4b0380b6c9a22d3?ncid=APPLENEWS00001

Sustainable Energy Science & Policy: Dan Kammen

The Human Value of Fair Trade

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Liberal Redneck - On Guns

Michael Strahan Thinks Colin Kaepernick Doesn't Get Enough Credit for Pr...

Trevor Responds to the Las Vegas Shooting & Trump Tweets the Weekend Awa...

How aspirin was discovered - Krishna Sudhir

Patient Becomes Caregiver

An excerpt from Buzzfeed News -

This 24-Year-Old Who Survived Cancer Twice Is Now A Nurse At The Hospital Where She Was Treated
"Never in a million years did I think that at the age of 24 I would have achieved my biggest and wildest dream — to work at the hospital I was treated at as a child/teenager."
By Stephanie McNeal

Brown, now 24, underwent chemo for a year at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and went into remission.

When she was 15, her cancer returned.

"I had just tried out for my high school cheerleading team," Brown told ABC News. "I actually ran a mile while I had cancer and had no idea...There weren't symptoms but my mom and dad could tell that something was different about me and they knew that something was a little off."

Brown's experience inspired her to become a pediatric oncology nurse, and last week, she started working at the hospital where she was treated.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemcneal/child-who-beat-cancer-returns-as-a-nurse?utm_term=.mrwyxalgQ#.ntdG9YBJj

Double Standard

An excerpt from the Washington Post -

‘Lone wolf’: Our stunning double standard when it comes to race and religion
By Khaled Beydoun

In what police call the deadliest attack in modern American history, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire on concertgoers at a country music festival in Las Vegas on Sunday.

Despite the scale of the attack and Paddock’s being armed with more than 10 rifles, Las Vegas Sheriff Joe Lombardo immediately dismissed any ties to terrorism, classifying Paddock, a white male from a rural town 80 miles from Las Vegas, as a “local individual” and a “lone wolf.”

We have yet to determine whether Paddock was motivated by anyone or anything, so many are tiptoeing around terms such as “terrorist.” But if Paddock were Muslim, his status as a local individual would be entirely irrelevant, and the motive of “Islamic terrorism” or “jihad” would likely be immediately assumed, even without any evidence.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/10/02/lone-wolf-our-stunning-double-standard-when-it-comes-to-race-and-religion/?utm_term=.6e339ea464d8

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Sunday, October 1, 2017

They Helped Us See the World

An excerpt from the Paris Review -

John H. Johnson and the Black Magazine
By Dick Gregory



Let me tell you a story about Jet magazine.

In the late 1970s, I went to the African country Uganda, which was falling apart under Idi Amin. His rule was over, and he had left a mess. I wanted to see about helping sick and hungry folks over there. I got on a plane, and then onto a bus. Things were crazy, with people fighting for control of the country. A group of men made everybody get off the bus I was on. And the saddest thing was: suddenly I was looking at a nine-year-old African child with a gun, who walked up to me and said, “Get up on the sidewalk.”

A man on a bicycle jumped off and said, “Dick Gregory! Dick Gregory!” He looked at that little punk packing the gun and said, “Get outta here. You know who this man is?”

And how did the man on the bicycle know who I was? Jet magazine.

That man said to me, “I see all your work, brotha. I just … ” And he started crying. Because he had read about me in Jet.

Jet and Ebony magazines exposed black people to the world—not just the negativity but the positive things, too. We got to see black folks we had never seen, hear about black folks we had never heard of. Let’s say your sister was a judge. How would I know that? Because Jet magazine put it out there. Let’s say your daddy was a scientist in California, but I’m in New York. How would I know? The New York Times wouldn’t mention it. So we looked at Jet and said, “Wow, this is positive stuff, not just the negative stuff about black folks that the white press was talking about.” Ebony and Jet had black photographers taking pictures of people and things that white photographers wouldn’t even have thought of.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/09/26/john-h-johnson-black-magazine/#nws=mcnewsletter

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So Wrong

From the AP & Time -

A Man Told His Friends He Needed Help Moving. They Didn't Realize They Were Robbing a House for Him

(GREAT FALLS, Mont.) — Police in Montana say a man told friends he needed help moving and got their unwitting help stealing $40,000 worth of items from another man's home.

One of the friends allegedly rented a U-Haul without knowing it would be used in a crime. The other told police he became suspicious and left after he saw military medals in the Great Falls home. He doubted 36-year-old Patrick Joseph Adams Jr. served in the military.


Investigators say the true homeowner came home later that night, found his home had been burglarized and called 911.

http://time.com/4964291/great-falls-movers-robbed-house/


Straight to Hell

http://www.vulture.com/2017/09/lin-manuel-miranda-cant-hide-his-disgust-at-trump-tweets.html

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