Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features jazz and blues organ player Jmmy McGriff. Enjoy!

“We’ve got to stop burning fossil fuels. So many aspects of life depend on fossil fuels, except for music and love and education and happiness. These things, which hardly use fossil fuels, are what we must focus on.”

-- Mayer Hillman

News and Opinion

CNN, Credibly Accused of Lying to its Audience About a Key Claim in its Blockbuster Cohen Story, Refuses to Comment

CNN's blockbuster July 26 story – that Michael Cohen intended to tell Special Counsel Robert Mueller that he was present when Donald Trump was told in advance about his son’s Trump Tower meeting with various Russians – includes a key statement about its sourcing that credible reporting now suggests was designed to have misled its audience. Yet CNN simply refuses to address the serious ethical and journalistic questions raised about its conduct.

The substance of the CNN story itself regarding Cohen – which made headline news all over all the world and which CNN hyped as a “bombshell” – has now been retracted by other news outlets that originally purported to “confirm” CNN’s story. That’s because the anonymous source for this confirmation, Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis, now admits that, in essence, his “confirmation” was false. As a result, both the Washington Post and the NY Post outed Davis as their anonymous source and then effectively retracted their stories “confirming” parts of CNN’s report.

CNN, however, has retracted nothing. ... It’s certainly possible that CNN had other sources for this story besides Davis, who now repudiates it. It’s hard to see how CNN’s story could be true given that Davis, Cohen’s own lawyer, explicitly says that Cohen has no information that Trump had prior knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting, that Cohen cannot and will not tell Mueller that this happened, and that Davis’ prior claims about Cohen’s knowledge and intentions are false. ... But there’s an entirely separate, and more significant, question about CNN’s behavior here; namely, the very specific claim they made about their sourcing for that blockbuster story. Last night, BuzzFeed reported that Davis explicitly confessed that he was one of the anonymous sources for CNN’s July 26 story, just as he was for the stories from the Washington Post and the New York Post. Last week, CNN put Davis on the air with Anderson Cooper to deny that he was the source for that CNN story – a denial Cooper did not contest – but Davis now admits he was one of CNN’s sources, if not their main source.

Yet remarkably, CNN, in its July 26 story, specificaly claimed that Davis refused to talk to CNN about the story or provide any comment whatsoever. Only one of two things can be true here, and either is extremely significant: (1) CNN deliberately lied to its audience about Davis refusing to comment on the story when, in fact, Davis was one of the anonymous sources on which the CNN report depended, and CNN claimed Davis refused to comment in order to hide Davis’ identity as one of their anonymous sources; or (2) Davis is lying now to BuzzFeed when he confessed to having been one of CNN’s sources for the story.

Big news backfires: Michael Cohen's attorney backtracks on Trump-Russia collusion claims

Why the US ruling class mourns John McCain

The Sunday television interview programs on five networks devoted the bulk of their coverage to McCain’s life and career and to fond reminiscences by well-heeled journalists and big-business politicians, Democratic and Republican. “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd noted that McCain was the single most-interviewed person on the program, appearing 73 times in his 36-year political career.

McCain was a right-wing Republican, but the loudest tributes to his political record are coming from Democrats. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer proposed renaming the US Senate’s Russell Office Building. Instead of Richard Russell of Georgia, a Democratic Party defender of Jim Crow segregation, the building would now be named after a Republican defender of wars in Vietnam, Central America, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc. Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said, “Right now I'm just heartbroken. I think America’s in tears about the loss of this great man.” Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted, “John McCain was an American hero, a man of decency and honor and a friend of mine. He will be missed not just in the US Senate but by all Americans who respect integrity and independence.”

In yet another characteristic display of lickspittling subservience to the ruling elite, “socialist” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: “John McCain’s legacy represents an unparalleled example of human decency and American service. As an intern, I learned a lot about the power of humanity in government through his deep friendship with Sen. Kennedy. He meant so much, to so many. My prayers are with his family.”

What does John McCain’s “legacy” consist of? How did he provide “an unparalleled example of human decency and American service”? McCain spent four years in the House of Representatives and 32 years in the US Senate, but it would be impossible to cite a single piece of legislation with which he was associated that benefited the broad mass of the American people. ... In the Senate, he was the lone Republican among the “Keating Five,” senators who lobbied federal regulators on behalf of savings and loan swindler Charles Keating in 1987. The political embarrassment caused by this episode, in which McCain narrowly avoided sanctions by the Senate Ethics Committee, led to his involvement in a decade-long effort to establish at least token limitations on corporate contributions to political campaigns. But the McCain-Feingold bill, as it became known, was ultimately gutted by the Supreme Court, which rejected most limitations on corporate purchasing of legislators as an infringement on “free speech.”

The overriding feature of McCain’s career, however, was his reflexive hawkishness on foreign policy. He supported war after war, intervention after intervention, always promoting the use of force as the primary feature of American foreign policy, and always advocating the maximum allocation of resources to fuel the Pentagon. In 2007 [...] McCain was interviewed on the “60 Minutes” program on CBS about the mounting opposition to the war in Iraq. “At what point do you stop doing what you think is right and you start doing what the majority of the American people want?” he was asked. McCain responded, “I disagree with what the majority of the American people want.” The Wall Street Journal hailed this response — which essentially rejected popular sovereignty as the basis of democracy — as “McCain’s Finest Hour.” It is this absolute commitment to the defense of American imperialism that endeared McCain to the US ruling elite as a whole and explains the outpouring of adulation over the weekend.

Whitewashing McCain's Warmongering By Journalists & Celebrities

The U.N. says the U.S.-backed Saudi coalition is committing war crimes in Yemen

A U.N. report published Tuesday claims that all sides involved in the conflict in Yemen have committed war crimes — singling out the U.S.-backed Saudi coalition as the worst offender. The 41-page document alleges that forces loyal to the Yemeni government, their Saudi-led backers and the rebel Houthi movement have all failed to minimize civilian casualties.

The U.N.-appointed panel accused the Saudi-led coalition of perpetrating the main attacks against civilians. “Coalition air strikes have caused most of the documented civilian casualties,” the report said. “In the past three years, such air strikes have hit residential areas, markets, funerals, weddings, detention facilities, civilian boats and even medical facilities.”

Just this month more than 50 children have been killed in coalition airstrikes, with at least 29 dying after a missile hit a school bus. Even though many of the victims were under the age of 10, a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition said the airstrikes “conformed to international and humanitarian laws.” ...

The U.N. panel also criticized the coalition’s blockade of the rebel-held port of Hodeidah and the effective closure of Sanaa airport, saying these actions amount to violations of international humanitarian law.

Europe can no longer rely on US for security, says Emmanuel Macron

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has warned that Europe can no longer depend on the US for its military defence and called for an urgent new European security policy in the face of rising nationalism and extremism. “Europe can no longer rely on the United States for its security,” Macron said in a foreign policy speech at what he called a “crisis moment” for European politics and global multilateralism. “It is up to us to guarantee European security.”

Macron vowed to put forward new proposals in the coming months for the EU to boost defence cooperation, as well as talks with Russia on their security relationship, an issue of concern for countries on Europe’s eastern edge. The pro-European French centrist warned that Europe was only just beginning a long battle to address rising nationalism and that the postwar, western-dominated world order was in danger. ...

Macron conceded that much had changed in the past year. He warned of an “awakening of nationalists and extremes” in Europe and hit out at what he called US president Donald Trump’s “aggressive isolationism”. Macron’s comments follow Trump’s repeated distancing himself from the Nato military alliance, which groups the US with most of Europe and has underpinned European security since the second world war. “The partner with whom Europe built the new post-world war order appears to be turning its back on this shared history,” he told French ambassadors gathered at the Élysée Palace.

1968 DNC Protests, 50 Years Later: Organizers Recall Coalition Building & Running Pig for President

World’s Leading Human Rights Groups Tell Google to Cancel Its China Censorship Plan

Leading human rights groups are calling on Google to cancel its plan to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, which they said would violate the freedom of expression and privacy rights of millions of internet users in the country.

A coalition of 14 organizations — including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, Access Now, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, PEN International, and Human Rights in China — issued the demand Tuesday in an open letter addressed to the internet giant’s CEO, Sundar Pichai. The groups said the censored search engine represents “an alarming capitulation by Google on human rights” and could result in the company “directly contributing to, or [becoming] complicit in, human rights violations.”

The letter is the latest major development in an ongoing backlash over the censored search platform, code-named Dragonfly, which was first revealed by The Intercept earlier this month. The censored search engine would remove content that China’s ruling Communist Party regime views as sensitive, such as information about political dissidents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest. It would “blacklist sensitive queries” so that “no results will be shown” at all when people enter certain words or phrases, according to confidential Google documents.

'They're liquidating us': AT&T continues layoffs and outsourcing despite profits

Though AT&T is earning record profits, spending billions on stock buybacks and is expecting an estimated windfall of $20bn in savings from Donald Trump’s tax reforms, it has continued to lay off workers and outsource jobs. ...

In the last seven years, AT&T has closed 44 call centers, according to the Communications Workers of America labor union. Four closures, including the facility in Harrisburg took place this year. While some workers are able to relocate to other call centers in the US, many are left jobless. For some, their jobs are sent offshore, where workers can be paid less than $2 an hour. ...

In the first six months of 2018, AT&T reported nearly $10bn in profit as the company seeks to finalize an $85bn merger with Time Warner. AT&T has spent $16.45bn on stock buybacks since 2013, including $419m in the second quarter of 2018, the most its spent on buybacks since 2014.

In a December 2017 news release advocating in favor of Trump’s tax cuts, AT&T promised bonuses of $1,000 to 200,000 employees over the next year. The news release omitted that unions had already previously negotiated those bonuses with AT&T before the tax cut bill was passed. AT&T also claimed it would invest $1bn into the United States, noting that on average a $1bn investment in the telecom industry creates 7,000 jobs. AT&T’s CEO, Randall Stephenson, reportedly promised to create those 7,000 “hard hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year” with the $1bn investment in anticipation of the tax cuts.

Instead, AT&T has laid off an estimated 7,000 workers since that announcement was issued, according to the Communication Workers of America union. AT&T disputed this number, arguing they have hired 8,000 employees in the United States so far this year and 87,000 over the past three years. Job security for current AT&T employees is a highly contentious issue between AT&T and the CWA.

Amazon’s Twitter ambassadors show hard work isn’t enough – employers expect forced cheerfulness too

Amazon wants you to know it is not the exploitative employer it is often made out to be. It wants you to know you should not believe nasty reports that its workers are forced to pee in bottles because they are not allowed toilet breaks. It wants you to know it is much maligned. Indeed, the e-commerce behemoth is so eager to communicate all these points that it has taken the unusual step of paying staff to tweet nice statements about it.

You may be asking yourself: is this real life or a dystopian fantasy? I’m afraid it is very much real life. It recently came to the internet’s attention that a number of Amazon warehouse workers have been scouring Twitter for criticism of the company and replying to it with suspiciously cheerful counterpoints. Last week, for example, an account called @AmazonFCShaye responded to a tweet that said the company should pay its workers more: “Did you know that Amazon pays warehouse workers 30% more than other retailers? I feel proud to work for Amazon – they’ve taken good care of me.”

@AmazonFCShaye, it turns out, is one of several Amazon “FC ambassadors”. FC doesn’t stand for forced cheerfulness. Rather, as Amazon said last week: “FC ambassadors are employees who have experience working in our fulfilment centres and choose to take the role of being an FC ambassador, do this full-time and receive the same compensation and benefits.” In other words, the warehouse workers tweeting super-specific statistics about how much better Amazon is than other companies are doing so because they are being paid to proselytise about how fulfilled they are by their fulfilment centre jobs. ...

On a broader level, Amazon’s ambassador programme is indicative of how emotional exploitation has become the norm in today’s economy. It is not enough to go to work and collect a paycheque any more; you are increasingly expected to profess a passion for your job. You are increasingly expected to act as if your work makes you happy.

As Bezos Forces Thousands to Rely on Food Stamps for Survival, Sanders Invites Struggling Amazon Workers to Share Their Stories

If you are one of the thousands of Amazon employees who has been forced to rely on federal assistance programs like food stamps and Medicaid to survive because CEO Jeff Bezos—the richest man in the world—refuses to pay a living wage or provide adequate benefits, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wants to hear your story. Just days after announcing his plan to introduce legislation that would force Amazon and other large American corporations to "get off welfare" and pay a 100 percent tax on the public assistance their low-paid workers receive, Sanders put out a call on Monday for current or former Amazon employees to share their experiences working for one of the world's largest retail giants, which has recently come under fire for its horrendous workplace practices. ...

Instead of paying people to tweet positive things about his corporation, Jeff Bezos needs to get off welfare, improve working conditions at Amazon's warehouses and pay his workers a living wage. https://t.co/5Wu8vvr0Aj

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) August 24, 2018

Sanders' call for Amazon employees to share what it's really like to work for the retail behemoth comes as the company is being accused of deploying an "army" of its employees on Twitter to defend its working conditions, benefits, and pay. As the Guardian reported last week, at least 16 Amazon "ambassador" Twitter accounts "have sprouted up on Twitter in response to negative comments about Jeff Bezos's wealth by Bernie Sanders, an alleged rise in health and safety complaints at Amazon facilities following Prime Day, and an April 2018 UK report that claimed Amazon employees skip bathroom breaks and urinate into bottles to ensure they make their quotas." While Amazon insists that actual employees are running these accounts and offering their honest assessment of the company, the Guardian notes that the accounts are all "remarkably uniform in look and tone" and "quite happy about how Amazon is treating them."

Nearly 3,000 people died in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria

A much-anticipated report out of George Washington University Tuesday shows that Hurricane Maria resulted in 2,975 excess Puerto Rican deaths in the six months after the storm’s landfall.
This latest death toll, gathered by a team of independent researchers, is more than twice the rate of what the Puerto Rican government admitted to earlier this month. It’s also an incredible increase from the earliest official estimate of 64 deaths, showing how the island’s devastation may have been underestimated for months after the storm hit shores last September, while many Americans there languished without electricity or access to medical care.

The study is based on mortality data that compares deaths from September 2017 to February 2018 to years prior, according to the Washington Post. Puerto Rico’s governor commissioned the George Washington University report in February after advocates decried the initial death toll estimate as egregiously low.

Police say 5 cops were justified in beating an unarmed black man nearly unconscious

Five police officers were justified in beating an unarmed 35-year-old man in Mesa, Arizona, until he was nearly unconscious, the Scottsdale Police Department said in a report released Monday. The report from a criminal investigation comes three months after the officers were caught on security camera footage punching, kneeing, and pulling Robert Johnson to the ground in the hallways of a Mesa apartment complex, on May 23.

“Based on the totality of the circumstances and all of the evidence in this case, our final determination is that no criminal charges are warranted against the involved officers as the use of force was legally authorized and justified under Arizona State Law,” a Scottsdale police statement says.

The Mesa PD officers responded to the complex after a woman called saying her ex-boyfriend was attempting to break into her home. When police arrived, they found the ex-boyfriend, 20-year-old Erick Reyes, and Johnson, who said he lived in the building, in the hallway of the woman’s apartment. Mesa police officers said Johnson resisted arrest and did not comply with their commands.

One of the officers is heard telling Johnson to sit on the floor, and another officer repeats the instruction to him, according to body camera footage. Johnson leaned back on the wall but didn’t go all the way down to the ground. That’s when the surveillance video, which was released in June, shows all five officers surrounding him and punching him to the ground. One officer can be heard saying, “See what happens. See what happens.”

Shorter Donna Brazile, "Fuck you losers, we're still going to rig the goddamned elections any way we bloody well please."

Democrats voted to removed automatic delegates from the first round of voting. But we still have seats at the table. We are still in the room and very much capable of setting the menu.#PowerRising https://t.co/vuD99YqFe2

— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) August 25, 2018

Donna Brazile Admits Donors Control Democrat Party

North Carolina gerrymandered districts to benefit Republicans, court rules

A federal court has ruled that North Carolina Republicans illegally drew up US congressional districts in the state to benefit their party, suggesting that new lines should be crafted before November’s midterm election.

The three-judge panel for the US district court for the middle district of North Carolina said in a 321-page opinion that Republican legislators responsible for the map conducted unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering to dilute the impact of Democratic votes.

“That is precisely what the Republican-controlled North Carolina General Assembly sought to do here,” the opinion, published on Monday, said. The panel gave parties until Thursday to file their recommendations to fix the problem. The decision could have national implications in this November’s battle for control of Congress.

Hothouse Earth Is Merely the Beginning of the End

“Our future,” scientist James Lovelock has written, “is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.” ... This summer, wildfires have been burning in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland and Germany. There are even wildfires in the Arctic. High temperature records have been shattered all around the globe, including in Death Valley, California, which set the record for the hottest month ever recorded on the planet, with 21 days over 120 degrees. Our world is aflame.

I doubt any of this would surprise Lovelock, who is one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century, as well as one of the most articulate prophets of doom. As an inventor, he created a device that helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer and jump-start the environmental movement in the 1970s. And as a scientist, he introduced the revolutionary theory known as Gaia — the idea that our entire planet is a kind of super-organism that is, in a sense, “alive.” Once dismissed as New Age quackery, Lovelock’s vision of a self-regulating Earth now underlies virtually all climate science. ...

The idea that the Earth’s climate system has certain tipping points, or thresholds, is nothing new. Small changes in the temperature of the Southern Ocean, for example, might have big implications for the West Antarctic ice sheet, leading to an ice cliff collapse that could raise sea levels by 10 feet or more in a very short (geologically-speaking) period of time. Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State, has described the Earth’s climate as a highly complex system that, based on small forces that are still only dimly understood, tends to lurch from one steady state to another. “You might think of the climate as a drunk,” Alley wrote in his great book The Two Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future, which was first published in 2000. “When left alone, it sits; when forced to move, it staggers.” ... “The heat and fires we’re seeing this summer is worrisome,” Alley tells Rolling Stone, in his typically understated way. “There are certainly human fingerprints on a lot of it.” But, Alley points out, this is just the beginning. As of now, the Earth has warmed just 1 degree Celsius. “Dealing with what we’re seeing now is the easy stuff,” Alley says. “With each additional degree of warming, the impact will be greater.” Alley is most concerned about physical systems with likely tipping points, such as the West Antarctic ice sheet. ...

But it’s the tipping point in human systems that worry Alley the most. He points to the recent drought in the Middle East, which was a key driver in the Syrian civil war. “You can see the resilience of different political systems. During the drought, Israel was OK. But Syria was not.” Maybe this is the summer that we figure out that, as Lovelock put it, our engines are about the fail and we are indeed headed over the falls. But I thought that after Hurricane Katrina, too. And after Sandy. Instead, America elected a president who thinks climate change is a hoax and tweets insanely about how California doesn’t have enough water to fight the fires because it has “diverted” rivers into the Pacific. ... What’s at stake, Lovelock believes, is civilization. ... What about humans?  When asked about this recently, Lovelock told the BBC: “Don’t you consider it possible that we’ve had our time?”

French environment minister quits live on radio with anti-Macron broadside

Emmanuel Macron’s climate commitment to “make this planet great again” has come under attack after his environment minister dramatically quit, saying the French president was not doing enough to meet environmental goals. Nicolas Hulot, a celebrity environmentalist and former TV presenter, announced on a radio breakfast show that he was leaving the government over “an accumulation of disappointments” with its measures to tackle climate change, defend biodiversity and address other environmental threats.

Hulot’s departure is a major blow to Macron and calls into question the president’s credibility on the environment. Though he did not make environmental issues a major part of his election manifesto last year, he subsequently attempted to push them to the forefront as a symbol of progressive politics and to counter Donald Trump’s decision to take the US out of the Paris climate accord.

Hulot, who was one of the most popular ministers in government, told French radio the “mini steps” taken by France and other nations to slow global warming and avert a collapse of biodiversity were inadequate. “I don’t want to create the illusion that we’re facing up to it,” he said. “I can’t lie to myself any more.”

Hulot resigns: Environment policy "is about making money, not preparing the future"

'Apocalyptic threat': dire climate report raises fears for California's future

California’s summer of deadly wildfires and dangerous heatwaves will soon be the new normal if nothing is done to stop climate change, a report released on Monday warns. City heatwaves could lead to two to three times as many deaths by 2050, the report says. By 2100, without a reduction in emissions, the state could see a 77% increase in the average area burned by wildfires. The report also warns of erosion of up to 67% of its famous coastline, up to an 8.8F (4.9C) rise in average maximum temperatures, and billions of dollars in damages.

“These findings are profoundly serious and will continue to guide us as we confront the apocalyptic threat of irreversible climate change,” said the state’s governor, Jerry Brown, in a tweet about the report, the fourth statewide climate change assessment released since 2006. Rising temperatures could lead to up to 11,300 additional deaths in 2050, the report says, and the overall number of days marked by extreme heat will “increase exponentially in many areas”.

The effects of those extreme heat days will probably weigh most heavily on the state’s most vulnerable residents, including the more than 100,000 people who are homeless in California, many of whom live on the streets without reliable access to fans, air conditioners, or running water.

Jerry Brown Warns of “Apocalyptic Threat” of Climate Change, But Carries on Drilling

Back in April this year, nearly 800 civil society groups formed a coalition to urge California Governor Jerry Brown, to take immediate action against fossil fuel extraction in the state before his term ends. The campaign kicked off five months before Brown’s “Global Climate Action Summit, which will occur in San Francisco next month. In a video to promote the summit Brown says we all have to fight the forces of carbonization.

A letter from the civil society campaign to Brown sent in April read: “In September, as you welcome the world to San Francisco for the Global Climate Action Summit, you have an opportunity to set the new standard for global climate leadership.” It called on Brown, who has positioned himself a leader on climate change, to ban new oil and gas permits and to announce a phase out of fossil fuel production in the state.

On September 8, to coincide with the Climate Action summit, thousands will march in San Francisco for the largest climate march the West Coast has ever seen. ...

Brown’s hypocrisy is plain to see. Whereas he says he is a climate leader, since he has been state Governor, his officials have approved over 21,000 new oil and gas wells. And the drilling of those wells is causing climate change. Something that is set to get worse. ... Brown cannot warn of an apocalyptic threat of climate change and be a force for carbonization at the same time by carrying on drilling. He is running out of time to be a true climate leader. This really is Brown’s last chance.

Air pollution causes ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence, study reveals

Air pollution causes a “huge” reduction in intelligence, according to new research, indicating that the damage to society of toxic air is far deeper than the well-known impacts on physical health. The research was conducted in China but is relevant across the world, with 95% of the global population breathing unsafe air. It found that high pollution levels led to significant drops in test scores in language and arithmetic, with the average impact equivalent to having lost a year of the person’s education.

“Polluted air can cause everyone to reduce their level of education by one year, which is huge,” said Xi Chen at Yale School of Public Health in the US, a member of the research team. “But we know the effect is worse for the elderly, especially those over 64, and for men, and for those with low education. If we calculate [the loss] for those, it may be a few years of education.” Previous research has found that air pollution harms cognitive performance in students, but this is the first to examine people of all ages and the difference between men and women.

The damage in intelligence was worst for those over 64 years old, with serious consequences, said Chen: “We usually make the most critical financial decisions in old age.” Rebecca Daniels, from the UK public health charity Medact, said: “This report’s findings are extremely worrying.”

The new work, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analysed language and arithmetic tests conducted as part of the China Family Panel Studies on 20,000 people across the nation between 2010 and 2014. The scientists compared the test results with records of nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide pollution. They found the longer people were exposed to dirty air, the bigger the damage to intelligence, with language ability more harmed than mathematical ability and men more harmed than women. The researchers said this may result from differences in how male and female brains work.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Margaret Thatcher and misapplied death etiquette

Republicans Who Oppose Teacher Protests Are Losing Their Primaries, Even in Red States

The Real Russian Interference in US Politics

The Ugly Truth About the Supposedly Booming U.S. Economy

A “Social Wealth Fund” Could be the Next Big Idea

'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention

A Little Night Music

Jimmy McGriff & Hank Crawford Quartet - Everyday I Have The Blues

Jimmy McGriff - All About My Girl

Jimmy McGriff - Ain't It' Funky Now

Jimmy McGriff - Turn Blue

Jimmy McGriff - South Wes

Jimmy McGriff - The Worm

Jimmy McGriff & Hank Crawford Quartet - Red Top