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How can you find it trite when the main character, one Daniel Pecan Cambridge, narrates the small parts of his day-to-day life with an intelligence that's as humbling as Cambridge is neurotic?
Let's say my shopping list consists of two items: Soy sauce and talcum powder. Soy sauce and talcum powder could not be more dissimilar. Soy: tart and salty. Talc: smooth and silky. Yet soy sauce and talcum powder are both available at the same store, the grocery store. Airplanes and automobiles, however, are similar. Yet, if you went to a car lot and said, "These are nice, but do you have any airplanes?" they would look at you like you're crazy. So here's my point. The question I'm flipping around - what it means to act like myself - is related to the soy sauce issue. Soy and talc are mutually exclusive. Soy is not talc and vice versa. I am not someone else, someone else is not me. Yet we're available in the same store. The store of Existence. This is how I think, which vividly illustrates Mensa's loss.
That's pretty much what got me hooked. Daniel's story and his change throughout the book from, basically, a compulsive man who can't leave his California apartment, to a loving (and loved) human being, is fun to watch, but it's also very telling about human nature and our tendency to push people away using some of the strangest reasons - just to keep them from getting to know us for who and what we are.
Amazon may be big, but CA pols are craftier.
Amazon.com didn't stand a chance against the power-hungry California Legislature.
In the war between state politicians and the Internet's most popular one-stop shop, the former has thrown a last-second curveball that might derail Amazon's (and no doubt many voters') wants to strike down California's brand-new Internet sales tax.
It cut ties with about 10,000 California business partners.
And soon after, the big guns: The megastore effortlessly gathered signatures for a referendum that would strike down the law, set to go on the ballot next June. And the outcome of such a vote is obvious: What Joe Sixpack in his right mind would want to pay extra for his 2 a.m. Internet impulse buys?
However, as of a sneaky Thursday move by the Senate Appropriations Committee, it looks like California lawmakers may be holding the bigger guns in this battle: sneaky loophole knowhow in the state's convoluted lawmaking system.
In a bit of legislative legerdemain, the state Senate Appropriations Committee took the language of that law, tweaked it and put it into a so-called urgency bill.
As an urgency bill, the legislation, should it pass, would nullify the existing law, invalidating Amazon's voter petition, and the new law would be immune from a referendum.
The Times writes that Amazon won't comment, "apparently blindsided by the maneuver."
We would be, too. Not only would this sneak re-write of the Internet sales-tax law invalidate Amazon's petition -- if approved by the Senate, Assembly and Governor, many of whom have made their anti-Amazon positions clear -- but the way committee members just redrafted the bill will rid the online giant of some much-needed allies.
Now, instead of taxing Internet companies who make over $500,000 per year, the government says it will only tax those who make over $1 million per year.
This has already caused eBay to drop out of the resistance movement, reports the Times, and skeptical Republicans are being steadily lobbied by small-business advocates like the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.
So who'll win this economic war? It's hard to say: The California affiliates Amazon dropped in June might still be too butthurt to follow the mother ship's rally cry. And then there's the rest of California, uninvested in the issue aside from the fact that we'd rather not pay any more for our motivational books on tape than we already (embarrassingly) have to.
May the best conniving five-year-old win.
Truman declared an emergency when he felt thwarted. Trump should know: It didn’t end well.
Truman seized control of the country’s steel mills during the Korean War. It led to a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court.
The president was frustrated. He was at odds with Congress. The regular workings of government didn’t let him do what he desperately wanted to do. So he went on national television to explain why a public policy impasse amounted to a national emergency allowing him to take extraordinary action.
Truman went on to explain why he had just directed his secretary of commerce to seize control of the country’s steel mills. An ongoing dispute between the companies and their workers threatened to deny U.S. troops the weapons and tanks they needed to fight in the Korean conflict.
“I would not be faithful to my responsibilities as president if I did not use every effort to keep this from happening,” he argued.
Truman’s actions 67 years ago sparked a fiery constitutional dispute that rocketed to the Supreme Court. And now, as President Trump considers claiming similar emergency powers to build his long-promised border wall despite lawmakers’ refusal to fund it, scholars are looking back at Truman’s gambit and the legal precedent it created. Suddenly, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, a great test of presidential power, is in vogue again.
Like Truman, Trump used a White House address to make the case that the United States is facing a security crisis at its southern border. Then he followed up with a trip to Texas Thursday as the administration began looking for unused money in the Army Corps of Engineers budget for the $5.7 billion the president says is needed for the wall.
A Trump declaration of a national emergency could end a partial government shutdown now in its third week, but will likely lead to congressional and court challenges.
Truman’s conflict was much different. In 1950, North Korea had invaded South Korea, and Truman, declaring an emergency, had sent troops for what he hoped would be a short deployment to defend a U.S. ally. But the Chinese joined the North, and the conflict raged on.
At home, Truman struggled to keep inflation in check with a new law that allowed him wartime wage and price controls over strategic industries. With the price of steel held in check, the companies refused to meet workers' demands for a pay increase, and by the end of 1951, a strike was looming.
Truman wanted to avoid disrupting the steel supply while U.S. troops were fighting, and he did have a weapon to head off the strike. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act gave the president authority, through court order, to suspend a strike for 80 days in cases in which national security was at risk. But Truman was a labor ally (Taft-Hartley had passed over his veto), and he didn’t want to anger his base.
But first, Truman ordered the parties before a special Wage Stabilization Board to work out a deal. The board recommended a wage increase, but the steel companies refused unless they were allowed to hike steel prices. Truman effectively accused the industry of trying to profiteer during an emergency, and after further negotiations collapsed and the unions voted to walk out, he went on the air to announce his intent to take over the mills. He had signed Executive Order No. 10340 before going on camera.
The steel companies reportedly had lawyers at the door of a federal judge within an hour of the broadcast. The arguments and appeals flew up the judicial chain until landing before the Supreme Court on May 12, 1952.
The government argued that even though the Constitution did not explicitly empower the president to seize private property, his role as commander in chief gave him authority to do so in times of national emergency. The steel companies argued that not only did Truman lack the power to take over their mills, but also that Congress had considered granting him such powers while debating the Taft-Hartley Act and deliberately rejected it. Instead, it had approved another mechanism to protect national security by giving the president authority to suspend a strike.
By a vote of 6 to 3, the justices sided with the steel companies. The “President’s power, if any, to issue the order must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself,” Justice Hugo Black wrote in the majority opinion.
“Youngstown is accepted by both liberals and conservatives as the clearest guide to presidential power under the Constitution,” he said.
It was a sharp rebuke, and Truman immediately ordered the mills returned to company control, heading off a deep constitutional crisis. But it didn’t stop future presidents from testing the limits of their emergency powers. During a wildcat postal strike in 1970, President Richard M. Nixon declared a national emergency and deployed the National Guard to deliver the mail.
In 1976, Congress tried to rein in presidents with the National Emergencies Act, which placed various limits on how executives could declare emergencies and how long they would be in effect. Still, by renewing some declarations year after year, from one administration to another, presidents have managed to use the power dozens of times. Jimmy Carter’s emergency sanctions against Iran are still in effect, as are George W. Bush’s against Zimbabwe and Barack Obama’s against Syria, among about 30 others.
In that tangled legal landscape, scholars don’t know how the courts would respond to a Trump declaration of a border emergency. The president’s critics say Truman’s example won’t work in his favor.
"If Harry Truman couldn’t nationalize the steel industry during wartime, this president doesn’t have the power to declare an emergency and build a multibillion-dollar wall on the border,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said on CNN over the weekend.
Truman himself was shocked by his Supreme Court smackdown, in part because he thought his arguments were sound. “The president has the power to keep the country from going to hell,” he said in response to critics. But more so because the court was full of justices appointed by Democrats, including four Truman had elevated himself.
Truman would complain about the case for the rest of his life. But his personal pique was mollified a few weeks after the ruling, Rosen said, when Justice Black invited him to a party at his house with other jurists.
“Hugo, I don’t much care for your law, but, by golly, this bourbon is good,” he said.
Oct. 17 (UPI) -- Authorities in California captured a wayward bull that escaped from a petting zoo and ran down a busy street in Los Angeles County.
The Crescenta Valley Sheriff's Station posted a photo to Facebook showing the bull strolling down a La Crescenta road next to a car in the late afternoon Saturday.
Sheriff's Lt. Mark Slater said the bull escaped from a petting zoo at a nearby pumpkin patch sometime after 5 p.m. Saturday.
"Deputies were forced to become cowboys and they herded the bull until his trainer arrived," the sheriff's station's Facebook post reads.
Slater said the deputies worked to corral the bull into a corner.
"We were initially trying to wrangle and get him into a safe location because he was meandering through traffic," he told the Los Angeles Times.
Slater said the bull's owner was able to lasso the bovine and lead it back to the petting zoo.
Comcast must be getting bored with its natural monopoly over cable and internet service because it’s launching a new wireless service in partnership with Verizon.
CEO of Comcast Brian Roberts announced the move today during a Comcast webcast. The new Comcast offering will reportedly combine hotspot access with access to the Verizon wireless network. But that’s just about all we know right now. Comcast is clearly trying to branch out from providing a horrible cable and home internet experience and also offer what will probably be a horrible mobile data experience. You can’t escape!
We have an existing [Mobile Virtual Network Operator] agreement and we were informed that they are going to execute on that agreement and the agreement is the agreement. I am not going to get into whether we’re discussing of revising the agreement or the terms and conditions of that, since it’s under NDNA and we will see how this plays out. Obviously the industry is moving. Cable is going to do what they are going to do and we’re going to do what we’re going to do.
So something is going to happen involving Comcast and a new wireless service. Again, you can’t escape the tendrils of this giant telecom cthulhu.
GENEVA (AFP) Relief agencies are having trouble obtaining funds to help millions of Pakistan flood victims as the country suffers from an image deficit, a UN spokeswoman said Monday. We note often an image deficit with regards to Pakistan among Western public opinion, said Elizabeth Byrs, spokeswoman of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. As a result, Pakistan is among countries that are poorly financed, like Yemen, she added. The United Nations has been struggling to obtain 460 million dollars to provide emergency aid to six million victims of the country ravaged by heavy flooding. Only a fifth of the required funds have been pledged since the appeal was launched on August 11. Melanie Brooks, spokeswoman of the humanitarian group Care International stressed that the UN must explain to donor states that the money is not going to go to the hands of the Taliban. The victims are the mothers, the farmers, children. But in the past, information linked to Pakistan has always been linked to Taliban and terrorism, she said. The UN said billions would be needed in the long term to reconstruct the villages, infrastructure and harvests devastated by the floods.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has violated his own conflict of interest guidelines, an ethics advocacy group says. The alleged conflict stems from the appointment of a KPMG official as Liberal Party treasurer shortly after a Liberal-dominated parliamentary committee halted its investigation into the accounting firm's offshore tax scheme in the Isle of Man.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau violated his own conflict of interest guidelines, according to NDP Leader Tom Mulcair and the head of Democracy Watch, an advocacy group on government ethics.
The alleged conflict stems from the appointment in June 2016 of John Herhalt, the national "public sector leader" for accounting firm KPMG, as treasurer of the Liberal Party. That appointment came the same month that a Liberal-dominated parliamentary committee halted its investigation into KPMG's offshore tax dodge in the Isle of Man, according to an investigation by CBC's The Fifth Estate.
"Last year Liberal MPs voted to kill the investigation into KPMG, that same month a director from KPMG was appointed treasurer for the Liberal Party," Mulcair said in question period Tuesday. "Ending the KPMG investigation and then hiring somebody from KPMG — that's called a conflict of interest."
Trudeau replied that his government had invested $440 million in the 2016 budget to aid in hunting down tax evaders. He criticized Mulcair for suggesting the finance committee's Liberal MPs were taking their marching orders from the Prime Minister's Office.
"It's troubling to hear the member opposite call into question the independent work of committees," Trudeau said. "The fact is we respect the work that the finance committee does and thank them for their hard work."
Though Herhalt retired from KPMG in 2013, he told CBC he later returned on contract to the firm in 2016 and remained there until October — five months after he was chosen to oversee the party's finances. To this day, he responds to his KPMG email in communications with The Fifth Estate.
Herhalt's direct KPMG phone number and voicemail were still active Monday.
The Liberal Party said the treasurer is a volunteer, non-voting position.
Duff Conacher, who lectured on government and ethics at the University of Ottawa and is co-founder of Democracy Watch, says that the prime minister violated his own ministerial conduct guidelines.
"Prime Minister Trudeau set out standards himself in a document called Open and Accountable Government that says that you can't even be in the appearance of a conflict of interest," Conacher told The Fifth Estate's Gillian Findlay.
Trudeau, his principal secretary Gerald Butts, as well as federal MP Francis Scarpaleggia, all sit on the national board of the Liberal Party. The party constitution says the treasurer can only be appointed with the "consent" of the Liberal leader.
Conacher says the timing of the KPMG official's appointment to the Liberal board in June 2016 is significant.
That's because Liberal MPs decided to halt a parliamentary investigation into KPMG's tax dodge on June 7, 2016. The CRA has alleged that KPMG ran a "sham" offshore scheme for multimillionaire Canadians that was "intended to deceive" the federal treasury.
KPMG says Herhalt retired from the firm in 2013, where he had been a long-serving partner. Herhalt returned to the firm on contract in 2016 as "national public sector leader," a position he held while appointed to oversee the Liberal Party's finances.
KPMG and Herhalt say he stepped down from that position in October 2016. The accounting firm removed Herhalt's employee profile from its website after The Fifth Estate first contacted the Prime Minister's Office on May 4, 2017.
"That bio should have been removed upon John's retirement but was left on the website in error and was removed this afternoon," KPMG said in a statement to The Fifth Estate.
In an email to The Fifth Estate, Herhalt, who did not work in the tax division at KPMG, says he never lobbied anyone in government for any reason. He says his position as Liberal Party treasurer is unpaid.
"My volunteer service with the Liberal Party of Canada has only pertained to assisting the party with administrative matters. As you will understand, that work as a volunteer with the party has no relation to policy decisions, the government of Canada or the independent work of parliamentary committees and MPs," Herhalt wrote.
Federal documents show KPMG registered in 2016 to lobby the Department of Finance, the Canada Revenue Agency and the Prime Minister's Office.
The PMO declined to provide details about any lobbying by KPMG officials.
"Staff in the Office of the Prime Minister meet regularly with stakeholders and organizations from across the country," a spokesperson said in a statement.
For its part, KPMG said in a statement that while it may have registered to lobby the PMO in 2016, it never did.
Parliamentary committees are set up to act independently from government, but Conacher says the optics of the committee's decision to stop its probe of KPMG are a problem for Trudeau.
"The prime minister has some control over that committee and those Liberal MPs and has a representative from cabinet sitting on that committee," Conacher said. "The prime minister cannot be sitting on a board with a representative of a company that that committee is investigating. It's a clear conflict of interest."
Lawyers for KPMG had argued it would be unfair for the probe to continue while a tax court case involving one of the accounting firm's clients was ongoing.
In a statement, the Prime Minister's Office said the committee investigating KPMG decided "independently" when to stop hearing witnesses. The committee issued its report on October 2016, but made no explicit references to the KPMG tax scheme in its recommendations.
A spokesperson for the Liberal Party said their national board never discussed the parliamentary inquiry into KPMG.
In a statement, the Liberal Party said "Mr. Herhalt's role with the Liberal Party of Canada is as a volunteer, and has consisted strictly of assisting the board on matters related to party administration and finance, not policy decisions."
*NEW YORK, NY -– BET Networks’ Music Matters is teaming up with S.O.B.’s, the well-known live music venue in SoHo to showcase up and coming new artists.
S.O.B’s is known as a breeding ground for emerging trends. Artists like Kanye West, John Legend, Erykah Badu, Common, Drake, Ryan Leslie and many others performed at S.O.B.’s early on in their careers.
“BET has a stellar 32-year history of breaking some of the biggest artists in music. We continue this tradition through BET Music Matters where we celebrate some of the best talent on the planet. It’s an honor to bring The BET Music Matters brand to such a legendary home like S.O.Bs. We are excited to provide a platform where fans can witness history in the making from the next generation of superstars,” said Kelly Griffin, BET Sr. Director of Music Programming.
The first monthly showcase at S.O.B.’s takes place on Tuesday, October 2 at 8:00 p.m. with performances by Gwen Bunn, Young Savage, Vaughn Anthony, Skyzoo and Q. Parker. The showcase will be hosted by Buttahman and Vanessa Fraction. S.O.B.’s is located at 200 Varick St., NYC, 10014. Guests must be 21 or older to attend.
BET’s Music Matters is an initiative dedicated to seeking out emerging artists devoted to creating music of the highest quality. It’s is a powerful way for new musicians to connect with existing fans and to be introduced to a wider audience.
Also, please visit our brand-new press website, www.BETpressroom.com, for BET downloadable series info, photos and videos.
Launched in 2010, the BET Music Matters initiative highlights emerging new artists by showcasing their talents through live performances including monthly showcases and the Music Matters Tour. Music Matters has helped propel the careers of artists such as Marsha Ambrosius, J. Cole, Melanie Fiona, Miguel, Estelle, Elle Varner, Eric Roberson, Big K.R.I.T., Kendrick Lamar, Emeli Sande’, Mali Music, Luke James and more. For more information on BET’s Music Matters initiative visit www.BET.com/musicmatters.
BET Networks, a subsidiary of Viacom Inc. (NASDAQ: VIA, VIAB), is the nation’s leading provider of quality entertainment, music, news and public affairs television programming for the African-American audience. The primary BET channel reaches more than 90 million households and can be seen in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and sub-Saharan Africa. BET is the dominant African-American consumer brand with a diverse group of business extensions: BET.com, a leading Internet destination for Black entertainment, music, culture, and news; CENTRIC, a 24-hour entertainment network targeting the 25- to 54-year-old African-American audience; BET Digital Networks – BET Gospel and BET Hip Hop, attractive alternatives for cutting-edge entertainment tastes; BET Home Entertainment, a collection of BET-branded offerings for the home environment including DVDs and video-on-demand; BET Event Productions, a full-scale event management and production company with festivals and live events spanning the globe; BET operates in the United Kingdom and oversees the extension of BET network programming for global distribution.
Allen Sherrod surfaced from a stormy sea nearly three years ago with swollen hands and scabbed legs, weak but triumphant.
He'd spent two days — 48 hours and 13 minutes, to be exact — at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, 900 feet from the shore of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. It was a dive that earned Sherrod a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.
But it didn't last long. A British diver stayed submerged in the Mediterranean, off Malta, for 49 hours and 56 minutes in October of last year.
Now Sherrod, 48, wants his record back. The Weeki Wachee man plans to slip under the surface of the ocean again Thursday morning, in the same place he last claimed victory.
This time, if all goes as planned, he won't come back up for 55 hours.
"It's not a competition against any person," said Sherrod, a former Scuba instructor and dive shop owner. "It's kind of a competition against the environment. I mean, the environment's who you're going against. Your mind and the environment."
He said his goal is to raise awareness of charities that'll benefit from fundraisers held during the dive, including Diveheart, which gives scuba opportunities to people with disabilities. He also wants to draw attention to the artificial reef just off Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, and the area's world-class diving.
"I'm pretty excited for him, but on the other hand, you worry about him, too," said Craig Dietrich, a Jupiter-based diver and underwater photographer recruited to document Sherrod's stay at the bottom of the Atlantic. "It's a pretty big challenge."
While submerged, Sherrod will limit his diet to Gatorade and a chocolate-flavored energy drink. He'll watch TV on an iPod in a waterproof case — mostly SpongeBob SquarePants, a favorite of his — and communicate through his "self-contained underwater loudspeaker" invention, called SCUL.
And he'll try to steal some sleep.
Sherrod said he plans to take it minute by minute, waiting for the minutes to turn into hours and then days.

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