In his latest blog post (link) my friend Bruce Arthurs recalls an incident from his military service in the 1970s when someone bragged to him about molesting a woman in their photography class, and Bruce’s later regret not to have said or done anything. Bruce is an excellent writer, and this is very much worth reading.
by 
In this web-only extra from Samatha Bee’s Full Frontal, Trump supporters express doubts about Hillary Clinton’s qualifications. It runs under a minute, with the single best bit starting 39 seconds in. The interviewer is Allana Harkin.
by Late night host and alumnus of SNL‘s Weekend Update segment Seth Meyers talks about the odd defenses offered up by Trump’s defenders (and Trump himself) against charges that he sexually harassed and assaulted women. Mike Huckabee’s analogy to the film Jaws is particularly weird and unintentionally funny.
As Meyers mentions in passing, it isn’t just that a number of women claim he forced unwanted attention and kisses on them, it’s that Trump himself said he’d done it on the notorious Access Hollywood tape. He also told Howard Stern that a perk of owning the Miss Universe Pageants was being able to go where no other man was allowed and ogle beauty contestants in their dressing rooms, something now confirmed by several of the women who competed in the Miss Universe and Miss Teen Universe contests. One member of the latter group reportedly ogled by Trump was 15 at the time.
by In a post back in April I embedded a video featuring dialog from the sitcom Friends dubbed over scenes from the HBO series Game of Thrones. Here’s a sequel from the same YouTube channel that’s not quite as good but has its moments, at least if you’re familiar with both programs:
by Even people who inject themselves with drugs almost always realize the risk of sharing needles, and they do it anyway. That’s pretty much what it means to be an addict.
So some places have experimented with making clean hypodermic syringes easy to obtain through a needle exchange program. Anyone who brings in a used one can get a replacement at no charge, with no risk of arrest on drug charges. At first glance this might seem like a way of promoting drug use and a waste of tax dollars, but experience suggests it’s the opposite. For one thing, when addicts come in to exchange needles they’re usually offered information on treatment programs, and when there are enough openings, a lot of addicts actually do enter them and some — not all, but enough to make it worth the effort — wind up getting off drugs.
Of course, needle exchange programs do cost money, but so the spread of HIV, hepatitis, and other infections costs even more. Laws restricting or prohibiting needle-exchange programs are well-intentioned and based on reasonable concerns, but hard experience over decades suggests that in actual practice needle exchange programs reduce cases of dangerous infectious disease while not increasing IV drug use and saving taxpayers money.
Here’s more from pediatrician and medical school professor Aaron Carroll:
For sources, click on the link and look at the video’s description.
by Polymath, entrepreneur, and fast talker Hank Green offers up a really very useful set of YouTube tricks and techniques.
Here are the keys he mentions:
j – Jump back 10 seconds
k – Pause and un-pause playback
l – Leap forward 10 seconds
, (comma) – Move paused video back one frame
. (period) – Move paused video ahead one frame
< (shift-comma) - Slow down playback
> (shift-period – Speed up playback
M – Mute and un-mute the sound
Up arrow – Louder
Down arrow – Quieter
Left arrow – Jump back 5 seconds
Right arrow – Leap forward 5 seconds
0 – Go to the start of the video
1 – Go to a point 1/10 of the way through the video
2 – Go to a point 2/10 of the way through the video
…
9 – Go to a point 9/10 of the way through the video
And from comments on the video:
/ – Jump to the search box (works a lot of places in Google products)
O (shift-o) – Change the color of closed captions text
W (shift-w) – Change the color of closed captions background
(Turn on captions by mousing over the video and clicking the CC button.)
Finally, right-click on the video (or Control-click on a Mac) and you’ll get a menu of options that includes “Loop” and “Copy embed code” (which copies some HTML to your computer’s clipboard than can then be inserted into a web page to cause the video to appear there).
by
To save your needing to point it out, yes, Maher is a bit off about violent crime. The latest FBI statistics show it up a bit though still way lower than a quarter-century ago.
by Jackie Broyles is disgusted by Trump, and even Dunlap is offended.
A couple of footnotes might be in order to clarify possibly obscure references to people with actual lives who might not keep up with all the political minutiae:
by