Welcome to the working week. This week brings Halloween and the end of daylight savings time. Next Sunday, time “falls back”, and sadly, so will Democrats on the 4th of November.
But right now, it is time to get up and get going. Remember Disco? Get down with “Stomp” by the Brothers Johnson from their 1980 Platinum album, “Light up the Night”:
Quincy Jones worked with the Brothers Johnson on several of their albums for A&M. Michael Jackson does background vocals on another song on this album, “This Had to Be”. “Stomp” went to #1 on the R&B charts, #1 on the Dance singles chart and #7 on Billboard in 1980.
Here are a few hot links for your Monday breakfast buffet:
The Federal government’s 2014 fiscal year ended on September 30th. Here are 10 facts you may not know about the federal budget.
The Sunshine Act, a provision of the Affordable Care Act, requires doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device manufacturers to disclose their financial relationships. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has released the first set of data. It includes $3.5 billion paid by Big Pharma to over half a million doctors and teaching hospitals in the last five months of 2013.
For 18 years, thousands of students at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill had “no show” classes with no assigned readings, and no responsible faculty member. These classes had just one requirement: a final paper that no one ever read. In the most crucial finding, no player was paid for an autograph, so it’s just a minor scandal.
More about the Dallas Ebola screening fail and likely cover up. It appears that the hospital and the software firm retrofitted the data to the story. Once again, we may never know the truth about what happened in Dallas.
My Terrifying Night with Afghanistan’s Only Female Warlord. Commander Pigeon is a woman who kills men, and is known to everyone in Kabul, but we are just hearing about her.
Al-Qaeda has a new English magazine called “Resurgence.” It is 117 pages of glossy graphics and articles about jihad and the war against America, all in understandable English.
The Social Security office that hears appeals for disability benefits is 990,399 cases behind. This Washington backlog is bigger even than the backups at Veterans Affairs, where 526,000 people are waiting in line, and the patent office, where 606,000 applications are pending.
Politics never change. Here is a 1796 editorial by Alexander Hamilton that accuses Thomas Jefferson of an affair with a slave.
Bonus Monday Music: You probably have heard that Jack Bruce died on the 25th. As Bob Lefsetz says:
Clapton might be God, but there was no Cream without Jack Bruce. He was the one who sang most of the songs.
He wrote the riff that we all know from “Sunshine of Your Love”. Here is Cream doing “I Feel Free”. That’s Jack Bruce on the left, Ginger Baker on drums and Eric Clapton on the right:
Feel free all week, my friends.
Actually I did not hear that Jack Bruce died. Saw members of Cream in a jam session at the Cafe Au Go Go in the Village when I was in High School. It was a time that cannot be recreated.