Grand Rapids, Michigan, Climate Update for April 2018

Grand Rapids, Michigan, Climate Update for April 2018

Max temp 74, Mean Max temp 79

Min temp 16, Mean Min temp 22

Av temp 40.1, Mean Av temp 46.5

Precip 2.85, Mean precip 3.30

Snowfall 6.0, Mean snowfall 2.4

Heating Degree Days 740, Mean HDD 553

Using HDD, the cold season to date has been just 1% warmer than the mean. Season to date HDD were 6339 vs. season to date mean of 6403.

Under Trump the FBI is still corrupt, won't investigate personal messages of pro-Hillary agents Lisa Page and her lover Peter Strzok

John Boltneck Kerry, private citizen, has been conducting foreign policy secretly with Iran

A commenter to the story here has it about right:

The liberal media was quick to label possible foreign contact by the Trump campaign as a Logan Act violation. Kerry pursuing his own foreign policy out of office ... no problem. Hypocrite, thy name is liberal democrat.

Maybe dropouts from the labor force were a cause of the Great Recession rather than a result

The high rate of dropping out of the labor force we've become accustomed to since the Great Recession actually predates it by a decade, suggesting that dropping out may be a cause of the Great Recession rather than a result of it. Continued slow growth of GDP since the Great Recession can also be explained by the absence of these inputs.

The crisis in growth of personal income since 2007 shows why it feels like a depression

The 13.9% growth of personal income between 2007 and 2017 is the worst since the Great Depression and is 60% off the average growth rate of 35%.

Somebody should elect somebody to do something about this!

Jeffrey Snider: Fix the suffering in the labor force or next time you might actually get socialism

Here:

The American labor force is suffering like it hasn’t since the 1930’s, but nobody seems willing to challenge Economists’ easily disproved claims.

Into that vacuum had swept Mr. Trump himself, but also Mr. Sanders. The mere election of the former didn’t immediately fix the problem; rather, things have gotten worse since the campaign ended (to be clear, it had nothing to do with Trump . . .). May Day is still only trending toward becoming an official holiday.

Bill Cosby's lasting contribution to America: Finally SOMEONE gets child rapist Roman Polanski booted from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

There was NO WAY the black guy was going to get expelled while the white guy got to remain.

Way to go Brownie!

Story here.

Failure of nerve: America has basically ceded control of the South China Sea to China since the 1950s

China has been playing a long game while America has dithered year after year with changeable, irresolute leadership. This is one important reason China laughs at America's political system. It knows it can get away with this stuff as long as it waits us out. Right now it is howling with laughter as everyone is consumed with Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels while it installs offensive missiles with impunity. We are a joke! And one day this joke may mean many dead Americans and the loss of freedom for countless others.   

From the story here:

While the installation of missile platforms are [sic] new to the Spratlys, China has already deployed similar systems in the nearby Paracel Islands. Satellite images of Woody Island, Beijing's military headquarters in the South China Sea, show deployments of Y-8 transport aircraft as well as J-10 and J-11 fighter jets. China first took possession of Woody Island in 1955 and has since outfitted it with ports, aircraft hangars, communication facilities, helipads and a runway. [Gregory] Poling notes that this particular outpost serves as a blueprint for China's future developments on Fiery Cross Reef, Subi Reef and Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands.

Laugh of the Day: If paying off a hooker means Trump has to leave office, Washington DC will be empty by tomorrow

A caller just now to the Rush Limbaugh show.

Roger Kimball calls Robert Mueller a fanatic, wants him shut down NOW

Here.

In a 2014 poll, 9.7% admitted to coming to work after smoking marijuana, which would have been 14.2 million Americans high at work at the time

Civilian employment averaged 146.3 million in 2014.

The story is here.

I'm sure Rex Tillerson is thrilled that the Boy Scouts is now just the Scouts

A Marist Poll from 2017 puts marijuana use monthly at almost 35 million US adults

The poll is here.

Apparently the 7.6 million missing jobs I keep writing about would be filled but for the fact that the unemployed are all smoking marijuana

From the story here:

[E]mployers ... are quietly taking what once would have been a radical step: They're dropping marijuana from the drug tests they require of prospective employees. Marijuana testing - a fixture at large American employers for at least 30 years - excludes too many potential workers, experts say, at a time when filling jobs is more challenging than it's been in nearly two decades.

The socialist backlash is coming

Rasmussen says 46% already favor government guaranteed jobs.

Hillary admits 41% of Democrats already are socialists.

All it will take for socialism to finally succeed is the onset of the depression the Feds keep intervening to prevent. One can intervene only so many times after which that doesn't work anymore. The problem is the interventions distort the course of capitalism so much that its natural mean-reverting ways will have to be by definition quite severe next time. Enter outright socialism because the young have been brainwashed against capitalism and will clamor for something other than capitalism or the Fed interventionism (aka state capitalism) which hasn't worked.

There will be blood.

China installs missiles in Spratly Islands, Admiral Harry Harris says China eroding the free and open international order

China has no business annexing this territory, and the international court of The Hague has so ruled already in July 2016.

Here:

China has installed anti-ship cruise missiles and surface-to-air missile systems on three of its fortified outposts in the South China Sea, sources tell CNBC. ... The Spratlys, to which six countries lay claim, are located approximately two-thirds of the way east from southern Vietnam to the southern Philippines.

May is the most wonderful time . . . of the year . . .

. . . to sell stocks if you've capitalized on the spectacular 9-year run since March 2009.

Getting in when stock valuations are cheap is key. So is getting out when those valuations soar as now. On the scale used in the chart, valuation right now is about 13.2, similar to the year 2000 when everything fell apart. At the January 2018 high valuation averaged 14.3.

Trump's impotence at the border is breeding not contempt exactly, but indifference

The lie of the day: "Mueller’s team continues to operate almost entirely leak-free"

Garrett M. Graff, "journalist", formerly of Politico, formerly of the Howard Dean presidential campaign, in Wired here.

What he really is is a Mueller toady:

"Mueller always knows more than we think".

"Mueller is building a bulletproof case".

"Mueller likely already knows how this story ends ... and it seems clear that Mueller might actually be relatively close to wrapping up the investigation".

Ilan Wurman calls for a return to interpretive departmentalism, siding with President Jackson and Justice Scalia

Here:

Thomas Jefferson, for example, pardoned individuals convicted under the Sedition Act because he believed that act to be unconstitutional notwithstanding contrary pronouncements by the courts, and Abraham Lincoln urged Congress to reenact the Missouri Compromise although it had been struck down as unconstitutional by the Court in Dred Scott. And Andrew Jackson vetoed the Second Bank of the United States, even though it had been approved by the Court.

“If the opinion of the Supreme Court covered the whole ground of this act,” Jackson wrote, “it ought not to control the coordinate authorities of this Government. The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others.”