We don't want 'em either

Story here.

The story behind "I Drive Your Truck"

Here.

Everyday is Memorial Day for Stephen Newman, 67

Editorial: 'Every day is Memorial Day': A lifetime of grief for a soldier's son

This guy's kidding about Amazon, right?

From the story here at CNBC:

Most people who cook and who don't leave the house often can probably get by pretty well using only Amazon services. You get can clothes, food and entertainment all from a single company, which is pretty wild. Who else offers that?

This guy obviously never heard of Meijer, a big box store where you can get your eyeglasses, prescriptions, haircut, banking, groceries, books, entertainment, electronics, hardware, automotive, pet supplies, flowers and on and on. And they deliver. There are others, and were.

Like Prange's.

Prange's was a department store in my hometown back in the 1960s. It had everything, from toys, sporting goods and groceries to shoes, clothing and furniture, and it delivered. My mom used it all the time. And for fun we went there, on the bus. It had a lunch counter where you could sit down and eat, and an express counter for fast food like foot long hot dogs, and right across from that a wonderful bakery, too.

What goes around comes around. 

Trump has cut federal employment by a miniscule 0.3% November 2016 through April 2018

9000 jobs, a fart in a windstorm.

Federal employment peaked in 1990 at 3.2 million and hasn't averaged below 2.7 million since the mid-1960s.

As with ending abortion, cutting federal spending is only aspirational for Republicans in the same way that ending poverty and securing equal pay are only aspirational for Democrats.

Actually delivering on these promises would mean having to come up with new ones, which is too much like work.

James Woods: Scum pardons scum

A Democrat is troubled by the FBI's excuses for Hillary's crimes

Saritha Prabhu in "I’m A Democrat, And The Left’s Russia Gaslighting Scares Me More Than Trump Does":

But I sense a bigger problem on the Democratic side, both among ordinary Democrats and prominent left-leaning pundits. In the Trump era, many seem unable to grasp irony and facts as it applies to their own side. For instance, when they talk about Trump violating the rule of law or obstructing justice, don’t they realize that some of us are thinking: Yes, but where were you when the FBI didn’t apply the rule of law to Hillary Clinton, and why didn’t you object when Hillary obstructed justice by deleting emails under subpoena? Shouldn’t the rule of law apply to everyone?

Despite what The New York Times now says, "Russia-Gate" has always been about the Steele dossier

So says Lee Smith for The Federalist in "How The Code Name ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ Undermines The FBI’s Russia Story":

After an October news report showed his dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, facts that further challenged the credibility of Steele’s research, the FBI investigation’s origin story shifted.

Meanwhile the trend toward lower minimum temperatures and lower maximum temperatures remains pronounced in Grand Rapids, Michigan: 3 degrees F lower over the last 120 years

Trend for average temperature in Grand Rapids, Michigan, indicates warming of about +0.5 degrees F over the last 120 years

That's it.

The not-much-of-a-muchness of it suggests that the growth of heat island effects could easily account for the observed results.

How the failed North Korean summit is just like Election 2016

The North Koreans simply failed to show up, as did Hillary's voters.

But as with the election, everyone will go on interminably with other attempts at explanation.

The idiots at Politico call the Hermit Kingdom "hermetic" after North Koreans fail to show up in Singapore

Hermits are recluses, the followers of Hermes something else again. Apparently the editor never learned the difference at Carleton College, or is himself a hermit, employing himself elsewhere.

Here:

The scuttling of the summit, which had been scheduled for June 12 in Singapore, is a blow to U.S. efforts to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, as well as Trump’s desire to land a legacy-making deal with the hermetic nation. ...

A senior White House official said the [North Korean] statement was simply the latest in a “trail of broken promises“ that led Trump to abandon the talks. Last week, North Korean officials failed to show up in Singapore for a series of meetings to lay the groundwork for the presidential summit, the official said, declaring: “They simply stood us up.“

In recent days, the North Koreans have also been unresponsive to U.S. attempts to reach them. “We simply couldn’t get them to pick up the phone,“ the official said. In addition, the North Korean government did not keep its promise to invite experts to observe what it has said was the closure of one of its nuclear test sites, casting doubt on what really happened, the official said.

GE's Obama champion Jeff Immelt took its bonds from AAA to one notch above junk, just like its products

From the story here, which never once mentions the problem of declining product quality:

It’s a bad day for a CEO when he announces he’s retiring and the stock goes up. That was Jeff Immelt’s day on June 12, 2017. ... Its bonds, rated triple-A when Immelt became chief, are now rated five tiers lower at A2 and trade at prices more consistent with a Baa rating, one notch above junk.

Did Immelt run GE into the ground?

Look no further than its light bulb business. While GE-branded lightbulbs shifted to compact-fluorescent technology and then to LED with big promises of longevity which never panned out (trust me, I have BAGS FULL of expensive, failed examples of each), it somehow stopped knowing how to make incandescent lightbulbs which worked, too.

I discovered this with its appliance bulbs. A couple of years ago I had to replace an oven bulb after a few years of service from the original one. None of the GE replacement bulbs lasted more than a day. When I went online I discovered the problem wasn't mine alone. Customers all over the country were having the same problem.

I've had a similar experience with another GE appliance component: gas oven igniters. The OEM part lasted just six years. The OEM replacement? Less than two.

Additionally, GE's long-term care insurance business appears to be tracking the same history. It sold off some of that business not long after 911, and what business it has kept in that line has been in the (bad) news lately as well. GE over-promised on some plans it issued and undercharged for them, not realizing that claims would exceed expectations, making the plans unprofitable. I'm sure that's unsettling to policy holders who trusted GE. How long before the long-term care plans of older customers stop working altogether?

And is it just a coincidence that the Fukushima nuclear reactors were of GE design?

Yeah, sure. Just a coincidence.

Hooah: US disinvites Chicoms from Hawaii naval exercises because of South China sea militarization

From the story here:

“The United States is committed to a free and open Indo-Pacific. China’s continued militarization of disputed features in the South China Sea only serve to raise tensions and destabilize the region. As an initial response to China’s continued militarization of the South China Sea we have disinvited the PLA Navy from the 2018 Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) Exercise. China’s behavior is inconsistent with the principles and purposes of the RIMPAC exercise,” Logan said.

“We have strong evidence that China has deployed anti-ship missiles, surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems, and electronic jammers to contested features in the Spratly Islands region of the South China Sea. China’s landing of bomber aircraft at Woody Island has also raised tensions,” he continued.

“We believe these recent deployments and the continued militarization of these features is a violation of the promise that President Xi made to the United States and the World not to militarize the Spratly Islands.”

This is so gay: Real men don't even do this for their girlfriends

Andrew McCarthy wonders why the FBI didn't give the Trump campaign a "defensive briefing" in early spring 2016

Instead, Comey waited until early January 2017 to do this, on instructions from Clapper.

Here:

There are many different ways the Obama administration could have reacted to the news that Page and Manafort had joined the Trump campaign. It could have given the campaign a defensive briefing. It could have continued interviewing Page, with whom the FBI had longstanding lines of communication. It could have interviewed Manafort. It could have conducted a formal interview with George Papadopoulos rather than approaching him with a spy who asked him loaded questions about Russia’s possession of Democratic-party emails.

Instead of doing some or all of those things, the Obama administration chose to look at the Trump campaign as a likely co-conspirator of Russia — either because Obama officials inflated the flimsy evidence, or because they thought it could be an effective political attack on the opposition party’s likely candidate.

From the “late spring” on, every report of Trump-Russia ties, no matter how unlikely and uncorroborated, was presumed to be proof of a traitorous arrangement. And every detail that could be spun into Trump-campaign awareness of Russian hacking, no matter how tenuous, was viewed in the worst possible light.

Rush is right: Comey admitted his dossier meeting with Trump was an "assignment"

Rush thinks Comey got this assignment from Clapper.

Notice that Comey admits he was acting at the behest of "all the intelligence chiefs". That would include Brennan at CIA, and presumably the heads of NSA, DIA and NGIA.

Also notice how Comey characterizes this "defensive briefing" of Trump as part of the FBI's "counterintelligence" operation. He's admitting a counterintelligence operation of a presidential campaign and transition was in existence, at the behest of Obama's government, and that the briefing was part of this.

The adversarial character of all this is hardly appreciated by your average observer. 

From the transcript, here, Meet the Press, 4/29/18:

CHUCK TODD:

When you told him the contents of the Steele Dossier, did you get the impression it was the first time he'd ever heard those allegations?

JAMES COMEY:

Yes. And I didn't give him the briefing on the whole Steele Dossier. My assignment was to brief him on a small part of it that was salacious and personal. And my sense was-- I didn't get a sense that he knew about those.

CHUCK TODD:

I want to re-ask a question that Reince Priebus asked you, and you said in your memo, why include that salacious part? If it was something that you thought was, you know, not that necessary to the investigation? Or did you think it was important that he knew?

JAMES COMEY:

We thought it was important that he knew. And I say, "We," meaning all the intelligence chiefs that put together the intelligence community assessment. We thought it was important that he know, because we knew, and we don't want to be holding that back from the new president. And also, the F.B.I.'s role is counterintelligence. And so we do a defensive briefing, whether or not something's true, just to let the person who might be the target of a leverage effort, of an effort by an adversary to gain advantage over him know that we have this information.

Chicoms admit human nature is evil, justifying imposition of tyrannical "social credit system" modeled on FICO

Apparently the model is the US FICO credit scoring system, except a low score on the Chinese version really emphasizes the socialism, meaning the State won't just stop you from getting a loan to buy a car or house, it will prohibit you from simply traveling, as a form of punishment. Socialism, you see, aims to be all-encompassing, a secular form of Puritanism.

From the propaganda source itself, globaltimes dot cn, here:

In 2014, China released an outline for building a government-led national social credit system, pledging to establish a set of laws and regulations regarding social credit, a credit reference system that covers the whole of society and a related reward and punishment system by 2020. Whether people have ridden the train without tickets, violated traffic laws, conducted heroic acts or performed exemplary acts are rated and the score plays a part in their life, determining whether he or she can buy a plane ticket, secure a loan etc.

In today's Chinese society, trustworthiness is not highly honored. That's why we see corruption, expired vaccines, commercial fraud, tax dodging and academic cheating from time to time. Take the arson case in Hangzhou last year. A nanny started a fire that killed a mother and her three children: She was in huge debt and starving for more money from her wealthy employer. It was a tragedy caused by the lack of a credit ranking system.

Brookings: Trump's record on GDP and investment is "middling"

Correctamundo.

Here.

Slate takes The Atlantic to task for not taking the 1% seriously enough

Here in "Actually, the 1 Percent Are Still The Problem".

Actually, the Reagan 1986 tax reform was the problem, but Jordan Weissmann never mentions it.

This despite his wonderful graph of the top 10% over time showing the 1% take-off after the reform. When it becomes easier for the already rich to take high incomes the ordinary way, like everyone else, because of low top marginal rates, less money ends up getting plowed back into productive purposes like it used to before 1986.

We keep believing the myth that "the rich are different than you and me", but they're not. They're as indolent, undisciplined and blinkered as any middle class family leveraged to the hilt which believes it deserves a house a little larger than it can afford, two car payments, the weekly fine dinner out and the expensive annual winter vacation.

The 1% aren't the problem. You will have them always with you, by definition. The problem is human nature, and government's failure to correct for it.

Say what you will about "Christian" belief, previously it at least curbed the 1%'s enthusiasm, with the stick of high marginal income tax rates and the carrot of low long term capital gains taxes.