Wednesday, July 25, 2018
Meanwhile the US east coast floods, but it's sunny and warm in Grand Rapids
Somebody's bad weather means good weather some place else.
"More than 26 million Americans are under a flood watch this morning, as severe weather grips the eastern U.S. for a fourth straight day. Beginning Wednesday, the storm will start to be felt further north, especially in New York. The heavy rain is expected to last through the weekend and possibly into next week. More than a foot of rain has fallen in parts of Maryland and Baltimore County is having its wettest July on record."
Greece can't get a break: First financial meltdown, then overrun by refugees, now swept by wildfires
"A pair of wildfires have [sic] left at least 79 people dead, and CBS News correspondent Seth Doane reports dozens are still believed to be missing. In some places around the Greek capital the fires were still burning. Elsewhere people began returning to neighborhoods left unrecognizable."
Drought conditions return to the southwest US, this time to Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado
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| Mid-July 2017 |
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| Mid-July 2018 |
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
Al Hunt's tortured logic about Wikileaks: Release e-mails when no one's paying attention in order to divert attention
Yeah, that makes sense!
Poor Al, he thinks voters are so stupid that whenever they hear or read something they are automatically programmed to do as instructed. Dumb lumps of clay are they. To believe otherwise would be unthinkable . . . to the journalist, the academic and the ad-man.
Here:
In early October, almost immediately after a video surfaced in which Trump bragged about groping women, WikiLeaks released its first leak of emails from the account of Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. This happened on a Friday afternoon, not the best time to leak a story if the object is to get attention; the intent was almost certainly to deflect attention from the Trump video. An indictment of 12 Russian operatives last week by Special Counsel Robert Mueller traced the email hacks to a Russian military intelligence unit.
HaHaHaHaHaHa!
And by the way, the indictment asserts, it traces nothing. That would be up to a jury to decide, you know, in an actual trial, which will never happen because it's a show indictment, not a real one.
Al, you are such a joke, just like your outfit with its "You have 6 free articles remaining" message. I'm counting the days.
William Murchison thinks The Wall was a ridiculous, unserious notion, analogous to Sanders' great, gooey slices of socialist pie in the sky
Here in The American Spectator:
Donald Trump, it could be argued, made the political environment safe for over-the-top declarations, e.g., he was going to wall off Mexico from the United States and make Mexico pay for the wall. I am not sure anyone outside the Trump bedroom ever took such a ridiculous notion seriously. It was an attention-grabber.
Mr. Murchison lives in the afterglow of a Reagan revolution which he thinks makes new schemes like Social Security and Medicare permanently unthinkable to the American people.
There are no lost causes because there are no permanent victories.
Ebola survives in woman for 13 months to infect and kill her oldest son after giving birth
From the story here:
Scientists do not know how the virus hid inside the woman for 13 months before re-emerging in lethal form. However, because she fell ill soon after giving birth, experts believe the immune suppression that normally occurs in pregnancy may have triggered a relapse. ...
A 15-year-old boy, the woman’s oldest son, was hospitalized vomiting blood. He tested positive for Ebola and, despite intensive treatment, died 10 days after his symptoms first appeared. ...
[S]urvivors must be tested for Ebola if they fall ill, even if they lack common Ebola symptoms.
Monday, July 23, 2018
Bill Clinton adviser Mark Penn: Mueller investigation is the progeny of Obama administration abuses
"We thought, after the actions of J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, that we had put in place safeguards to prevent such abuse. ... [T]he Page warrant is a significant indication that government officials are quick to assume the worst about disliked rivals and to use those beliefs to overcome the guardrails on their authority through this backdoor secret FISA process."
Read the whole scathing thing here.
Kevin Williamson asserts but does not prove that conservatives have made peace with New Deal economic nationalism
Here.
Williamson simply presupposes that there is a coherent Trump program to sign up for, not to mention that there was a coherent Obama program, neither of which is true. Lots of Republicans have "made peace" with Social Security, but that doesn't mean they have become New Deal ideologues. Williamson ignores their political pragmatism, and Trump's.
The essay is otherwise interesting. He might have added Reagan to his so-called new nationalist "Roosevelt-Obama-Trump model", but not wanting to inflame too much is understandable given his recent history:
"Conservatives have a conflicted view of government. Many who revile FDR as the root of all welfare-statist evil revere Ronald Reagan, who insisted all his life that he was an FDR Democrat whose former party had simply gone insane."
Yes, Reagan was confused. Hence his movement, and Williamson.
Bill and Hillary Clinton, David Boies, photographed dining with Harvey Weinstein at Rao's Dec. 13, 2016!
"The dinner took place about ten months before Weinstein's world would come crashing down."
Hillary at Oxford at June end avoids discussing Electoral College: Because it prevented the populism which would have elected her
She can't tell the truth about anything.
Hillary:
"‘Turkey also shows that political and intellectual elites, both inside the country and around the world, persistently underestimate the threat which these kinds of leaders pose to the survival of democratic institutions'".
Morrissey is too charitable to say that precisely Hillary is one of these leaders who pose a threat to the survival of democratic institutions, since she's repeatedly come out against the Electoral College since her memoir appeared a year ago:
Ahem. Among those democratic institutions in the US happens to be the Electoral College. And why did the framers of the Constitution create it? To act as a buffer against populism, at least in form. The Electoral College reflects the popular vote on a state-by-state basis to prevent a handful of the most populous states from controlling the executive through the nationwide popular vote, which creates a buffer against the very impulse Hillary decries in this speech.
Why Hillary hates it now: Remembering Trump's completely unexpected landslide victory over Hillary in the Electoral College
Flashback Reuters October 15, 2016:
Hillary projected to win "by a margin of 118 Electoral College votes".
Or The New York Times October 17, 2016:
"The maneuvering speaks to the unexpected tension facing Mrs. Clinton as she hurtles toward what aides increasingly believe will be a decisive victory — a pleasant problem, for certain, but one that has nonetheless scrambled the campaign’s strategy weeks before Election Day: Should Mrs. Clinton maximize her own margin, aiming to flip as many red states as possible to run up an electoral landslide, or prioritize the party’s congressional fortunes, redirecting funds and energy down the ballot?"
Or International Business Times November 7, 2016 (Hillary +108):
"Emerson pollsters predicted Clinton will garner 323 electoral votes compared to 215 for Trump."
Housing starts continue to improve but gradually: It's not a boom
The best that can be said is that the horrible Obama era is over. Housing starts continue to improve, but we have a long way to go before we recover the pre-Great Recession average.
Saturday, July 21, 2018
New study demonstrates that pot damages memory
So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so all the Obama voters will forget him? Who?
From the story here:
It was discovered that the cannabinoid stopped the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex from communicating with each other.
Researchers led by Lancaster’s Dr Neil Dawson suggested this was to blame for the negative effects of cannabinoids on memory.
The findings were published in the Journal of Neurochemistry.
Jean-François Revel recognized in America's Protestant legacy its key strength in 2003, he just didn't call it that
Nor did the New York Times in his obituary, here, but that's what it is:
In an interview in 1970 with The New York Post after publication of "Without Marx or Jesus," he said his research did not involve talking to political leaders.
"I just looked around, talked to people, to students," he said. "And in the 20th century the information is pretty good, and I read a lot of your press and books."
In the introduction to his "Anti-Americanism" book, Mr. Revel wrote that he found an America "in complete contrast to the conventional portrayal then generally accepted in Europe." In particular, he was impressed with Americans' willingness to address and correct their own faults.
From the Confession of Sins in the Lutheran liturgy:
Most merciful God, we confess that we are by nature sinful and unclean. We have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved You with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We justly deserve Your present and eternal punishment. For the sake of Your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, so that we may delight in Your will and walk in Your ways to the glory of Your holy name. Amen.
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