Climate Update for Grand Rapids, MI, May 2019

Climate Update for Grand Rapids, MI, May 2019

Max Temp 79, Mean Max 86

Min Temp 38, Mean Min 32

Av Temp 57, Mean Av 57.9

Precip 5.96, Mean 3.48 (12th wettest May on record)

Snow 0, Mean 0.2

HDD 248, Mean 252

Season to date HDD 6673, Mean 6654

CDD 6, Mean 39

We've had a very wet spring, and now we're seeing caterpillar activity on some pine and apple trees, in addition to vigorous ant activity in our sandy soils. Song birds have a plentiful supply of bugs to eat and are feeding and nesting robustly. 

Robin Munro: The Tiananmen massacre was not primarily of the students, rather the workers, not in the Square but citywide in Beijing

Remembering Tiananmen Square:

Western criticisms based on a false version of the clearing of Tiananmen Square have handed the butchers of Beijing needless propaganda victories in the U.N. and elsewhere. ... By May 17, the sight of as many as 2,000 idealistic young students collapsing from heat and starvation brought more than a million ordinary Beijing citizens into the square in a moving display of human solidarity. “The students speak on behalf of all of us,” they would tell any foreigner who cared to listen. 

Having been passive spectators, the laobaixing now began to act as a bastion of active support for the students, bringing food and other supplies to the square on a round-the-clock basis. This specter of emerging cross-class solidarity led directly to the authorities’ decision to impose martial law in Beijing on May 20. ...

Action groups formed spontaneously throughout Beijing. ... The laobaixing were now in a posture of peaceful, nonviolent but direct confrontation with the government and army, and similar “turmoil”—to use the party’s term—rapidly emerged in dozens of other cities. Moreover, the laobaixing were beginning to articulate their own grievances. ...

However, the birth of the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation a few days after the abortive imposition of martial law posed a much greater threat. That is because this group, headquartered in a couple of scruffy tents in the northwest corner of Tiananmen Square, raised an issue that had been taboo in China since 1949: the right of workers to engage in independent labor organization and self-representation. Such a demand struck at the very core of the Chinese Communist state, for the party’s main claim to legitimacy is that it rules in the name and interests of the “laboring masses.” Although its active membership remained relatively small, its formal membership soared during the first few days of June, reaching a peak of more than 10,000 enrollments after three of its leaders were secretly arrested on May 29.

Autonomous workers’ groups quickly sprang up in most of China’s major cities. This was the “cancer cell” that the authorities had feared from the outset would appear if legal recognition were ever to be conferred on the student organizations. In the government’s eyes, if the statue of the Goddess of Democracy, erected in the square at the end of May, represented the arrogant defiance of the students and the symbolic intrusion of “bourgeois liberalism” and “Western subversion” into the sacred heart of Communist rule, the crude red-and-black banner of the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation, not a hundred yards away from the goddess, represented the terrifying power of the workers awakened.

Both had to be crushed, and the rapidly defecting party apparatus had to be frightened and shocked back into line.

Forget the glowing Wikipedia entry for gay classicist Claude Fredericks of Bennington College, he preyed on students

The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980s' Most Decadent College:

NICHOLAS DELBANCO: A strange fellow, Claude Fredericks. He dropped out of Harvard because he refused to take the swim test or something like that, but he was a genuinely learned person, an autodidact. Knew Latin, Greek, Japanese. Punctilious in his self--presentation. And he had an avant-garde printing press, quite famous at the time, called Banyan Press. It published people like Gertrude Stein and the poet Jimmy Merrill, who’d been Claude’s lover early on. ...

MATT JACOBSEN: It was never unfriendly between me and Claude, but as I fell more deeply in love with Liz [Glotzer, Jacobsen’s girlfriend and eventual wife], I saw less of Claude. I realized it was kind of ridiculous to hang out with him, cool as he was. And he wasn’t going to get what he wanted from me, so he moved on to greener pastures, started fooling around with another guy who’d been his student. At the end of the day, Claude was driven by a—you know—perverse interest in me. And that was wrong. I’m a geezer now, and I understand how wrong he really was.

Cable from UK Ambassador to China declassified in 2017 indicates 10K brutally killed by China's military during Tiananmen Square protest in 1989

Tiananmen Square protest death toll 'was 10,000'

UK cable on Tiananmen Square Massacre

 

Full transcript of John Dowd conversation with Flynn lawyer shows Mueller report's selective quotation intended to insinuate improper behavior when there was none

JOHN DOWD BLASTS MUELLER OVER SELECTIVE QUOTES IN RUSSIA REPORT:

“Isn’t it ironic that this man who kept indicting and prosecuting people for process crimes committed a false statement in his own report. By taking out half my words, they changed the tenor and the contents of that conversation with [Flynn lawyer] Robert Kelner,” Dowd said of former special counsel Robert Mueller in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity.

Just 58 Republicans had the temerity to vote Nay on the $19 billion disaster relief bill

You'll notice that Democrat Ilhan Omar didn't bother to vote. Must have been busy washing her hijabs.

The bill showers more money on Puerto Rico, and spends nothing on the disaster at the US/Mexico border.

FINAL VOTE RESULTS FOR ROLL CALL 232

Gillibrand steals from Yang, Booty Judge steals from Beto: Elect any of them and they'll steal from you

El Salvadorans in the US remit so much money back home it amounts to 20% of El Salvadoran GDP

2017 GDP was nearly $25 billion, so $5 billion.

Merkel did not see that coming

Wow, white Daily Beast POS who doxxed black blue-collar Pelosi-vid creator did 5 years for espionage

Daily Beast Writer, A Convicted Felon Previously Banned From The Internet, Doxxes Man Who Made Pelosi Meme Video

Twitter's 12-hour punishment of Erick Erickson for this Elizabeth Warren joke was so grade schoolish

Twitter is treating some of its customers like children because it can. The company lost money every year since 2013, when it went public, until 2018, when it turned a profit of $1.2 billion. The service has about 126 million daily users.

ICYMI Twitter banned the conservative who said conservatives banned by Twitter were reactionaries not conservatives

Helping the ࿕ will not protect you.

A multiculturalist self-excommunicates from National Review

"Glory, glory, hallelujah, His truth is marching on."

Erick Erickson is still too wet behind the ears to appreciate how National Review made purging conservatives from the movement its persona, Twitter just puts that on steroids

Catholics excommunicate. Protestants self-excommunicate. Get with it, Erick.

 

 

 

 

 

National Review’s Own Struggle With “Ideological Diversity”:

For Murray Rothbard, the history of National Review was largely a story of exclusion. “And so the purges began,” Rothbard recounted in a 1992 article. “One after another, Buckley and the National Review purged and excommunicated all the radicals, all the nonrespectables. Consider the roll call: isolationists (such as John T. Flynn), anti-Zionists, libertarians, Ayn Randians, the John Birch Society, and all those who continued, like the early National Review, to dare to oppose Martin Luther King and the civil-rights revolution after Buckley had changed and decided to embrace it.” 

That policy of excommunication continued to the present. Over the years, the magazine has fired or stopped publishing figures like Joseph Sobran (an editor who should have been fired for his anti-Semitism and racism but was not let go until criticizing Buckley in 1993), Peter Brimelow (an editor who was excessively anti-immigrant) and Ann Coulter (who was fired in 2001 after writing a column arguing saying that the United States should “invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”).

Trump gave 2.3 million foreigners US jobs in fiscal 2017 and 1.8 million in 2018 while 22.7 million able-bodied Americans 25-54 weren't even in the labor force in 2018

2018 USCIS Statistical Annual Report

Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey

In China, however, things are mostly wrong, very wrong

Chinese dissidents are being executed for their organs, former hospital worker says:

The world is beginning to wake up to the fact that virtually every organ transplant in China costs the life of an innocent human being. That’s why countries like Israel, Spain, Italy and Taiwan have already banned transplant tourism.

 

Justin Raimondo checks to make sure that all is right with the world, and finds that it mostly is

Elizabeth Warren has another tough day on the warpath

There were zero bank failures in 2018, but we got the first one of 2019 last night

The Enloe State Bank, Cooper, Texas, failed last night, the first bank failure in the US since Dec. 15, 2017. A bank failure hasn't occurred in Texas since 2013.

The failure in Texas is estimated to cost the FDIC's Deposit Insurance Fund $27 million.

The FDIC insures the deposits at 5,362 institutions as of March 31, 2019.

Bernie's still dead, Jim, up not quite 2-points since May 9th, with Creepy Uncle Joe still comfortably in the lead