Friday, June 7, 2019
Average hourly earnings increases for the bottom 80% of workers not-seasonally-adjusted are averaging 3.08% in April and May vs. 3.42% in 4Q2018 and 1Q2019
These are good numbers compared with the awful Obama era, but still far off the 4+% levels before the last two recessions.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Greedy and craven U.S. tech companies have helped China control the internet and police its citizens"
The world must stand up to China’s crimes, repression and chicanery. ... [Tank man's] defiance is a lesson for the rest of the world, which must resolutely stand up to China’s crimes, repression and chicanery and nurture democracy there whenever, however, it can.
Thursday, June 6, 2019
Rush Limbaugh tells us western civilization is in jeopardy when one of his advertizers features a woman boasting she dumped her boyfriend because he was a dud in the bedroom
Rush's market is cads and whores.
Western civilization isn't in jeopardy, it's already dead.
I would demonetize you just for writing "When YouTube demonetizes I"
You are an embarrassment to the platform and to the English language, sir.
Chip Roy calls latest House immigration bill a show, political theatre, which is ignoring the invasion
Everything government does is theatre, usually bad theatre, and when it's occasionally mediocre theatre because it's so rarely even that good the politicians abandon all sense of proportion and fall all over themselves telling us how wonderful what they did was.
Trump won't actually do his job. Congress won't actually do its job.
Sounds like a trend.
Link.
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
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.
Tuesday, June 4, 2019
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
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.
Full transcript of John Dowd conversation with Flynn lawyer shows Mueller report's selective quotation intended to insinuate improper behavior when there was none
“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.
Monday, June 3, 2019
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.
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