Didn't China sign the Paris Climate Accords?

"As we speak, President Trump is negotiating a trade deal with China. 

I hope that he's reminding China why the U.S. pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords.  President Trump was right when he said that the agreement had no enforcement mechanism against countries like China.

This is the latest about China and their 'commitment' to environmental concerns:  

Chinese factories are pumping tons of dangerous chemicals into the air despite an international agreement intended to halt the destruction of the ozone layer, a study released on Wednesday said.

Two provinces in China have been cited as a source of a spike in emissions of a globally banned chemical chlorofluorocarbon, according to the study, published in the journal Nature.

‘This is a huge problem,’ a State Department official told the Washington Post. ‘If it’s a problem in another country, we’re also going to be suffering.’

I'm sure that it impacts other countries but does China care?  I don't think so, and that's precisely why the Paris Accords are flawed."

Didn't China sign the Paris Climate Accords?:

Obstruction score card - Bill Clinton 4, President Trump 0

Bill Clinton was investigated by Independent Counsel Ken Starr. Starr reported that he found evidence of eleven cases of obstruction of justice; four of them cited were perjury in court deposition, perjury before grand jury and two cases of interfering with a witness. In the Mueller investigation he did not report any such violation.

Below Bob Barr who was a Representative in 1997 explains the difference:

Bob Barr: Trump shouldn’t be impeached, but Bill Clinton’s impeachment was justified – Here’s why | Fox News:

… The House Judiciary Committee hearings established as well, and also among other offenses, that Clinton ‘corruptly engaged in … a scheme to conceal evidence that had been subpoenaed in a federal civil rights action brought against him.’

Contrast the extensive record of specific acts by President Clinton to corruptly influence ongoing legal proceedings in federal court (the Paula Jones case and the independent counsel grand jury proceedings), with the obstruction currently alleged to have been committed by President Trump.

All allegations of obstruction leveled at Trump arise from something far less legally substantive than the circumstance under which Clinton was impeached. There is no legal proceeding against Trump in which he has been alleged to have corruptly acted; there is only an investigation (of collusion with Russia) by Mueller that found nothing prosecutable against the current president.

Moreover, there are no civil proceedings targeting President Trump in which he is alleged to have corruptly acted, as existed in the 1998 case against President Clinton.

Clinton did far more than lash out at his tormentors, who included Starr. And Clinton’s actions went far beyond indirectly urging his tormentors to stop mistreating him and those in his administration. These allegations are the essence of the obstruction charges House Democrats now seek to advance against Trump.

I realize all this is complicated and may be hard to follow. But the bottom line is this President Clinton interfered in a judicial proceeding against himself, and President Trump did not. For this reason, Clinton deserved to be impeached but Trump does not.

The Founding Fathers deliberately made the impeachment process very difficult. They did not want impeachment used as a tool to enable Congress to easily remove the president over policy and political disagreements.

Congressional Democrats opposed to President Trump have every right to vote against his legislative proposals, to challenge his actions in office with lawsuits, and to work to defeat him in the November 2020 election. But right now they don’t have grounds to impeach him.

Former Rep. Bob Barr was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia from 1995 to 2003. He is now president of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation. 

Counting all the votes in Florida

Florida is counting and recounting votes for senator and governor. We hear over and over “We just need to count all the votes.” From the Democrats on behalf the of candidates who are behind. I oppose what they want to do. Because they don’t tell you something very important: when they say that they mean to count illegal ballots and invalid ballots.

Illegal ballots. Only registered voters can vote. Noncitizens cannot vote. 

- You can vote only once; a second vote in the same election is illegal. 

- Felons: In Florida it is very difficult for a person convicted of a felony to regain the right to vote, so it is illegal for most to vote. (This provision is about to change.)

Invalid ballots. There is a deadline for mail-in ballots to arrive; a late ballot is invalid; cannot be counted. 

- Signature: The signature when voting is checked against the one collected when registering; non matching signature makes the ballot invalid. (Washington has a process to allow the voter to correct an error on this.)

- There surely are other actions that make a ballot invalid.

So when Honorable Chuck Schumer of New Your says “Just count all the votes,” he is demanding the county officials of Florida to violate the law they work under and count illegal and invalid ballots.

So what?? Every illegal or invalid balot cancels out the vote of one legally registered citizen. They cancel out your vote and my vote.  I say count all legal and valid ballots/votes and none of the others.

Eclipse - we saw it!

We drove to central Oregon to the see August, 2017 total exlipse of the Sun. (About 360 miles each way.) We reserved a hotel in The Dalles, Oregon, over a year in advance. We paid more than we usally pay, but they honored their regular rate and did not try to gouge us.

Totality was at about 10 am. So we had breakfast at the hotel and left at about 7 am. We would have aimed for the eclipse center at Mitchell, Oregon, but having a nursing mother (and 3-week-old son) along, she required a shorter trip. So I assumed a group of 3 adjacent parks about 10 miles SE of Fossil, Oregon would provide us public bathroom. On arrival we found a campground with bathroom and an open meadow perfect for viewing. About 150 people joined us, including a group who set up a 10-inch telescope set up for sun viewing and gave everyone a chance to use it. Almost everyone had protective glasses of various sorts (My son-in-law sold for $10 a pair he paid $2.00 for!) and some had pin-hole viewers - trivial to make; a paper plate with a pinhole will do,

It was spectacular. Amateur astronomers present had phone apps that gave the instant of totality to the second, so they shouted out when it was safe to remove glasses, then when necessary to put them back on. Totality creeps up... It gets darker and darker... then the dark sun has a halo around it that is not uniform, but has some streaks. Spectacular!!

It is an experience of a lifetime. It's worth traveling 720 miles and two nights in a nice hotel. This was my second. In 1979 there was a total that we only had to drive 110 miles from Seattle to view so I took off from work to go see it.

(This was in my drafts for over a year.)

Sound Transit lied to Legislature and voters and ...

Sound Transit lied to the Legislature, lied to the public and violated the Washington Constitution.

According to a study by the Washington Senate when they got permission for the huge Sound Transit 3 tax increase. Dow Constantine (King County) and other board members told the Legislature in 2016 that the highest amount it wanted was $15 billion, then asked the public for $54 billion - more than 3 times as much. Constantine lied. Sound Transit exec Peter Rogoff coordinated lobbying by multiple groups to the Legislature, violating the prohibition of lobbying by public agencies.

Marilyn Strickland (Tacoma) and the ST board mislead voters about the size and scope of tax increases. And what has the public seeing red: ST misrepresents the value of your car in calculating the annual car tax. That is hitting people this year, and hard!! Their schedule is based on manufacturers suggested retain price, which is more people pay. The difference is often 10% and sometimes much more.

Tim Burgess’s predecessor Mayor Murray (Seattle) and the ST board improperly gave the Yes campaign the emails of 172,000 people. They said it was an accident. Yeh… they know better. But  no ST employee was disciplined for that violation of law … oh it's just a convenient mistake. The State Public Disclosure Commission joins in the guilt on this one. Lead by Anne Levinson, they said “Oh, maybe the disclose was unintentional.” But for people like you and me the intent doesn’t matter, just the violation.

The violation of the Constituion is too technical to be of interest. My source for this is a Senate committee chair, but many Demos feel violated also.

Senator Padden

Medicaid has big troubles - now!

Politician logic: Since Medicaid is going broke let’s put more people on it. Man on the street: But won’t that double the crisis? Politician: Yes, I mean maybe. But… I get points for covering more people. (Even if they don’t get the care they need, I get to say “they have gained insurance.”)

The intent of Medicaid was to help the poorest Americans. Its costs were rising before Obamacare. but Obamacare caused the increases to be even steeper. And the needy are getting poor care and poor availability.

Meanwhile it is not serving those it was intended for. While Illinois expanded the population eligible, 800 of those previously eligible died - died - while on waiting lists, according to Foundation for Government Accountability.

A start would be refocusing Medicaid on its original mission of caring for the poor and those unable to do it for themselves. That means changing the program’s incentives to allow people more responsibility for their own health outcomes. It also means giving states the freedom to explore options like health savings accounts, direct primary care for Medicaid patients, and systems to remove enrollees who abuse the program.

WSJ Requires subscription, I am afraid.

What’s particularly perverse is that ObamaCare pays states more for the able-bodied adults newly covered under the Medicaid expansion than for people with serious disabilities under the original program.

Founders of the US. Original documents

For American history lovers Jay Cost at the Weekly Standard highlighted the current online resources for documents of the founders. Article: Founders’ Keepers. The occasion is the new or newly completed Founders Online at US National Archives. And he gives some other valuable sources.

The big one: Founders Online at US Archives

Three more important ones:

Online Library of Liberty

The American Presidency Project

A Century of Lawmaking 

And one university press digitizing books:

The Rotunda at U VA

The ban of DDT killed millions of people

The US banned the use of DDT in 1972 and millions have since died due to that decision. Seattleite William Ruchelshaus was EPA administrator and made that decision. He did do despite the science. Yes, despite the science, not because of it.

EPA appointed Administrative Law Judge Edmund Sweeney to evaluate DDT. In 1971-2 he conducted a seven-month hearing. EPA actually participated, testifying against DDT! 

Judge Sweeney, after 80 days of testimony from 150 expert scientists, ruled that DDT “is not a carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic hazard to man” and does “not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wild life. There is a present need for the continued use of DDT for the essential uses defined in this case.”

Ruckelshaus in April 1979 told American Farm Bureau Federation that he imposed the ban for political reasons. And millions died. 

The UN World Health Org allowed limited use of DDT in 2006 and several African countries are using it to combat malaria, so Ruckelshaus’s damage now continues at a lower level.

American Spectator

Alabama Democrats support Senator Jeff Sessions for Attorney General

President-elect Donald Trump chose Senator Jeff Sessions to be his attorney general. Senate hearings have started today.

The headline charge against him is over 30 years old and very thin. That he had called a black man “boy,” and said positive things about the Ku Kux Klan. Sessions denied the charges and there was no supporting testimony at that time. in 1986 - 30+ years ago.

In Alabama there are a lot of good words about him. A group of black pastors from Alabama held a press conference Monday saying they know him, have worked with him for years and that Sessions is a good man who has done good things. Quote from CNS News:

 … “We know in Alabama who Jeff Sessions is,” Bishop Kyle Searcy, senior pastor of the multi-racial, nondenominational Fresh Anointing House of Worship in Montgomery, Ala., told CNSNews.com.
“And it’s important to me that the truth comes out about him,” he added, “that he’s known for who is, he’s known for the good things he’s done in Alabama. 

… Also speaking at the event organized by the Family Research Council (FRC) was Rev. Dean Nelson, director of African-American outreach for FRC's Watchmen on the Wall, a ministry to pastors, and chairman of the board for the Frederick Douglass Foundation.
Nelson noted that Sessions helped prosecute and insisted on the death penalty for Ku Klux Klan (KKK) member Henry Francis Hays, who had abducted and killed a black teenager. 

“Senator Sessions has consistently demonstrated respect and care for people of all races while serving in his home state of Alabama,” Nelson said. “He has, in fact, worked relentlessly on the side of desegregation and justice.”

And at my favorite blog they have found similar support.

Power Line has several testimonials at - The down-home truth about Jeff Sessions

Power Line has more at Son of civil rights leader prosecuted by Sessions endorses him. Even though Sessions prosecuted his father he says Sessions was always fair.

He has been in the Senate for a long time. The Demo senators know him. I hope they will treat him fairly. 

Cookies?

This site uses cookies, because it is at Blogger. The European Union requires that every web site in the world that is seen in the EU post a warning and, in some cases, a request for permission if using cookies. Google tells me they provide such a notice on this, my blog. But I am responsible to make sure it is seen. But, but since I am outside the EU I cannot see it. So I can't make sure it works, even though I am responsible.

I almost appreciate Google helping me comply with this. But, but, but I can't know whether or not I am complying.

Giving thanks

Today is the day we stop to give thanks. To think of what we have received and who it came from. Then we are supposed to say so - "the giving" -  but I don't do very well on the action part.

I thank God for my wife, my family, our church and our community of Lake Forest Park, WA.

Church: New Hope International Church in Bellevue, WA

Family: I attended the retirement party for my brother Rick yesterday. He worked for Seattle Pacific University for 18 years.

Growth

Growth of our economy brings more jobs, higher paying jobs and challenging jobs. We need it badly.

This year Hillary Clinton offers more Obama stagnation. The 2008 recession ended in 2009, but we have little growth since. Obama's drop in the unemployment rate is NOT due to more people working but to people giving up on the job search and sitting on the side line.

Donald Trump is far from perfect, but he is far, far better than Mrs. Clinton on jobs and the economy.

Temper tantrum in Congress

My congressman was in the group that threw a temper tantrum and shut down the House of Representative. The Democrats already got the vote they are demanding. The Senate voted on the same bill and they lost. Adults would have said "OK. We lost this time." But they ...

Speaker Ryan ends Demo sit-in with Zika vote

An honorable Marine and a Secretary of State

When a young Marine committed a single security violation he followed the Marine honor code and turned himself in - with consequences.

A Secretary of State violated Department policies  -- set up an email server with minimal security to avoid the disclosure required by law. Then stored classified material where foreign governments could get access. (Did they access it?) She expects her violations to be excused and to be rewarded with the highest trusted position in the US.

Phillip Jennings in USA Today.

When will Bezos pay to locate an Amazon facility in space?

No. He doesn't plan to risk his business by putting it in space, but yours! He expects Boeing to!! In order to "Save the Earth" of course.

His comments at the Code Conference on May 31 via Recode.net:

Bezos says tasks that require lots of energy shouldn't be handled on Earth. Instead, we should perform them in space, and that will happen within the next few hundred years."Energy is limited here. In at least a few hundred years ... all of our heavy industry will be moved off-planet," Bezos added. "Earth will be zoned residential and light industrial. 

You shouldn't be doing heavy energy on earth. We can build gigantic chip factories in space." Solar energy, for instance, is more practical for factories in space, he said. 

"We don't have to actually build them here," he said. "The Earth shades itself, [whereas] in space you can get solar power 24/7. ... The problem with other planets ... people will visit Mars, and we will settle Mars, and people should because it's cool, but for heavy industry, I would actually put it in space."

The reporter adds:

No word yet, however, on when Bezos plans to move Amazon fulfillment warehouses beyond the surly bonds of Earth.

Still slow posting

I still haven't solved the tie-in between my blogging SW (both on Mac and IPhone). And I have other problems now! The SSD in my Mac froze. I have replaced it but am only part-way restored from my back up. My situation is not straight-forward for Apple's Time Machine. And I am being very, very careful not to mess up my only back up.

A family member asked me which I would vote for: The Donald or Hillary Clinton.

Response: My only vote for Hillary is "Guilty." She violated State Department rules and stored Secret and Top Secret information on her own private server. That made that classified info available to foreign governments - friends and foes. If I had done inadvertently a fraction of what she did  I would be behind bars. She did it intentionally and expects you and me to elect her president.

Does Bernie Sanders want GE to remove 1,500 jobs from Vermont?

Bernie Sanders of Vermont complains constantly about immoral corpoerations. Generally without any examples. But recently he cited giant GE. Does Sanders want GE to close two plants and remove its 1,500 employees from Vermont? And stop buying $40 million of parts and services per year in Vermont?

GE's CEO Immelt responded  in Washington  Post:

The senator has never bothered to stop by our aviation plant in Rutland, Vt. We’ve been investing heavily (some $100 million in recent years), hiring and turning out some of the world’s finest jet-engine components in Vermont since the 1950s. The plant employs more than 1,000 people who are very good at what they do. It’s a picture of first-rate jobs with high wages, advanced manufacturing in a vital industry — how things look when American workers are competing and winning — and Vermont’s junior senator is always welcome to come by for a tour. 

Elsewhere in Vermont, GE Healthcare employs more than 340 men and women in South Burlington. Yearly, GE does about $40 million worth of business with dozens of suppliers of parts and services across Vermont. Nationwide, we have 200 GE plants, including 15 that were built in the past five years — all with the aim of making GE the world’s premier industrial company.

And Immelt defends GE's global business.

Would Vermont be better if GE took those jobs to another state? Via Powerline Blog.

Swedes leaving their country

Swedes are leaving their wonderful, perfect country. Don’t we wish the US  could be like Sweden? Where are the Swedes choosing to go? The United States is the top destination!!

SPEISA

… emigration reaches record levels. Last year, 51,237 Swedes left the country. It is more than the peak reached in the late 1800s when there was an agriculture crisis in Sweden.

And there might be “unregistered residents” also departing, making the number larger.

Yale University is closing its climate institute

Yale University is closing its climate institute - Yale Climate and Energy Institute. It only opened in 2009. Looks like the priorities of the elite changed rather quickly. Everyone told us the Paris climate summit in December, 2015 was going to solve everything. If it did we can stop spending money on “settled science." This should be just the beginning. 

American Thinker

Yale Students respond. Maybe alumni were not donating to it.

Three things Congress got right last year

Congress got three things right this year. 

1. End oil export ban.

It was a good-faith effort to reduce dependency on imports after the 1973-74 Arab oil em cargo. But market forces have overwhelmed this simplistic approach. The goal has been attained by increased US production(!) due to fracking. Furthermore US refineries are not set up to handle the characteristics of US crude. It can be processed in many places overseas. Let the marketplace decide where.

2. Make permanent removing marriage penalty from EITC - Earned Income Tax Credit. 

An income subsidy for families with children, it penalized families where both parents were working. A correction was put in place in 2009, but was temporary.

3. Improved military retirement. 

Broadening the “serve for 20 years, so you can retire” rule. Under the existing policy only those who completed 20 years got anything toward retirement. Now all those serving will be able to establish 401(k)-type accounts with employer matching.

Charles Lane puts his best left slant on this meager good news at Washington Post.

Did they get anyting else right? Can't think of anything. Making Paul Ryan Speaker was worse than a disappointment.

The middle-income moved up

The middle-income group in the US has gotten smaller. We have all heard this. The assumption is always that the families no longer in the middle dropped to lower-income.

Wrong. They moved up. While the middle group got smaller the top group got larger; even the lower group got smaller. Data for 1967 to 2014.

 The change is not due to more women working. The number of workers per household is unchanged from 1960 to 2000 at 1.22. Source: US DOT (I don’t use “class” terminology, but “income.”)

Graphics and data from Prof Mark Perry’s Carpe Diem blog at AEI - American Enterprise Institute. Click to enlarge.

Sanders can't afford his socialist dreams

Bernie Sanders’ socialists goals are so expensive that he can’t raise taxes enough to pay for half their cost. Megan McArdle at Bloomberg.

… And Democratic priorities, particularly Sanders' plans, would cost a great deal of money. He says he favors single-payer health care, which would involve funneling through government coffers most of the $3 trillion a year that Americans currently spend on health care; $1 trillion of new spending on infrastructure; expanded Social Security benefits; and free tuition at public colleges. Enacting his agenda would require something on the order of $1.5 trillion a year in new revenue. 

That’s a lot of money. That’s not “whack up taxes on the rich” money: His Social Security plan to modestly increase benefits, for example, appears to consume all of the revenue from lifting the cap on Social Security earnings above $250,000 a year. Maybe that sounds like a little itty bitty change to you, but in fact it is a 12.4 percent tax hike on all wage and salary income for high earners, who already have a marginal tax rate of about 40 percent, not including state and local taxes. That’s just to pay for one proposal. Covering the estimated $1 trillion a year in private health insurance expenditures would need something many times larger than that. 

That means taking money from the middle class, because while the middle class does not have oodles of the stuff lying around, there are so many more of them that in aggregate, taxing them raises more revenue than taxing the rich. (That’s why extending the Bush tax cuts for the middle class cost three times as much as extending the tax cuts for the wealthy would have, even though investment bankers got a much bigger individual benefit from the tax cuts than a bus driver making $45,000 a year.) Just paying for Sanders’ single-payer plan would, for example, conservatively require between 25-35 percent more tax revenue than we currently collect. Other plans require expenditure from other parties -- employers, state and local governments -- that are likely to end up being collected from the paychecks of workers, one way or the other.
...

She also goes into an obstacle I hadn’t thought/heard of: His tax-raising ideas would have to get past the chattering class - policy wonks and journalists - who will realize that they will have to pay big; some will take a bullet for the cause, but most will hesitate when they realize the tax increases will hurt them.

The Adminstrative State - The EPA sending us to jail

We are seeing our government become out of touch and responsible for nothing. The elected officials give power to the bureaucracy, but don’t hold it responsible when it is ineffective or causes harm.

Scott Johnson of PowerLine Blog reviewed a book on this - Is Administrative Law Unconstitutional? by Prof. Philip Hamburger in National Review in 2014.

… The practice of rule by decree is of dubious constitutionality, to say the least, and Obama is extending it to the breaking point. While of dubious constitutionality, the practice is not without precedent. The precedent, however, is the prerogative power claimed in the past by the British king. It is the power against which the British revolted in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and against which we revolted in 1776. 

Now comes Professor Philip Hamburger with a serious work of legal scholarship on the return of the prerogative power to our government. The power returns in the dry-as-dust form of “administrative law,” reflecting the agency form of government. Administrative law has not been a matter of substantial intellectual controversy for a long time. Professor Hamburger comes not to bring peace, but rather a sword of understanding and ultimately of action. He means for us to understand what we have lost or are losing. ...

Johnson briefly revisits it this week at PowerLine.

An in-your-face example. This summer the EPA caused the horrible toxic spill in the XYZ river near Durango, Colorado, affecting New Mexico and Utah also. See Daily Caller. Did any individual lose his/her job over it? No. But the EPA is sending people like you and me to jail - to jail - over much smaller violations. 185 people in 2015 for an average sentence of eight months. Daily Caller

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforcers helped convict 185 Americans of environmental crimes this year, with each of these eco-convicts getting sentenced to eight months in prison on average for crimes ranging from biofuel fraud to illegally removing asbestos. 

EPA enforcement data for 2015 shows the agency opened 213 environmental cases which resulted in 185 people convicted and sentenced to 129 years in prison. EPA has been opening fewer cases in recent years to focus more on “high impact” cases. 

...Every year, EPA agents help put dozens of Americans in prison for breaking U.S. environmental laws. Environmental crimes range from spilling coal ash into public waterways, to pretending to produce biofuels, to illegally cleaning up asbestos in buildings.

Via: American Thinker

Three unreported global warming news stories

Here are three global warming, that is, climate change, stories that were reported on in the UK, but not in the US, or hardly reported, according to my source.

1. NASA has "found the Earth has cooled in areas of heavy industrialization where more trees have been lost and more fossil fuel burning takes place."

This is, of course, the opposite of what we've been told for decades.

2. Polar bears are increasing.

3. Scientists are collecting bad weather data from compromised sites. This one is not new, but seldom reported.

Investors Business Daily

Graphic: Find the cat by Hungarian artist Gergely Dudas.

Poverty-related diseases and malnutrition increased in UK

The United Kingdom has recently seen increases in the diseases associated with 19th Century poverty plus malnutrition. NHS statistics show that 7,366 people were admitted to hospital with a primary or secondary diagnosis of malnutrition between August 2014 and July this year, compared with 4,883 cases in the same period from 2010 to 2011 – a rise of more than 50 per cent in just four years. Independent UK

Cases of other diseases rife in the Victorian era including scurvy, scarlet fever, cholera and whooping cough have also increased since 2010, though other diseases are decreasing.

What is happening? The Fabian Society blames the government.

Eric Worrall at WattsUpWithThat looks further and finds large increases in energy costs. Those costs, of course, hit the lower-income people much harder.

… The article in the Independent carefully avoids mentioning the cost of energy, but you don’t have to look far for evidence that electricity prices are placing a lot of stress on British household budgets. Quite apart from devastating job losses which occur when energy intensive industries are forced to close, because they can’t compete with lower energy costs in other countries, Eurostat reports that electricity costs have surged from £0.121 / kWh in 2010, to £0.155 / kWh in 2015 (USD $0.23 / kWh), a rise of 28%. 

A lot of British homes rely on gas for heating, this isn’t always the case, especially in isolated rural regions. In any case, the price of gas has also surged, from £0.035 / kWh, to £0.046 / kWh. Thanks to British hostility to fracking, British gas supplies and prices are vulnerable, to political instability in Russia, and to sudden cold snaps – Britain is on the end of a long supply chain of countries which quite reasonably place the needs of their citizens first. 

What evidence is there that green policies are exacerbating this price spike? Willis did a compelling analysis in 2014, which shows a strong relationship between installed renewable capacity, and domestic energy prices. [See the link for graphic.] 

British people are slowly waking up to the cost of green energy. For the British middle class energy costs are a serious annoyance. For the poor, rising energy prices are an unmitigated disaster. Adding to this burden, in the name of saving the environment, must be contributing to the ongoing surge in poverty related illnesses.

South America socialists run out of money and ...

South America’s socialist leaders are running out of money. And corruption is catching up with several leaders.

Brazil is in a great recession. Fausta’s Blog

Argentina is a mess; defaulted on sovereign debt again last year.

Venezuela despite having among the largest oil reserves in the world, has gone hugely into debt and destroyed its own economy. It memorably could not afford to import toilet paper; and blamed unknown capitalists. And the government calls out the national guard if the long lines at stores get unruly.

But… In Argentina a non-Peronist was recently elected president. In Venezuela the opposition won control of the national assembly. But Chavist President Maduro says the revolution will continue. 

Investors Business Daily

Also Guatemala. In September President Ottto Perez Molina resigned, then was jailed on customs corruption charges. NY Times

But no good news yet In Ecuador President Correa is changing the constitution so he can stay in office beyond the legal limit. Groups are rising up against him. Wall Street Journal

Poverty for everyone (almost) is the normal condition

Robert Heinlein (science fiction writer) quote on poverty:

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. 

Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck.”

Goodreads

Worldwide poverty has dropped and dropped

Around the world deep poverty is dropping and dropping and is now below 10%. This is huge: until 1860 it was over 90%! Everyone! This is very good news. 

The term means per person income of less than $1.90 per day, indexed for inflation and adjusted for different countrys’ cost levels. 

Glen Reynolds explains at USA Today

… For most of human history, of course, extreme poverty was the norm. People worked hard to get — if they were lucky — three meals a day and clothes on their backs. Money was scarce, possessions were few, leisure existed only when all the work was done, which was seldom, and capital for investment was scarce — as were things to invest in.
Deaths from sickness and violence were common: As Steven Pinker has noted, human beings back in the era before nation states developed had a 15% chance of dying by violence; numbers today are vastly lower. This is true, he notes, despite the number of deaths from wars and civil wars.

Charles Kenny even wrote in The Atlantic that 2015 was the best year ever in the history of humanity. Wars have become less common and less deadly (though better publicized), while vaccines and medicines have reduced sickness and death. Kenny writes: “The UN reported this year that global child mortality from all causes has more than halved since 1990. That means 6.7 million fewer kids under the age of five are dying each year compared to 1990. Nearly 7 million families avoided the pain of burying their child in 2015 who would have gone through it if the world hadn’t seen two and a half decades of historically unprecedented progress against childhood illness.”

Graphic: At Instapundit.

Veterans Day and VA health care

The best to all veterans today. 

Even though I was in Army National Guard and Army ROTC, I never considered myself a veteran, because I neither served long-term nor overseas. But I was active for five months and wore green uniforms for 3 1/2 years, including on the U of Washington campus during the Vietnam war. Doesn't that count? 

President Obama today says that at VA medical facilities the waiting lists are much shorter. Where did he get his data? The whole VA scandal was about VA officials building false waiting lists and throuwing those who waited long off the list to make the data look better. Who is Obama believing?

In Phoenix, where deaths of those waiting broke open the mess, veterans are protesting today. They say that Skye McDougall, who was appointed in October to serve as the new director of the Southwest Health Care Network, lied to Congress on wait times in So. California. Putting her in charge won't help any.

USA Today tells more about the unacceptable situation.

Killing NAFTA would hurt US companies and consumers

Donald Trump would kill NAFTA, North American Free-Trade Agreement in order to save US jobs. But doing so would make things worse, not better.

Our exports are up since NAFTA. Our economies are integrated - Manufacturers allocate different tasks to firms in the US, Canada and/or Mexico, using the comparative strengths of each. Cars being manufactured cross between the US and Canada, sometimes more than once!

Putting up Donald Trump's wall would break those relationships that have been developed and refined over decades. That would raise costs to the producers - and to us consumers.

See Mary Anastasia O'Grady at Wall Street Journal. (Might require subscription.)

Aat Wharton School of Business at U of Pennsylvania they go into all the pluses and minues. Their mesure of loss/benefit is closer, but still positive for the US. The authors are more worried about Mexico damaging its economic ties with US and Canada. Wharton

If your city/town is dying then move!

If your city/town is failing then MOVE. It’s the best thing you can do. If you stay to live among the ruins you and your sons and daughters will have fewer and fewer opportunities.

Kevin Williamson at NRO: 

The town where my parents grew up and where my grandparents lived no longer exists. Phillips, Texas, is a ghost town. Before that it was a company town, a more or less wholly owned subsidiary of the Phillips Petroleum Company. Phillips had already lost a great deal of its population as highway improvements sent residents off to the relative urban sophistication of Borger, and there were fewer than 2,000 people living there in 1980 when an explosion at the refinery destroyed practically all of the town’s economic infrastructure, along with a fair number of houses.

Phillips, Inc., in the end decided it had no need for Phillips, Texas, and the town was scrubbed right off the map. The local homeowners owned their houses but not the land they sat on, which belonged to the company. (These sorts of arrangements were, and are, more common than you’d think, as in the case of the many Californians in the Coachella Valley who own their houses but lease their land from the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians.) Many of the residents of Phillips were uneager to be evicted from their homes, and they sued the company with the help of the famously theatrical Texas trial lawyer Racehorse Haynes, who informed the good people of Phillips: “They might whup us fair and square, but they better bring lunch.” Lunch was served, and Phillips is just gone. 

It was the right thing to do. Some towns are better off dead.

...

Recycling is expensive!! says John Tierney

Recycling is a waste. Expect for only paper, cardboard, steel and aluminum for greenhouse gas emission reduction. The very respected science reporter John Tierney for the establishment NY Times says so after full research.

NY Times

... In 1996, I wrote a long article for The New York Times Magazine arguing that the recycling process as we carried it out was wasteful. I presented plenty of evidence that recycling was costly and ineffectual, but its defenders said that it was unfair to rush to judgment. Noting that the modern recycling movement had really just begun just a few years earlier, they predicted it would flourish as the industry matured and the public learned how to recycle properly.

So, what’s happened since then? While it’s true that the recycling message has reached more people than ever, when it comes to the bottom line, both economically and environmentally, not much has changed at all.

Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill. ...

Slow blogging

Blogger stopped accepting posts from both my blogging applications a couple months ago. Haven't figured out why. I am going to attrmpt more posts via Bloggers adequate, but less friendly web interface. I see news and analysis crying out to be emphasized on my very popular Economic Freedom blog.

Jimmy Carter rushes for photos with dictators

Jimmy Carter rushed to get his photo with dictators while worlds leaders were in NYC for United Nations meetings.

See his big smile with Nicolas Maduro the “elected” dictator who has made Venezuela and absolute mess - very high inflation, shortages of basics including toilet paper and armed soldiers at grocery stores to control the lines of frantic shoppers. Here is a post on lack of rule of law and good currency, comparing Venezuela to Ecuador.

From 2011 there are photos of President Jimmy sharing his biggest smile with Raul Castro, who with his brother Fidel ruined and enslaved Cuba. Gateway Pundit

The story at Investors Business Daily

Pres. Carter with Maduro photo at Yahoo

For my practice: En Espanol at NTN24

Prison this week for vote fraud in Alabama

The Democrats repeatedly say that vote fraud is very, very rare. Well, here it is today. A woman in Alabama was found guilty on 24 felony counts of vote fraud. A local race was flipped due to many absentee votes for the candidate who lost at the polls. Dothan Eagle newspaper

A Houston County jury found Olivia Reynolds guilty Wednesday afternoon for her role in a voter fraud case.
Assistant District Attorney Banks Smith said the jury found 66-year-old Olivia Reynolds guilty of 24 felony counts of absentee ballot fraud. Smith said the jury deliberated for less than an hour before returning with the guilty verdicts. 

Houston County Sheriff’s investigators arrested Reynolds in May 2014. She was one of three women charged who worked on the 2013 campaign for District 2 City Commissioner Amos Newsome.
In the August election, Newsome beat challenger Lamesa Danzey by 14 votes. Newsome received 119 of the 124 absentee votes that were cast. Danzey received more votes than Newsome at the polls. 

Reynolds is the third suspect in the election fraud investigation to go to trial.
Smith argued to jurors during his closing Wednesday morning that investigators with the Houston County Sheriff’s Office found evidence of widespread voter fraud during the District 2 race for the City of Dothan election in the summer of 2013. 

Smith said some of the voters testified at trial how they never wanted to vote for Newsome yet their ballot was cast for Newsome anyway.
“This case is about the sanctity of the ballot,” Smith said.

Via Thomas Lifson at American Thinker.

US Navy will charge office who defended against Islamist murders in Chattanooga

Unbelievable. An Islamist attacked personnel in a recruiting center in Chattanooga, TN a couple of weeks ago and killed four active duty Marines and on Navy reservist. The facility commander returned fire with his personal weapon -  Navy Lt. Cmdr Timothy White. He is a hero.

But not to Obama’s military. The Navy is bringing criminal charges against him who defended his comrades. Navy Lt. Cmdr Timothy White will be charged with possessing and/or discharging a weapon on federal property.

Unbelievable. Who is in charge of our military? 

Gateway Pundit:

But rather than being celebrated as a hero, Lt. Commander White may be charged for discharging a firearm on federal property. 

Allen West reported this week: 

Ladies and gents, resulting from the text message I received yesterday, I can confirm that the United States Navy is bringing charges against Lt. Cmdr Timothy White for illegally discharging a firearm on federal property.
The text message asked if it would be possible for Lt.Cmdr White to reach out to me. To wit I replied, affirmative. 

What kind of freaking idiots are in charge of our Armed Forces — pardon me, our “unArmed Forces”? What would they prefer that Abdulazeez had been able to kill all the Marines and Sailors at the Naval Support Reserve Center? Let me draw an interesting contrast: Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus is more concerned about lifting the ban on transgendered Sailors. Mabus has a problem in that for the first time since 2007 the US Navy will not have a Carrier Battle Group operating in the Persian Gulf. But this knucklehead has no problem with the Navy seeking to destroy the career of a Sailor, a commander of an installation, returning fire against an Islamic jihadist attack. I do not care if it was his personal weapon, he deserves a medal for facing the enemy. 

Folks, this has become the Obama military that will not implement policies for our men and women in uniform to be protected — but will punish them if they do protect themselves. What ever happened to the Navy of John Paul Jones, Farragut, Halsey, and Nimitz? What has happened in our America where we believe that our men and women in uniform — especially the commanders — are just targets for these damn Islamic jihadists

Seattle is a more expensive area

Seattle is a more expensive area, but not one of the worst. If $100 is worth $100 on average, what does it buy in Seattle? Less: $93.37. In San Francisco-Oakland? $83.13. In Rapid City, South Dakota? More: $106.95

See the interactive map at:

Tax Foundation

Obama's Iran nuclear deal in plain English

We are hearing this and that about President Obama’s historic agreement with Iran then ends sanctions and allows Iran to return to polite society.

But don’t take my word for it. Read it yourself at Vox. I quote the intro below, but read the whole thing; it’s not very long.

VOX

International negotiators assembled in Austria have announced the final terms of the Iranian nuclear deal. The purpose of the deal is to limit Iran's nuclear program to something that is small, safe, and peaceful — and to impose lots of invasive inspections to make sure Iran is keeping to its end of the deal. In exchange, Iran gets relief from some of the economic sanctions that have crippled its economy. Both sides, the thinking goes, also get to avert a war. 

You can really see how that plays out, how the deal works, and what it means when you look into its details. But those details can get awfully technical. So what follows are the most important provisions of the deal, along with a simple translation of each into plain English and a brief description of why it matters: ...

Moving low-income people did not improve their lives. Repeat it???

Obama has a new initiative to move racial-minority people to the suburbs to improve their living conditions, incomes and school results. But this was tried by Pres. Clinton, called MTO, “Move to Opportunity," and it didn’t work. People did not go off welfare; indeed, use of food stamps went up. School results did not improve. And crime followed them to the suburbs! We know because the results I am citing were carefully collected by the Dept of HUD over fifteen years in a 187-page 2011 report.

Why is Obama repeating an experiment that failed? It will not benefit the low-income people. That has been proven. So why is He doing the same thing again? The Hill

 More at Investors Business Daily

Social Engineering: President Obama's new suburban integration plan won't just harm the middle class by reducing safety and property values. It won't even provide the economic benefits it promises to relocated minorities.

We know this because HUD already tried a similar experiment under President Clinton of resettling urban poor in the suburbs. It failed, as a HUD study reveals.
From 1994 to 2008, HUD moved thousands of mostly African-American families from government projects to higher-quality homes in safer and less racially segregated neighborhoods. The 15-year experiment, dubbed "Moving to Opportunity Initiative," or MTO, was based on the well-intentioned notion that relocating inner-city minorities to better neighborhoods would boost their employment and education prospects.

But adults for the most part did not get better jobs or get off welfare. In fact, more went on food stamps. And their children did not do better in their new schools.
The 287-page study sponsored by HUD found that adults who relocated outside the inner city using Section 8 housing vouchers did not avail themselves of better job opportunities in their new neighborhoods, and saw a "sizable negative impact on annual earnings."

"Moving to lower-poverty neighborhoods does not appear to improve education outcomes, employment or earnings," the study concluded.Even then-senior HUD official Raphael Bostic, a black Obama appointee, admitted in a foreword to the 2011 study that families enrolled in the program had "no better educational, employment and income outcomes."

Worse, crime simply followed them to their safer neighborhoods. "Males ... were arrested more often than those in the control group, primarily for property crimes," the study found.

Buying votes in Texas

Voting fraud. Real vote fraud in Texas.

In Rio Grande Valley campaign workers are paid to harvest votes. This is not get-out-the-vote. This is pay to vote for my candidate - the Democrat.

NPR:

A new FBI anti-corruption task force is trying to clean up the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. According to the Justice Department, in 2013, more public officials were convicted for corruption in South Texas than in any other region of the country. One of the practices the task force is looking at is vote-stealing. 

They're called politiqueras — a word unique to the border that means campaign worker. It's a time-honored tradition down in the land of grapefruit orchards and Border Patrol checkpoints. If a local candidate needs dependable votes, he or she goes to a politiquera. 

In recent years, losing candidates in local elections began to challenge vote harvesting by politiqueras in the Rio Grande Valley, and they shared their investigations with authorities. After the 2012 election cycle, the Justice Department and the Texas attorney general's office filed charges.

"Yes, there is a concern in which the politiqueras are being paid to then go and essentially round up voters and have them vote a certain way," says James Sturgis, assistant U.S. attorney in McAllen.

In the town of Donna, five politiqueras pleaded guilty to election fraud. Voters were bribed with cigarettes, beer or dime bags of cocaine. In neighboring Cameron County, nine politiqueras were charged with manipulating mail-in ballots.

Via Hot Air

The pic. Texas A&M University beauties. Source forgotten.

Independence Day

Today, July 4, we celebrate the birth of the United States of America. The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 2, 1776, but was not announced until July 4, 1776. So that is the day we celebrate.

The Declaration says that King George III of Great Britain was violating the rights of his subjects in American; to the point that their differences were irreconcilable. So it was necessary to break the bond of the 13 colonies to Great Britain and to form a new nation.

American leaders in the Continental Congress who signed risked everything - their lives, their land and homes, their possessions, their families and their own lives.

Images: the Betsy Ross 13-star flag is from PDClipArt.org. Below is Memorial Day at National Cemetary of the Pacific aka Punchbowl in Honolulu from American Battle Memorials.

James Jamerson originated much of the bass guitar style we are all familiar with. He did it without credit in the studio band called the Funk Brothers for Motown records for 15 years in the 1960s to 70s. Before Jamerson the bass did “1-2-3-4”. He took a new approach and carried it to incredible heights.

Instapundit featured him recently.

He died in his early 50s and got little recognition. But “Dr Licks” Allan Slutsky put together a film in 2002 on his life and music: Standing in the Shadows of Motown. Ed Driscoll tells about Jamerson at Blog Critics with interview of the book author and film producer “Dr Licks” Allan Slutsky. The movie at Amazon.

The book came out in 1989 - Standing in the Shadows of Motown: The Life and Music of Legendary Bassist James Jamerson, at Amazon.

Review: While at one time he was simply known as "The Motown Bassist" to thousands of aspiring bass players around the world, including more famous and world class bass players than you can imagine, James Jamerson is now a legend of immense proportions. If you don't know who Jamerson is by now then you simply must get this book. 

If you do know who James Jamerson is, then this book is a no brainer. Quite possibly the most influential musician of the past 50 years. If it weren't for him, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and countless of others in the rock and r&b genres wouldn't sound the way they do. 

The biography is compelling and I read it straight through over a several hour period when I first received this book. The lessons are difficult, and definately not for the beginner. 

For a beginner who wants to learn classic R&B style bass playing I'd reccomend the Duck Dunn book (What Duck Done) ... When you get through that book you can go on to Funkmasters and learn some classic James Brown grooves.

Finally, when you've graduated from those books you can take a crack at the Jamerson book, though I think it should be on your shelf from day 1 to give you inspiration, and so you can listen to the tracks with the bass prominently mixed. Just to get it into your ears, so to speak. You might also hear a Motown tune you think you can pick up and will want to reference this book. 

James Jamerson, legend, towering genius of Bass, has challenged countless bass players exposed to his playing. This book will challenge you, it will push you, and it will humble you. ...

Interlude

My blog software stopped working with my blog host, so it is awkward to post. Took a break. (Still not fixed.)