"I have not the
pleasure of knowing my reader but I would stake ten to one that for six
months he has been making Utopias, and if so, that he is looking to
Government for the realization of them."--Bastiat
Corruption
costs taxpayers about $1,308 per person more per year in states with
the most corruption, compared to states with average corruption levels, a
report in Public Administration Review says. Attorney General Kathleen
Kane last year spoke of “untold millions” in public costs as a result of
a Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission corruption scandal. (A grand jury
alleged bribery and bid-rigging.) Former Turnpike officials maintain
their innocence. A state contract awarded in the 1980s to Computer
Technology Associates, an obscure California company whose owner offered
bribes to Pennsylvania pols, was much higher than one offered by a “Big
Eight” accounting firm, said former U.S. Attorney James West, who
prosecuted people tied to the case.
Justice Department data place Pennsylvania historically among the 10 most corrupt states.
Chelsea Manning, nee Bradley Manning, is serving a 35-year prison
sentence on espionage
charges and other offenses for passing along 700,000 secret documents,
including diplomatic cables and military intelligence files, to
anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks in the largest-scale leak in US history.
Manning has an editorial in the NYT about Iraq. Why would we have an
editorial by a convicted spy in the NYT?
Who was.....Cecil Woodham-Smith?
Statistics
show that people with bad credit file claims something like 40 percent
more frequently than those with good credit. So your credit history
affects your car insurance premiums.
It takes 2,500 gallons of water and three-quarters of a gallon of oil to make a pound of hamburger. Or so they say.
In
September, 2013, an Israeli soldier, Sgt. Tomer Hazan, 20, was killed
by a Palestinian man with whom the sergeant worked at a restaurant in
Israel. Security officials said the Palestinian man had lured the
sergeant to the West Bank and killed him in the hope of trading his body
for a brother imprisoned in Israel.
The average cost of an American wedding is $28,000. That is over 50% of the average American household income.
Writing
about kidnapped women brought into American Indian war camps, Anne
Butler writes, "...when separated from her cultural community, a woman
could find that her decision-making and personal agency evaporated.
Instead, now held by an enemy camp, a woman became quite powerless,
transformed into a slave to be used for forced labor -- domestic,
mercantile, or sexual." Let's see, after being carried off screaming
after seeing her family--husband and children--being tortured slowly to
death, the women found they lost their "decision-making and personal
agency?"
Russia has instituted a 13% flat tax. Russia!
National
rates of gun homicide and other violent gun crimes are strikingly lower
now than during their peak in the mid-1990s, paralleling a general
decline in violent crime, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of
government data. Beneath the long-term trend, though, are big
differences by decade: Violence plunged through the 1990s, but has
declined less dramatically since 2000. Compared with 1993, the peak of
U.S. gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and
there were fewer deaths, even though the nation’s population grew. The
victimization rate for other violent crimes with a firearm—assaults,
robberies and sex crimes—was 75% lower in 2011 than in 1993. Violent
non-fatal crime victimization overall (with or without a firearm) also
is down markedly (72%) over two decades. According to DOJ’s Bureau of
Justice Statistics, U.S. gun-related homicides dropped 39 percent over
the course of 18 years, from 18,253 during 1993, to 11,101 in 2011.
During the same period, non-fatal firearm crimes decreased even more, 69
percent. The majority of those declines in both categories occurred
during the first 10 years of that time frame. Firearm homicides declined
from 1993 to 1999, rose through 2006, and then declined again through
2011. Non-fatal firearm violence declined from 1993 through 2004, then
fluctuated in the mid-to-late 2000s.
Nate Silver says the best time to fly is between 6 and 7 in the morning. Flights scheduled
to depart in that window arrived just 8.6 minutes late on average.
Flights leaving before 6, or between 7 and 8, are nearly as good.
Fifty-one
percent of the Americans who responded to a Gallup poll conducted June
5-8 said that they do not believe the phrase “is honest and
trustworthy” applies to President Barack Obama. The question has been
asked eight times in the last six years and this is the first time a
majority of respondents felt that way.
I read recently that O.J. Simpson wrote a suicide note after the murders.
Dr.
Caleb Rossiter - an adjunct professor at American University,
Washington DC - has been fired by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)
when he wrote an OpEd in the Wall Street Journal describing man-made
global warming as an "unproved science." In the article Rossiter argued
that Africans should benefit from the same mixed energy policy as
Americans rather than being denied access to fossil fuels.
That is a very good way to build consensus.
Golden oldie:
A makeshift bomb exploded at a Nogales, Ariz., power plant.
Fascinating
overproduction risk of solar in Hawaii. The local utility is cutting
back on approval of home-based solar units. According to the utility,
HECO: "This unprecedented rapid growth in rooftop solar in Hawaii has
resulted in some neighborhood circuits reaching extremely high levels of
photovoltaic [penetration]. An increasing number of distribution-level
circuits have rooftop PV capacity exceeding 100 percent of the daytime
minimum load, the trigger for interconnection studies and possible
implementation of safety measures or upgrades before new PV systems on
that circuit can be interconnected to the grid."
More, the
grid is built for one-directional deliverance of electricity, and now,
the utility has to deal with bidirectional electricity so, for safety
reasons, circuit breakers must be installed.
Bigotry: Origin: late 16th century
(denoting a superstitious religious hypocrite): from French, of unknown
earlier origin. Google has a definition of "bigotry" they have taken
verbatim from the Oxford Dictionary: "Bigoted attitudes; intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself: the report reveals racism and right-wing bigotry."
My understanding of "right" and "left" has always been that of economic and governmental policies. Left and right "wing" was a
reference to the National Assembly in France (1789–91), where the
nobles sat to the president's right and the commons to the left.
The
terror organization ISIS is said to have looted $429 million from the
central bank in Mosul after it took control of the Iraqi city, making it
the world’s richest terror group. (International Business Times) Now
there's a business.
AAAAAAaaaaaaaannnnnnddddddddd...........a
picture of a baby woolly mammoth considered to be the most complete
example of the species ever found, at the Natural History Museum. She
died in the Yamal peninsula of Siberia around 42,000 years ago:
No comments:
Post a Comment