Bad Juju

Many think the investigation into Clinton's e-mail should be in quotes. That is, the investigation is no more an investigation that the WWE championship is a competition. This kind of thing is inevitable, of course, when the quality and integrity of a performance is judged by the performers themselves. This story might be a worthwhile indicator of the sincerity of the entire event.


In March of 2013, a Romanian hacker calling himself Guccifer hacked into the AOL account of Sidney Blumenthal and leaked to "Russia Today" four e-mails containing intelligence on Libya that Blumenthal sent to Hillary Clinton.
Sidney Blumenthal is a long time friend and adviser of the Clinton family who in an unofficial capacity sent many “intelligence memos” to Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State.
The emails have since been released in all of the Clinton hubbub--except for one, which exists only in the hacked release. That email says the Saudis funded the Benghazi attack, and not only was this not followed up on, but there is not any record of this e-mail ever existing except for the "Russia Today" leak.
There is another e-mail missing with the subject “H: Libya security latest. Sid”
The fact that it is missing suggests one of two possibilities, at least according to William Reynolds of Medium.com:  

1. The State Department does have a copy of this e-mail but deemed it top secret and too sensitive to release, even in redacted form. This would indicate that Sidney Blumenthal was sending highly classified information from his AOL account to Secretary Clinton’s private e-mail server despite the fact that he never even had a security clearance to deal with such sensitive information in the first place. If this scenario explains why the e-mail is missing, classified materials were mishandled.
2. The State Department does not have a copy, and this e-mail was deleted by both Clinton and Blumenthal before turning over their subpoenaed e-mails to investigators, which would be considered destruction of evidence and lying to federal officials. This also speaks to the reason why the private clintonemail.com server may have been established in the first place. If Blumenthal were to regularly send highly sensitive yet technically “unclassified” information from his AOL account to Clinton’s official government e-mail account, it could have been revealed with a FOIA request. It has already been established that Hillary Clinton deleted 15 of Sidney Blumenthal’s e-mails to her, this discrepancy was discovered when Blumenthal’s e-mails were subpoenaed, although a State Department official claims that none of these 15 e-mails have any information about the Benghazi attack. It would seem from the subject line that this e-mail does. And it is missing from the public record.

Cab Thoughts 4/6/16

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.~Dwight Eisenhower
 

Costco sold 465,000 vehicles through partnerships with auto dealers in 2015, a 16.8% increase from the previous year. That's not far behind the No. 1 auto retailer in the US, AutoNation, which sold 533,000 vehicles in 2014.

According to legend, Ireland's mythical hunter-warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill was imbued with universal wisdom after inadvertently eating the Salmon of Knowledge. This boundless knowledge ultimately led Fionn to become leader of the Fianna, the famed heroes of Irish myth. The Salmon of Knowledge.

For the first time ever, middle class Americans now make up a minority of the population. But back in 1971, 61% of all Americans lived in middle class households. According to the Pew Research Center, the median income of middle class households declined by 4% from 2000 to 2014. The Pew Research Center has also found that median wealth for middle class households dropped by an astonishing 28% between 2001 and 2013. 

 

Who is....Ed Mezvinsky?

 

In 1889 the famous female outlaw Belle Starr was murdered. Born Myra Belle Shirley on a small farm near Carthage, Missouri, in 1848, she received an education in the classics and became a competent pianist but at the end of the Civil War with her family's life destroyed she moved to Texas, met Cole Younger, had a baby, married the outlaw Jim Reed and then went through a number of dramatic and criminal paramours (Sam Starr, Jim July) as they robbed and rustled and shot their way through the Mid-West. She was ambushed and shot twice in the back with a shotgun by unknown assailants. A decline from her classic expectations. Bad company.

Chelsea Clinton's father-in-law is Ed Mezvinsky. He is a felon.

In the waning days of Clinton's presidency, federal prosecutors and the FBI were bearing down on former Rep. Ed Mezvinsky (D-Iowa), who had fallen for a series of Ponzi schemes and pulled in nearly $10 million money from other investors to cover his losses.

Mezvinsky would not be formally indicted until March of 2001, but records released last week by the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock and obtained by POLITICO show Mezvinsky and his then-wife - ex-Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky (D-Pa.) - pleaded with the former president for a presidential pardon to head off the looming federal case.

Chelsea would later marry the son but in the '90s the Clintons were close with them all.

One of his victims was his mother-in-law.

There was no pardon but by his indictment Clinton was out of office. He certainly was free with pardons while in office. Can you pardon pre-emptively?This article came across the news. "The Phillies have traded left-handed pitcher Jesse Biddle to the Pittsburgh Pirates."  Interesting until this: "Biddle is expected to miss the entire 2016 season after undergoing Tommy John surgery last October."

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2014/05/coriolanus-review.html 

Theodore Roosevelt, while President, railed against the "Nature Fakers," who, he said, were filling the country's books and periodicals with starry-eyed tales of the outdoors. These "yellow journalists of the woods" anthropomorphized animals recklessly, mistook fables for facts, and trusted "irresponsible guides," wrote Roosevelt in the popular general interest periodical Everybody's Magazine. "Much remains to be told about the wolf and the bear, the lynx and the fisher, the moose and the caribou," he continued. "But he is not a student of nature at all. whose imagination is used not to interpret facts, but to invent them."

According to historian James Perrin Warren, this was "the first and only time in American history the president acted as a literary and cultural critic."

Called "re-entrants," dolphins once lived on land and looked and behaved something like a small wolf but with five hoof-like toes on each foot instead claws. Some dolphins still have hair on their heads and the Amazon River dolphin has hair on its beak. Dolphins also have remnant finger bones in their flippers, a forearm, wrists, and a few remnant leg bones deep inside their bodies.

Stress alters the neurochemical makeup of the body, which can affect the maturation and release of the human egg. Stress can also cause the fallopian tubes and uterus to spasm, which can affect implantation. Stress in men can affect sperm count and motility and can cause erectile dysfunction. In fact, stress may account for 30% of all infertility problems.

"The most warlike of commanders and those who have accomplished most by a union of daring and cunning, have been one-eyed men, Philippus, Antigonus, Annibal, and the subject of this Life-Sertorius." Thus spake Plutarch in his Life of Sertorius. Other one eyed leaders? Briggs adds: "To this list of cylopsian colonels can be added Nelson, who gave us that most useful of phrases "turning a blind eye", World War II's Archibald Wavell, who dared outshine Churchill and who paid the price, Moscow's tenacious defender and ruiner of Napoleon Marshal Kutuzov, defender of the heretical Jon Hus (the forerunner of the protesting Martin Luther) the Czech Jan Zizka, who in death and by his own order was turned into a drum so that his followers would ever follow his beat, Admiral Don Blas de Lezo, Spain's greatest naval hero (it would have been Alonso Pérez de Guzmán if not for a spot of unfortunate weather), who beat back the Brits at Columbia. Even Odin, the chief Norse God, had unocular vision: the loss of his eye was voluntary; he exchanged exterior for interior vision."

Posthumous: adjective: Happening after someone's death, but relating to something done earlier. For example, a book published after the death of the author, a child born after the death of the father, an award given after the death of a person.

From Latin posthumus, alteration of postumus, superlative of posterus (coming after). The word literally means "subsequent" but since it was often used in contexts relating to someone's death, people began associating the word with humus (earth) or humare (to bury) and amended the spelling. Earliest documented use: 1608. USAGE: "President Aquino has authorized the posthumous conferment of Medal of Valor to two SAF commandos who died during the Mamasapano mission." Pres. Aquino to Confer Posthumously Medal of Valor; Asia News Monitor (Bangkok, Thailand); Jan 26, 2016.

The bigger a planet gets, the thicker its atmosphere becomes, as it accumulates more and more gaseous elements in a process known as "core accretion." This is thought to be why rocky planets like Earth and Mars can only reach a certain size before they become a gas giant, like Jupiter or Saturn. Ice giants seem to be a kind of in-between: their atmospheres are thick and made mostly of the same stuff as gas giants, but they're nowhere near as big.

For those of you not stimulated to read about Jan Zizka and turning his skin into a drum, here a summary. He was the leader of Bohemia's Hussite Revolution - the first of the religious wars during the Protestant Reformation.

About a hundred years before Luther, there was a lot of questioning going on about the Catholic Church. Indulgences always came up because of the distinction it created between the rich and the poor. One such reformer was Jan Hus, a Czech priest. Hus thought the Catholic Church needed to be reformed: First, the Church services should be read in Czech instead of Latin. Second, everyone should be able to take wine with communion, not just priests. Third, the only way to be absolved for your sins should be to make peace with God through Confession; rich people should not be able to give the Church money in exchange for absolution of their sins. Hus was rewarded for his outspokenness and forward thinking by being burned at the stake. Trouble followed--including the wonderfully named The First Defenestration of Prague. Eventually the Holy Roman Emperor attacked and was opposed by Zizka, something of a dangerous man who had been through a number of wars and did a lot of very warlike things including inventing a war wagon called a "Tabor." Zizka was successful throughout his campaigns and, for a time, liberated Bohemia. 

Zizka died of the plague at Přibyslav on October 11, 1424 on the Moravian frontier. According to chronicler Piccolomini, Žižka's dying wish was to have his skin used to make drums so that he might continue to lead his troops even after death. Žižka was so well regarded that when he died, his soldiers called themselves the Orphans (sirotci) because they felt like they had lost their father. His enemies said that "The one whom no mortal hand could destroy was extinguished by the finger of God".

It should be remembered his soldiers were irregulars--farmers and religious devotees--not men with any warrior background so his success is all the more astonishing.

 

Poland's state archives released documents it says show Lech Walesa had been a paid informant of communist-era secret police in the 1970s, before leading the Solidarity movement that helped end communism in Europe.

 

In 2008 just as the subprime crisis was coming to a head, Americans had $12.68 trillion in debt outstanding, of which housing debt made up $10 trillion, or 79% of the total. In the fourth quarter of 2015, there was $12.12 trillion in total debt, and housing's share had dwindled to 72%, or $8.74 trillion.

One of the biggest contributors to the decline in mortgage debt is that Americans aren't taking equity out of their homes at nearly the same rate as in the prior decade. Cash-out refinances and home equity lines of credit rose at a rate of more than $300 billion every year from 2003-2007. In 2015, such debt grew only by $30 billion.

 

James Alfred Wight, better-known as veterinarian-novelist James Herriot, went to the Yorkshire Dales in 1940 as a twenty-three-year-old graduate of Glasgow Veterinary College, joining the practice of Donald Sinclair. Thirty years later, Wight would turn Sinclair into Siegfried Farnon, the tweedy, eccentric and ebullient character who would anchor the Herriot books. Over 60 million books were sold.

AAAAAAaaaannnnnnddddddd.........a chart (from 2006) on the percentage of immigrants admitted vs. native population:
 

Pivin

The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a national system of "a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty". (Wiki)
In their 1966 article, titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation , Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a sip of sustenance, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. So the welfare system acted as "an opiate of the people," sedating them and their anger. An increase in the demands upon the current welfare system would collapse it and force the government into a national guaranteed income. They wrote, "The ultimate objective of this strategy—to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income—will be questioned by some. Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income."
Social policy through fear.

So the idea is to show the current system impossibly ineffective and replace it with a new one, presumably effective. There seems to be confidence in the government's ability to build a good new system despite its failure to build the old one. (In fairness, the failure to build the first welfare system apparently is the result of the insincerity of "the ruling class" who wants only to calm the poor, not help them. Apparently this "ruling class" will not be involved in the new system.) And this new system, which will not collapse, would be initiated by loading the current system which is so bad it inevitably will collapse.

Some--especially Glenn Beck--have expanded this "strategy" in to a more aggressive and purposeful "conspiracy." It is interesting to watch the ebb and flow. The Cloward–Piven people are confident in the ability of the government to create a new system despite its original failure; they also admit to the "strategy" but deny the "conspiracy." Beck and his supporters cannot actually prove the "conspiracy" but, I suppose, when you can't see a clandestine operation, that's the beginning of proof it is there.

Anbang and Globalism

China’s Anbang has informed Starwood Hotels that it is walking away from a $14 billion bid for the hotelier, in a surprise move capping off a three-week bidding war with Marriott.

Anbang, a Chinese insurance company, was founded in 2004. Over the last several years it seems to be trying to build itself into a financial conglomerate along the lines of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Like Berkshire, Anbang is using insurance reserves to buy assets in a variety of businesses such as banking and real estate. It  bought more than $20 billion worth of hotel properties in the space of a year or so; it bought Waldorf and has a bid in on Starwood. It also spent over $2 billion on insurers in Belgium and South Korea in 2015. The company’s explanation is that it is diversifying. It may be they are concerned with the aging Chinese population and the burden that may place upon them as an insurer. They may see real estate as high yielding and a hedge against that population's aging.
Anbang is funding this spree by selling high-yield investment products to Chinese citizens.

Perhaps this is a grand currency play. And Anbang might be willing to overpay because it is converting Chinese currency. As there are expectations that there will be a further devaluation of the Chinese currency, the renminbi, by moving its money out of China, Anbang can hedge against such a downturn. Anbang also buys further protection from interference by Beijing authorities.

In the case of the Waldorf, Anbang entered into a 100-year contract with Hilton to manage the property. But who would manage Starwood? Anbang has partnered with the private equity firm J. C. Flowers & Company and the Primavera Capital Group. J. C. Flowers specializes in acquisitions in the financial services industry. Primavera is a Chinese private equity firm. Neither appears to have much hotel experience. What are the risks to the Americans should the takeover go through?

Caixin, a Chinese business publication, has reported that insurance regulators in China are said to be preparing to block the bids for both Starwood and Strategic Hotels & Resorts, because they would violate rules prohibiting insurers from investing more than 15 percent of their assets abroad. So the question may be moot. But it raises an interesting question: What is the responsibility of a regulatory agency who might worry about the viability of such a takeover? Globalism has some risks at home, too.

Sunday 4/3/16

Today's gospel is "Doubting Thomas." It also contains the command from Christ to evangelize the world and to forgive--and not to forgive--sins.

This is a huge gospel, filled with important concepts. Christ seems to be delegating authority, creating a structure and a hierarchy for his mission. But first He is appearing to His fearful disciples to confirm His resurrection. His instructions to his followers are buried within this revelation. The group, of course, believes but Thomas, absent from the first visitation, does not.

Thomas is a guy of some consequence in the gospel. He not seen often (he is seen only in John) but when he is seen, he is seen big. When Christ learns of the death of Lazarus--which He clearly manipulates to show His power over death-- the apostles are fearful to return to Judea where Christ was so recently threatened with stoning. But Thomas says to the apostles, "Let us also go, that we may die with Him." After the Last Supper Christ muses about the next days, about preparing "a place for you" in His father's house. And then He says, "And whither I go you know, and the way you know" and Thomas immediately replies "Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way?" Christ responds "I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me."

Thomas is a a bit over his head here--as they all seem to be--but is a fulcrum balancing faith and disbelief. He is brave, he has seen Lazarus raised from the dead, he has great loyalty to Christ. But this step, His resurrection, is too much for even him, even when verified by his fellows.

Christ clarifies it by returning and showing Thomas His wounds. The philosophy of Christ, the two great commandments, the new testament, the new covenant--all of these revolutionary thoughts--do not work unless Christ rises from the dead. Otherwise He is just another brilliant philosopher. (Nikos Kazantzakis, in "The Last Temptation of Christ," has James running through town to his father Zebedee to announce that Christ, a great prophet, has come out of the desert after forty days and forty nights and Zebedee exclaims, "Not another one!")

But He is not just "another one." The apostles, disbelieving and shaken at His death, are not just convinced, they are changed. They are not the same people as before. They are transformed and able to shoulder their burden to evangelize the world.

Like Paul on the road to Damascus, they are revolutionized in a moment. A thunderclap.

In a singularity because belief and skepticism are, like Thomas, twins.

Cab Thoughts 4/2/16

"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

There are some things a shark cannot eat, such as a small fish called the Moses sole and the puffer fish. When a shark bites a sole, the sole releases a chemical in the shark’s mouth that makes the shark release it. Scientists are trying to duplicate this chemical so it can be used to keep sharks away from people. This doesn't seem like much of an advantage to me because by the time the shark figures out the downside to the meal it is too late for the meal.

Alex Nowrasteh’s article “The Fiscal Impact of Immigration,” includes the two major analyzable components of immigration to an economy. One is what an immigrant costs the community and the other is what he produces. His generality is that the net effect depends upon the structure of the economy--especially on the social support side--but that generally the net is very small, positive or negative. So there is no great financial argument against immigration historically, but no positive one either. There is another element, the notion that each of us brings our own gift to the culture, some positive, some negative. Those who see humans as positive will see an increase of people as an increase in resource.

There is nothing in this country that can not be cured by a good satirist. The absence of one is telling; we are in unreasonable and sensitive times. One of Mencken's Laws was "Nature abhors a moron," and one of his favorite pastimes was to attack the South for being especially ruled by the "booboisie"; upon finding itself elevated to "the apex of moronia," Arkansas had apparently had enough. In 1931, the Arkansas state legislature passed a motion to pray for the soul of H. L. Mencken.

What is....Zagami meteorite?

The world is engorged with strange facts. The ant can lift 50 times its own weight, can pull 30 times its own weight and always falls over on its right side when intoxicated. Now there are several little things of interest here, perhaps even a tiny life lesson from tiny insects on effort and work. But who decided to get an ant drunk? And why? And did I fund it somewhere?

Barnett Davenport committed an awful mass murder in rural Connecticut--excluding combat savagery--apparently America's first known mass murder. Caleb Mallory, his wife, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren were killed in their home by their boarder, Davenport. Davenport, born in 1760, enlisted in the American army as a teenager and had served at Valley Forge and Fort Ticonderoga. In the waning days of the war with the British, he came to live in the Mallory household. Today, Davenport’s crime might be ascribed to some type of post-war stress syndrome, but at the time it was the source of a different sociological significance. They thought he was a mean s.o.b..
On February 3, apparently unprovoked, Davenport beat Caleb Mallory to death. He then beat Mallory’s seven-year-old grandchild with a rifle and killed his daughter-in-law. Davenport looted the home before setting it on fire, killing two others.

On of the software modeling the CO2 in the atmosphere is the A1B of the IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES), which yields a 735 ppm concentration of CO₂ by the year 2100, producing warming of 3.8°C (at least according to the C-ROADS simulation).

West Huddleston, the then-CEO of the National Association of Drug Court Professionals, wrote HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell and urged her to keep strict caps on the number of opioid addicts doctors can treat with buprenorphine. Use of the medication along with counseling, known as medication-assisted treatment, is considered by public health officials to give opioid addicts the best chance at a recovery. But many drug court judges have opposed the treatment, insisting defendants go cold turkey instead.

So, is there court literature on the topic? Do judges have peer review that they fuss about?

Wiki describes a galaxy as  a gravitationally bound system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter. As of July 2015, EGSY8p7 is the oldest and most distant observed galaxy with a light travel distance of 13.2 billion light-years from Earth, and observed as it existed 570 million years after the Big Bang--although these things change all the time. Approximately 170 billion (1.7 × 10¹¹) to 200 billion (2.0 × 10¹¹) galaxies exist in the observable universe. In Greek mythology, Zeus places his son born by a mortal woman, the infant Heracles, on Hera's breast while she is asleep so that the baby will drink her divine milk and will thus become immortal. Hera wakes up while breastfeeding and then realizes she is nursing an unknown baby: she pushes the baby away, some of her milk spills and, produces the faint band of light known as the Milky Way. The English term Milky Way can be traced back to a story by Chaucer c. 1380:

"See yonder, lo, the Galaxyë
 Which men clepeth the Milky Wey,
 For hit is whyt."

— Geoffrey Chaucer, The House of Fame

The origin of the word galaxy derives from the Greek term for the Milky Way, galaxias (γαλαξίας, "milky one"), or kyklos galaktikos ("milky circle")

I went to the Pterosaur exhibit at the Museum. Quite something. One of these monsters was the size of an F-16. Their wings are the extension of the fourth digit. The whole dinosaur exhibit has been updated. Really terrific. I also touched the Zagami meteorite, the meteorite believed to be from an explosion on Mars. (It has the same gas composition as measured on Mars by the Voyager.) I did not know that all birds of flight--and the reptile Pterosaurs--have wings aerodynamically like planes.

One of the maddening things about the world is the tendency of scientists to change names of things. There is no such thing as a "pterodactyl" anymore.

Golden oldie (supreme court):
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/12/bork-redux.html

So...Trump disrupts the FOX debate because he objects to a newswoman. Everyone, politician and newspeople, are upset. How close are these people? How linked are their individual success or is it mutual success? How integrated are these people?

The State Department is lying when it says it didn’t know until it was too late that Hillary Clinton was improperly using personal e-mails and a private server to conduct official business — because it never set up an agency e-mail address for her in the first place, the department’s former top watchdog says. “This was all planned in advance” to skirt rules governing federal records management, said Howard J. Krongard, who served as the agency’s inspector general from 2005 to 2008. He says “the key” to the FBI’s investigation of Emailgate is determining how highly sensitive state secrets in the classified network, known as SIPRNet, ended up in Clinton’s personal e-mails. “This totally eliminates the false premise that she got nothing marked classified,” Krongard said. “She’s hiding behind this defense. But they [e-mails] had to be classified, because otherwise [the information in them] wouldn’t be on the SIPRNet.”

After rising from clerk to sales executive in the National Cash Register Co., Thomas Watson became president of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co., which made scales, time clocks, and tabulators that sorted information using punched cards—all forerunners of mainframe computers. Watson renamed the company International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) in 1924 and became its chairman in 1949, widening IBM's line to include electronic computers. I wondered where the name of the IBM computer came from.

In 1943, a Mexican farmer named Dionisio Pulido witnessed the birth of a volcano in his cornfield about 329 kilometers west of Mexico City. It started as a slight depression in his field and soon became a fissure that emitted smoke and hissing noises. During the next nine years, the volcano Paricutin had grown to an elevation of 2,272 meters and its voluminous lava flows had destroyed several towns.

Guy: curious background. noun: 1. A man (in plural, persons of either sex). verb tr.: To make fun of; ridicule. 2. noun: A rope to steady, guide, or secure something. verb tr.: To steady, guide, or secure something with a rope. For set 1:After Guy Fawkes (1570-1606), a conspirator in the failed attempt to blow up England’s Parliament in 1605. Earliest documented use: 1874. For set 2: From Old French guie (guide), from guier (to guide). Ultimately from the Indo-European root weid- (to see), which is also the source of guide, wise, vision, advice, idea, story, history. Earliest documented use: 1375.

David Tepper is a big deal hedge fund manager who started the famous Appaloosa Fund. Back in September, Tepper told BBG TV that "it might be a good time to take money off the table." That's what he said. What did he do? According to his latest 13F as the market was surging in the final quarter of 2015, Tepper was busy buying. So busy in fact, that he took his total long notional exposure to $5 billion an increase of 75%, in the process adding 40% to his longs. 

Kelli Peters, a former PTA president and Orange County resident, won $5.7 million in a civil suit in damages over an incident in which a pair of two other parents, whose son attended her child’s school, planted weed and narcotics in her car. Kent Easter and Ava Everheart (who then went by Jill Easter) decided to frame Peters after a misunderstanding over a remark Peters made about their son, believing she had called him dumb. Peters said  that the boy was “walking slowly,” and his parents took it as an insult to intelligence.

Lessons from Denny's: When the cup is hotter than the coffee, it's probably microwaved.

AAAAaaaaaaannnnndddd.... a graph of Projected Path of Emissions by Region, 2017-2100, under A1B. (Gtons of CO₂)

The Evil Wendy Bell and the End of "Likely"

Wendy Bell's apparently scurrilous comment--called a "rant"--on the ambush in Pittsburgh that killed several women, one pregnant, and one man:
“You needn’t be a criminal profiler to draw a mental sketch of the killers who broke so many hearts,” Bell wrote. “they are young black men, likely in their teens or early 20s.

“They have multiple siblings from multiple fathers and their mothers work multiple jobs. These boys have been in the system before. They’ve grown up there. They know the police. They’ve been arrested. They’ve made the circuit and nothing has scared them enough. Now they are lost. Once you kill a neighbor’s three children, two nieces and her unborn grandson, there’s no coming back. There’s nothing nice to say about that.”

 

Her company fired her with this explanation:

"WTAE has ended its relationship with anchor Wendy Bell,” Hearst Television, the station’s owner, said in a statement. “Wendy’s recent comments on a WTAE Facebook page were inconsistent with the company’s ethics and journalistic standards.”