The turkey was fed and sheltered for 1000 consecutive days, but this did not mean that the butcher loved him. --anon
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’s (BLS’s) most-recent estimate of monthly layoffs and discharges. From January 2007 through December 2017 that average is about 1.7 million. That is, on average for the years 2007 through 2017, the number of Americans who were either laid-off or discharged from their jobs was 1.7 million monthly. Therefore, over the eleven-year period of January 2007 through December 2017, 224.4 million Americans in total were either laid-off or discharged from their jobs. Of course, the vast majority of these dismissed workers soon found other jobs, which is why the unemployment rate is today lower than it was over all but the final three months of that period.
Mexico is one of only two places in the world (the other is off the coast of Peru and Ecuador) that resides on or near the junctions of four tectonic plates—the Pacific, Cocos, Caribbean, and North American plates. This makes the country a hub for seismic activity, the cause of Mexico’s many mountain ranges and plateaus.
Historically, Mexico City could not easily move large numbers of troops over vast distances and treacherous terrain, so it has had no choice but to rely on local forces to augment the national security forces. Friedman argues that the Mexican states, in turn, have been conditioned to be self-reliant on security. From time to time, the isolation of some areas and subsequent feeling of alienation has engendered the creation of armed rebel groups, hoping to secede from or even overthrow the national government. Combined, these trends have led to a strong belief in homegrown security and skepticism of the national government. This strongly influences the way state and non-state actors respond to lapses in security in modern Mexico.
This fragmentation has led to more than skepticism and rebellion, it has allowed the rise of well-armed cartel proxies for government force.
Who is....Esteban Loaiza?
All of Lincoln's sons but one died in their youth. In 1862, Willie Lincoln contracted typhoid fever. He lay sick for weeks before dying on February 20. His death crushed Lincoln, who cried to his secretary, John Nicolay, “…my boy is gone–he is actually gone.” Lincoln and his wife Mary grieved for months and the president never fully recovered from the loss. Tad Lincoln died from illness at age 18 in 1871. The Lincoln’s second son, Eddie, died shortly before his fourth birthday, in 1850. Only the Lincoln’s first child, Robert, lived to an advanced age; he passed away at age 82 in 1926.
"Comfort" has emerged as a criteria for acceptance in our lives. Apparently To Kill A Mockingbird has been deemed "uncomfortable" in some Minnesota schools and has been removed. Comfort. Comfortable books, as a criteria, will be very limiting--and widely personal so in might become all inclusive. Discomfort is the essence of many entertainment genres, comedians, horror movies, war stories, some large periods of history, almost all productions of intellectual conflict and social resolution. How could one write about the Holocaust, the Inquisition, the Crucifixion, or slavery? This may even outlaw lullabies in preschool--which I always found terrifying. Comfort is a wide, tight net and very unlike us.
On the other hand, I am uncomfortable with this story:
An online adjunct professor incorrectly told a student that Australia isn't a country and gave her a failing grade, prompting Southern New Hampshire University to replace the instructor.
Buzzfeed News reports that the 27-year-old student in Idaho was assigned to compare American social norms to that of another country. She chose to study social media use in Australia, but the professor gave her a zero on that portion of the assignment, saying Australia is a continent, not a country.
And this one:
The Israeli military shot down an Iranian drone it said infiltrated the country early Saturday before launching a "large-scale attack" on at least a dozen Iranian and Syrian targets inside Syria. Responding anti-aircraft fire led to the downing of an Israeli fighter jet.
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www.washingtonpost.com
Why so many free agents? Teams are aligning their behavior with changing information.
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An interesting notion. Over 40% of white lawmakers have law degrees. So do over 40% of black lawmakers. Blacks have a relatively low percentage of law degrees, around 3% and, although whites are low as well, they are not as low as blacks. So who do black lawmakers have more in common with, their constituents or their white colleagues?
One Philadelphia Eagles player says the team ran a fake walkthrough in Minneapolis to throw off the New England Patriots in case they tried any of their alleged spying .
Trump has been ripped for criticizing the British NHS but there are some articles appearing that imply things in Europe are not going so well.
England: Health spending per capita in the UK climbed 160% between 2000 and 2015, according to the World Health Organization, 60% faster than in the U.S. As a share of GDP, health spending increased 50% over those years, compared with 36% in the U.S. In the U.K., private spending has been skyrocketing. In fact, per-capita out-of-pocket spending in the U.K. shot up 233% from 2000 to 2015, according to the World Health Organization. In the U.S., it went up just 50%. Out of seven major industrial nations, the U.K. had the lowest cancer survival rates for colon, lung and prostate cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The mortality rate for heart-attack and stroke patients is higher there than in the U.S. (But, just look at it from the billionaire's point of view.)
An estimated 4.6 Billion dollars was bet illegally on the Super Bowl.
Golden oldie:
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steeleydock.blogspot.com
The Westboro Baptist Church is in front of the Supreme Court this session. The Church is small, eighteen members or so, and inbred, all of i...
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When I was growing up, in the 1940s and 1950s, parents and teachers commonly taught children the venerable saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Judging by all the news articles I read about snowflake youth, it seems that the tables have been turned on the old aphorism. You may now bomb people back into the stone age, but never, never refer to them with an unwelcome pronoun.--Higgs
Berkley has a municipal bond payable in Bitcoin.
From a letter to the NYT:
"Let’s see if I’ve got Pankaj Mishra’s argument straight (“The Rise of China and the Fall of the ‘Free Trade’ Myth,” Feb. 11). He recognizes that the all-embracing state control of the Chinese economy before Mao’s death was “calamitous,” but Mishra then credits China’s post-Mao economic growth, not to the very real liberalization of markets in China that has occurred since then, but, instead, to what remains of that state control."
A stolen analogy: A man covered in chains cannot walk. Remove some chains, he begins to walk--but it’s not because some chains were removed, it’s because some chains remain.
Prepare yourselves: I am told on good authority that 63 people are responsible for 40% of the gambling profits at the Meadows Casino.
There is a massive gap between school and work, between learning and earning. While the labor market rewards good grades and fancy degrees, most of the subjects schools require simply aren't relevant on the job. Literacy and numeracy are vital, but few of us use history, poetry, higher mathematics or foreign languages after graduation. The main reason firms reward education is because it certifies (or "signals") brains, work ethic and conformity.--Caplan
The graduation rate of African Americans in high school is 72% nationally. Among black males it is 47%. (I am a bit unsure what the denominator is.)
Edwards argues that the increasing scope of the government increases the tendency for members of congress to compromise. He uses Cruz' recent vote in favor of the trillion dollar deficit: "The number of federal subsidy programs has doubled since the 1980s. That has strengthened the power of logrolling and put upward pressure on spending. It would have been harder for congressional leaders to buy off Senator Cruz in the 1980s because the federal government was not in the business of huge disaster bailouts at that time."
The bigger the scope the more the option to trade.
Former Pirates pitcher Esteban Loaiza was arrested in San Diego County on Friday for transporting about 44 pounds of heroin and cocaine.
Vanessa Trump, the wife of Donald Trump Jr., and two other people were taken to a hospital after she opened a piece of mail containing an unidentified white powder that was later determined not to be hazardous, New York officials said. Ah, peaceful protests by the righteous. No wonder she wants to get out of there.
On the evening of February 13, 1945, a series of Allied firebombing raids began against the German city of Dresden, reducing the “Florence of the Elbe” to rubble and flames, and killing as many as 135,000 people. It was the single most destructive bombing of the war—including Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and all the more horrendous because little, if anything, was accomplished strategically, since the Germans were already on the verge of surrender. "Strategically" is the key word here as the atrocity of war apparently needs a "strategic" lens to be viewed through. Kurt Vonnegut was a POW there at the time and the raid eventually became the center of Slaughterhouse Five.
The novel--and the event--became a symbol of the very peculiar "anti-cruelty-in-war" movement.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, even before taking under consideration the budget impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the added spending from the budget deals, we are about three years away from the next $1 trillion deficit. Also, this year, the Department of the Treasury will inevitably have to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to pile on top of our already eye-popping $20.6 trillion of gross debt, which is public debt plus the debt the federal government owes to other accounts, such as Social Security. That's over 100 percent of our gross domestic product. It will also have to request yet another increase to its borrowing limit.
"We are all Keynesians now?" Even he would not stimulate during an expansion.
AAAAaaaannnnndddddd......a graph:
