Reverie

The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power--Daniel Webster

Agreement. The foundation of the latest budget deal, much like the spending planned signed earlier this year, is an agreement to spend more—on everything. The deal spends $11 billion more on the Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services departments than the Trump administration requested. That's what Democrats wanted in exchange for agreeing to a $17 billion year-over-year increase in military spending, according to The Washington Post. The two parties reached a deal by giving both sides what they want: more spending.

Governing is a lot easier when no decisions are made.

Who is ...Strzok?

Einstein's travel diary shows significant racial stereotyping, especially toward Asians.

Should we stop teaching the Theory of Relativity?

It is fascinating that Trump, with his rag-tag coalition of the anti-government and the annoyed, could possibly be in a situation where he, without any true coherent national or international policy, might become the most influential president of my lifetime because of his court appointments.

Pirate rookie third baseman Colin Moran is older than Bryce Harper, who is a free agent at the end of this year..

An American family of three living in the republic of Georgia died during an attack by a disgruntled shepherd.

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) held its biennial convention in Pittsburgh. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were among the speakers for the event. The AFT, which represents 1.7 million teachers, has 3,000 affiliates throughout the country, making it the nation's largest teacher union. I did not read about any Republican speakers at the event; I wonder why it seems so partisan. And I wonder, if it is so partisan, how it can be non-partisan in the classroom.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/03/oscars-and-union-of-elites.html

The Oscars and a Union of Elites steeleydock.blogspot.com The Academy Awards, seen as a social test or study, can be fun. First, the interface. Hathaway seemed to be a winning, energetic girl who t...

Scalability is the idea that you can do 100 tasks as easily as 1 task. Facebook, for instance, works the same with one user as it does with two billion users. Amazon is also infinitely scalable, a brick-and-mortar store is not.

Strzok, the FBI guy, was very aggressive and convincing at the House hearings. It was almost as if he didn't send those emails.

A funny little segment of the hearings: Strzok diminished the import of emails generally; he works for an intel agency whose main activity is listening to phone calls and intercepting emails.

Sexism has been a bigger problem than racism at the World Cup in Russia, according to anti-discrimination experts advising FIFA.

Fans harassing female broadcasters while they worked are among about 30 cases of "sexism on the streets" reported to FIFA by the Fare network.

Apparently the World Cup is responding by censoring pictures of good looking women in the stands.

"Anti-discrimination expert" sounds like a pretty good job.

The Great Courses has a Netflix arm.

If we are serious about our interest in other sources of life in the universe, someone better investigate where Melania is really from. She looked otherworldly at the NATO dinner.

Legerdemain:

1. trickery; deception.
2. sleight of hand.
3. any artful trick.

There are about 50 spellings in Middle English for (modern) legerdemain. The English word most likely comes from a Middle French phrase leger de main “light of hand,” which is unfortunately unrecorded. Middle French has two similar idioms meaning “to be dexterous”: estre ligier de sa main, literally “to be light of his hand” and avoir la main legiere, literally “to have the light hand.” In English, legerdemain first meant “skill in conjuring, sleight of hand” and acquired the sense “trickery, artful deception” in the 16th century. Legerdemain entered English in the 15th century.

"Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes. Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations." (This is from the NYT on some U.N. resolution)

So, if economics is the analysis of the movement of labor and products in scarcity, what happens in times of surplus?

New Jersey State legislators have approved a bill to use taxpayer money to support "grants to strengthen local news coverage," starting with a $5 million. The goal when the bill was first introduced was to have $20 million allocated toward the "civic information" fund every year for five years. "Particularly during these uncertain times, we need a strong and free press, which we know is the best safeguard for truth in our state and the country," State Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg declared.

She said this with a straight face, acting as if the state subsidy did not undermine the press' freedom.

An attorney for former FBI lawyer Lisa Page says she would not appear for a private interview with two House committees, despite a subpoena. Ignore subpoenas, take the fifth--I just don't see how these people can do stuff that we average guys would be just destroyed doing.

A very good and important sentence from the WSJ:
One reason the economy struggled under Barack Obama is because he stretched the law to serve his ideology. Businesses never knew when a new regulation might hit next, and on what legal basis. Mr. Trump is making the same mistake on trade, substituting presidential whim for clear and fixed rules.

So we should man the barricades over the minimum wage. Or the trade deficit. Or something. Look at the recent coffee "science." A large observational study used about half a million records from people who donated tissue and samples to the UK BioBank. Researchers found a slightly lower risk of death over 10 years of follow-up among people who self-reported that they drink coffee.
The researchers said their study “should be interpreted with caution.” They didn’t claim a health benefit, but rather said the findings “provide further evidence that coffee drinking can be part of a healthy diet and may provide reassurance to those who drink coffee and enjoy it.”
Sitting down over a cup of coffee in the morning, you could come up with countless explanations for such a finding. Coffee is part of the working culture; workers are healthier than non-workers. Coffee is a gastric irritant; people with gastric disease don't drink coffee. Some with high blood pressure are annoyed by coffee; so hypertensives don't drink coffee. You could make it a parlor game that could go on forever.
Yet, predictably, the news stories not just told readers that “coffee drinkers are more likely to live longer” (NPR’s headline), they often told readers to “go ahead and have another cup” as the AP advised in its opening sentence.
Info is different from understanding.

Since 2001, the percentage of self-employed health care professionals declined and the gap in annual earnings between self-employed and employed health care professionals narrowed.

From the indictment of the 13 Russians: “The ORGANIZATION sought, in part, to conduct what it called, ‘information warfare against the United States of America.'” . . . “By in or around May 2014, the ORGANIZATION’s strategy included interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, with the stated goal of ‘spread[ing] distrust toward the candidates and the political system in general.”
Strangely, the Left is outraged, as least as outraged as they were over the Rosenberg execution or the Alger Hiss case. And remember their ridicule of Romney when he called Russia our most dangerous enemy?
Gun rights activist charged with being a Russian agent?
Washington D.C.'s  liberal City Council plans to repeal their minimum wage?
I'm getting dizzy.

Fruits are seed-bearing structures; so, anything with seeds in it is a fruit. Vegetables are every other part of the plant, from the roots (onions) and stems (celery) to the leaves (spinach) and flowers (cauliflower). So, technically, tomatoes are fruits and rhubarb is a vegetable. Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. -Miles Kington, journalist, musician, and humorist (1941-2008)

U.S.—While most Americans are hostile to socialism, touching a hot stove, and sticking one’s face in a sack full of badgers, surveys show that millennials are much more open to these dangerous ideas and activities than previous generations. Finding themselves pessimistic about the future and saddled with student debt, millennials often turn to socialism, and also tend to say things like “Hey, maybe it would be fun to touch that hot, glowy thing above the oven.”
(from a satirical mag)

This is the ninth time in this century that the US has had the largest decline in emissions in the world. This also was the third consecutive year that emissions in the US declined, though the fall was the smallest over the last three years.

Carbon emissions from energy use from the US are the lowest since 1992, the year that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) came into existence. The next largest decline was in Ukraine (-10.1% and 28.1 tons).

The largest increase in carbon emissions in 2017 came from China (1.6% and 119 tons)

Together, China and India accounted for nearly half (212.2 million tons) of the increase in global carbon emissions (426.4 million tons).

Aaaaaannnnnddddd......a graph:

Source: Gavekal