Pentacost

 There is a bird in the church today, a big one, with a loud and varied song. On Pentecost one might get symbolic here but its probably just a bird of pray.

Today is Pentecost, observed 7 weeks after Easter. It is a complex day in the Church in history and meaning.
Literally Pentacost means "fifty," as the fiftieth week of the year. It, in the Old Testament, refers to the giving of the Ten Commandments and, in the New testament, signifies its new direction. Christ reappears to the fearful apostles, reinvigorates them and then breaths upon them, infusing the spirit of the New Testament and the abilities to carry out their evangelism. "Whose sins you forgive..." essentially creates a church structure.
 In England it is--or was--the feast of Whitsun, so changed after the Norman Conquest. Whitsun is a contraction of "White Sunday," attributed to the white vestments worn by catechumens on the day. Eventually white (hwitte) began to be confused with wit or understanding, not entirely inappropriate for the occasion. It was a significant holiday and celebration in its time and began to substitute for more secular spring celebrations.

The word for "Spirit" in Greek has several meanings; it also can mean "wind" and "breath." Christ does breath on the apostles and the Spirit is often described as a great wind. One ancient writer describes the Holy Spirit as Christ's last expired breath on the cross.

Breath is, of course, different from wind, which can be destructive, even in the scorching Middle East. But Christ's breath is gentle; it seems there is no downside here, no risk. Unless to the recipient who internalizes it. Of the apostles--who all abandoned Christ to die alone--after Pentecost, all, save John, died for Christ's message.
In our cautious and uncertain world, Pentecost might be more safely observed from a window.


 

Sunday/Pugh

In "Chocolate from the Famine Museum," the poet Sheenagh Pugh writes about a guide's earnest efforts to make the history of The Great Hunger alive and relevant to comfortable and privileged children. It caught my eye because my family is from Roscommon.




Chocolate from the Famine Museum

Strokestown, Co Roscommon

Reading numbers on a wall,
so many thousand evicted,
exiled, starved,


soon palls. The boys are looking
for buttons to press,
and Sir’s at a loss


how to bring it alive. He tries
to give them the reek
of peat smoke and lamp oil


in a cramped turf cabin,
wishing there was a replica
they could crowd into.


At every turn, language
fails him. Starving
means wanting dinner,


not boiling boot-leather
till you can chew it,
hoping it stays down.


They sailed to America,
he laments, to lads
who’ve flown there


on holiday, who make nothing
of oceans. They fidget
through the video,


dying for their reward:
the gift shop.
Their faces light up,


for the first time, at sheep
in green hats, penny whistles,
toy blackthorn sticks,


and the chocolate. Praline,
ganache, mint, mocha, truffle,
they’re spoiled for choice,


their day flavoured
for ever with the velvet
dark in their mouths.


SHEENAGH PUGH (2003)

Accord2

Sandra has noted, critically, that I have not condemned Trump's exit from the Paris Accords. What is interesting about the Accords is why some people are so passionate about them. The basic American objection--and mine--is that it is a treaty Obama structured to enact by dodging the constitutional requirements for treaties. I think that wrong. The motives--arrogance, elitism, vision of higher good--are interesting and instructive but not as important to me as preserving the country's foundational laws. So I oppose the effort to side-step the basic, clear rules that make the democracy up. 

Foreigners in European capitals may have no real interest--or knowledge--of that objection but, if they will excuse me, this is my country. Our rules are important to me. 

They may be entirely concerned with the practical problems of global warming and willing to do anything to improve matters. Accepting that as their motive, what do the Accords actually do? The most complimentary assessment I have read is that it brought nations together for a common and important cause. The effectiveness of that effort is not in question. But it should be.
The debate over global warming centers on several elements. The earth seems to be warming, how do we measure that, what are the factors and how can we, if possible, influence the process?

Current political belief is that the climate is changing, not through regular and natural processes but rather as the side effect of  human activity, particularly as the result of carbon fuel use. The data has been argued over but computer models have been developed to predict the future effect and they are dire. The problem is that many do not think the data accurate and, more import, the models using that data to predict future activity have not been correct. That raises questions--reasonable questions--as to the accuracy of the original data and/or the models based upon them. 

The second objection is the Procrustean distortions the Accords go through to accommodate the various signers. Nations are to assess themselves on their progress, progress which is very different for each nation, and culturally based. So China continues to build coal-fire plants at the rate on one a week. Nor is there any enforcement program. Nor is their a mechanism approved for the nations to use; that is said to be coming.

One definite position is that carbon as an energy source will have to go, certainly in the next generation and a half. All of the power of transportation, temperature and information will have to come from a new source, a source we do not have or use. An entirely new power source for humanity will have to be invented, developed and put into service to replace the abundant and cheap carbon power we use now. If one is worried about disorder, imagine the effect of turning off the world's industrial carbon power switch without an adequate, affordable replacement.

And this effort will have to be financed, financed by someone.

This may look like a good plan to Europe but, constitutional objections aside, it looks like a lousy idea to me. It doesn't look like an idea at all; it looks like a wish. And, somehow, my bet is that we, more than anyone, will be financially responsible for this long term project.
Actually, this looks like a placebo, therapy whose benefit depends upon the optimism of the participants. And an unending series of proclamations, good ideas, unasked for leadership, interventions and great dinners for the participant ruling class that will go on and on as a make-work project for the rich forever.

Reverie

“The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”--Salena Zito 

Markets require that one consider the point of view of others and alter one’s behavior to satisfy their desires.  This disposition supports three liberal virtues.  The first is deliberation, the ability to consider an opposing viewpoint.  The other two virtues are negative.  Markets weaken loyalty to tribe and family, cultivating the ability to relate to strangers according to impersonal criteria.  Finally, markets break down aristocratic habits, encouraging people to relate peaceably as equals. --Nathan Oman

".... people "have taken an expectation that previously applied to the private sphere — control over our environment — and are increasingly applying it to the public sphere." Social media's "self-affirming feedback loop" encourages "expectations for a custom-made reality" and indignation about anything "that deviates from our preferences." The consequences of what Stewart calls "our growing intolerance of an unedited reality" are enumerated in Tom Nichols' new book "The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters." Our devices and social media are, he says, producing people who confuse "internet grazing" with research and this faux research with higher education..." (Will)


Say you have a study that shows a drug significantly improves the life expectancy of someone with a particular illness. Is it ethical to try to reproduce the results of the study?

Who is....Patrick Frank?


Since 2010, when the government took over student lending, direct government lending to students has gone from approximately $200 billion to more than $900 billion—creating dramatically increased student defaults and a population that is rightfully angry about how much money they owe, particularly since it reduces their ability to get other credit. (from Jamie Dimon's letter to shareholders)


"In horrible madness Caligula wished that the entire Roman people had one head so that he could strike it off. The civilization of the twentieth century has made it possible for the raving madness of the modern imperialists to realize similar bloody dreams. By pressing a button one can expose thousands to destruction. It was the fate of civilization that it was unable to keep the external means that it had created out of the hands of those who had remained estranged from its spirit. Modern tyrants have things much easier than their predecessors. "


This is von Mises musing on the first great war with the ability of the nations to kill and the inability of the citizen to hide.



According to the NYT, current academic definitions include the following changes: "sex is never truly consensual between adults unless they both have equal power." You may mull that over.




The U.S. military was the world's 17th largest in April 1917, smaller (less than 250,000) than Romania's, and smaller than Britain's casualties in one battle. America's military became a melting pot for a nation in which one-third of the population had been born abroad or whose parents had been. Forty-three languages were spoken in one Army division raised in New York. (Will)

That "melting pot" unleashed a flu pandemic that killed more people in a year — somewhere between 20 million and 50 million — than the war killed in four years.




Toshiba--Toshiba!--expressed doubt for the first time over whether it can continue as a going concern, citing huge losses at its U.S. nuclear subsidiary which filed for bankruptcy last month.




Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-second-commandment.html

The Second Commandment steeleydock.blogspot.com You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or...

The Second Commandment steeleydock.blogspot.com You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or...

The writer Deborah Levy was asked which she preferred, modernist or post-modernist and she replied, "Modernism. Post is like having a conversation with someone who never looks at you."




Which is more simplistic, "Let the market with its millions and millions of self-interested participants handle it" or "Let the government handle it?"




The reason elite values have been enshrined as ‘the truth’, right from the Ancient Greeks onwards, is because the rulers of society need to secure the deference of the masses. The masses are being encouraged to defer not to the power of the elites, but to the truth of elite values. While each revolt of sections of the public against the values of the elites has been met with the riposte that people are no longer interested in the truth, what the elites really mean is that people don’t care about their version of the truth. So when the French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy asserted that people have ‘lost interest in whether politicians tell the truth’, he was venting his frustration at an electorate that no longer shares his values. A recent essay by suggests the era of deference toward elite values may be over.





Mrs. Clinton, who was Sec. of State during the infamous "Red Line" speech by Obama, had the gall to urge military action against Syria recently..

Measurement errors: Patrick Frank is a scientist at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), part of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University. Frank has published papers that explain how the errors in temperatures recorded by weather stations have been incorrectly handled. Temperature readings, he finds, have errors over twice as large as generally recognized. Based on this, Frank stated, in a 2011 article in Energy & Environment, “…the 1856–2004 global surface air temperature anomaly with its 95% confidence interval is 0.8˚C ± 0.98˚C.” The error bars are wider than the measured increase. It looks as if there’s an upward temperature trend, but we can’t tell definitively. We cannot reject the hypothesis that the world’s temperature has not changed at all.

Sometimes people are just not able to process and explain and overt idiocy should disqualify them from doing so.

A Syria theory on the Right: The U.S. government actually carried out the chemical weapons massacre in Syria last week — a "false flag" to trick President Trump into retaliating, thus entangling himself in a foreign war. A slightly more convoluted Syria theory on the Left: Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the chemical weapons massacre to help Trump — distracting Americans from an investigation into Trump's campaign ties to Russia by provoking the missile strike.
That theory — evidence-free — was laid out on a small anti-Trump site shortly after the missile strike.
But it went mainstream Friday night, when Lawrence O'Donnell advanced similar speculation on his MSNBC show, "The Last Word."  

How can anyone be asked to take these people seriously?

Tesla’s market cap surpassed that of Ford. But Ford sells a lot more cars than Tesla. When the cost of capital is zero or less, many unreasonable things are possible.

Bogel recently said this: "Find a company that is the right company, even if it is the wrong job for you. Once you get in the door, it will be a much wider opportunity,"



At least two-thirds of federal spending can be described as Congress’ taking the rightful property of one American and giving it to another American, to whom it does not belong.  So-called mandatory spending totaled $2.45 trillion in 2015.  Thus, two-thirds of the federal budget goes toward Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, food assistance, unemployment and other programs and benefits that fall into the category of taking from some and giving to others. (Williams)


"Certainly misogyny played a role, I mean that just has to be admitted," Hilary Clinton said yesterday in discussing her loss to Trump. And she offered a mixed religious/biologic non sequitur: "The things that come out of some of these men's mouths, like why do we have to cover maternity care? Oh I don't know, maybe you were dropped by immaculate conception?" she said.

V-P Pence does not attend one-on-one dinners with women other than his wife Karen, and he does not drink alcohol in social settings when Karen is not with him. This has raised all sorts of strange questions on the Left. Jonah Goldberg's good line: "Elites say we have no right to judge adultery, but we have every right to judge couples who take steps to avoid it."



More on measurement error by Patrick Frank:
Climate models are used to assess the CO₂-global warming hypothesis and to quantify the human-caused CO₂ “fingerprint.”
How big is the human-caused CO₂ fingerprint compared to other uncertainties in our climate model? For tracking energy flows in our model, we use watts per square meter (Wm^–2). The sun’s energy that reaches the Earth’s atmosphere provides 342 Wm^–2—an average of day and night, poles and equator—keeping it warm enough for us to thrive. The estimated extra energy from excess CO₂—the annual anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution—is far smaller, according to Frank, at 0.036 Wm^–2, or 0.01 percent of the sun’s energy. If our estimate of the sun’s energy were off by more than 0.01 percent, that error would swamp the estimated extra energy from excess CO₂. And, unfortunately, the sun isn’t the only uncertainty we need to consider.





Freedom means freedom: not necessity, but choice; not responsibility, but the choice between responsibility and irresponsibility; not duty, but the choice between accepting and rejecting duty; not virtue, but the choice between virtue and vice. --Frank Meyer






AAAaaaaaannnnnnnnddddddd.....a graph:
It was a Scotsman named William Playfair who invented statistical graphics in the 18th century, during that period when the Scots were building the modern world. Here is a lovely line graph of his from 1786 showing England's trade balance with Norway and Denmark.

Backchannel

A report from the Innuendo Front.

A panel segment on NBC’s “Meet The Press” Sunday morning was discussing reports that White House advisor Jared Kushner may have suggested establishing a communication back channel with Russian officials. Kimberly Strassel of The Wall Street Journal  interjected this information to place the dreaded "back channel" in some perspective:

"Let me set the scene for you: It’s 2008, we are having an election and candidate Obama, he’s not even president elect, sends William Miller over to Iran to establish a backchannel, and let the Iranians know should he win the election they will have friendlier terms. Okay? So this is a private citizen going to foreign soil, obviously in order to evade U.S. intelligence monitoring and establishing a backchannel with a sworn enemy of the United States who was actively disrupting our efforts in the military in the Middle East."

Not to say this is ok, just that it is common--our esteemed leaders see themselves well beyond our mundane restraints-- and criticism of our esteemed leaders is quite selective.

Accords

The Paris Accords

Trump is said to be considering leaving the Paris Climate Accords. I do not know his reasons but reasons are often foreign to him. The main American objection to the Treaty has been that it was negotiated and signed outside of established Constitutional Law: The Congress, not the Administrative Branch, confirms treaties. The Constitution provides that the president "shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur" (Article II, section 2).
The international reaction to the recent Trump rumor has been quite negative, as if a great and noble thing will be lost if the U.S. indeed leaves.
Here is a summary of several points of the Treaty:

In 2009, in Copenhagen, the world’s nations agreed: The global temperature average should not be allowed to rise more than two degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. This is a difficult demand because the very nature of the mechanism and degree of global warming is in dispute. The data has been criticized and the models based upon that data have not been accurate. Nonetheless, in 2015, the Paris climate deal agreed to limit the rise of global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius in this century. To bell the cat, the agreement also directed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the climate-science arm of the UN—to draw up a report by 2018 on how to reach that 1.5 degrees Celsius target.

 

The mechanisms of this rise is assumed to be carbon fuel. If humanity hopes to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, it must essentially stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2060, according to a recent study from Nature Climate Change. Their estimates come from the same unfulfilled models mentioned above. The Paris meeting could not agree on this crucial concept because the world runs on carbon and replacing it implies relying on technology we do not yet use.

If nations eliminate carbon fuel which is cheap and efficient for another energy source we do not have or use, changes will be necessary. Alternative power sources must be made available. Growing nations will be especially stressed it is said, but it is difficult to imagine how established economic powers like the U.S., China, Russia and India will manage such a conversion. This energy gap is not filled by the Paris Accords but it seems that money will solve the question. As usual, as it is assumed that someone will have to pay and, unsurprisingly, it seems that the Americans are most likely to be the ones. Mrs. Clinton, in Copenhagen, volunteered $100 billion that the rich world would “mobilize." But "mobilize" is different from "pay."  And the Paris agreement includes no new specific commitments to finance the change. But item 115 of the Paris decision says that more than that $100 billion will be needed.

How will the progress of this vision be assessed? The Paris agreement deals with both "stocktaking" and "ratcheting." It announced that the first  taking stock will occur in 2023, then every five years, and that countries should “update and enhance” individual plans at that and future meetings, those innovations presumably the ideas the aforementioned  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will bring forth in 2018.

No outside agency will approve and oversee whether nations are keeping their words—this was a red line for China and India. But under Article 13, nations will be subject to a common framework of transparency, though it will recognize that developing countries may need more help reaching their goal.

According to the U.N.’s website on climate change, the agreement has a “hybrid of legally binding and nonbinding provisions.”

But there’s no clear cut consequence or penalty for countries that fall short of their pledged goals.

 

So we have a presumed climate problem, for which we apparently have no definitive solution. If we assume carbon fuel is the problem and we eliminate it, that elimination will cause untold economic problems for which we have no solution as we do not have a substitute energy source. We agree to start the process but defer the means to do so. There is no money for the project and there is no process for the enforcement of any of the Agreement's notions.

Do I have that right? Is that the great international achievement we should defend?

Reverie

“Slow is Smooth. Smooth is quick. Quick is fast.”--SEAL slogan

 

 

Would there be any threat from automation if interest rates were positive and the cost of capital real?

Millennials are the only generation out of the four current generations who don't identify work ethic as a key part of their identity, according to the Pew Research Center.

FBI Director James Comey attempted to go public as early as the summer of 2016 with information on Russia’s campaign to influence the U.S. presidential election, but Obama administration officials blocked him from doing so, two sources with knowledge of the matter told  Newsweek.

"Unless you need a financial advisor to help you get started in that routine, you probably don't need a financial advisor at all," Jack Bogel said, giving a nod of approval to, instead of a human advisor, hiring a low-cost robo-advisor to help you automate your investing. (Vanguard now offers such a service). "It's a personal choice. If you think you need a helping hand, then you do."

In 2013, when Democrats controlled the chamber,  then-Majority Leader Harry Reid obliterated the filibuster for all presidential nominees except Supreme Court justices.

Historically, it wasn't easy to sustain a filibuster, since it required the senator to remain in the chamber, standing on his feet and continuously speaking — or lose the floor, and see the issue brought to a vote. As long as a filibuster was underway, the Senate was blocked from moving on to other business. Filibusters were grueling ordeals. That explains why there were so few of them: only one per year, on average, before 1970.

In 1970, the Senate adopted a new policy under which senators had only to announce a filibuster on Bill X or Nominee Y in order to prevent that bill or nominee from being voted on. By unanimous consent, the Senate would agree to defer the issue in dispute, while other Senate business could proceed.

Richard Dawkins is fond of pointing out that a single college in Cambridge has won more Nobel Prizes than the entire Muslim world.

Who is....Jeffrey Lacker?

It remains to be seen what will happen to health care. The idea of mandating everyone have health care is an interesting gambit in ObamaCare as it is the obverse of the idea that everyone has a right to health care. If health care is a right like life, liberty et al and not an aspiration like your own home, super models and Audis then the thinking of the nation has changed a lot. The practical problems are terrific (think how scarcity would be managed) but the philosophical change is revolutionary.

Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science focuses on generalities the Left dislikes but not much on consequences. For example, it reveals that Republican creationists exist but are they influential? They don’t affect the biologists or anthropologists studying evolution. George W. Bush refused federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but that hardly put a stop to it (and not much changed after Barack Obama reversed the policy).  In his first chapter Mooney’s brief acknowledgment that leftists “here and there” have been guilty of “science abuse.” First, there’s the Left’s opposition to genetically modified foods, which stifled research into what could have been a second Green Revolution to feed Africa. Second, there’s the campaign by animal-rights activists against medical researchers, whose work has already been hampered and would be devastated if the activists succeeded in banning animal experimentation. Third, there’s the resistance in academia to studying the genetic underpinnings of human behavior, which has cut off many social scientists from the recent revolutions in genetics and neuroscience.

The tyranny of the majority is no less real than any other, and, indeed, it may be more dangerous because it feeds on the idealistic illusion that participation is all that matters.--Buchannan

Presidents have had trouble with the press before. Both Adams and Jefferson did. Roosevelt was the most dramatic. Roosevelt created the Special Senate Committee on Lobbying, aka The Black Committee, after its chair,  Sen. Hugo L. Black (D–Ala.). The committee's original mission was to probe the opposition campaign to the "death sentence" in the Public Utility Holding Company Bill, a provision that would have allowed, under certain circumstances, the dissolution of utility holding companies. The Black Committee gained traction with the public when it brought to light evidence that some lobbyists had concocted thousands of "fake telegrams" sent to Congress to protest the bill. Smelling blood, Black expanded the investigation into a general probe of anti–New Deal voices, including journalists. Over a nearly three-month period at the end of 1935, FCC and Black Committee staffers searched great stacks of telegrams in Western Union's D.C. office. Operating with virtually no restriction, they read the communications of sundry lobbyists, newspaper publishers, and conservative political activists as well as every member of Congress. Writing to Black, one investigator stated that they had gone through "35,000 to 50,000 per day." Various newspapers and members of Congress later estimated that staffers had examined some five million telegrams over the course of the investigation. In 2017, this would be akin to staffers from a congressional committee and the FCC teaming up at the headquarters of Google and Yahoo! and then spending months secretly searching emails. (from the David Beito article in Reason)

The involvement of WikiLeaks in the Edward Snowden affair, catalogued ably by authors like John Schindler, Edward Lucas, and others, was so obviously facilitated by the Russians that it should be used as a case study in Espionage School 101. Recall that when Snowden showed up in Russia—a destination Assange recommended—WikiLeaks dispatched a fixer from their staff named Sarah Harrison to meet Snowden in Hong Kong and stand by his side in Moscow. From the time Snowden arrived in Russia, Harrison stuck to him like glue. If you think Assange’s recommendation, Snowden’s arrival, and Harrison’s presence are at all possible without a cozy relationship with the Russian secret services, then you don’t understand how any of this works.
Indeed, the later feuding between the Snowden camp and WikiLeaks (insofar as it was more than mere theater) speaks well of Snowden, in that it suggests what many of us long suspected: that Snowden was a stupid little boy who got involved way over his head in matters way beyond his competence. Assange and Harrison know what they’re doing, and for whom. Snowden, by now, also knows, but there’s not much he can do about it but to repay his masters for his new life in Russia.--Nichols

This is interesting. According to the WSJ, American companies are trying to stop employees from raiding their 401(k)s, in an attempt to ensure that older workers can afford to retire and make room for younger, less-expensive hires.
 
Public choice theory states that lying is more rational for a politician than for individuals in other walks of life. A politician's lies are less likely to be noticed or remembered by the "rationally ignorant" voter. Rational ignorance means that the individual voter has little incentive to invest time and money in gathering and analyzing political information because he will not be able, with his single vote, to change the election result. The politician running for office also has an incentive to lie when deprecating his opponents' character. If he wins, there will be no way to know whether or not his opponents would have been as bad as he claimed. And since the politician has no property rights in his office, the discounted value of his political reputation over time is very low, giving him an incentive to trade long-term credibility for short-run victories. --from Lemieux

A New Jersey teen pleaded guilty recently to a plot allegedly inspired by the Islamic State group to kill Pope Francis during his 2015 visit to the United States.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/01/state-of-union.html

State of the Union steeleydock.blogspot.com The State of the Union speech was the first formal campaign speech of this long and dreadful campaign season that inexplicably is tolerated ...

Having a state school system is a remarkably difficult idea to understand in a democracy. The relationship between the public and its government is by nature very difficult and antagonistic. The strongest argument for the separation of school and state is that it is extraordinarily dangerous to have the state in the business deciding which ideas and values are, and which aren’t, to be taught and conveyed.

Scientists try to avoid confirmation bias by exposing their work to peer review by critics with different views, but it’s increasingly difficult for liberals to find such critics. Academics have traditionally leaned left politically, and many fields have essentially become monocultures, especially in the social sciences, where Democrats now outnumber Republicans by at least 8 to 1. (In sociology, where the ratio is 44 to 1, a student is much likelier to be taught by a Marxist than by a Republican.) The lopsided ratio has led to another well-documented phenomenon: people’s beliefs become more extreme when they’re surrounded by like-minded colleagues. They come to assume that their opinions are not only the norm but also the truth.

It is generally believed--approvingly--among academics that education raises social liberalism and economic conservativism. But why should a social community prefer that over any other?


Richmond Federal Reserve President Jeffrey Lacker announced his immediate resignation Tuesday, admitting that he discussed sensitive information with an analyst regarding the Fed's plans for economic stimulus. What!?

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring set off decades of chemophobia with its scary anecdotes and bad science, like her baseless claim that DDT was causing cancer in humans and her vision of a mass avian die-off (the bird population was actually increasing as she wrote). Yet Silent Spring is taught in high school and college courses as a model of science writing, with no mention of the increased death tolls from malaria in countries that restricted DDT, or of other problems—like the spread of dengue and the Zika virus—exacerbated by needless fears of insecticides.

 

One of Trump's more obnoxious qualities is his willingness to besmirch the country for his own purposes. He famously responded to a question about Putin, "There are a lot of killers. You think our country's so innocent?" 
His response to Assad's poison gas attack on the children--and then on the first responders--was to connect American errors in the past to the act. That is ridiculous. The gas attack is the result of Assad and his supporters, the Russians. Period. You don't get to have six degrees of separation for responsibility.

Fox and O'Reilly had paid out around $13m to halt potential legal action against O'Reilly, on claims including sexual harassment and verbal abuse. O'Reilly's show is a monster money maker having brought Fox $178m in advertising revenue in 2015 and $188.6m in the first nine months of 2016, according to research firm Kantar Media.
And why does Trump have an opinion?

 

AAAAaaaaaaaannnnnndddddddd......a graph:

Charles Minard's flow-map describing Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. Created in 1869, modern-day graph maven Edward Tufte called it "the best statistical graphic ever drawn". The main variables it conveys are army size, spatial location, temperature and time. The beige line is the army on its way to Moscow, the black line is the return journey. The most striking thing about it is the incredible shrinkage of le Grande Armée as the Russians chip away at it for 6 months.