Directive 10-289

Directive 10-289: Feelin' the Bern

Security. Jobs. Production. Equality. These sacred platitudes fill the air at election time like Christmas music in December. And how many have tried to achieve these lofty and sacred goals. The following is an excerpt from Directive 10-289, a plan to create these ideals. Security. Jobs. Production. Equality. If not now, when?

 

In the name of the general welfare, to protect the people's security, to achieve full equality and total stability, it is decreed for the duration of the national emergency that:
Point One. All workers, wage earners and employees of any kind whatsoever shall henceforth be attached to their jobs and shall not leave nor be dismissed nor change employment, under penalty of a term in jail. The penalty shall be determined by the Unification Board, such Board to be appointed by the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources. All persons reaching the age of twenty-one shall report to the Unification Board, which shall assign them to where, in its opinion, their services will best serve the interests of the nation.
Point Two. All industrial, commercial, manufacturing and business establishments of any nature whatsoever shall henceforth remain in operation, and the owners of such establishments shall not quit nor leave nor retire, nor close, sell or transfer their business, under penalty of the nationalization of their establishment and of any and all of their property.
Point Three. All patents and copyrights, pertaining to any devices, inventions, formulas, processes and works of any nature whatsoever, shall be turned over to the nation as a patriotic emergency gift by means of Gift Certificates to be signed voluntarily by the owners of all such patents and copyrights. The Unification Board shall then license the use of such patents and copyrights to all applicants, equally and without discrimination, for the purpose of eliminating monopolistic practices, discarding obsolete products and making the best available to the whole nation. No trademarks, brand names or copyrighted titles shall be used. Every formerly patented product shall be known by a new name and sold by all manufacturers under the same name, such name to be selected by the Unification Board. All private trademarks and brand names are hereby abolished.
Point Four. No new devices, inventions, products, or goods of any nature whatsoever, not now on the market, shall be produced, invented, manufactured or sold after the date of this directive. The Office of Patents and Copyrights is hereby suspended.
Point Five. Every establishment, concern, corporation or person engaged in production of any nature whatsoever shall henceforth produce the same amount of goods per year as it, they or he produced during the Basic Year, no more and no less. The year to be known as the Basic or Yardstick Year is to be the year ending on the date of this directive. Over or under production shall be fined, such fines to be determined by the Unification Board.
Point Six. Every person of any age, sex, class or income, shall henceforth spend the same amount of money on the purchase of goods per year as he or she spent during the Basic Year, no more and no less. Over or under purchasing shall be fined, such fines to be determined by the Unification Board.
Point Seven. All wages, prices, salaries, dividends, profits, interest rates and forms of income of any nature whatsoever, shall be frozen at their present figures, as of the date of this directive.
Point Eight. All cases arising from and rules not specifically provided for in this directive, shall be settled and determined by the Unification Board, whose decisions will be final.

The Directive appears as an effort to stabilize the economy in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged

Reverie

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

~H. L. Mencken

Are gender and class specific games with disparate powers bad lessons in society? Should games like chess be banned?


Now Weber was a very learned and intelligent scholar.  After all, he gave us the true definition of government, namely, a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.  It is a definition as full and accurate as it is sadistically useful for torturing our mild social democratic friends in Sweden or Massachusetts, who like to believe that the government is a festival of kindly collectivism, sort of like a loving family.--McCloskey, on Max Weber


Who is...John Jay?

A poet said he was opposed to any competitions in poetry because memorizing is "repressive" and competition was foreign and destructive to art.
Do you think it is possible for us to produce the culture we want as opposed to the culture that grows naturally from us?

[N]o one should expect that governments will behave simply as social agencies whose sole or primary purpose is to maximize welfare.  Research during the past decade … has confirmed lay suspicions that politicians maximize their own objectives, including power, income, ideology, and patronage subject to the “constraints” imposed by elections.  For the most part, politicians are interested in externalities for their own sake as much as alcoholics are interested in the profitability of breweries. --Rowley

If the constants were created at the Big Bang, is it possible there are different constants?

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites. … Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. --Burke

Clinton's new spy novel has been bought to film. The politicians and the entertainers--two peas, one pod.

China's earthquake administration said it detected a magnitude 3.5 earthquake in North Korea, which it suspects "was caused by an explosion", raising fears that the rogue state has tested another nuclear bomb.

A rule for lawyers is never ask a question in court that you do not know the answer to. So it is with economics and politics; we avoid questions with challenging answers.

Just to show the Left has always been crazy: After the Russians decided to resume nuclear testing in 1961, J.K. Galbraith wrote a review for JFK alleging that, should nuclear war develop, allowing private industry to develop domestic shelters would favor the safety of Republicans.

25% of American jobs require a government license.

The North Koreans are great with their attacks. Trump is a "dotard," Hillary Clinton was described in 2009 as "by no means intelligent" and a "funny lady". "Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping,"
When Obama was president they said this:

In 2014 US President Barack Obama was a "juvenile delinquent", a "clown" and a "dirty fellow.” The North’s remarks verged on outright racism when they said Obama "still has the figure of monkey while the human race has evolved through millions of years."
They added that Obama "does not even have the basic appearances of a human being" and, in a particularly vile statement, called him: "a wicked black monkey."

Maybe we shouldn't encourage them.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/reward-limits.html

steeleydock: Reward Limits steeleydock.blogspot.com This academic sounding separation is becoming more important and practical. Most jobs in the United States up until the last decades have been algorithmic.

The "Last shall be first and the first last" gospel, a saying implying a Topsy-turvy reward system which actually means that all will be rewarded the same. It is an insightful look into the specie where people are unhappy at the rewards others are receiving. Jealousy means to desire another's attainment, but envy is more complex: it is sadness at the attainment of another.


The slavery question in the world and in the U.S. deserves more attention from clear thinking people. Patrick Henry, in a correspondence with an abolitionist Quaker named Pleasence, wrote that while he felt slavery an evil, he, himself, bought slaves.



The Judiciary Act of 1789 was passed by Congress and signed by President George Washington, establishing the Supreme Court of the United States as a tribunal made up of six justices who were to serve on the court until death or retirement. That day, President Washington nominated John Jay to preside as chief justice, and John Rutledge, William Cushing, John Blair, Robert Harrison, and James Wilson to be associate justices.


Whether as a tourist, guest worker, or refugee, the vast majority of all admissions to the United States have been legal from 2003 through 2015.  A mere 0.3 percent of all entries to the United States during that time were illegal. Illegal entries peaked in 2004 at 0.42 percent of all entries.  The last year for which data is available, 2015, provides evidence that illegal entries are falling as 99.81 percent of all admissions were legal while only 0.19 percent were illegal. 99.7% success is pretty high success for anybody, let alone the government. And the cost of attacking that marginal 0.3% does not look like a good investment.


Amid ongoing fallout from the negative media attention and student (and faculty) protests that rocked campus in 2015, the University of Missouri recently welcomed its smallest student body since 2008, with enrollment down about 33% from its peak in 2015.


Scientists have built an antibody that attacks 99% of HIV strains and can prevent infection in primates. It is built to attack three critical parts of the virus -- making it harder for HIV to resist its effects. The work is a collaboration between the US National Institutes of Health and the pharmaceutical company Sanofi. This study, reported on BBC, had only 24 primate subjects.


The International Trade Commission in a unanimous decision ruled that the companies SolarWorld Americans and Suniva were struggling financially not because of their own poor management, but because they couldn't compete with cheap panels from countries like China, Mexico, and South Korea. Suniva is suggesting import duties of 40 cents a watt for solar cells, and a floor price of 78 cents a watt for panels. (Right now, the average floor price, worldwide, for panels is about 32 cents.) The Solar Energy Industries Association warned that implementing these suggestions could end up doubling the price of solar, thus destroying demand and causing Americans to lose their jobs.
This is too hard for these people.


Rates of workplace violence in health care and social assistance settings are five to 12 times higher than the estimated rates for workers overall, according to a Government Accountability Office report from last year. This is from an article trying to emphasize the violence against nurses although the specific incidence was surprisingly vague.

5% of homes are responsible for 50% of flood insurance claims. One home in Houston has been rebuilt 16 times in the last 18 years.
And, on the topic of allocations, Katy, Texas, is building a $72 million football stadium for its high school.

Anyone interested in the conflict between causation and correlation need look no further than the death rates in states due to opioid overdose. They have a recognizable pattern; they are all states with declining 20th Century industries.

An article recently blamed the recent outbreak of anti-Columbus rhetoric on a return to the old English-Dutch anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic nationalism and bigotry. Delicious.


First Things, a religious journal founded on very conservative principles has had a stroke and turned Left. 



From a letter on the Internet:
"When I go to Walmart no one on the staff “takes a knee” before stocking a shelf or selling a product.
Neither does this happen at Home Depot or McDonald’s or anywhere else that I spend my money.  Of course, none of these businesses pipe the national anthem into their stores.
My entertainment dollar is no different than my grocery dollar.
If the fans object to being asked to sacrifice their leisure time with political issues or to the players “taking a knee”, then maybe the sports venues should simply stop playing the national anthem rather than ask the players to choke down their voicing of their conscience."
I do not think these people understand how dangerous it is for them to politicize sports. The politicization of the movie entertainment industry has done serious damage to it--from Fonda to the awards ceremonies. People want diversion/escape from these very things. Integrating politics into diversions will make people seek diversion elsewhere. Nobody's margins are infinite; the decrease in interest will be damaging.

According to an article in Reason, too much debt slows economic growth, reducing living standards. The sheer size of the existing debt is deeply worrying to economists on both the left and the right, who agree that when debt reaches 90 percent of GDP for five years in a row it means painfully slow growth, creating what's called a "debt overhang."
A group of progressive economists affiliated with the University of Massachusetts predicted in 2013 that a debt burden at that level would result in an annual growth rate of just 2.2 percent, which means economic stagnation and anemic job growth.
Our debt been at more than 100 percent of GDP for years now. Periods of slow growth associated with debt overhangs almost always last more than a decade and sometimes stretch out over a quarter century. That means that in 25 years, the overall economy will be about 75 percent the size it would have been if the government had only gotten the debt in check.

AAAAAAaaaaaannnnnnnnddddddd.......a map of hedge fund success--or lack thereof:
  In

Fable

A story from Quora:

"I was babysitting a friend’s little sister and decided to take her out for fro-yo. As the two of us piled on the different flavors and toppings, we noticed a friendly-looking old man in the corner.

I paid, we sat down, and the man approached us.

“If I gave you a million dollars, would you give me your sister? (Sic)” he asked.

“NO!” I shouted. I pulled her closer to my chest. Instinctive. Instantaneous. Natural.

The man looked at me in the eye. He said, “Never forget how rich you are.”"

A charming lesson in life, except in many instances the man would be lynched before he could explain his point.

Guns

Here are some comparisons on the national homicide rate over time, the U.S. compared to the Brits.

According to Wiki, the first restrictive legislation in Great Britain was the pistol act of 1903, but it had little effect:

"The Act was more or less ineffective, as anyone wishing to buy a pistol commercially merely had to purchase a licence on demand over the counter from a Post Office before doing so. In addition, it did not regulate private sales of such firearms."

The first  significant restriction was the Firearms Act of 1920. There were additional acts in 1937, 1968, 1988, 1997 and 2006.

Here is the data on Homicide rates per 100,000:

Year	U.S.	England&Wales	Ratio
1900	1.2	0.96	1.3
1910	4.6	0.81	5.7
1920	6.8	0.83	8.2
1930	8.8	0.75	11.7
*1946	6.4	0.81	7.9
1950	4.6	0.79	5.8
1960	5.1	0.62	8.2
1970	7.9	0.69	11.4
1980	10.2	1.11	9.2
1990	9.4	1.09	8.6
2000	5.5	**1.71	3.2
2010	4.8	1.14	4.2

*No data for the U.K. 1940-1945
**The figure is for the U.K. rather than England and Wales

What seems clear is not that one side here is right or wrong; it is hard to believe that restriction makes no difference (and the argument in the U.S. is over government, not murder anyway). What should be evident is how hard these questions are and how we refuse to accept complexity, preferring to substitute arrogant outrage in the discussion.

Sumner

William Graham Sumner’s term “the forgotten man” has been revived. Like "American Exceptionalism," it is a phrase that is adopted liberally by people who misuse it, often in a way directly opposite of its original meaning.
 It is the title of Amity Shlaes' reassessment of the Great Depression. And it has appeared in Trump's speeches as well.

Sumner introduced the term “forgotten man” in 1883 as a reminder of the overlooked decent and hard-working people whom the government taxes, pushes, and prods in order to acquire the resources and create the privileges that it then bestows on those who do not earn these things. 
Shlaes writes that in 1936 Franklin Roosevelt systematically established the modern political constituency, from unions to artists, to senior citizens. Her website summarizes that Roosevelt's solution was to spend for these groups, so extensively that federal spending that year outpaced state and local spending, for the first time ever in peacetime. The consequence was the Roosevelt landslide of 1936 --but also the modern entitlement trap. Roosevelt often spoke of the Forgotten Man, the man "at the bottom of the economic pyramid." Yet, Miss Shlaes shows, his New Deal recreated Sumner's forgotten man, the man who subsidizes the funding of other constituencies -- and who haunts politics in all developed nations today.

But central to Trump’s worldview is his belief in the economic and ethical merits of economic protectionism.  Yet no policy received more withering criticism from Sumner than protectionism.  In “The Forgotten Man,” Sumner complained that “The biggest job of all is a protective tariff. This device consists in delivering every man over to be plundered by his neighbor and in teaching him to believe that it is a good thing for him and his country because he may take his turn at plundering the rest.”

Sunday/ Materialism

Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones: 

But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.

This was written by the poet Richard Wilbur, a reference to Samuel Johnson's famous refutation of an argument against materialism: ‘I refute it thus,’ he said, and kicked a large rock.
Wilbur is right; not so fast, Sam.


Materialism is alive and well in the coffee-houses of the bloody-minded college political theorists and continues as the path du jour among the theorists of consciousness. But there is real trouble brewing for materialism in the minds of those who probably will decide this argument: The physicists.


This is excerpted from an article in Aeon by Adam Frank, professor of astronomy at the University of Rochester. It is dense but the last paragraph itself is worth the read.

...century of agnosticism about the true nature of matter hasn’t found its way deeply enough into other fields, where materialism still appears to be the most sensible way of dealing with the world and, most of all, with the mind. Some neuroscientists think that they’re being precise and grounded by holding tightly to materialist credentials. Molecular biologists, geneticists, and many other types of researchers – as well as the nonscientist public – have been similarly drawn to materialism’s seeming finality. But this conviction is out of step with what we physicists know about the material world – or rather, what we don’t know.

The equation F = ma gave you two things that matter most to the Newtonian picture of the world: a particle’s location and its velocity. This is what physicists call a particle’s state. Newton’s laws gave you the particle’s state for any time and to any precision you need. If the state of every particle is described by such a simple equation, and if large systems are just big combinations of particles, then the whole world should behave in a fully predictable way. Many materialists still carry the baggage of that old classical picture.

But to account for all the new phenomena physicists were finding (ones Newton knew nothing about), the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger had to formulate a very different kind of equation. When calculations are done with the Schrödinger equation, what’s left is not the Newtonian state of exact position and velocity. Instead, you get what is called the wave function (physicists refer to it as psi after the Greek symbol Ψ used to denote it). Unlike the Newtonian state, which can be clearly imagined in a commonsense way, the wave function is an epistemological and ontological mess. The wave function does not give you a specific measurement of location and velocity for a particle; it gives you only probabilities at the root level of reality. Psi appears to tell you that, at any moment, the particle has many positions and many velocities. In effect, the bits of matter from Newtonian physics are smeared out into sets of potentials or possibilities.


The wave function treats all properties of the particle (electric charge, energy, spin, etc) the same way. They all become probabilities holding many possible values at the same time. Taken at face value, it’s as if the particle doesn’t have definite properties at all.

According to the standard way of treating the quantum calculus, the act of making a measurement on the particle kills off all pieces of the wave function, except the one your instruments register. The wave function is said to collapse as all the smeared-out, potential positions or velocities vanish in the act of measurement.

...there are multiple interpretations of quantum theory, each of which corresponds to a very different way of regarding matter and everything made of it – which, of course, means everything. The earliest interpretation to gain force, the Copenhagen interpretation, is associated with Danish physicist Niels Bohr and other founders of quantum theory. In their view, it was meaningless to speak of the properties of atoms in-and-of-themselves. Quantum mechanics was a theory that spoke only to our knowledge of the world. The measurement problem associated with the Schrödinger equation highlighted this barrier between epistemology and ontology by making explicit the role of the observer (that is: us) in gaining knowledge.  

Some pinned their hopes on the discovery of hidden variables – a set of deterministic rules lurking beneath the probabilities of quantum mechanics. Others took a more extreme view. In the many-worlds interpretation espoused by the American physicist Hugh Everett, the authority of the wave function and its governing Schrödinger equation was taken as absolute. Measurements didn’t suspend the equation or collapse the wave function, they merely made the Universe split off into many (perhaps infinite) parallel versions of itself. Thus, for every experimentalist who measures an electron over here, a parallel universe is created in which her parallel copy finds the electron over there.

Here is an even more important point: as yet there is no way to experimentally distinguish between these widely varying interpretations. Which one you choose is mainly a matter of philosophical temperament. As the American theorist Christopher Fuchs puts it, on one side there are the psi-ontologists who want the wave function to describe the objective world ‘out there’. On the other side, there are the psi-epistemologists who see the wave function as a description of our knowledge and its limits.....The real problem is that, in each case, proponents are free to single out one interpretation over others because … well … they like it. Everyone, on all sides, is in the same boat. There can be no appeal to the authority of ‘what quantum mechanics says’, because quantum mechanics doesn’t say much of anything with regard to its own interpretation.

First, the differences between the psi-ontological and psi-epistemological positions are so fundamental that, without knowing which one is correct, it’s impossible to know what quantum mechanics is intrinsically referring to. A second and related point is that, in the absence of experimental evidence, we are left with an irreducible democracy of possibilities.

The high ground of materialism deflates when followed to its quantum mechanical roots, because it then demands the acceptance of metaphysical possibilities that seem no more ‘reasonable’ than other alternatives.

[...Then this:...]

Some consciousness researchers see the hard problem as real but inherently unsolvable; others posit a range of options for its account. Those solutions include possibilities that overly project mind into matter. Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained in the laws of particles. There is also the more radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to the list of things, such as mass or electric charge, that the world is built of.

Reverie

Another benefit of private property, not so clearly economic, is that it diffuses power.  When one entity, such as the government, owns all property, individuals have little protection from the will of the government.--Boaz

"The Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton invented the concept of ‘white people’ on 29 October 1613, the date that his play The Triumphs of Truth was first performed. The phrase was first uttered by the character of an African king who looks out upon an English audience and declares: ‘I see amazement set upon the faces/Of these white people, wond’rings and strange gazes.’ As far as I, and others, have been able to tell, Middleton’s play is the earliest printed example of a European author referring to fellow Europeans as ‘white people’."
This is from an article by Ed Simon which also contains this little nugget: "English commoner John Rolfe of Jamestown in Virginia took as his bride an Algonquin princess named Matoaka, whom we call Pocahontas. The literary critic Christopher Hodgkins reports that King James I was ‘at first perturbed when he learned of the marriage’. But this was not out of fear of miscegenation: James’s reluctance, Hodgkins explained, was because ‘Rolfe, a commoner, had without his sovereign’s permission wed the daughter of a foreign prince.’ King James was not worried about the pollution of Rolfe’s line; he was worried about the pollution of Matoaka’s."

Total unfunded liabilities in state and local pensions have roughly quintupled in the last decade.

On this day in 1973, Billie Jean King, 29, beat Bobby Riggs, 55, in a tennis match publicity stunt. One needs to know only that the stunt is now the subject of a movie. At this trajectory it will soon be a national holiday and, eventually, a holy day of obligation.
National significance abhors a vacuum.


Who is...Major John Andre?

Five Wheaton College football players face felony charges after being accused of a 2016 hazing incident in which a freshman teammate was restrained with duct tape, beaten and left half-naked with two torn shoulders on a baseball field.

Some things I came across about Gandhi:
During his stay in South Africa, Gandhi routinely expressed “disdain for Africans,” says S. Anand, founder of Navayana, the publisher of the book titled “The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire.”
According to the book, Gandhi described black Africans  as “savage,” “raw” and living a life of “indolence and nakedness,” and he campaigned relentlessly to prove to the British rulers that the Indian community in South Africa was superior to native black Africans. The book combs through Gandhi’s own writings during the period and government archives and paints a portrait that is at variance with how the world regards him today.
In response to the White League’s agitation against Indian immigration and the proposed importation of Chinese labour, Gandhi wrote in 1903: “We believe also that the white race in South Africa should be the predominating race.”
"Gandhi before India", By Ramachandra Guha, notes the relative lack of attention paid Gandhi’s racial blind spot: the fact that this campaigner for “non-white” British subjects’ rights had nothing to say about the absolute lack of rights of native Africans in colonial southern Africa. This leader who would set an important political example for a number of African and African-origin leaders, including Martin Luther King, Kenneth Kaunda and Nelson Mandela, did not himself, while in Africa, regard Africans as deserving of the same political rights as other oppressed people.
So, should Gandhi's writings and influence be purged?


Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were close to taking military action in the early stages of their ongoing dispute with Qatar, until Donald Trump called leaders of both countries and warned them to back off. Or so it is rumored.

De Tocqueville, who transited the Ohio River in the 1830s, observed that on the free bank, farms and towns appeared prosperous and well kept, while the opposite was true on the Kentucky side of the River.  He attributed this to the fact that in a free society labor was valued and respected, while the opposite was true in a society in which an entire class of people was confined to labor and deprived of the right of ownership of themselves or anything else.--J Burt

In 1780, during the American Revolution, American General Benedict Arnold met with British Major John Andre to discuss handing over West Point to the British, in return for the promise of a large sum of money and a high position in the British army. In the frenzy to tear down statues, Arnold has been suggested as the prototypical traitor who has no statues while the Confederates have, through bigoted and supremacist thinking, do.
In a world that is moving away from binary choices, this is at least curious.


Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/cab-thoughts-72013.html

Cab Thoughts 7/20/13 steeleydock.blogspot.com "I'm not sure I'm ready to have fun yet."--child on sideline of tennis camp According to a recent Rasmussen poll, 31 percent of blacks ...

Many people are really upset over Trump's UN speech. I am a bit uncertain why. They are unhappy about his "Rocket Man" line as unpresidential. But Trump is indeed presidential, as much so as Kennedy or Johnson or Bush who were no less mistaken or dangerous than Trump (see Cuban Crisis, Vietnam War and Iraq), only smoother and occasionally more sincere in their errors. How should we view the North Korean leader? Does he deserve the charade of respect we give guys like Putin and Assad? Look at what has happened to Venezuela, one of the richest countries in the world. All of these so-called leaders are a threat to us and a growing number of them are nuclear-ly armed. What the Trump presidency has done is reduced the role of leaders to the low level they deserve; we should think of them all as Trumps and Assads, not as Churchills and Lincolns. Churchill and Lincoln are the outliers here.



And, on the adventure front, a former head teacher who went missing while trying to kayak the length of the Amazon River on her own has been confirmed dead. A teenager and two men have been arrested in connection with her murder and four other suspects are being sought. Emma Kelty, 43, from Taunton, Somerset, disappeared last week along a lawless stretch of river known for drug smuggling and pirate attacks, after ignoring advice not to attempt the journey without an armed escort. Her body has not been found.

According to Newsweek (9/20, Firger), “a report published...by the World Health Organization (WHO) suggests the world may soon run out of effective antibiotics.” Newsweek, “According to the researchers, most new drug compounds scientists are busy developing are based on antibiotics that already exist on the market.” This is problematic, as “many of these drugs are less effective because the bacteria is slowly becoming resistant to them.”

 

Less than 24 hours after a 7.1-magnitude earthquake pummeled Mexico City, another tremor has occurred off the east coast of Japan.

The 6.1-magnitude quake struck roughly 175 miles east of the shuttered Fukushima nuclear plant at roughly 2:30 a.m. local time, according to the US Geological Survey. Its hypocenter — the underwater locus of the quake — happened at a depth of about 6 miles.

Depending on how they are measured or defined, there are 1.5 million entities that qualify as tax-exempt organizations in the United States.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than ten percent of the U.S. workforce is employed by nonprofit organizations of one sort or another. Twenty five percent of the adult population volunteers for those organizations. Then there's the money: in 2016, charitable giving in the United States continued to grow, inching closer to $400 billion.

Of the 1.5 million nonprofit entities in the United State, only about seven percent are private foundations. Those seven percent, however, accounted for about fifteen percent (or nearly $60 billion) of charitable giving in 2016, and, if one believes that the philanthropic distribution of funds is an exercise of power, this means private foundations are the most powerful institutions in terms of charitable giving. (Note that individual giving still dwarfs all other kinds of giving combined.)

Kim's calling Trump a "dotard" was very reassuring. It implied some research and effort at precision. And it was educational; apparently it stimulated a lot of searches for definitions on the internet.


Imagine a world where Kim, Trump, Maduro, Putin and Castro are world leaders with significant influence on their own countries and the world. Indeed the very survival of the species. And imagine a world where billions of people live in nations which have, as a basic political or economic or religious philosophy, the homicidal hatred of their neighbors.



Puerto Rico had, before the storm, $123 Billion--BILLION--in debt they can not finance. What will happen now that the storm has come and gone?


In the frenzy to tear down statues, Benedict Arnold has been suggested as the prototypical traitor who has no statues while the Confederates, though bigoted and supremacist, do.
In a world that is moving away from binary choices, this is at least curious. The gender world has gone analog, why is there so little leeway elsewhere?





AAAaaaaaannnnnndddddd.....a graph: