Ruminations – 15jun2018 (updated 20jun18)

George Rebane

Headline, ‘Growth in US Leaves World Behind’ while the ECB continues to keep the ‘fragile economies’ of the EU on crutches with low interest rates.  Wonder why our lamestream considers this too insignificant to report?  One might almost think that they're afraid people will credit President Trump with some of this good news.

Judge’s ruling - Illegal aliens now know how to be turned loose in the US after crawling under the fence - just bring your kid along.  Wonder if this will invite or deter more illegals.

Macron wants to restore the ancien régime after Brexit, and make French again the official language of the EU.  Meanwhile English, and specifically American English, has become the world’s lingua franca in both commerce and diplomacy.  Maybe Monsieur le Président knows that French is the most rapidly shrinking developed country language worldwide.

California’s new enforced water restriction law is designed to make real in people's lives the global warming hysteria that the progressives’ politicized consensus science could not do.   It looks like you will be criminalized if ‘in this land of surf and sun, you still flush for Number One’.  Meanwhile we continue to oppose building new reservoirs and dump most of our fresh water into the Pacific. (more here)

Government cheating government – it turns out that “America’s great progressive political hope, NYC Mayor Bill deBlasio is essentially the nation’s pre-eminent slumlord.”  NYC’s affordable housing projects have been allowed to deteriorate while deBlasio has been “taking active steps to deceive inspectors and cover up its ineptitude and wrongdoing.”  We recall our mantra – in creating social problems, government is always guilty until proven innocent.

[16jun18 update]  Gary Litke in the 16jun18 Union (here) is among the county’s NIMBY legions who oppose building 28 new houses west of Grass Valley because “the agricultural, open space history of this property should be maintained in ways that would benefit someone other than residential real-estate developers.”  It continues to be lost on the local Litkes that Nevada County needs people who need places to come and raise their families here, do business with our merchants, send their kids to our schools, support our cultural offerings, and do all the things which have made Nevada County the desirable place to live that it has been.  Do all of these people not also benefit from such developments?  Today, we seem to be a draw primarily for people with, let’s say, a spectrum of alternative life styles based on cesspool SF values.  What are we offering to middle-class working families with traditional American values?

Mizzou’s comeuppance.  The university is in dire straits with student enrollments down 35%, and more graduating than wanting to attend.  It turns out that all that horsecrap in 2015 - when student activists banned free speech, got top administrators to leave, and made academics a politically correct supplementary offering - has convinced students and parents that the University of Missouri is a place to avoid, especially when other neighboring universities and colleges are doing their best to return to academics and offer an open environment for exchanging ideas. (more here and here)

[17jun18 update]  The naivete of The Economist.  This hoary ‘newspaper’ continues its lurch leftward, donning the trappings that so often today adorn the remarks of progressive naifs.  In its 16jun18 edition’s lead editorial (here) this auto-aggrandized paragon of journalism laments that the Singapore “agreement contains no binding North Korean commitments.”  More sober observers celebrated Trump’s first meeting with NK’s UFK as 1) the decades-awaited breakthrough meeting that defused what the Left itself had been aspirating as imminent nuclear armageddon, and 2) the potential for further talks that could lead to the normalization of that rogue regime and remove it as China’s pawn for irritating the west.

[19jun18 update]  Now here’s a bit of embarrassment for Mueller and his crack team of progressive yet unbiased lawyers finally investigating the Russia conspiracy angle which was their charge.  A Russian company charged in the conspiracy did not exist at the time of the alleged mischief, and the company is now fighting back - whoulda thought of that? - justifiably demanding Mueller’s evidence on which he based his indictment.  Red-faced and with pants down, Mueller is desperately petitioning the court for delays and gag order for submitting his supposedly unclassified evidence.  Oh my.  (more here)  H/T to reader.

[20jun18 update] 'My Lazy Summer as a Public Employee' by Jason Riley is another of a gazillion examples we see every day of government workers' gold bricking, hubris, inefficiencies, and incompetence.  All of it counsels letting government do something should be the choice of last resort when all other private sector means have been exhausted, including to consider not doing it at all if government is the only remaining choice.

Comments

[Russ]

Atlanta Fed: Q2 GDP estimate rises to 4.8% from 4.6%

"The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the second quarter of 2018 is 4.8 percent on June 14, up from 4.6 percent on June 8," the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta said in its latest GDPNow report on Thursday.

https://www.fxstreet.com/news/atlanta-fed-q2-gdp-estimate-rises-to-48-from-46-201806141617

Getting closer and closer to 5%, which the left has declared to be impossible. Humm.

[Russ]

Two years of stonewalling: What happened when a scientist filed a public records request for NASA code

Nathan Myhrvold, who holds a Ph.D. in physics, and the former chief technology officer at Microsoft has uncovered what he alleges is an attempt by NASA JPL asteroid researchers to pass off other research results as the product of their model, possibly to conceal the shortcomings of the NASA model.

Myhrvold writes:

This cannot possibly be what Congress had in mind when it enacted FOIA 52 years ago to bring transparency and sunshine to government operations. Scientific research paid for by taxpayers and performed by government agencies belongs to all of us. Two years of stonewalling, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on FOIA fees and outside counsel, three administrative appeals: these are the outrageous tolls exacted by a federal agency that impede my quest for scientific clarity.

https://retractionwatch.com/2018/06/14/two-years-of-stonewalling-what-happened-when-a-scientist-filed-a-public-records-request-for-nasa-code/

This article exposed more government science dishonesty, like the climate change models that cannot model the climate, an exciting story or our times, taxpayer-funded scientific fraud.

[Russ]

Mizzou: Get Woke, Go Broke!