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Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show  airing live every Monday night from 2-3 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston). My engineer is Don.

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For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:

• You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts;
  

  Houston Mayor Annise Parker [L] with Mike, just before the show. (Dec. 7, 2015)

• An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.

SIGNOFF QUOTE[s]:“Strong, responsible unions are essential to industrial fair play.  Without them the labor bargain is wholly one-sided.  The parties to the labor contract must be nearly equal in strength if justice is to be worked out, and this means that the workers must be organized and that their organizations must be recognized by employers as a condition precedent to industrial peace.” —Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (from http://laborquotes.weebly.com/unions–labor.html)

 

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2. 2017 was a great year for CEOs. Not so much for the average worker – A new study shows that CEOs made about 312 times more money in 2017 than the average worker, By Alexia Fernández Campbell@AlexiaCampbellalexia@vox.com Aug 16, 2018, 11:10am EDT
   1. Earnings for the top executives at America’s largest companies skyrocketed in 2017, while wages for the average worker hardly budged.
   2. CEOs for the 350 largest US companies earned an average pay of $18.9 million in 2017, a sharp 17 percent increase from the previous year, according to a new study by the left leaning Economic Policy Institute. These estimates include salaries, bonuses, restricted stock grants, cashed-in company stock, and other forms of compensation for chief executives at those firms. Meanwhile, wages for the average US worker grew a paltry 0.2 percent during that time.
   3. This means that the CEOs made about 312 times more money than the average worker last year — an even larger gap than in 2016, when they made 270 times more money, according to EPI. But even more shocking is how much the gap has widened in the past 50 years: In 1965, CEOs earned only 20 times more than the average worker. …
   4. … there is another theory, which [the author] think is more persuasive: Starting with the Reagan tax cuts passed the 1980s, CEOs have more incentive than ever to inflate their pay.
   5. Vox’s Ezra Klein puts it this way:
   6. “Consider that for much of the post–World War II era, paying your CEO a lot of money didn’t make much sense because the government would simply tax it all away. Top marginal tax rates on income were above 90 percent. President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts sent those top rates tumbling, and so a CEO who could negotiate a much bigger salary could also keep a much bigger salary.”
   7. [Also] Capital gains tax rates, which tax income earned from stocks, have also plummeted since then. …
   8. MIKE: IN A CHART WITH THE ARTICLE, YOU CAN SEE THAT INCREASES CLIMB SIGNIFICANTLY THROUGH THE 1980s AND THEN TAKE OFF THROUGH THE 1990s AND BEYOND
3. Unions struggle in the courts, but they have a fighting chance in the streets, By Barry Eidlin (Barry Eidlin is an assistant professor of sociology at McGill University, and the author of “Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada.”) Washington Post, August 31,2018
   1. American labor has taken some hard hits in recent years. Since 2012, six more states have passed [so-called] “right to work” laws, bringing the total to 28. These laws undermine unions by allowing workers to receive the benefits of union contracts without having to pay dues . President Trump’s administrative appointees have issued a raft of anti-worker, anti-union rulings. And most significant, the Supreme Court imposed a right-to-work law on all public-sector employees in its Janus v. AFSCME ruling in June.
   2. Despite these defeats, labor has reason for hope. This spring’s massive teacher strikes in “deep red” states like West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona galvanized the public and forced reluctant legislators to increase education funding and teacher pay. With the new school year underway, the strike wave seems to be spreading to “blue” states, with teachers walking out or preparing to in California and Washington. And in early August, voters in Missouri repealed their state’s right-to-work law by a 2-to-1 margin, only the fifth state ever to do so, and the first to do it by referendum.
   3. There is a pattern to these losses and wins — one with broader lessons for labor. When judges and legislators determine labor’s fate, labor loses. When labor takes matters into its own hands, bringing the battle into the workplace and the public sphere, it at least stands a fighting chance. …
   4. … That doesn’t mean that courts never rule in favor of workers or that legislators never pass pro-labor laws. But historically, such rulings and laws have typically come after mass protests created crises to which elites had to respond.
   5. Missouri unions did not wait for the courts to rule on their state’s right-to-work law. Instead, they took the question out of the courts and the legislature and put it in the hands of voters. Framing right-to-work not as a narrow union issue but as a broad economic and labor rights issue , unions attracted widespread support: Nearly four times as many people voted to repeal right-to-work as there are union members in the state. In New York, the 18,000-member Taxi Workers Alliance managed to disrupt a Silicon Valley disrupter, using escalating public mobilizations to win regulations that require Uber to classify its drivers as employees for unemployment insurance purposes, cap the number of drivers on the road and guarantee its workers a minimum wage. And across the country, the Fight for $15 movement has used strikes and public pressure to transform a $15-per-hour minimum wage from a pipe dream to policy within a few years. …
   6. … The lesson for labor is clear: A viable strategy for revival must start with rebuilding labor’s disruptive capacity. This means moving the fight for labor’s future out of courtrooms, boardrooms and legislative committee rooms, and into the workplace and the streets. …
   7. That’s because when it comes to political fights, it’s not just about the players; the arena matters, too.
   8. … [W]orkplaces and public spaces play to labor’s strengths. Labor will never have as much financial, legal or lobbying help as its opponents. But it will almost always have more people….
4. Trump blasts union leader on Labor Day, CBS/AP September 3, 2018, 9:21 AM
   1. President Trump started his Labor Day with an attack on a top union leader, lashing out after criticism from AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.
   2. Trump tweeted Monday morning that Trumka “represented his union poorly on television this weekend.” He added: “it is easy to see why unions are doing so poorly. A Dem!”
   3. The president’s attack came after Trumka appeared on “Fox News Sunday” over the weekend where he said efforts to overhaul the North American Free Trade Agreement should include Canada. Trumka, whose organization is an umbrella group for most unions, said the economies of the United States, Canada and Mexico are “integrated” and “it’s pretty hard to see how that would work without having Canada in the deal.” …
   4. ,,, Trumka also said of Mr. Trump: “the things that he’s done to hurt workers outpace what he’s done to help workers,” arguing that Trump has not come through with an infrastructure program and has overturned regulations that “will hurt us on the job.”
   5. Asked about the low unemployment rate and economic growth, Trumka said “those are good, but wages have been down since the first of the year. Gas prices have been up since the first of the year. So, overall, workers aren’t doing as well.”
5. In victory for unions, judge overturns key parts of Trump executive orders, By Lisa Rein, Reporter |WASHINGTON POST | August 25, 2018
   1. Unions representing federal workers on Saturday declared victory in what they have described as an assault by the Trump administration after a federal judge struck down key provisions of a set of executive orders aimed at making it easier to fire employees and weaken their representation.
   2. The ruling, by [Obama-appointed] U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in Washington, was a setback to the White House’s efforts to rein in federal unions, which have retained significant power over working conditions even as private-sector unions are in decline.
   3. “It’s a big win for us,” said David Borer, general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees. With 750,000 members, the AFGE was the largest of about a dozen unions to sue the administration to block the new rules affecting 2.1 million civil servants.
   4. The AFGE and the other plaintiffs plan to demand that the administration immediately reverse the new rules, which were issued just before Memorial Day and had begun to take effect in several agencies.
   5. In a 122-page decision, Jackson … took issue with key elements of each order and immediately barred the administration from enacting them. …
   6. “They’re going to have to unwind what they’ve already done,” [AFGE general counsel David] Borer said. …
6. Jeff Bezos’s $150 Billion Fortune Is a Policy Failure – Growing inequality in the United States shows that the game is rigged, By Annie Lowrey | THEATLANTIC.com | Aug 1, 2018
   1. Last month, Bloomberg reported that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, has accumulated a fortune worth $150 billion. That is the biggest nominal amount in modern history …
   2. … Bezos is the world’s lone hectobillionaire. He is worth what the average American family is, nearly two million times He has about 50 percent more money than Bill Gates, twice as much as Mark Zuckerberg, [and] 50 times as much as Oprah …
   3. …He needs to spend roughly $28 million a day just to keep from accumulating more wealth. …
   4. … Bezos has argued that there is not enough philanthropic need on earth for him to spend his billions on. (The Amazon founder, unlike Gates or Zuckerberg, has given away only a tiny fraction of his fortune.) “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel,” he said this spring. “I am going to use my financial lottery winnings from Amazon to fund that.”
   5. In contrast, half of Amazon’s employees make less than $28,446 a year, per the company’s legal filings.* …
   6. … Amazon itself paid no federal corporate income taxes last year, despite making billions of dollars in profits. It has fought tooth-and-nail against state and local taxes, and has successfully cajoled cities into promising it billions and billions and billions in write-offs and investment incentives in exchange for placing jobs there. (Given that Bezos is a major Amazon shareholder, such tax-dodging redounds directly to his benefit.) …
   7. … The result of these decades of trends and policy choices is that Jeff Bezos has accumulated a $150 billion fortune while the average American family is poorer than it was when the Great Recession hit. Concerns about such astonishing levels of inequality are not just about fairness, nor are they just sour-grapesing about runaway success. The point is not that Jeff Bezos himself has done wrong by accumulating such wealth, or creating such profitable and world-changing businesses. But wealth concentration is bad for the economy and the country itself, and the government has failed to counter it. Rising inequality fuels political polarization and partisan gridlock. It slows economic growth, and implies a lack of competition that fuels economic sclerosis. It makes the government less responsive to the demands of normal people, potentially putting our very democracy at risk. Bezos’s extraordinary fortune shows that the game is rigged. He just happened to play it better than anyone else.
7. Turkey’s woes could be just the start as record global debt bills come due, By David J. Lynch [com] September 3 at 10:59 AM
   1. Ten years after the worst financial panic since the 1930s, growing debt burdens in key developing economies are fueling fears of a new crisis that could spread far beyond the disruption sweeping Turkey.
   2. The loss of investor confidence in the Turkish lira, which has surrendered nearly 40 percent of its value this year, is only a preview of debt problems that could engulf countries such as Brazil, South Africa, Russia and Indonesia, some economists say.
   3. “Turkey is not the last one,” said Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan, an economics professor at the University of Maryland. “Turkey is the beginning.”
   4. For now, few experts think that a broader crisis is imminent. But the danger of a financial contagion that could hit Americans by crushing U.S. exports and sending the stock market plunging should be taken more seriously in light of a massive increase in global debt since the 2008 downturn, the economists said.
   5. Total debt is a whopping $169 trillion, up from $97 trillion on the eve of the Great Recession, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.
   6. While previous debt crises involved U.S. households and, later, profligate European governments such as Greece, this time the concern centers on companies in emerging markets that borrowed heavily in dollars and euros….
   7. … Those bills are coming due, and Turkey, like other developing countries, may not have the dollars and euros to pay them back.
   8. That is in part because the Fed is raising interest rates in the midst of a healthier U.S. economy. The stronger dollar — along with the sinking lira — makes it increasingly expensive for Turkish borrowers to repay their dollar debts. Paying off a $100,000 loan at the start of this year would have required 379,000 lira. Now, that same loan would take more than 600,000 lira….
   9. …The prospect of a new debt crisis is striking because the world has already seen two in the past 10 years. …
   10. … Turkey’s problems are likely to get worse before they get better. Inflation is headed to a peak of 22 percent by year’s end, and the economy will shrink next year for the first time in a decade, according to S&P.
   11. But even if the country’s currency woes do not herald a global crisis, their impact is unlikely to be quarantined there.
   12. “We’ve depended on emerging markets to bring up global growth, some of it due to a credit boom,” Lund said. “This is going to take a bite out of growth, which will affect the U.S., Europe and the entire world economy.”
8. National debt of the United States (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
   1. As of July 31, 2018, debt held by the public was $15.6 trillion and intragovernmental holdings were $5.7 trillion, for a total or “National Debt” of $21.3 trillion.^[5] Debt held by the public was approximately 77% of GDP in 2017, ranked 43rd highest out of 207 countries.^[6] The Congressional Budget Office forecast in April 2018 that the ratio will rise to nearly 100% by 2028, perhaps higher if current policies are extended beyond their scheduled expiration date.^[7] As of December 2017, $6.3 trillion or approximately 45% of the debt held by the public was owned by foreign investors, the largest being China (about $1.18 trillion) then Japan (about $1.06 trillion).^[8]
   2. … According to the CIA World Factbook, during 2015, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio of 73.6% was the 39th highest in the world. This was measured using “debt held by the public.”[22] However, $1 trillion in additional borrowing since the end of FY 2015 has raised the ratio to 76.2% as of April 2016 [See Appendix#National debt for selected years]. Also, this number excludes state and local debt. According to the OECD, general government gross debt (federal, state, and local) in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2015 was $22.5 trillion (125% of GDP); subtracting out $5.25 trillion for intergovernmental federal debt to count only federal “debt held by the public” gives 96% of GDP.[23]
   3. MIKE: Low Taxes That lead to higher debt, which leads to higher interest rates, paid to banks and investors. This seems okay to Republicans who cut taxes in good times and thus raise borrowing and, unavoidably, interest rates. John Maynard Keynes talked about pump priming, spending borrowed money in bad times but running surpluses to pay it back in bad times.
   4. MIKE: Question: Would you rather pay higher taxes that build infrastructure, create jobs and improve the competitiveness and way-of-life in this country, or higher interest rates that buy the nation nothing? Which one is better for YOU?
9. Some Bacteria Are Becoming ‘More Tolerant’ Of Hand Sanitizers, Study Finds, By Melody Schreiber [NPR.org] August 2, 20184:22 PM ET
   1. In the early 2000s, hospitals across Australia began installing more hand-sanitizer dispensers in their rooms and hallways for staff, visitors and patients to use. Research showed these alcohol-based disinfectants helped battle staph infections in patients and certain kinds of drug-resistant bacteria. And rates of these infections went down.
   2. But other infections didn’t drop when people started using the sanitizer stations. In fact, certain infections went up.
   3. In the early 2000s, hospitals across Australia began installing more hand-sanitizer dispensers in their rooms and hallways for staff, visitors and patients to use. Research showed these alcohol-based disinfectants helped battle staph infections in patients and certain kinds of drug-resistant bacteria. And rates of these infections went down.
   4. But other infections didn’t drop when people started using the sanitizer stations. In fact, certain infections went up.
   5. In particular, enterococcal infections — caused by bacteria that affect the digestive tract, bladder, heart and other parts of the body — started increasing.
   6. This wasn’t only happening in Australia. Countries around the world saw rises in this type of infection even as hand sanitizer became more popular. Globally, enterococci make up ten percent of bacterial infections acquired in the hospital. In North America and Europe, they are a leading cause of sepsis, a deadly blood infection.
   7. Now, researchers say, they may have found the cause. Blame it on the alcohol.
   8. New research published by Science Translational Medicine on Wednesday shows that several strains of these bacteria have begun adjusting to alcohol-based hand sanitizers. They’re not resistant to the alcohol — at least, not yet — but they’re becoming “more tolerant” of it, the authors write. That means the bacteria were able to survive for longer periods of time after being doused with alcohol.
   9. The researchers used different strengths of alcohol concentrations to combat the bacteria, starting with 23 percent. Eventually, at a 70-percent alcohol mixture, the bacteria were conquered. Typically, hand sanitizers are 60 percent alcohol.
   10. To make matters worse, many of these alcohol-tolerant bacteria are resistant to multiple drugs as well. Half of the strains the researchers studied cannot be treated with vancomycin, a last-line antibiotic. That means the bacteria are spreading more easily within hospitals, and there aren’t many options for treatment.
   11. The researchers were surprised by their findings.
   12. “To our knowledge this was the first time anyone had shown hospital bacteria becoming tolerant to alcohols,” says Timothy Stinear, a coauthor of the study and a researcher at the University of Melbourne’s Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity. …
   13. … Health-care institutions trying to control the spread of these infections will need to “adhere rigorously to hand-hygiene protocols,” Stinear says — and probably institute additional measures to stop the spread, such as increased hand-washing with soap after coming into contact with the bacteria. …
   14. … Lance Price, a professor at the George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health and the founding director of GW’s Antibiotic Resistance Action Center, was also surprised by the findings. … “If you’re washing your hands less because that alcohol-based hand sanitizer makes you feel confident that your hands are clean,” Price says, “all of a sudden you can become a vehicle for alcohol-resistant organisms.”
   15. The research is still clear that alcohol-based hand sanitizers are more effective at battling some bacteria, like those causing staph infections. However, this study indicates that other bacteria are best cleaned off with simple soap and water.
   16. “It’s the physical action of lifting and moving them off your skin, and letting them run down the drain,” Price says.
   17. “We have to be careful about this new trend towards heavy reliance on alcohol-based hand sanitizers,” Price continues. “Soap and water should be our number-one protection” — both in hospitals and for personal use….
10. New Drug Wipes Out Malaria In A Single Dose — But There’s One Hitch, by  Michaeleen Doucleff  [NPR.org] July 26, 20181:02 PM ET
    1. The world now has a potent, new weapon against malaria — one that can wipe out the parasite from a person’s body with a single dose.
    2. But before many people around the world can use it, scientists have to overcome a big obstacle. …
    3. … In certain people, tafenoquine can cause red blood cells to burst open and die. As a result, people can become anemic, and in some instances, this can be lethal.
    4. Here in the U.S., there is a lab test available to see which people will respond poorly to Krintafel. It’s called a “G6PD” test. The FDA and the World Health Organization require a health care worker to give this test before prescribing tafenoquine or other similar drugs.
    5. Right now, this test requires expensive machinery and a high level of expertise to run it, Domingo says.
    6. “It requires the kind of laboratory facilities that are not available where most people with malaria seek care,” he says.
    7. But Domingo and his colleagues are trying to change that. Over the past few years, several companies and nonprofits have been working together to develop an affordable, easy-to-use test that runs off a battery. …
    8. … In terms of cost, GlaxoSmithKline and Medicines for Malaria Venture say it’s too early to say how much tafenoquine will cost in poor countries.
    9. “[We] are committed to making tafenoquine accessible and affordable on a not-for-profit basis to those who need it most,” a spokesperson for GlaxoSmithKline wrote in an email to NPR. “A shared goal is for the cost of tafenoquine not to be a barrier to access.”Meteor Explodes with 2.1 Kilotons of Force 25 Miles Above US Air Force Base in Greenland, By Jack Phillips [TheEPOCHTIMES.COM] August 3, 2018 Last Updated: August 3, 2018
       1. A meteor exploded with 2.1 kilotons of force above a U.S. Air Force base in July, but the military has made no mention of the event, according to reports.
       2. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said that a meteor exploded 26 miles above U.S. Air Base Thule on July 25. It was detected by … the early missile warning radar at Thule Air Base, The Aviationist reported on Aug. 3.
       3. The Aviationist’s Tom Demerly, … reported on the incident, [and] wrote in an analysis that it’s concerning because there was no public warning from the U.S. government about the meteor blast. “Had it entered at a more perpendicular angle, it would have struck the earth with significantly greater force,” he wrote.
       4. [As of August 3,] The Air Force has remained silent about the incident.
11. MAJOR FOREIGN HOLDERS OF TREASURY SECURITIES

MAJOR FOREIGN HOLDERS OF TREASURY SECURITIES (in billions of dollars)

HOLDINGS 1/ AT END OF PERIOD

May     Apr     Mar     Feb     Jan     Dec     Nov     Oct     Sep

Country                           2018    2018    2018    2018    2018    2017    2017    2017    2017

China, Mainland                 1183.1  1181.9  1187.7  1176.7  1168.2  1184.9  1176.6  1189.2  1182.3  1201.7  1166.9  1146.5  1102.2

Japan                           1048.8  1031.2  1043.5  1059.5  1065.8  1061.5  1084.1  1094.0  1096.0  1101.7  1113.3  1090.3  1111.5

Ireland                          301.0   300.4   317.9   314.0   327.5   326.5   324.3   312.4   310.6   309.0   312.3   304.4   297.8

Brazil                           299.2   294.1   286.0   272.9   265.7   256.8   265.3   270.0   272.8   273.6   271.9   269.7   269.7

United Kingdom                   265.0   262.7   263.7   250.5   243.3   250.0   237.5   225.9   237.4   225.0   229.6   236.0   236.4

Switzerland                      243.4   242.2   245.4   248.0   251.1   249.6   250.9   254.0   253.3   248.2   244.5   244.1   239.4

Luxembourg                       209.1   213.9   221.6   218.6   220.9   217.6   218.3   217.9   213.9   213.3   213.0   211.6   208.0

Hong Kong                        191.7   194.0   196.2   196.5   194.1   194.7   194.9   192.3   194.4   194.5   196.7   201.1   196.6

Cayman Islands                   185.8   180.7   165.5   176.9   168.0   170.6   240.4   247.2   246.9   242.9   240.5   249.3   250.1

Taiwan                           164.8   168.1   170.1   170.7   175.4   180.9   179.9   181.7   183.9   182.0   184.1   185.9   181.2

Saudi Arabia                     162.1   159.9   151.2   150.9   143.6   147.4   147.6   145.2   136.7   137.9   142.5   142.0   134.0

Belgium                          150.5   137.6   125.5   125.7   123.7   119.2   115.3   116.0   104.8    96.9    99.4    98.3    98.7

India                            148.9   152.8   157.0   152.9   148.6   144.7   140.8   141.4   145.1   138.9   135.7   130.3   127.3

Singapore                        118.9   118.0   117.8   118.0   122.6   125.0   124.2   130.4   125.2   119.3   112.3   106.4   107.9

Korea                            104.7   100.1   100.4   101.3   101.7    96.2    98.5   100.1    94.3    95.0    97.9    96.8   100.1

Canada                            96.6    89.4    92.9    89.1    85.5    86.1    82.4    78.0    75.0    73.6    75.5    76.5    80.1

France                            89.6    82.5    80.9    77.0    78.4    80.9    76.6    77.9    78.2    76.0    80.0    72.2    74.4

Germany                           78.3    86.0    76.5    78.5    71.0    72.3    71.6    72.9    74.9    73.0    73.3    68.3    68.3

Bermuda                           63.6    64.7    66.4    67.4    67.5    67.0    63.5    62.9    62.4    62.3    61.5    60.2    59.8

Thailand                          62.2    60.8    57.2    68.0    67.2    60.9    68.0    68.4    70.8    71.6    67.2    66.1    66.5

United Arab Emirates              60.0    59.7    59.2    57.5    55.1    57.7    58.2    57.7    54.3    55.9    59.9    58.8    60.5

Norway                            49.7    39.3    40.2    50.4    46.9    51.1    55.3    60.6    64.1    58.0    54.9    53.7    48.3

Sweden                            45.5    45.1    46.2    46.3    46.3    43.9    44.7    45.3    45.9    44.3    42.7    41.0    40.8

Netherlands                       45.1    42.5    43.9    44.8    45.1    48.6    47.6    45.1    47.5    50.3    50.5    53.1    52.2

Kuwait                            43.9    42.6    36.9    36.3    36.9    36.8    36.8    39.4    38.0    35.6    33.0    31.8    31.6

Mexico                            43.2    41.9    45.2    35.4    33.9    38.7    40.6    41.6    40.5    34.7    35.8    32.4    38.9

Poland                            40.2    41.4    40.3    40.4    40.7    40.0    38.4    38.8    37.3    36.3    35.6    34.1    35.0

Italy                             39.6    36.4    37.2    36.6    35.4    35.2    35.6    34.5    35.3    35.4    36.2    36.1    35.6

Australia                         37.6    36.0    34.1    38.5    37.8    37.5    40.6    38.7    36.9    37.8    37.9    38.1    37.1

Spain                             34.5    31.3    32.0    32.4    34.7    33.5    36.2    36.9    38.1    38.2    38.2    36.6    37.9

Turkey                            32.6    38.2    40.9    45.6    49.6    52.6    61.2    61.5    60.8    57.7    54.5    58.9    49.5

Philippines                       31.6    31.5    32.1    33.0    33.8    36.4    35.8    36.4    35.5    36.3    38.1    37.9    38.2

Chile                             30.2    28.4    29.8    30.2    29.0    28.9    29.2    28.8    25.6    26.2    27.1    27.4    27.3

All Other                        512.5   533.5   575.2   575.9   571.4   575.9   585.3   581.3   583.3   566.6   567.7   556.0   565.6

Grand Total                     6213.6  6169.0  6216.6  6216.4  6186.6  6209.7  6306.2  6324.1  6301.9  6249.4  6230.2  6151.9  6108.4

11. Facebook’s 20% Stock Implosion Signalled By Insider Selling, But Is It A Buy Now?, by Roger Aitken Contributor [FORBES.cpm] Jul 28, 2018, 04:16pm

1. … In becoming the biggest-ever one-day wipeout in U.S. stockmarket history, Facebook’s stockmarket value recovered somewhat, but still declined by 19% to around $120 billion. In so doing, the personal wealth of Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of the social networking site, tanked by almost $16 billion over stalling growth. Some analysts described it as a “bombshell” moment and the earnings news caused immediate waves of selling on Wall Street. …
2. … “I think we were all caught off guard by the extent of the move. However, investors should really have seen something like this coming as insiders at Facebook have been selling shares heavily in recent months,” remarked Neil Wilson, Chief Market Analyst at Markets.com in London in the wake of the earnings release.
3. Indeed, over the last three months alone insiders – including Mark Zuckerberg – have sold off $3.8 billion worth of stock in the company. …
4. MIKE: But why isn’t the insider selling for months prior to the crash discussed more in the article?

12. Typhus making comeback in Texas, By Todd Ackerman | August 3, 2017, Updated: August 3, 2017 10:20pm

1. … Between 2003 and 2013, typhus increased tenfold in Texas and spread from nine counties to 41, according to Baylor College of Medicine researchers. The numbers have increased since then.
2. Harris County, which reported no cases before 2007, had 32 cases in 2016, double the previous years’ numbers. Researchers do not know why the numbers are increasing. …
3. … the infection is severe enough that 60 percent of people who contracted the infection during the 10-year period had to be hospitalized. Four died, one in Houston.
4. “We can now add typhus to the growing list of tropical infections striking Texas,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor and Texas Children’s Hospital, “Chagas, dengue fever, Zika, chikungunya and now typhus – tropical diseases have become the new normal in south and southeast Texas.” …

13.Sucking carbon out of the air won’t solve climate change – But it might fill in a few key pieces of the clean energy puzzle, By David Roberts @drvoxdavid@vox.com Updated Jul 16, 2018

1. Climate change is caused by putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. What if, instead, we took it out? …
2. … In June, we got the first solid engineering and cost numbers on DAC [“direct air capture”], courtesy of a company called Carbon Engineering out of Calgary, Canada. …
3. … The headline news from the paper is that the cost of capturing a ton of CO2 — estimated at around $600 in 2011 — has fallen to between $94 and $232. Almost any source of renewable energy can prevent a ton of carbon for cheaper than that, but still, down at the lower end, beneath $100, DAC starts to look viable in a low-carbon world. …
4. … To state the bottom line clearly: The ability to pull carbon out of the air is not a silver bullet. It is not the cheapest or most effective way to fight climate change. It won‘t allow us to bypass any of the hard work of reducing our emissions. …
5. ‘’’ From a climate change mitigation perspective, there are two basic ways of dealing with CO2 emissions.
6. The smartest and cheapest is to not emit them in the first place. We can do that in a million different ways, by reducing our consumption, using current technologies more efficiently, or shifting to low-carbon technologies and practices.
7. The second is to remove CO2 from the biosphere and put it back into the geosphere, where it won‘t cook the planet. Such “negative emissions” may end up being necessary if we emit more CO2 than our “carbon budget” for no more than 2 degrees Celsius rise in global average temperatures, the target the world agreed on in Paris.
8. Much of the confusion around [“direct air capture”] arises from the fact that it can play either role — it can either prevent CO2 emissions or draw down CO2. At least for now, Keith’s company, Carbon Engineering, has elected to play in the former space, not the latter. …
9. … getting to true negative emissions [has] the greatest long-term implications: moving carbon from the biosphere back into the geosphere, taking it out of circulation (sequestering it) so that it no longer warms the earth.
10. … From a net-carbon perspective, all that matters for negative emissions is burying more carbon than you dig up. It doesn’t matter what carbon you bury, or where, as long as the overall sign is negative, more in than out. …
11. … Why aren’t the commercial DAC [“direct air capture”] plants burying their emissions? Two reasons.
12. First, … CO2 used for greenhouses has economic co-benefits … Same with CO2 used to make fuels, or for enhanced oil recovery, or as an industrial feedstock. In contrast, burying CO2 has no economic co-benefits whatsoever. …
13. … Second, even if there were a market for sequestration … [it] would pay for any CCS [“carbon capture and sequestration”], anywhere. That would put DAC in direct competition with carbon capture at thermal power plants, and it is always going to be easier to pull CO2 out of an exhaust stream, where it is concentrated (roughly 1 molecule out of every 10), than out of the air, where it is highly dispersed (roughly 1 molecule out of every 2,500).
14. … [T]o get negative, we‘ll have to do more. [T]here are a number of ideas for how it might be done…
15. [One] is bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS), which involves burning biomass (plants or biowaste) in a thermal power plant, capturing CO2 from the exhaust stream, and burying the CO2. Biomass is from the biosphere, so this really does involve transferring carbon from the biosphere to the geosphere — reducing net atmospheric carbon.

14.California’s future: More big droughts and massive floods, new study finds, By Paul Rogers | progers@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group [mercurynews.com] PUBLISHED: April 23, 2018 at 8:00 am | UPDATED: April 23, 2018 at 9:18 am

1. The extreme weather swings that Californians have experienced over the past six years — a historic drought followed by drenching winter storms that caused $100 million in damage to San Jose and wrecked the spillway at Oroville Dam — will become the norm over the coming generations, a new study has found.
2. Those types of extremes are not new, but because of climate change, they can be expected to occur more frequently, as hotter global temperatures and warming oceans are putting more water vapor into the air, concluded the study, which was published Monday in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change.
3. And perhaps most ominous, the odds are rising that a mega-storm — like the one that famously flooded California in 1862, forcing Leland Stanford to take a rowboat through the streets of Sacramento to his inauguration as governor — will strike again. Such a storm “is more likely than not” to hit the state at least once in the next 40 years and twice in the next 80, the study found. The 1862 event, the largest recorded flood in California history, saw 43 days of continuous rainfall that washed whole towns away and forced the state capital to be temporarily moved to San Francisco.

TOPICS FROM PREVIOUS WEEKS:

1. The Daily 202: Puerto Ricans who fled to Florida after Hurricane Maria are not registering to vote, By James Hohmann [WASHINGTON POST] July 27, 2018 Email the author With Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve
   1. … Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico last September and prompted a mass exodus of more than 100,000 residents to the mainland United States. …
   2. … The exact number is still not known, but tens of thousands of people permanently resettled in Florida. …
   3. …Because they’re already U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans are eligible to vote as soon as they move to the mainland. The thinking last fall was that they’d be so angry at Trump that they’d be champing at the bit to vote against Republicans in the midterms. Operatives from both parties said that this could prove decisive in a perennial battleground like Florida where elections are always close. …
   4. … The freshest data reveals that there has been no surge in new Puerto Rican voters. During the nine months before the hurricane — January through September of 2017 — there were 343,000 people who registered to vote in Florida, and 18 percent were Hispanic, according to Daniel Smith, the chairman of the political science department at the University of Florida. During the nine months after the hurricane — from last October through the end of June — there were 326,000 new registered voters. Just 21 percent were Hispanic. That’s a pretty small uptick — and not necessarily explained by Puerto Rican registration at all.
   5. The Puerto Ricans emigres have mostly gravitated toward the Orlando area, mainly because so many other Puerto Ricans already lived there. The number of people of Puerto Rican origin living in Florida surpassed 1 million in 2015, which is more than double what it was in 2000.
   6. Steve Schale, a Tallahassee-based Democratic strategist who directed Barack Obama’s 2008 victory in Florida and was a senior adviser on his 2012 reelection campaign, has been closely tracking these numbers in Excel spreadsheets, which he shared Thursday.
   7. “The concern I’ve had for a while is that … the Maria impact was probably not going to be as significant as people initially thought,” he said. “We’ve got two-and-a-half months left for voter registration. But these numbers show it’s not going to happen organically. … This is a warning flare that there’s real work to be done. … Dems need to be registering around the clock, which they clearly aren’t doing.”
2. Trump’s ‘emoluments’ battle: How a scholar’s search of 200 years of dictionaries helped win a historic ruling, by Fred Barbash July 27 at 10:31 AM Email the author
   1. … John Mikhail, a law professor with a PhD in philosophy and associate dean at the Georgetown University Law School … went to dictionaries available to the framers of the Constitution in 1787, which is what litigants do when trying to figure out what the Founding Fathers meant.
   2. With the aid of a Georgetown law student, Genevieve Bentz, he embarked on a lexicological odyssey into dozens of long-forgotten dictionaries, published over a 200-year period before 1806, 40 regular dictionaries and 10 legal dictionaries, listed here.
   3. The research yielded a very different, much broader definition than that put forward by Trump’s lawyers. “Every English dictionary definition of ’emolument’ from 1604 to 1806″ uses a “broad definition,” including “profit,” “advantage,” “gain,” or benefit,” he wrote in his paper describing the research.
   4. As to the “office-and-employment-specific” interpretation by Trump’s team, Mikhail wrote that “over 92 percent of these dictionaries define ’emolument’ . . . with no reference to ‘office’ or ’employment.’ ”
   5. In other words, by his research, the emoluments clause would bar any benefit or profit to a president via a foreign state, whether in his capacity as president or in any other role, such as the owner of a hotel. It would, specifically, cover Saudi Arabia or Kuwait renting out space at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
   6. … On Wednesday [July 18], Mikhail’s labors paid off. In a historic decision, U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte in Greenbelt, Md., ruled that a suit brought by the District of Columbia and Maryland could go forward instead of throwing it out, as the administration desired.
   7. Messitte cited, in part, what he called the “exhaustive” research of Mikhail, mentioning him by name 17 times.
   8. And while citing numerous other factors, the judge’s choice of definition proved crucial to the ruling, the first on the meaning of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses. (There are two, one covering domestic gain, the other foreign.)
   9. The judge noted that Mikhail’s dictionary research was more extensive than that of the president’s lawyers, covering “virtually every founding-era dictionary.” Citing Mikhail again, Messitte said, “the President’s definition appears in less than 8% of these dictionaries” vs. 92 percent for the broader meaning.
   10. “The clear weight of the evidence,” wrote the judge, “shows that an ’emolument’ was commonly understood by the founding generation to encompass any ‘profit,’ ‘gain,’ or ‘advantage.’ …
3. TV Talk:
   1. “The Good Place”
   2. “The Orville”
   3. “Adam Ruins Everything”

LINKS:

 SOURCES WHICH MAY BE RELEVANT TO OTHER DISCUSSION:

1. Op-Ed: Texans should be wary of bullet train proposal, By Alain Leray  – Guest Contributor, Mar 22, 2018, 12:27pm –
   1. This opinion piece was written by Alain Leray, president and CEO of SNCF America Inc., which is France’s national state-owned railway company
   2. Amtrak partners with Texas Bullet Train for ticketing, access to national routes, By Dallas Business Journal staff, May 4, 2018, 1:09pm

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