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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 Nabu.

Listen live on the radio, or on the internet from anywhere in the world! When the show is live, we take calls at 713-526-5738. (Long distance charges may apply.)

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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]:

“A peaceful world is a world in which differences are tolerated, and are not eliminated by violence.” ~ John Foster Dulles

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1. Make sure you are registered to vote
   1. GENERAL ELECTION:11-6-2018
   2. Early voting locations: CLICK
   3. You may vote early by-mail if you are registered to vote and meet one of the following criteria:
      1. Away from the county of residence on Election Day and during the early voting period;
      2. Sick or disabled;
      3. .65 years of age or older on Election Day; or
      4. Confined in jail, but eligible to vote.
   4. Make sure you are registered:
      1. HarrisVotes.com (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965)
      2. VoteTexas.gov
      3. Ann Harris Bennett, Tax Assessor-Collector & Voter Registrar
         1. CHECK REGISTRATION STATUS HERE ß CLICK
      4. How to register to vote in Texas, Sunday, October 07, 2018 05:29PM (abc13.com/)
   5. ALSO, try Vote.org.
      1. It takes less than 2 minutes to register. Register to vote
      2. Find out if you are registered to vote. Check registration status
      3. Can’t vote in person on Election Day? Get your absentee ballot
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2. I’ve sent in my mail ballot.
   1. I was surprised that I had to provide postage. I would think a mail-in ballot should be postage paid. Why isn’t it?
3. Global Warming: When the scientists and media talk about a 1-2^o degree change in global temperature, it’s rarely if ever noted that they’re talking Centigrade. Most Americans don’t intellectually or viscerally understand what that means.
   1. In the US, we need to talk about global temperature increases of 2-4^o Fahrenheit
   2. Americans understand just how uncomfortable 2-4^oF can be when they set a thermostat.
4. On the Left, Eyeing More Radical Ways to Fight Kavanaugh, By Charlie Savage (NY Times) Oct. 7, 2018
   1. MIKE: “What’s ours is ours, what’s yours is negotiable.” ~ Attributed to expert on the USSR, Charles Eustis “Chip” Bohlen (August 30, 1904 – January 1, 1974) in the NY Times article, “What’s Yours Is Negotiable” By C. L. SULZBERGERJULY 30, 1975
      1987. The bitter partisan fury that engulfed Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation was the fiercest battle in a political war over the judiciary that has been steadily intensifying since the Senate rejected Judge Robert H. Bork in 1987.
      1988. But an even greater conflagration may be coming. …
   2. … Facing a Supreme Court controlled by five solidly conservative justices, liberals have already started to attack the legitimacy of the majority bloc and discussed ways to eventually undo its power without waiting for one of its members to retire or die.
   3. Some have gone as far as proposing — if Democrats were to retake control of Congress and the White House in 2020 or after — expanding the number of justices on the court to pack it with liberals or trying to impeach, remove and replace Justice Kavanaugh.
   4. Either step would be an extraordinary violation of constitutional and political norms. No justice has been removed through impeachment. And a previous attempt at court packing, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt after a conservative-dominated Supreme Court rejected important parts of his New Deal initiatives during the Great Depression, is broadly seen as having been misguided.
5. • Sean Illing – What the Republicans did to Merrick Garland was one of the most egregious examples I’ve ever seen.
   • David Faris – Right. They [the GOP] essentially stole a seat on the Supreme Court — a swing seat, no less. But they correctly argued that they had no clear constitutional obligation to consider the president’s nominee for the seat. They didn’t violate the Constitution. They violated the spirit of the Constitution. They violated the norms that have allowed these institutions to function normally for years and years. This is the sort of maneuvering and procedural warfare I’m talking about, and the Republicans have been escalating it for two decades. And they’ve managed to entrench their power through these dubious procedures. The result is that the structural environment is biased against Democrats and the Republicans have engineered it that way. …
   • Sean Illing – Let’s dive into some of your proposed solutions. For starters, you think Democrats should break California up into seven states. Why?
   • David Faris – I don’t think the architects of the Constitution understood that population dynamics would create a state like California with 38 million people, and then a bunch of states like the Dakotas and Wyoming and Vermont and Delaware that have very small populations. The end result is that voters in California and New York and Texas are systematically disadvantaged in national policy relative to their counterparts in smaller, rural states. It’s absurd that California and Delaware should have the same number of senators. Given the current system, Democratic-leaning states, which contain far more people, are rarely going to be represented in the Senate. That’s not fair or democratic, and we shouldn’t accept it, especially with the current horror show in the White House. …
   • David Faris – I think they should grant statehood to DC and Puerto Rico. Both states have held referenda that endorsed statehood. We have millions of Americans right now who have no representation in Congress.
   • David Faris – The Constitution doesn’t say how many Supreme Court justices we should have, and we have not always had nine. Up until the mid-19th century, it was routine for the number of justices to change based on the whims of Congress, so it’s not unprecedented. The way I look at it, Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections. I went back and added up all the votes for the US Senate since 1992, and Democrats have won 30 million more votes over that time period. I think the American people have pretty clearly expressed their desire to have Democrats staff the federal judiciary, and yet, due to the Republicans’ procedural tactics, they’ve not been able to do that. …
   • Sean Illing – I don’t really disagree with your logic, but doesn’t this spiral of norm-violating give you pause? I get that this is a war Republicans are already waging, and it’s near suicidal for Democrats to ignore that. But I wonder what the end game is here.
   • David Faris – We’re in the midst of a slow-motion unraveling of democracy in this country. If we don’t return the favor with some of this procedural war stuff, the only other option is to continue watching the other side do it. That’s not an acceptable option in my opinion. I don’t think we can restore order by respecting rules that are not respected by Republicans. I do believe we’ll have to find a way to end this procedural war at some point, but now is not that time. Republicans need to know what it’s like to be on the other end of normative violations. The Republicans are behaving like a party that believes it will never be held accountable for anything they’re doing, and so far they haven’t been.
6. NLRB Takes Closer Look at Labor Picketing – The federal labor board (NLRB) may be looking closer at workers, By Hassan A. Kanu | BLOOMBERG LAW | Posted Oct. 4, 2018, 10:44 AM (Originally found here at UCOMMBLOG.COM)
   1. … The National Labor Relations Board recently ruled that a group of subcontracted janitors were justifiably fired for picketing at the San Francisco building where they worked. The board said the workers weren’t protected by federal labor law because they were trying to convince the building’s property manager to cut ties with their employer.
   2. Workers and their unions can picket or protest at job sites with multiple employers. They can also inform a “secondary” or “neutral” employer that they plan to do picketing directed at the primary employer they work for. But it’s generally unlawful to coerce a secondary employer to stop working with the primary business they have the dispute with. …
   3. … The decision suggests the Republican-controlled NLRB will likely be looking closer at workers’ picketing and protests on job sites where multiple businesses operate. Some worker advocates told Bloomberg Law the ruling also signals that the board is likelier to find that those sorts of actions by workers are “secondary” activities not protected by law.
   4. The ruling takes on added significance as unions are pushing their agendas heavily before the midterm elections, and worker actions targeted at multiple employers and industries are spreading across the country. It also comes as the board’s general counsel has made other moves that could limit worker protest actions and make it easier for employers to lawfully punish those who participate. …
   5. … Federal labor law “prohibits picketing where ‘an object’ is to pressure a neutral to cease doing business with the primary employer,” Zachary Fasman, a partner at Proskauer Rose who represents employers in collective bargaining and litigation involving union and employee relations, told Bloomberg Law. “It’s hard to fault the board for reaching the conclusion that ‘an object’ here was secondary in nature.”
   6. Worker advocates and one former NLRB chairman said the decision appears to be a subtle but remarkable change to a long-standing approach the board has taken in these sorts of cases.
   7. The ruling “suggests the board will take a very persnickety view of the requirements for what counts as lawful picketing when you have two employers that share a workspace,” Charlotte Garden, a labor law professor at Seattle University, told Bloomberg Law. “As workplaces get increasingly fissured, it will be more likely that any union picketing raises questions about whether there’s unlawful secondary activity going on.” …
7. Georgia senator seen grabbing student’s phone amid question about voter ID law, By Morgan Gstalter | TheHill |Oct 14, 2018
   1. US Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) was seen on video snatching [phone] the out of the hands of a Georgia Tech student while he was being asked a question regarding the state’s possible suppression of minority voter registration. …
   2. … An unnamed student member of the Young Democratic Socialists of America on Saturday confronted Perdue about Kemp while recording the senator on his cellphone, according to the Post. The student was in the middle of asking Perdue a question apparently regarding his support for the gubernatorial candidate when Perdue interrupted him. …
   3. … The group said in the statement that the Georgia Tech student would have likely been arrested “on the spot” had the roles been reversed. …
8. Ancestry Sites Could Soon Expose Nearly Anyone’s Identity, Researchers Say, By Ed Cara | COM | OCT-11-2018 Yesterday 2:37pm
   1. .. new study published this week in Science suggests that the information uploaded to these services can be used to figure out your identity, regardless of whether you volunteered your DNA in the first place. The researchers behind the study were inspired by the recent case of the alleged Golden State Killer.
   2. Earlier this year, Sacramento police arrested 72-year-old Joseph James DeAngelo for a wave of rapes and murders allegedly committed by DeAngelo in the 1970s and 1980s. And they claimed to have identified DeAngelo with the help of genealogy databases.
   3. [Yaniv Erlich, a computer engineer at Columbia University] and his team wanted to see how easy it would be in general to use the method to find someone’s identity by relying on the DNA of distant and possibly unknown family members. So they looked at more than 1.2 million anonymous people who had gotten testing from MyHeritage, and specifically excluded anyone who had immediate family members also in the database. The idea was to figure out whether a stranger’s DNA could indeed be used to crack your identity. …
   4. … In one specific case, they were able to cross-reference a woman’s anonymous genetic profile from another research project with the same service used by Golden State Killer investigators—a website called GEDmatch—and find her identity. The woman had been identified in an earlier study conducted by Erlich, using a different method that relied on figuring out the genetic profile of her husband, but the search was even easier and required less upfront information than their previous method. …
9. There May Still Be Hope for NASA’s Sleeping Opportunity Rover, By Catie Keck | Gizmodo.com | Oct 14, 2018 Today 12:59pm
   1. It’s been months since NASA engineers have heard from the sleeping Opportunity rover, which powered down after getting caught in a massive dust storm on Mars that obscured its surface from the Sun. But all hope isn’t yet lost, as the space agency said in an update Thursday that a coming windy season on the Red Planet could help clear dust believed to be obstructing Opportunity’s solar panels.
   2. “A windy period on Mars—known to Opportunity’s team as “dust-clearing season”—occurs in the November-to-January time frame and has helped clean the rover’s panels in the past,” NASA said.
   3. In the meantime, engineers with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)—which oversees the 14-year-old rover’s operations—are increasing the number of commands to Opportunity and listening for any calls home in the event that it is still operational. …
10. Why this political scientist thinks the Democrats have to fight dirty – “The Republicans are behaving like a party that believes it will never be held accountable.”, By Sean Illing (@seanilling) (illing@vox.com) Updated Oct 7, 2018, 9:37am EDT
    1. September 2016, an anonymous conservative writer published an essay called “The Flight 93 Election.” The title was a reference to the one hijacked flight on 9/11 that didn’t reach its destination because passengers overwhelmed the hijackers and brought the plane down.
    2. The logic of the essay was simple enough: The prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency was so positively ruinous that conservatives had no choice but to support Donald Trump — no matter how awful or incompetent he appeared to be. The stakes were simply too high.
    3. Until now, there was no left-wing equivalent to the “Flight 93” essay, no rallying cry that urged Democrats and liberals to do whatever is necessary to win. But David Faris’s new book, It’s Time to Fight Dirty, is the closest anyone has come so far.
    4. Faris, a political scientist at Roosevelt University, argues that the Democratic Party must recognize that Republicans aren’t engaged in a policy fight; instead, they’re waging a “procedural war.”
    5. What he means is that Republicans have spent the past two decades exploiting the vagueness of the Constitution to create structural advantages for their side — passing discriminatory voter ID laws, using the census to gerrymander districts, blocking Democratic Supreme Court nominees, and so on.
    6. Faris writes Democrats have to recognize this reality and act accordingly, especially now that the Republicans are poised to conquer the Supreme Court for a generation. I reached out to him to find out what, exactly, he has in mind.
       1. Sean Illing – In the book, you say that Democrats are engaged in “policy fights” and Republicans are waging a “procedural war.” What does that mean?
       2. David Faris – The Constitution is a shockingly short document, and it turns out that it’s extremely vague on some key procedures that we rely on to help government function at a basic level. For the government to work, cooperation between parties is needed. But when that cooperation is withdrawn, it creates chaos. Since the ’90s, when Newt Gingrich took over Congress, we’ve seen a one-sided escalation in which Republicans exploit the vagueness or lack of clarity in the Constitution in order to press their advantage in a variety of arenas — from voter ID laws to gerrymandering to behavioral norms in the Congress and Senate.
11. RECOMMENDED READ :: Trump’s successful neutering of the FBI’s Kavanaugh investigation has scary implications – A proof of concept for further erosion of the FBI. By Matthew Yglesias |VOX.COM |(TWITTER @mattyglesias /EMAIL: matt@vox.com Oct 8, 2018, 10:00am EDT
    1. Donald Trump’s instinct was right. A loyal FBI is worth a purge or two.
    2. Case in point: Brett Kavanaugh is an associate justice on the Supreme Court.
    3. FBI Director Christopher Wray, installed after Trump fired James Comey for refusing to limit the scope of the Russia investigation, said and did nothing as the White House ordered limits on a reopened background check of Kavanaugh.
    4. The bureau agreed not to interview Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford, who accused him of sexually assaulting her, or to respond to many people stepping forward with new information. They agreed not to follow up on possible lies Kavanaugh is accused of telling in his Senate testimony. And they made other concessions unknown to the public or even Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
    5. According to the New York Times’s reporting, White House lawyer Don McGahn made sure relevant questions went deliberately unexplored because, he believed, “a wide-ranging inquiry like some Democrats were demanding — and Mr. Trump was suggesting — would be potentially disastrous for Judge Kavanaugh’s chances of confirmation to the Supreme Court.”
    6. At the end of the one-week deadline, the FBI handed a document to Congress that didn’t seek to clarify seriously the veracity of the accusations against Kavanaugh, but its existence gave Republicans the cover they wanted to back him anyway.
    7. The upshot is that the independent FBI established after Watergate and whose existence everyone reaffirmed during Wray’s confirmation process is now dead. Other senior FBI leaders have already been purged, and Trump’s shameful treatment of Peter Strzok, Bruce Ohr, and others has made it clear that he has no compunction about ordering further purges. …
    8. … To be seen as meddling in a federal investigation in that way would have been a huge scandal had it been uncovered, and traditionally, presidents have tried to avoid generating huge scandals. … Trump, by shutting down an FBI investigation into Kavanaugh for transparently partisan purposes and earlier firing Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe on thin pretexts sends a powerful message: He doesn’t care.
12. On the Left, Eyeing More Radical Ways to Fight Kavanaugh, By Charlie Savage (NY Times) Oct. 7, 2018
    1. MIKE: “What’s ours is ours, what’s yours is negotiable.” ~ Attributed to expert on the USSR, Charles Eustis “Chip” Bohlen (August 30, 1904 – January 1, 1974) in the NY Times article, “What’s Yours Is Negotiable” By C. L. SULZBERGERJULY 30, 1975
    2. The bitter partisan fury that engulfed Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation was the fiercest battle in a political war over the judiciary that has been steadily intensifying since the Senate rejected Judge Robert H. Bork in 1987. But an even greater conflagration may be coming. …
    3. … Facing a Supreme Court controlled by five solidly conservative justices, liberals have already started to attack the legitimacy of the majority bloc and discussed ways to eventually undo its power without waiting for one of its members to retire or die.
    4. Some have gone as far as proposing — if Democrats were to retake control of Congress and the White House in 2020 or after — expanding the number of justices on the court to pack it with liberals or trying to impeach, remove and replace Justice Kavanaugh.
    5. Either step would be an extraordinary violation of constitutional and political norms. No justice has been removed through impeachment. And a previous attempt at court packing, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt after a conservative-dominated Supreme Court rejected important parts of his New Deal initiatives during the Great Depression, is broadly seen as having been misguided.
13. Amazon workers split as company raises minimum wage, By Washington Post on Oct 6, 2018 at 11:00 a.m.
14. Mushrooms could help save the world’s bees, By Evan Bush / The Seattle Times/ Posted Oct 6, 2018 at 8:53 PM Updated Oct 7, 2018 at 8:50 PM (via Tuscaloosa News)
    1. The epiphany that mushrooms could help save the world’s ailing bee colonies struck Paul Stamets while he was in bed.
    2. “I love waking dreams,” he said. “It’s a time when you’re just coming back into consciousness.”
    3. Years ago, in 1984, Stamets had noticed a “continuous convoy of bees” traveling from a patch of mushrooms he was growing and his beehives. The bees actually moved wood chips to access his mushroom’s mycelium, the branching fibers of fungus that look like cobwebs. …
    4. …Decades later, he and a friend began a conversation about bee colony collapse that left Stamets, the owner of a mushroom mercantile, puzzling over a problem. Bees across the world have been disappearing at an alarming rate. Parasites like mites, fast-spreading viruses, agricultural chemicals and lack of forage area have stressed and threatened wild and commercial bees alike. …
    5. … In research published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, Stamets turned intuition into reality. The paper describes how bees given a small amount of his mushroom mycelia extract exhibited remarkable reductions in the presence of viruses associated with parasitic mites that have been attacking, and infecting, bee colonies for decades. …
15. Neil Armstrong’s private collection up for auction, By Kwegyirba Croffie, CNN | Updated 8:27 AM ET, Sat October 6, 2018
    1. (CNN)Collectors will have the opportunity to own a piece of American history when 3,000 items from the personal collection of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, go up for auction next month.
    2. The Armstrong Family Collection includes never-before-seen items from his lunar landing, including pieces of a wing and propeller from the 1903 Wright Brothers flight that Armstrong took with him to the moon. It also includes items from his childhood, such as his Boy Scouts cap, and a letter he wrote to the Easter bunny.
    3. The process of preserving Armstrong’s vast collection began two years ago when his sons Mark and Rick Armstrong were going through the items left by their parents and found that several them were starting to show their age.
16. Voyager 2 May Leave Our Solar System Soon, NASA Says, By Ron Brackett / Oct 6, 2018. 2 days ago / weather.com
    1. Signals indicate the NASA space probe could be nearing the edge of the heliosphere.
    2. Voyager 2 and Voyager 1 were launched in 1977.
    3. Voyager 1 left the heliosphere in 2012.
    4. The space probe Voyager 1 may soon have company in interstellar space. 
    5. Voyager 2 has detected an increase in cosmic rays that originate outside our solar system, NASA announced. That could indicate the probe, which was launched 41 years ago, is nearing the edge of the heliosphere, a giant bubble that surrounds the sun and the planets.
    6. When Voyager 2 leaves the solar system, it will become the second human-made object to enter interstellar space, NASA said. … . Voyager 2 is almost 11 billion miles from earth.
17. Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not – S. unemployment is down and jobs are going unfilled. But for people without much education, the real question is: Do those jobs pay enough to live on?, By Matthew Desmond |NY Times | Sept. 11, 2018
    1. … These days, we’re told that the American economy is strong. Unemployment is down, the Dow Jones industrial average is north of 25,000 and millions of jobs are going unfilled. But for people like Vanessa, the question is not, Can I land a job? (The answer is almost certainly, Yes, you can.) Instead the question is, What kinds of jobs are available to people without much education? By and large, the answer is: jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
    2. In recent decades, the nation’s tremendous economic growth has not led to broad social uplift. Economists call it the “productivity-pay gap” — the fact that over the last 40 years, the economy has expanded and corporate profits have risen, but real wages have remained flat for workers without a college education. Since 1973, American productivity has increased by 77 percent, while hourly pay has grown by only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage tracked productivity, it would be more than $20 an hour, not today’s poverty wage of $7.25.
    3. American workers are being shut out of the profits they are helping to generate. The decline of unions is a big reason. During the 20th century, inequality in America decreased when unionization increased, but economic transformations and political attacks have crippled organized labor, emboldening corporate interests and disempowering the rank and file. This imbalanced economy explains why America’s poverty rate has remained consistent over the past several decades, even as per capita welfare spending has increased. It’s not that safety-net programs don’t help; on the contrary, they lift millions of families above the poverty line each year. But one of the most effective antipoverty solutions is a decent-paying job, and those have become scarce for people like Vanessa. Today, 41.7 million laborers — nearly a third of the American work force — earn less than $12 an hour, and almost none of their employers offer health insurance.
    4. The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines a “working poor” person as someone below the poverty line who spent at least half the year either working or looking for employment. In 2016, there were roughly 7.6 million Americans who fell into this category. Most working poor people are over 35, while fewer than five in 100 are between the ages of 16 and 19. In other words, the working poor are not primarily teenagers bagging groceries or scooping ice cream in paper hats. They are adults — and often parents — wiping down hotel showers and toilets, taking food orders and bussing tables, eviscerating chickens at meat-processing plants, minding children at 24-hour day care centers, picking berries, emptying trash cans, stacking grocery shelves at midnight, driving taxis and Ubers, answering customer-service hotlines, smoothing hot asphalt on freeways, teaching community-college students as adjunct professors and, yes, bagging groceries and scooping ice cream in paper hats.
    5. Americans often assume that the poor do not work. According to a 2016 survey conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, nearly two-thirds of respondents did not think most poor people held a steady job; in reality, that year a majority of nondisabled working-age adults were part of the labor force. Slightly over one-third of respondents in the survey believed that most welfare recipients would prefer to stay on welfare rather than earn a living. These sorts of assumptions about the poor are an American phenomenon. A 2013 study by the sociologist Ofer Sharone found that unemployed workers in the United States blame themselves, while unemployed workers in Israel blame the hiring system. When Americans see a homeless man cocooned in blankets, we often wonder how he failed. When the French see the same man, they wonder how the state failed him.
    6. Researchers set out to study welfare dependency in the 1980s and 1990s, when this issue dominated public debate. They didn’t find much evidence of it. Most people started using cash welfare after a divorce or separation and didn’t stay long on the dole, even if they returned to welfare periodically. One study found that 90 percent of young women on welfare stopped relying on it within two years of starting the program, but most of them returned to welfare sometime down the road. Even at its peak, welfare did not function as a dependency trap for a majority of recipients; rather, it was something people relied on when they were between jobs or after a family crisis. A 1988 review in Science concluded that “the welfare system does not foster reliance on welfare so much as it acts as insurance against temporary misfortune.”
18. Nearly 10 percent of Texans displaced by Harvey still haven’t gone home, survey says, by Brandon Formby – Meanwhile, 15 percent of homes damaged or destroyed by the storm are still unlivable. Yet FEMA and Texas officials aren’t keeping track of how many people remain displaced one year later, by Brandon Formby 23, 20182 AM | TexasTribune | Aug. 23, 2018
    1. One year after Hurricane Harvey slammed the Texas coast, 8 percent of the people impacted by the disaster have not been able to return to their homes, according to a report from two nonprofits that surveyed Texans about how the storm affected their finances, health and living conditions.
    2. Fifteen percent of the hundreds of thousands of homes damaged by the storm are still unlivable. And of the 1,651 people from 24 counties who answered the survey, 30 percent of those impacted by the storm said their lives are still “somewhat” or “very” disrupted by the devastating storm’s lingering damage….
19. Why saying Roe v. Wade is ‘settled’ isn’t saying much, By Ariane de Vogue, CNN Supreme Court Reporter, Updated 6:58 AM ET, Mon September 3, 2018
    1. When Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican who supports abortion rights, emerged from her office last month after her first meeting with Judge Brett Kavanaugh, reporters listened closely trying to divine whether she would back President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. Her vote, in a closely divided Senate, could help to determine not only Kavanaugh’s fate, but the future of Roe v. Wade, the historic 1973 opinion that legalized abortion. …
    2. … Abortion opponents hope that Kavanaugh will provide a fifth vote on a court decision to either overturn Roe or weaken the decision. …
    3. … To reporters, Collins suggested that she thought Kavanaugh respected Roe because he told her that it was “settled law. “He said that he agreed with what (Chief) Justice (John) Roberts said at his nomination hearing in which he said it was settled law,” Collins said….
    4. … In fact, any potential nominee asked about almost any Supreme Court case will likely say it’s “settled.” What they don’t usually say is that while a lower court nominee must accept Supreme Court precedent, a sitting justice does not. They can vote to unsettle it.
    5. Earlier this year, for instance, the court overturned a 40-year-old precedent when it delivered a blow to public sector unions in striking down an Illinois law that required non-union workers to pay fees that go to collective bargaining.
    6. In Kavanaugh’s hearings that start Tuesday, Democrats want to push Kavanaugh on abortion.
    7. “It’s not enough for Brett Kavanaugh to say that Roe is ‘settled law,'” Sen. Dianne Feinstein said a tweet after Collins’ comments.
    8. “Chief Justice Roberts said the same thing in 2005,” the California Democrat added. “Then he voted in favor of a law that would have forced 75% of Texas clinics to close. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
    9. Indeed, during his confirmation hearings Roberts, like other conservatives Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, said that Roe was settled. ,,,
20. 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….
21. For Some Facebook Employees, Free Food Is Coming To An End, By Tonya Mosley [NPR.org From KQED] August 12, 20185:06 PM ET
    1. For years, tech employees of companies in Silicon Valley have enjoyed free meals around the clock. That’s changing — at least in Mountain View, Calif., where the city is banning the social media giant Facebook from offering free food in its newest office building.
    2. Currently, Facebook’s main campus in Menlo Park, Calif., is the stuff of lore. The 430,000 square foot compound offers perks like an onsite cleaners, a dentist and free food — basically a smorgasbord of anything your heart desires — custom omelets, braised beef, handmade sushi and desserts often made to order by trained chefs. …
    3. … But about eight miles away, in Mountain View, Calif. — also the home of Google — free food, at least at the new Facebook campus — won’t be on the menu.
    4. “We believe these companies are part of our community,” says Mountain View Mayor Lenny Siegel. “A growing number of their employees live in our community, and we want them to be a part of our community.”
    5. Siegel, a Democrat, says that for years, restaurant owners have complained that employees of Google never come out to eat or shop. So when the city learned that Facebook would be opening a new office in the fall of 2018 at a building project known as the Village at San Antonio Center, the city passed a project-specific requirement that bars the company from providing free daily meals to employees at any in-house cafeteria. The company is also prevented from providing deeply discounted meals.
    6. … Under the agreement between Mountain View and Facebook, meals within the Facebook offices can’t be subsidized by more than 50 percent on a regular basis. However, the company can fully subsidize meals if employees go to restaurants that are open to the public. Mayor Siegel acknowledges there are still a few kinks that need to be smoothed out.
    7. “Facebook is a global company and some of their people work in the middle of the night,” Siegel says. “If all the restaurants are closed, maybe I would be open to considering food service in the middle of the night.” …
    8. … The city of San Francisco is also considering a similar measure that would ban cafeterias in all new office buildings, forcing tech employees to venture out and share a bit of the wealth outside of their walls.
22. 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….
23. Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy? A new report finds that big companies could have given their workers thousands of dollars’ worth of raises with the money they spent on their own shares, By Annie Lowrey [THEATLANTIC.com] Jul 31, 2018
    1. Stock buybacks are eating the world. The once illegal practice of companies purchasing their own shares is pulling money away from employee compensation, research and development, and other corporate priorities—with potentially sweeping effects on business dynamism, income and wealth inequality, working-class economic stagnation, and the country’s growth rate. Evidence for that conclusion comes from a new report by Irene Tung of the National Employment Law Project (NELP) and Katy Milani of the Roosevelt Institute, who looked at share buybacks in the restaurant, retail, and food industries from 2015 to 2017.
    2. Their new paper contributes to a growing body of research that might help explain why economic growth is so sluggish, productivity so low, and increases in worker compensation so piddling, even as the stock market is surging and corporate profits are at historical highs. Companies are working overtime to make their owners richer in the short term, more so than to improve their longer-term competitiveness or to invest in their workers.
    3. Buybacks occur when a company takes profits, cash reserves, or borrowed money to purchase its own shares on the public markets, a practice barred until the Ronald Reagan administration. (The regulatory argument against allowing the practice is that it is a way for companies to manipulate the markets; the regulatory argument for it is that companies should be able to spend money how they see fit.) In recent years, with corporate profits high, American firms have bought their own stocks with extraordinary zeal. Federal Reserve data show that buybacks are now equivalent to 4 percent of annual economic output, up from zero percent in the 1990s. Companies spent roughly $7 trillion on their own shares from 2004 to 2014, and have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on buybacks in the past six months alone. …
    4. … How much might workers have benefited if companies had devoted their financial resources to them rather than to shareholders? Lowe’s, CVS, and Home Depot could have provided each of their workers a raise of $18,000 a year, the report found. Starbucks could have given each of its employees $7,000 a year, and McDonald’s could have given $4,000 to each of its nearly 2 million employees.
    5. “Workers around the country have been pushing for higher wages, but the answer is always, ‘We can’t afford it. We’d have to do layoffs or raise prices,’” Tung said. “That is just not true. The money is there. It’s just getting siphoned out of the company instead of reinvested into it.”
    6. The report examines the period just before President Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut came into effect, leading to an even greater surge of buybacks …
    7. … What did publicly traded corporations do with that money? Buy back shares and issue dividends, mostly. …
    8. … more and more analysts disagree. Larry Fink, who runs BlackRock, a huge money-management firm, has argued that buybacks are bad for companies and even bad for democracy. “Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose,” he wrote in an open letter. “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society. Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate.”
    9. 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
    10. … 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. …
    11. … “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.
    12. Indeed, over the last three months alone insiders – including Mark Zuckerberg – have sold off $3.8 billion worth of stock in the company. …
    13. MIKE: But why isn’t the insider selling for months prior to the crash discussed more in the article?
24. 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.”
25. 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.

1. 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.” …
2. 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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