SHOW AUDIO: Link is usually posted within about 72 hours of show broadcast. We take callers during this show at 713-526-5738. 

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 engineers are Don and Letty.

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.)

Please take a moment to visit Pledge.KPFT.org and choose THINKWING RADIO from the drop-down list when you donate.

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]:

______________________________________________________________________

1. Americans want to be the good guys.
2. Lindsey Graham says Saudi crown prince will not get a pass if ‘he’s making the world a more dangerous place’, By Dana Bash and Kate Sullivan, CNN, Updated 9:11 AM ET, Mon November 26, 2018
3. Activists, Politicians React With Horror At Border Scenes Of Tear-Gassed Children – Mothers carried sobbing children away from tear gas fired by U.S. officers at the Mexican border. By Mary Papenfuss | HUFFINGTON POST | 11/25/2018 11:50 pm ET
5. Climate change will shrink US economy and kill thousands, government report warns, By Jen Christensen and Michael Nedelman | CNN | Updated 3:53 PM ET, Fri November 23, 2018
   1. A new US government report delivers a dire warning about climate change and its devastating impacts, saying the economy could lose hundreds of billions of dollars — or, in the worst-case scenario, more than 10% of its GDP — by the end of the century.
   2. The federally mandated study was supposed to come out in December but was released by the Trump administration on Friday, at a time when many Americans are on a long holiday weekend, distracted by family and shopping.
   3. David Easterling, director of the Technical Support Unit at the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, emphasized that there was “no external interference in the report’s development.” He added that the climate change the Earth is experiencing is unlike any other. …
   4. … Coming from the US Global Change Research Program, a team of 13 federal agencies, the Fourth National Climate Assessment was put together with the help of 1,000 people, including 300 leading scientists, roughly half from outside the government.
   5. … the science explained in these and other federal government reports is clear: Climate change is not disproved by the extreme weather of one day or a week; it’s demonstrated by long-term trends. Humans are living with the warmest temperatures in modern history. Even if the best-case scenario were to happen and greenhouse gas emissions were to drop to nothing, the world is on track to warm 1 degrees Fahrenheit. As of now, not a single G20 country is meeting climate targets, research shows.
   6. The expense – The costs of climate change could reach hundreds of billions of dollars annually, according to the report. The Southeast alone will probably lose over a half a billion labor hours by 2100 due to extreme heat. …
   7. Farmers will face extremely tough times. … Heat stress could cause average dairy production to fall … When it comes to shellfish there will be a $230 million loss by the end of the century due to ocean acidification…
   8. Impacts on our health – Higher temperatures will also kill more people, the report says. The Midwest alone, which is predicted to have the largest increase in extreme temperature, will see an additional 2,000 premature deaths per year by 2090.
   9. There will be more mosquito- and tickborne diseases like Zika, dengue and chikungunya. West Nile cases are expected to more than double by 2050 due to increasing temperatures.
   10. Expect asthma and allergies to be worse due to climate change.
   11. No one’s health is immune from climate change, the report concludes. People will be exposed to more foodborne and waterborne diseases. Particularly vulnerable to higher temperatures in the summer, children, the elderly, the poor and communities of color will be at a much greater risk for illness and death.
   12. Heat and flooding – Wildfire seasons — already longer and more destructive than before — could burn up to six times more forest area annually by 2050 in parts of the United States. Burned areas in Southwestern California alone could double by 2050. Dependable and safe water for … Hawaii, the Caribbean and others are threatened by these rising temperatures.
   13. Along the US coasts, public infrastructure and $1 trillion in national wealth held in real estate are threatened by rising sea levels, flooding and storm surges.
   14. Energy systems will be [overstretched], … and the potential loss in some sectors could reach hundreds of billions of dollars per year by the end of the century, the report said.
   15. The number of days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit will multiply; Chicago… could start to resemble Phoenix or Las Vegas, with up to two months worth of these scorching-hot days.
   16. Sea levels have already gone up 7 to 8 inches since 1900. Almost half that rise has been since 1993, a rate of rise greater than during any century in the past 2,800 years. Some countries are already seeing land underwater.
   17. By midcentury, it’s likely that the Arctic will lose all sea ice in late summer, and that could lead to more permafrost thaw, according to the report. As the permafrost thaws, more carbon dioxide and methane would be released, amplifying human-induced warming, “possibly significantly.” …
   18. … The Defense Department is trying to understand what risk climate change poses to security. But the Trump administration has signaled that the country will pull out of international initiatives like the Paris climate accord, aimed at lowering global temperatures, claiming that these treaties have been unfair for the US economy.
   19. A report from the UN in October urged all governments to take “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to avoid disaster from climate change. That report predicted that the Earth will reach the crucial threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by as early as 2030.
6. 3 things businesses can do to win the climate change fight, By Jeff Nesbit for CNN Business Perspectives | Updated 11:47 AM ET, Thu November 15, 2018 (Jeff Nesbit is author of This is the Way the World Ends and executive director of Climate Nexus. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.
   1. The sobering report issued by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last month was a public jolt. The report found that the Earth’s temperature will warm by 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by as soon as 2030, sparking some devastating consequences.
   2. Like it or not, if we are going to make any progress on climate change, we are going to have to look to the business world. There are roughly 100 companies directly responsible for CO2 emissions, outlined in the Carbon Majors report. Others in the utility and transportation sectors are indirectly responsible for carbon emissions.
   3. Make it a part of the business – …For some businesses, it means making changes in their own supply chains that reduce CO2 emissions. … For other companies, it means shifting their own energy needs away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. …
   4. Support a carbon tax – Many large multinational corporations now allocate resources to either mitigate damage or exposure from climate risks or to adapt to changing environments. They’re doing so largely because they want regulatory certainty, as well as a level playing field as governments begin to restrict carbon emissions in the next 20 years. …
   5. … the proposed Climate Leadership Council’s Baker-Shultz carbon dividends plan … would set a national carbon price at $40 a ton in the first year, and it would rise each year after that. The revenue from the carbon fee would be returned to US families as a dividend. The business community as a whole can and should support this proposal.
   6. Turn to renewable energy – Renewables [and] Distributed-grid technologies offer homeowners and small businesses options to generate power for zero fuel costs. Vast new economies of scale drive down prices, making clean energy easier, cheaper and available to all. For businesses, utilities should offer solar and wind options and have solar rooftops integrated into the electric grid. The cost of building solar plants is now as cheap as building a coal plant.
   7. MIKE – The problem with all of the above is that ‒ as I have said many times, “Profit is private, but pollution is public.” Until industry has title and ownership to the pollution it creates, and thus financial liability and responsibility to end it, mitigate or purify it, business incentives to do so are based on PR concerns, government rules and fines, or the occasional profit motive. Ownership means that businesses can release pollution from their factories unless and until they can make their wastes safe for the public air, land and water. Otherwise, they should be as responsible for it as a pet owner is for a vicious animal.
7. Russian ‘creeping annexation’ hits Ukraine in Sea of Azov – “It is the first time the Russian military has openly fired on the Ukrainian military and claimed responsibility for it.” – By Alexander Smith and Yuliya Talmazan |NBCNEWS.com | Nov. 26, 2018 / 9:39 AM CST / Updated 10:01 AM CST
   1. Tensions in the Sea of Azov have been simmering for months and this weekend its waters came to the boil.
   2. Russian ships opened fire at three Ukrainian naval vessels Sunday after they attempted to enter the sea.
   3. Ukrainian media reported that 23 crew members were detained, including six who were injured, and the vessels seized.
   4. Kiev’s navy is hugely outgunned and outnumbered by Moscow. Ukraine responded by putting its forces on high alert.
   5. Some Western experts say the Kremlin’s tactics in the Sea of Azov are straight out of the Kremlin playbook.
   6. Analysts have been warning for months that the Azov, which is just under half the size of Lake Superior, is the latest example of Russia carrying out “creeping annexation” — where borders are subtly shifted to take territory, or in this case waters, from former Soviet allies.
   7. The sea is technically shared by Ukraine and Russia as part of a 2003 agreement. That was before Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, a move denounced by the U.S. and its European allies as an illegal occupation.
   8. This gave Moscow control of the Kerch Strait, the only maritime entrance into the Sea of Azov, which it literally cemented by opening a huge, low-lying bridge in May. Ukraine lost many of its naval ships when Crimea was annexed. …
   9. … Cutting off Ukraine’s access to these waters would isolate half of the country’s coastline, including the economically important port city of Mariupol, and effectively turn the Sea of Azov into a Russian-controlled lake.
   10. “Russia sees the Sea of Azov as an area where it can impose huge pressure on Ukraine,” said Michael Carpenter, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense at the Pentagon.
   11. … Maxim Tucker, an expert on Ukraine with the Open Society Foundations, said the Sea of Azov incident represents a “dramatic” escalation.
   12. “It is the first time the Russian military has openly fired on the Ukrainian military and claimed responsibility for it,” he told NBC News.
   13. … under the 2003 agreement, Ukraine “did not need Russian permission” to pass through the Kerch Strait. However, it could be argued it had an obligation to notify and cooperate with the Russian authorities controlling it, Schatz added.
   14. Ukraine said it informed Russia; Russia denies this. If Ukraine is correct then blocking its ships’ passage was “clearly illegal,” Schatz said.
   15. The use of force as a means to protect coastline can only be used in “exceptional circumstances” under international law, he said, and “foreign warships cannot be detained for trying to pass through a strait.”
   16. In any case, if the Russian objection was that the Ukrainian ships were in Crimean waters, Russia’s annexation of that peninsula is not recognized under international law, “rendering any Russian enforcement action illegal per se,” he said.
   17. Russia-Ukraine tensions rise after Kerch Strait ship capture, 27, 2018 | BBC.com
       1. Ukraine’s parliament is to decide whether to bring in martial law as anger over the capture of three of its naval vessels by Russia spilled into the streets overnight. …
       2. … The incident, in waters off the Crimean Peninsula, marks a major escalation of tension between the two countries.

• The UN Security Council will hold an emergency meeting as a result.

1. Each country blames the other for the incident in which two gunboats and a tug were captured and a number of Ukrainian crew members injured.
2. There have been growing tensions between the two sides over access to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov off the Crimean Peninsula – annexed by Russia in 2014. …
3. It began when Russia accused the Ukrainian ships of illegally entering its waters.

• On Sunday morning, Ukraine’s Berdyansk and Nikopol gunboats, and the Yana Kapa tug, tried to sail from the Black Sea port of Odessa to Mariupol in the Sea of Azov, which is shared between the two countries.
• Ukraine says the Russians tried to intercept the ships, ramming the tug.

1. The vessels continued towards the Kerch Strait, the only access to the Sea of Azov, but were blocked by a tanker placed under the Kerch bridge.
2. Russia built the bridge, that links mainland Russia to Crimea, earlier this year, despite opposition from Ukraine. …
3. Russia’s FSB security service later confirmed that one of its patrol boats had used force to seize the three Ukrainian vessels but said only three sailors had been wounded. The Ukrainian navy later said the boats had been hit and disabled as they tried to leave the area. It said six crew members had been injured.

• Blame game – Analysis by Steven Rosenberg, BBC News, Moscow
• Under a 2003 treaty between the governments in Moscow and Kiev, the Kerch Strait and the Sea of Azov are shared territorial waters.
• But recently there, Russia began inspecting all vessels sailing to or from Ukrainian ports.

xv.	Image copyright Photoshot A tanker under the bridge shut all navigation from and into the Sea of Azov

• The use of force by Russia to seize Ukrainian vessels – with casualties – is a major escalation. But you won’t hear Moscow taking the blame.

8. World’s second human case of rat hepatitis discovered, By Nina Avramova, CNN, Updated 12:20 PM ET, Thu November 22, 2018
   1. A second case of rat hepatitis E has been reported in a human in Hong Kong, making it also the second recorded globally. …
   2. … A 70-year-old woman from the Wong Tai Sin district of Hong Kong was diagnosed with the disease this month, according to Hong Kong’s Department of Health. She does not recall having direct contact with rodents or their excreta (feces and bodily fluids) and didn’t notice any rodents in her residence, the Department of Health said in a statement. The woman was admitted to a public hospital on May 4, 2017, for headache, anorexia, malaise, abdominal pain and palpitations, which she had developed since May 1, 2017.
   3. She soon recovered and was discharged four days later, on May 8. The woman had underlying illnesses, according to the Department of Health. …
   4. In September, the first case was reported, involving a 56-year old man. Before this, it was not known that the disease could be passed from rats to humans.
   5. After that case, the Centre for Health Protection of the Department of Health provided blood samples from patients who had tested positive for immune protein called anti-HEV immunoglobulin — a sign someone is infected with hepatitis E, known as HEV. Further investigations by Hong Kong University detected elements of DNA evident of rat HEV.
   6. “Rat hepatitis E virus now joins this list of infections as an important pathogen that may be transmitted from rats to humans,” Dr. Siddharth Sridhar, clinical assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong, previously said, adding that the risk of rat hepatitis E affecting humans has been underestimated. …
   7. … The apparent clustering of the two cases is of concern, and the Centre for Health Protection will continue to closely monitor the situation, Leung wrote, adding that the sources and routes of the infections could not be determined.
   8. “It is likely that the virus can be found commonly in rats, with one study in Vietnam suggesting that more than 10% of them may have been infected,” Martin Hibberd, professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, wrote in an email. “Infection can be acquired by close contact with rats, or perhaps more likely through rat contaminated food or water.”
   9. … The increasing number of case observations in Hong Kong is, according to Hibberd, “likely at this stage to be due to improved diagnostic tools and increased surveillance, as the clinical presentation can be confused with other diseases.” …
   10. … The human form of hepatitis E is typically transmitted through contaminated water and is estimated to infect 20 million people worldwide, resulting in 3.3 million people showing symptoms each year, according to the World Health Organization. It caused approximately 44,000 deaths in 2015, making up 3.3% of all deaths from viral hepatitis.
   11. The animal form of the disease is thought to infect wild boars, domestic pigs and deer, as well as rats and other rodents.
9. Viggo Mortensen Apologizes For Saying Racial Slur At ‘Green Book’ Screening – “I have no right to even imagine the hurt that is caused by hearing that word in any context, especially from a white man,” the actor said. By David Moye | COM | 11/09/2018 04:02 pm ET
   1. Actor Viggo Mortensen is apologizing after he used a racial slur Wednesday night during a panel for his newest movie.
   2. Mortensen was doing a Q&A session in Los Angeles for “Green Book,” a film that depicts the relationship between a black classical pianist (Mahershala Ali) and his white chauffeur (Mortensen) as they travel the American South during the 1960s.
   3. The film, directed by Peter Farrelly, deals explicitly with race relations, and during Wednesday’s panel, Mortensen used a slur in an attempt to make a point about progress, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
   4. “For instance, no one says ‘nigger’ anymore,” Mortensen said, according to numerous witnesses.
   5. Mortensen says he was trying to make a point about how things have changed to the point where a once-common slur is no longer acceptable, but Dick Schulz, a director at the screening, doesn’t think the message got across.
   6. “It was all anyone was talking about when we left the theater,” Schulz told the Reporter. “I was hearing everybody passing by me going up the stairs going, ‘That was crazy! Why did he say that? You cannot say that!’”
   7. “And it’s sad because the movie is great,” he added. “The irony is confounding, to be honest — it’s really shocking, and it was really shocking in the moment.”
   8. Mortensen later released a statement to IndieWire apologizing for using the slur:
   9. In making the point that many people casually used the ‘N’ word at the time in which the movie story takes place, in 1962, I used the full word. Although my intention was to speak strongly against racism, I have no right to even imagine the hurt that is caused by hearing that word in any context, especially from a white man. I do not use the word in private or in public. I am very sorry that I did use the full word last night, and will not utter it again.
      1. HOW I LEARNED ABOUT THE GREEN BOOK – MIKE
10. 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.”
11. 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….
12. 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….
13. 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.

1. 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.”
2. 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?
3. 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.”
4. 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.
5. 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.” …
6. 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. 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.
2. 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

======================================================

__________________________________________________________________