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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 engineers are Don and Letty.

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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]:

: “Julius Caesar”  by: William Shakespeare (Act 3 Scene 2), ANTONY (from Julius Caesar, spoken by Marc Antony):

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. …

______________________________________________________________________

1. With Bush 41’s passing, there seem nothing but kind words to be said. In “Julius Caesar”, it appears that the opposite was expected to be true.
   1. What do you think?
2. MIKE: The kind of permanent damage done to USA by Trump:
   1. Despite pause in trade war, U.S. and China’s economic relationship is forever changed, By David J. Lynch | COM | December 2, 2018 at 8:53 PM
      1. The trade talks that President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping launched this weekend have raised hopes for a peaceful resolution of the trans-Pacific tariff war — but the economic relationship between the U.S. and China has been permanently altered. …
      2. … Over the past quarter century, American manufacturers grew dependent upon low-wage Chinese workers to produce iPhones, clothing and industrial parts, often at the expense of factory employees in the industrial heartland.
      3. China, in turn, invested more than $140 billion in the U.S. since 2000, according to the Rhodium Group, further knitting together two economies that account for roughly 40 percent of global output.
      4. But almost a year of heated U.S. rhetoric, escalating tariffs and tighter investment and export controls have shaken Chinese government officials and global business executives.
      5. As repeated tariff salvos prompt companies to rethink their reliance upon Chinese factories, Beijing is stepping up efforts to wean itself from what it sees as an unpredictable American partner, according to trade analysts, business executives and former government officials.
      6. “Both sides have set in motion policies that won’t be up for negotiation. So it’s not realistic to expect a return to the status quo,” said Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade negotiator now with Akin Gump via email. “We are in a new world.” …
      7. The president’s abrupt return to brinkmanship over a new North American trade deal, which he signed Friday along with leaders of Mexico and Canada, underscored U.S. unpredictability. [Lawmakers wary of Trump’s threat to cancel NAFTA]
      8. Returning to Washington, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he will withdraw the U.S. from the existing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to present Congress with an all-or-nothing vote on the new pact.
      9. “I’ll be terminating it within a relatively short period of time,” [TRUMP] said. “It’s been a disaster for the United States. It’s caused us tremendous amounts of unemployment and loss and company loss and everything else.” …
      10. … Xi has personally directed a campaign to promote “self-reliance,” with public tours of China’s modern industries in the south and its traditional Rust Belt region in the northeast.
      11. “The turn away from reliance on the U.S. for agricultural and industrial inputs will accelerate,” Charles W. Freeman Jr., a former U.S. diplomat said in an email. “U.S. companies in China will hedge by continuing to move some of their facilities to Vietnam and other lower labor cost economies.”
   2. Trump touts ‘extraordinary’ meeting with Xi, says it could produce benefits ‘far beyond’ trade – Trump on his ties to China’s president: ‘The relationship is very special’, By John Wagner (The Washington Post) December 3 at 9:47 AM
      1. President Trump on Monday repeatedly lauded his weekend meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, suggesting their dinner in Argentina would not only produce better trade relations and help U.S. farmers but could also help curtail an arms race with Russia, potentially saving billions in military spending.
      2. In morning tweets, Trump touted his “very strong and personal relationship” with Xi, asserting that they are “the only two people that can bring about massive and very positive change, on trade and far beyond.”
      3. The president’s effusive tweets came amid differing accounts by the two nations on the specifics of what was billed as a trade war cease-fire and confusion over a late-night tweet Sunday by Trump asserting China would drop tariffs on imports of American-made cars.
      4. As of Monday morning, it remained unclear what if anything China had agreed to in that regard. …
      5. … The two sides also agreed to commence talks about “structural changes” in Chinese practices, including forced technology transfer, trade secrets theft and nontariff barriers, according to U.S. officials.
      6. “Relations with China have taken a BIG leap forward!” Trump said in one of his tweets. “Very good things will happen. We are dealing from great strength, but China likewise has much to gain if and when a deal is completed. Level the field!”
      7. [Trump used a really unfortunate phrase while hailing progress with China]
      8. Trump asserted that U.S. farmers — who’ve been particularly hard hit by the trade war — would be “a very BIG and FAST beneficiary” of the cease-fire. He ended one of his tweets with: “Farmers, I LOVE YOU!”
   3. MIKE: Reminisicent of Herbert Hoover’s campaign’s claim of, a “chicken in every pot. And a car in every backyard, to boot.”
      1. And we know how THAT worked out a year later in 1929.
      2. Although Hoover never uttered the phrase, the Republican Party did use it in a 1928 campaign advertisement touting a period of “Republican prosperity” that had provided a “chicken in every pot. And a car in every backyard, to boot.”
3. California Republicans see what happens when more voters vote, and they don’t like it one bit, By Michael Hiltzik | COM | Nov 30, 2018 | 11:35 AM
   1. California Republicans, drummed out of office by the carload in the recent election, have exited whining.
   2. They’ve figured out why they got thumped so badly, and it’s simple: California, that dastardly state, allowed voters to vote. The result was that seven Republican House seats turned Democratic, including all four in Orange County, transforming that once reliably GOP stronghold into a blue streak.
   3. “I just think it’s weird,” outgoing House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said of California’s system of allowing every vote to be counted, even if it’s filed with local election officials days after election day. “California defies logic to me.”
   4. Ryan wasn’t alone in implying, if not stating outright, that something illegal happened in California. Rep. Mimi Walters (R-Laguna Beach) issued a fund-raising appeal immediately after the election, accusing Democrats of “trying to steal this Republican seat.” …
   5. … The most comprehensive whine about California’s vote has come from Shawn Steel, a former state Republican Party chair, writing in the conservative Washington Times. Steel’s argument deserves careful scrutiny, especially since he concedes at the outset that “there’s no evidence of ballot box shenanigans” in California.
   6. … Instead, Steel complains, California has changed its voting laws to allow more voters to vote.
4. Behind Michael Cohen’s deal: All the lies surrounding Trump start to crumble – Michael Cohen has been talking to Mueller and other prosecutors for months: This is very bad for Team Trump, By Heather Digby Parton | SALON.COM | December 3, 2018 2:25pm (UTC)
   1. As President Trump was getting ready to take off for the annual G20 meeting in Argentina he let fly at his former lawyer and longtime Trump Organization executive Michael Cohen, calling him a liar and characterizing him as weak for cooperating with the government. He made a point of complimenting “others” for refusing to do so — an obvious reference to his former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, and their longtime pal Roger Stone — which was an extraordinary comment coming from the man who is formally in charge of the Department of Justice. …
   2. … Trump was sore about the surprise guilty plea Cohen had entered on Thursday in which he admitted to lying about his dealings with Russia on Trump’s behalf during the presidential campaign. …
   3. … [COHEN] didn’t ask for a formal cooperation agreement because his lawyers apparently convinced him that the smarter move was to cooperate willingly and preemptively so as to begin his sentence as soon as possible. The memorandum suggests that prosecutors have been convinced that he will continue to cooperate and that he plans to do so. Whether that’s true or not, now that he’s pled guilty to lying, most observers feel he’s “locked in” on the Russia conspiracy side of the Mueller investigation. What Cohen lied about is substantial, despite Trump’s characterization of it as “lightly looking at doing a building in Russia” while he was talking up the Russian president on the campaign trail and the Russian government was sabotaging his opponent on his behalf.
   4. Cohen’s guilty plea for to lying to Congress has also opened up a huge can of worms for a whole lot of people who came before congressional committees.  Cohen admits that he “remained in close and regular contact with White House-based staff and legal counsel to Client-1 [Donald Trump]” in advance of giving testimony that he now admits was false. There’s a lot of evidence that others did the same thing. In fact,  the Republican chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Richard Burr of North Carolina, saidthe committee has referred “a lot” of them to the Justice Department for doing so. It’s an open question as to whether or not those witnesses conferred with the president’s staff and legal counsel before they testified. …
   5. … [The] outgoing GOP majority acted as agents of the president and helped engineer the cover-up. As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye pointed outthis weekend, the unethical behavior of the GOP leadership, epitomized by House Intelligence chair Devin Nunes of California, pretty much told anyone who testified that they could lie with impunity.
   6. … The incoming Democratic chairs of both the House Intelligence Committee and the House Judiciary Committee — Adam Schiff of California and Jerry Nadler of New York, respectively — made it clear on the Sunday morning shows that they plan to release all the testimony to the special counsel’s office, which the Republicans have refused to do. In fact, Nunes and his fellow Trump henchmen’s willingness to scheme with the White House on behalf of the president may have created a sense of false security for prominent witnesses such as Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Eric Prince, all of whom could soon find themselves in the kind of hot water Cohen just got himself out of. …
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. 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.
7. 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.”
8. 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….
9. Some Bacteria Are Becoming ‘More Tolerant’ Of Hand Sanitizers, Study Finds, By Melody Schreiber [NPR.org] August 2, 20184:22 PM ET
   1. In the early 2000s, hospitals across Australia began installing more hand-sanitizer dispensers in their rooms and hallways for staff, visitors and patients to use. Research showed these alcohol-based disinfectants helped battle staph infections in patients and certain kinds of drug-resistant bacteria. And rates of these infections went down.
   2. But other infections didn’t drop when people started using the sanitizer stations. In fact, certain infections went up.
   3. In the early 2000s, hospitals across Australia began installing more hand-sanitizer dispensers in their rooms and hallways for staff, visitors and patients to use. Research showed these alcohol-based disinfectants helped battle staph infections in patients and certain kinds of drug-resistant bacteria. And rates of these infections went down.
   4. But other infections didn’t drop when people started using the sanitizer stations. In fact, certain infections went up.
   5. In particular, enterococcal infections — caused by bacteria that affect the digestive tract, bladder, heart and other parts of the body — started increasing.
   6. This wasn’t only happening in Australia. Countries around the world saw rises in this type of infection even as hand sanitizer became more popular. Globally, enterococci make up ten percent of bacterial infections acquired in the hospital. In North America and Europe, they are a leading cause of sepsis, a deadly blood infection.
   7. Now, researchers say, they may have found the cause. Blame it on the alcohol.
   8. New research published by Science Translational Medicine on Wednesday shows that several strains of these bacteria have begun adjusting to alcohol-based hand sanitizers. They’re not resistant to the alcohol — at least, not yet — but they’re becoming “more tolerant” of it, the authors write. That means the bacteria were able to survive for longer periods of time after being doused with alcohol.
   9. The researchers used different strengths of alcohol concentrations to combat the bacteria, starting with 23 percent. Eventually, at a 70-percent alcohol mixture, the bacteria were conquered. Typically, hand sanitizers are 60 percent alcohol.
   10. To make matters worse, many of these alcohol-tolerant bacteria are resistant to multiple drugs as well. Half of the strains the researchers studied cannot be treated with vancomycin, a last-line antibiotic. That means the bacteria are spreading more easily within hospitals, and there aren’t many options for treatment.
   11. The researchers were surprised by their findings.
   12. “To our knowledge this was the first time anyone had shown hospital bacteria becoming tolerant to alcohols,” says Timothy Stinear, a coauthor of the study and a researcher at the University of Melbourne’s Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity. …
   13. … Health-care institutions trying to control the spread of these infections will need to “adhere rigorously to hand-hygiene protocols,” Stinear says — and probably institute additional measures to stop the spread, such as increased hand-washing with soap after coming into contact with the bacteria. …
   14. … Lance Price, a professor at the George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health and the founding director of GW’s Antibiotic Resistance Action Center, was also surprised by the findings. … “If you’re washing your hands less because that alcohol-based hand sanitizer makes you feel confident that your hands are clean,” Price says, “all of a sudden you can become a vehicle for alcohol-resistant organisms.”
   15. The research is still clear that alcohol-based hand sanitizers are more effective at battling some bacteria, like those causing staph infections. However, this study indicates that other bacteria are best cleaned off with simple soap and water.
   16. “It’s the physical action of lifting and moving them off your skin, and letting them run down the drain,” Price says.
   17. “We have to be careful about this new trend towards heavy reliance on alcohol-based hand sanitizers,” Price continues. “Soap and water should be our number-one protection” — both in hospitals and for personal use….

TOPICS FROM PREVIOUS WEEKS:

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?
4. 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.”
5. 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.
6. 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.” …
7. 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.
8. 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.’ …

1. 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

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