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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]:

 

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1. Obamacare (https://www.healthcare.gov/): enrollment ends 12/15.

   1. For a quick look without logging in, go to https://www.healthcare.gov/lower-costs/

   2. Random Example: A single 50 y.o. male earning up to $30k/yr can get a Silver Plan in Harris County for $296/mo.

2. Social Security notices showing cost-of-living increases available online for retirees, By Janna Herron, USA TODAY Published 12:41 p.m. ET Dec. 9, 2018 | Updated 12:50 p.m. ET Dec. 9, 2018

3. CRISPR = Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats
   1. CRISPR^[38] is a DNA editing method that makes genetic engineering faster, easier, and more efficient.^[39]
   2. The CRISPR Baby Scandal Gets Worse by the Day – The alleged creation of the world’s first gene-edited infants was full of technical errors and ethical blunders. Here are the 15 most damning details. By Ed Yong | THEATLANTIC.COM | Dec 3, 2018
      1. 1. He didn’t address an unmet medical need. 2. The actual editing wasn’t executed well. 3. It’s not clear what those new mutations will do. 4. There were problems with informed consent. 5. He operated under a cloak of secrecy … 6. … but organized a slick PR campaign. 7. A few people knew about He’s intentions but failed to stop him. 8. He acted in contravention of global consensus. 9. He acted in contravention of his own stated ethical views. 10. He sought ethical advice and ignored it. 11. There is no way to tell whether He’s work did any good. 12. He has doubled down. (If He shows any contrition about how these events have unfolded, it has not been obvious. 13. Scientific academies have prevaricated. 14. A leading geneticist came to He’s defense. 15. This could easily happen again.
4. Chinese Scientists Are Outraged by Reports of Gene-Edited Babies – Researchers fear that the controversial study will be a stain on China’s scientific reputation. By Sarah Zhang | .THEATLANTIC.COM | Nov 27, 2018
5. Brightest comet of the year can be seen as it zips past Earth – 46P/Wirtanen is beginning to brighten in the sky, Nicole Mortillaro · CBC News · Posted: Dec 08, 2018 4:00 AM ET
6. Supreme Court gives victory to Planned Parenthood in Medicaid case – Three of the court’s conservatives said the court should have taken up the case, but Justice Kavanaugh and Chief Justice Roberts voted with the majority. By Pete Williams | NBC NEWS | 10, 2018 / 9:05 AM CST
   1. … The dispute did not involve abortion, but the action by the justices keeps a hot-button political issue off the docket. Three of the court’s conservatives said the court should have taken the case.
   2. After an anti-abortion group released videos in 2015 that purported to show officials from Planned Parenthood talking about selling fetal tissue, several states immediately terminated Medicaid provider agreements with the group’s affiliates. The videos were largely discredited, but the states involved said they found the allegations troubling.
   3. Medicaid patients in Kansas and Louisiana, two of the states that took action against Planned Parenthood, claimed the states violated Medicaid’s requirement that patients must be free to seek their health care from any qualified and willing provider. They sued, and lower federal courts found in their favor, entering injunctions that ordered those states to lift their bans.
   4. In declining to take up the states’ appeals, the Supreme Court’s action on Monday leaves those lower court victories for the Medicaid patients in place.
   5. … The states argued that the Medicaid law does not give individual patients the right to sue when health care providers are excluded. If a state acts improperly …
   6. …Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said the court should have taken up the appeals because the issue of whether Medicaid recipients can sue is an important one….
7. Prosecutors’ Narrative Is Clear: Trump Defrauded Voters. But What Does It Mean? By Peter Baker and Nicholas Fandos | NYTIMES | Dec. 8, 2018
   1. The latest revelations by prosecutors investigating President Trump and his team draw a portrait of a candidate who personally directed an illegal scheme to manipulate the 2016 election and whose advisers had more contact with Russia than Mr. Trump has ever acknowledged.
   2. In the narrative that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and New York prosecutors are building, Mr. Trump continued to secretly seek to do business in Russia deep into his presidential campaign even as Russian agents made more efforts to influence him. At the same time, in this account he ordered hush payments to two women to suppress stories of impropriety in violation of campaign finance law.
   3. The prosecutors made clear in their memo that they viewed efforts by Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, to squelch the stories as nothing less than a perversion of a democratic election — and by extension they effectively accused the president of defrauding voters, questioning the legitimacy of his victory.
   4. On Saturday, Mr. Trump dismissed the filings, and his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, minimized the importance of any potential campaign finance violations. Democrats, however, said they could lead to impeachment. …
   5. … “Until now, you had two different charges, allegations, whatever you want to call them,” Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the incoming Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in an interview on Saturday. “One was collusion with the Russians. One was obstruction of justice and all that entails. And now you have a third — that the president was at the center of a massive fraud against the American people.”
8. Good riddance to John Kelly – He’s been the chief of staff America didn’t need. By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com | COM | Dec 10, 2018, 10:20am EST
   1. … The typical thing to say about Kelly is that he brought order to the White House process. He was the “grown-up in the room” who enforced discipline, but, ultimately, even Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, could not curb President Donald Trump’s most egregious instincts. …
   2. … But the emphasis on times when Kelly could rein in Trump ignores the extent to which the two men were genuinely like-minded, and the many crucial moments where Kelly exacerbated Trump’s worst instincts.
   3. Kelly intervened to scuttle a potentially sensible Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) deal while mocking large numbers of DACA-eligible youth as “lazy.” He slandered Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) and then for no real reason refused to apologize. He attempted to orchestrate a cover-up of White House aide Rob Porter’s alleged domestic abuse.
   4. Trump is having trouble replacing Kelly. Nick Ayres, the young political operative who’d long been rumored to be next in line, apparently turned down the job. Based on Trump’s hiring track record, we can expect he’ll hire someone terrible. But the Kelly bar is exceptionally low, so America may be in for a stroke of luck. But we owe it to ourselves to remember how bad Kelly was. …
   5. … Unfortunately, the truism that nobody escapes the Trump administration with their reputation intact is not accurate.
   6. Gary Cohn was invited by Harvard’s Institute of Politics to address incoming members of Congress and school them in the ways of the world. (Sean Spicer was an Institute of Politics visiting fellow until recently.) Dina Powell was the featured speaker last week at a gala fundraising luncheon for the Women in Foreign Policy Group.
   7. On his way out the door, Kelly seems to have a reputation (in at least some circles) as a disciplinarian who played a constructive role in the administration.
   8. It’s true that, next to Trump, virtually anyone looks good. It’s also true that any chief of staff is bound to try to undercut Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s influence, which will almost automatically make you a sympathetic-seeming figure in comparison.
   9. But the fact remains that Kelly was a true believer in some of Trump’s very worst ideas, echoed several of his very worst influences, failed completely to compensate for Trump’s most significant personal deficiencies, and intervened at key moments to make things worse. Good riddance.
9. Comet 46P/Wirtanen [WIRtanen], first discovered in 1948, will have its closest encounter with Earth on Dec.16. But it’s already visible in the sky.
   1. While this is the brightest comet of the year and the 10th closest comet in modern times, don’t expect one with a well-defined tail, a hallmark of comets.
   2. At the moment, Wirtanen — a small comet at just 1.2 kilometres in diameter — is a fuzzy, bluish object in the southern sky. Recent photos do show a thin tail, but nothing very pronounced. Wirtanen will likely brighten as it makes its closest approach to the sun on Dec. 12. …
10. Trump used a really unfortunate phrase while hailing progress with China – By Aaron Blake (The Washington Post) December 3 at 9:30 AM
    1. Intentionally or not, President Trump on Monday conjured images of mass death and tragedy in China while hailing diplomatic progress with it.
    2. In a tweet after he and Chinese President Xi Jinping reached a truce in the ongoing trade war, Trump suggested relations with China were taking a “BIG leap forward.”
    3. But “leap forward” is a hugely fraught phrase when it comes to China. The Communist Party’s “Great Leap Forward” was an economic and social program of the late 1950s and early 1960s that aimed to modernize the country’s economy but has been linked to crippling famine and tens of millions of deaths.
    4. The “Great Leap Forward” involved forcing villagers to live in communes. This disrupted China’s agriculture and, when combined with serious weather problems, led to the “Great Famine” — sometimes referred to as the largest man-made disaster in history.
    5. Experts generally agree that at least 20 million people died during these few years, mostly of starvation. But in 2010, Frank Dikötter, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, estimated the death toll was actually more than 45 million…
    6. … The question from there is whether Trump knew what he was doing when he used the phrase. The president is, after all, something of a troll. He has also employed historically fraught slogans before, including “America First” (which was used by Nazi sympathizers in the United States in the 1930s) and “enemy of the people” (which traces back to Joseph Stalin’s show trials of the same era).
11. 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.”
12. 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….
13. 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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