A day of art

A fabulous day of art yesterday. First, we had lunch with our friend from church Harry Parsons at the Chef-O-Nette in our old neighborhood where we had our first meal as Columbus residents almost 50 years ago. We both had our favorite--the Hang-Over sandwich.  So many memories--our son (then about 4) and I used to stop there after dropping his sister off at Tremont School across the street.

Then we headed downtown to the Gallery in the Riffe building to see the Ohio Watercolor Show (OWS).  Best arrangement EVER. Hanging a show is an art--my husband does it for our church shows--and this one is perfection. There is one more drop in class there with Suzanne Acceta on January 4, 2017. 

Then on to German Village Meeting Haus to see the Central Ohio Watercolor Show (COWS). From there we went to an cartoonist's home to see his wonderful collection and his studio. The 1903 three story brick house faces Schiller Park--what a wonderful "front yard." Then home for a nap before pizza. 

 

The Peace Prize president--Barack Obama--not one day of peace

 A Russian reporter asks the obvious:

"America, in all the eight years [of Obama], did not have one day where it was completely at peace. There was one war or another, and not all of those wars were inherited by President Obama. And he's a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

"Then, he -- he's like the first African-American president. But the race relations in this country have become worse. Not better, worse. It's also, I -- you know, you say some things are facts. Those are allegations. But I cannot say that it's a fact. It's an impression I get, that they are worse. But many people share this -- this impression."

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/russian-reporter-does-obama-feel-any-responsibility-us-russia-relations

On destabilizing the Trump presidency

Mike Huckabee: "So far, liberals have blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss on racism, sexism, xenophobia, James Comey, fake news, hacked voting machines and a Russian conspiracy (To quote Graham Parker, “Is this a Russian conspiracy, or is it just idiocy?”) Before they take a cue from “South Park” and blame Canada, they need to read this exhaustive report from Politico, hardly a right-wing source. It details how Hillary blew the race in Michigan and hence the election (and $1.2 billion of donors’ money) all by herself, because she was a terrible candidate who surrounded herself with bad advisors and ran an incompetent campaign.

Her supporters can’t seem to fathom that when you nominate a candidate most Americans distrust; who piously preaches “public service” while getting wealthy off government connections; who told her core voters that she planned to put them out of work; who poured money into states she had no chance of winning while ignoring states she needed to win; who insulted millions of Americans and spent most of her speeches denigrating her opponent; who seemed, as one Ohio Democrat put it, to care more about transgender bathrooms than whether blue collar workers had jobs; and who was under FBI investigation for mishandling classified information – and whose excuse was that she wasn’t intentionally criminal, just incompetent – then she might legitimately lose."

From Politico
"Politico spoke to a dozen officials working on or with Clinton’s Michigan campaign, and more than a dozen scattered among other battleground states, her Brooklyn headquarters and in Washington who describe an ongoing fight about campaign tactics, an inability to get top leadership to change course."

I don't think it's exactly accurate to point out all the ways Hillary failed the voters--she obviously succeeded with more voters than Trump did. His handlers were smarter than hers and were able to plug in where it mattered.

The myth of the Christmas blues

Where does the myth of the Christmas blues come from? Statistical studies don’t back it up. It is "real" fake news, but it was created--perhaps by the very counselors people turn to for help.

“Writer Olga Khazan speculates that perhaps the answer lies with the 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life—with its famous scene in which Jimmy Stewart’s character George Bailey contemplates suicide—and the way in “which basic-cable networks put [it] on heavy rotation as Christmas nears.” I wondered, however, whether psychiatrists and clinical psychologists might also have played a role in associating the holidays with acute mental health problems.” http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/major-depressive-disorder/holiday-syndrome-who-exactly-came-idea-those-christmas-blue

The author of this article gets a bit esoteric and technical . . . as one might expect from a writer for a psychiatric publication.

"It was James P. Cattell⁹ (d. 1994), a Harvard- and Columbia-trained psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who seems to have been the one to have shifted the discussion in a new direction. In 1955, he coined the term “the holiday syndrome,” describing it as a reaction in some patients that manifests itself beginning around Thanksgiving and ending a few days after January 1st. It is characterized, he insisted,

 '. . . by the presence of diffuse anxiety, numerous regressive phenomena including marked feelings of helplessness, possessiveness, and increased irritability, nostalgic or bitter rumination about holiday experiences of youth, depressive affect, and a wish for magical resolution of problems.^9p39"

Rosaria Butterfield's trainwreck conversion

Although I have read articles by Rosaria Butterfield I have never heard her speak.  This is a wonderful testimony, but only intended for Christians, or Christians who have wandered from the faith and are investigating the truth of Jesus and what he offers. It’s erudite--she’s a scholar and was professor of English. She attended Ohio State University! I love her way with words, her humor, and her analysis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVTTsD9o1IM  Through friendship, kindness and deep study of the scripture, she finds the Jesus of the Bible.  She fought, but Jesus won.

 https://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/justintaylor/2016/10/31/rosaria-butterfield-responds-to-jen-hatmakers-blessing-of-lgbt-sexual-relationships-as-holy/

 http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/january-february/my-train-wreck-conversion.html

When I became a Christian, I had to change everything—my life, my friends, my writing, my teaching, my advising, my clothes, my speech, my thoughts. I was tenured to a field that I could no longer work in. I was the faculty advisor to all of the gay and lesbian and feminist groups on campus. I was writing a book that I no longer believed in. And, I was scheduled in a few months to give the incoming address to all of Syracuse University’s graduate students.

 http://www.kevinhalloran.net/the-secret-thoughts-of-an-unlikely-convert-by-rosaria-champagne-butterfield/

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgDAEPRXWgU  (longer version of conversion story)

Women are still not ready for prime time

The U.S. needs innovators. Our outdated federal IT system is just one of the problems. Some agencies are still using floppy disks, and they are spending billions patching and repairing.  Putting social manipulation ahead of innovation is a big problem. Although women now outnumber men in PhDs they are over represented in the social sciences, and are not innovators in the sciences. (They do write about it if you've ever looked at the research.) The exception is foreign born Chinese women living in the U.S. or who have become citizens. So do you manipulate hiring/appointing to include less qualified? Why are women avoiding the harder subjects? We've had special workshops and classes for young females for 40 years! I know because I helped teach them in the 1980s.

The demographics of innovation, Feb. 2016

"Rather than using entrepreneurship, advanced degrees, or patents filed as metrics to approximate the creation of successful, commercial inventions, we identify meaningful and marketable innovations and then study the people behind them."

After a few minutes, I hit the mute button

 

"SHEPARD SMITH currently serves as the chief news anchor and managing editor for the network's breaking news division. Additionally, he is the anchor of Shepard Smith Reporting (weekdays 3-4PM/ET)."


I'm listening to Shep on Fox (leftist with his own "news" show--heavily opinion, however). He's blaming Putin for the crisis in Aleppo and Syria. Short memory. The U.S. supported the rebels after the much glorified Arab Spring; our leaderless presidency stood by helplessly and did nothing after our interference backfired. Putin stepped into a vacuum created by Obama. ISIS, which Obama helped create with his sloppy pull out from Iraq, is also involved.

I do think we should take in some Syrian refugees--at least the Christians--because we helped break the country. Readjusting to a new home and culture is extremely difficult. 83% of Americans identify as Christian, and 1% as Muslims. Muslims are killing Muslims of different sects in Syria, but they are all killing Christians.

https://www.barnabasfund.org/news/Christians-in-Aleppo-face-death-on-all-sides

So now they say it was a typo in Podesta's e-mail

 
Tucker Carlson of Fox (opinion show, not news show) interviewed a Democrat (forgotten his name) last night who commented on how damaging the leaked e-mails of Podesta were to the Clinton campaign. He had been a Bernie supporter and was really mad at the DNC for its deceptive practices fixing the primaries. Then Carlson asked him whom he voted for: Hillary.

 It isn't the Russians damaging our system, it is the Democrats/Clinton campaign trying to change the results. They are trying to get Electors to be "faithless." Ballots weren't changed; machines weren't tampered with. People found out the truth and used it. But did loyalists change their minds or just lose respect for the DNC? Finding out that Podesta and staff were ridiculing opponents and fellow Democrats didn't change my vote--or any Democrats I know. 

Last March, Podesta received an email purportedly from Google saying hackers had tried to infiltrate his Gmail account. When an aide emailed the campaign’s IT staff to ask if the notice was real, Clinton campaign aide Charles Delavan replied that it was “a legitimate email" and that Podesta should “change his password immediately.”

Instead of telling the aide that the email was a threat and that a good response would be to change his password directly through Google’s website, he had inadvertently told the aide to click on the fraudulent email and give the attackers access to the account. 

 http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/310234-typo-may-have-caused-podesta-email-hack

Finally, a Physician Chosen to Head HHS

By Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D., guest blogger*

Congratulations to President-elect Donald Trump for a common-sense and much needed approach to selecting the new Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS): Instead of a lawyer or another bureaucrat, President-elect Trump selected a competent, knowledgeable physician and surgeon, Dr. Tom Price

HHS is the third largest federal agency, often described as a moribund, over-budget, bloated bureaucracy rife with waste and fraud, that controls Medicare and Medicaid, on which millions of Americans depend. HHS itself is desperately in need of strong medicine.

Dr. Price, a long standing member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), is well known to the medical community as a physician who has been a proponent of sound medical practice, has fought for common-sense reforms and market-based solutions on rising medical costs, and has worked to reduce the escalating government interference in medical decision-making. Dr. Price has also worked to improve access to medical care and specialists for patients in the government-run programs.

As physician himself, Dr. Price understands that patients need care tailored to their individual needs of patients without government bureaucrats dictating what must be done. Secretary Sebelius, a lawyer by profession, imposed thousands of pages of new and onerous regulations during her tenure at HHS, strangling the practice of medicine and causing increased costs and confusion in medical practice across America.

Democrats constantly claim that “Free-markets didn’t work; we can’t go back to what was, even if ObamaCare has problems.” But “free markets” in medical care and health insurance have not been allowed to operate in the U.S. since the 1940s, when employer-owned health insurance arose because of government wage and price controls.

“Free markets” in medical services were further destroyed with the 1965 passage of Medicare and Medicaid. President Johnson caused insurers to cancel the private insurance that millions of senior citizens liked and wanted to keep, wiping out competition. Costs exploded, followed by more and more government controls on doctors and hospitals in a futile effort to contain runaway spending.

State governments piled on with insurance mandates, “certificate-of-need” legislation, and other restrictions on competition.

The political elites have “disconnected” the natural regulatory mechanism of price signals and consumers making voluntary decisions about the use of their own money, so politicians keep compounding the problems they created by creating more and more regulations in an effort to fix them. The key problem is NOT failures of free markets, but rather government control of markets.

Despite the government’s restrictions, the remnants of a free market managed to keep the U.S. at the top in the world for quality, accessibility, innovation, variety of medications, diagnostic and treatment procedures available, and longevity for the major diseases we face. Then came ObamaCare, forced on America by Democrats on a 100% partisan vote, that drove many private insurers out of business, and caused further consolidation of hospitals into megasystems, and destruction of small, independent medical practices. Costs rose exponentially as a result.

There is practically NO true health insurance available, just managed-care plans. Americans prepay their premiums, and someone else (government or insurance company) decides what services they are allowed to have, and which doctors and hospitals they can use.

President-elect Trump has proposed reforms that would pair catastrophic medical insurance with individually owned Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). Patients themselves would then control most medical spending. This would provide more medical freedom that we have seen over the course of my whole career. 

To be affordable, health insurance must be like casualty insurance (such as automobile and fire insurance), reimbursing us only for unpredictable expenses that would wipe us out, and leaving the free market to work to determine prices and allocation of resources. True insurance is voluntary, portable throughout the nation, and owned by the subscriber rather than employers. It is only about the contractually agreed amount of payment, not about dictating one’s choice of body shop, mechanic, contractor, type of repair, or medical treatment.

“Reforms” like ObamaCare or many proposed “replacements” are about redistribution of money. Huge premiums are collected from all Americans, placed in the coffers of government-preferred “plans,” and doled out to preferred “providers” according to the “values” of decision-makers working for the plan or the government, regardless of the individual needs and desires of patients. After the huge premium, often as large as a mortgage payment, Americans have little money left, and little choice about how to spend it. They are forced to pay for overpriced care for those preferred by the policymakers, and less and less able to provide for their own needs.

If we “reformed” what is actually “broken” in the medical payment system—the distortions put in place by state and federal governments, then all Americans would pay less and get more value. With a physician who believes in medical freedom and free markets at the head of HHS, perhaps patients will finally be free of government and third-party control.

*Dr. Vliet is an Independent physician with an active US medical practice in Tucson AZ and Dallas TX, specializing in preventive and climacteric medicine with an integrated approach to evaluation and treatment of women and men with complex medical and hormonal problems. Dr. Vliet is also Chief Medical Officer of Med Expert Chile SpA, connecting patients to top tier, lower cost medical care in Latin America, focused on medical freedom, patient-centered, individualized care preserving the Oath of Hippocrates. Dr. Vliet is a past Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS).

Do the Democrats want to stage a coup and destroy the republic?

Democrats don't want an investigation for the truth, they want to convince the Electors to lose faith in the election and "vote their conscience." They want them all (or just enough to throw the election) to be "faithless"--to violate what they've pledged to do--vote for their party's choice.

 

There is no evidence that the Russians leaked Podesta's e-mails (a G-Mail account is not secure for anyone--what was he thinking?), or that any Clinton supporters left her for that reason. There's also no evidence that it wasn't an inside job. . .but that's what Julian Assange says. And there was no sign the Democrats wanted this so-called interference investigated last fall when it first came up.  In October, the Democrats and their lapdog media friends were ridiculing the idea that an outside power could affect a U.S. election. Will the electors be given that information or just the version the Washington Post made up (aka fake news). 

 

Democrats just can't accept that she ignored millions of voters, called Americans names, sneered at their values, and they didn't turn out for her as they did for Obama. But they really turned out for her in Detroit--more ballots than voters! Where's that investigation? Trump was speaking at 5-6 rallies a day to huge crowds--and she could barely field enough interest for a basketball game and only a few times a week.  He was talking to the press ($2 billion free publicity) and she was hiding and resting.

 

 These trouble makers may be the biggest threat to our country ever--and it's not from the Russians. It's Democrats who can't accept the results. They want the popular vote which is not constitutional and they continue to sow seeds of doubt.  It's OK not to like the elected person--I didn't like Obama--but it's not OK to try to undo the election results.

 

Did they try this nonsense in 2008 when Clinton got the popular vote in the Democrat primaries?

Proverbs and Parables, by Dee Brestin

Cleaning out cabinets today. We're planning to make some adjustments so books, files and even dishes might have to be moved.  How do I toss out a Bible study from 1987-88 on Proverbs with my Mom's handwriting and the prayer concerns of all the dear ones from the Brethren church now gone--Ada and Grover, Hazel and Irwin, Lola, Lovita, Velma, Ruby, Harlan, Ira, etc. ? This is why cleaning bookshelves and cabinets takes such a long time!  I have to stop and read.

 

Democrats continue to destabilize our government

Eat your words, Senator Warren. In mid-October, all prominent Democrats--Clinton and Obama included-- were ridiculing Trump for his suspicions of a rigged election and calling for accountability from losers. But now, the worm has turned, and they have nothing but slander, slurs, gripes and whines to add to the usual tired charges of racist, homophobe, sexist, etc. They need to get down to work and find programs and policies that work that don't involve more mandates, more regulations and more taxes. The moles in their organization that leaked their secret animus for Bernie and working people have probably left the building. You don't need a clever Russian to hack a G-Mail account that wasn't secure.

So far, only the Democrats, not the Russians, have tried to screw up our presidential election. Electors are being threatened, recounts are revealing some serious mischief in Democrat controlled counties in Detroit, collusion between the Democrats and our "free" press is at an all time high, calls for undoing the electoral college vote after the fact, and tons of fake news about Russia in an attempt to destabilize our government.

I'm still waiting to find a report of a Democrat who left Clinton's side because of Podesta's e-mails showing the Democrats true feelings. I guess it was all expected in politics, also the other candidate wasn't appealing.

Arthritis and diversity social policy

 

Two friends have described to me their terrible problems with rare forms of arthritis, so today I decided to look at NIH and see what sort of research was going on at the federal level of support.  That took me to The National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS).  The first statement I encountered was not about this challenging debilitating constellation of diseases, but about diversity!  Yes, that diversity--they've even changed the name of the Precision Medicine Initiative to All of Us. Read the message of the "guest director."

Since its inception, the Precision Medicine Initiative® (PMI) Cohort Program — recently renamed the All of Us^SM Research Program — has been deeply committed to diversity. This commitment was inherent in the President’s vision when he announced the program in January 2015, with the goal that this massive new effort scale the benefits of precision medicine across health statuses and across populations.

 Our goal is for people of all ages, races and ethnicities, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic statuses to join us in this unprecedented effort. To achieve this, we aim to build trust through intensive community outreach and engagement, maintaining the highest standards for security and privacy, and providing a meaningful value proposition to the people who generously share their information with us including through a firm commitment to returning research information. We share with NIAMS the commitment to multicultural outreach and the goal of bringing populations historically underrepresented in biomedical research into the fold — and ensuring that precision medicine discoveries yield meaningful advances to all communities across the United States

Good luck, sir, on sorting out the "diversity" goals of this administration with transgendered folks who don't have the cell, muscular or bone structure of the sex they are pretending to be. Be careful or your researchers will be called transphobic.

The guest director, Eric Dishman's message also alerts us to the real reason for the Electronic Health Records foisted on us and medical community through ARRA funding in 2009 at great cost, from which it hopes to use our data.  Good luck if you need mine or my husband's, because it takes months to move them a mile or so down the road from Riverside hospital to our doctor's office.  A carrier pigeon would move faster.

Eric Dishman and Ted Talk

http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/eric-dishman-exits-intel-head-national-institutes-health-precision-medicine-research

No workable policies, the left resorts to name calling

Although I think it’s dangerous and inaccurate for our media (and I include leftist digital news like Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and Vox in media) and Democrats to call patriotic, non-college graduates “alt-right” which has become synonymous with Nazi, I do think I’ve observed the right falls for falsified information more than the left, and that includes memes about health products and cures, genetically modified food, vaccines, collapse of bee colonies, big foot, and things famous people have said. The left inserts more trolls—again my opinion—at conservative websites. This has been confirmed in their own words by recent videos by undercover researchers.  

This is not new—the phenomena of fake news—only the name is new and political since Clinton lost. As a librarian, I saw it all the time, especially from the animal rights movement. You’d see the same photo of an abused cow or dog appear in a number of publications as “real news.” I consider a lot of climate change news fake, yet that can get me called a “climate denier” as though Ohio was never under a glacier or that coal didn’t come from a time of heat and pressure. There was a time in the 20th century when pogroms or mass starvation in USSR were unreported and then called fake news by our own government and media when it did come out. Turks call reports of Armenian genocide fake to this day 100 years later, despite photos and survivors’ families. There are some who say no one died at Sandy Hook and no one landed on the moon. People have been falling for fake news and MSNBC news for years. Look at the whoppers Clinton told about the video causing Benghazi. Or Brian Williams. 

 As one of the best known correspondents in the world for one of the best known newspapers in the world, [Walter] Mr. Duranty's denial that there was a famine was accepted as gospel. Thus Mr. Duranty gulled not only the readers of the New York Times but because of the newspaper's prestige, he influenced the thinking of countless thousands of other readers about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviet regime. And he certainly influenced the newly-elected President Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union. http://www.weeklystandard.com/pulitzer-winning-lies/article/4040

http://www.dailywire.com/news/11475/brian-williams-blames-fake-news-clintons-loss-robert-kraychik

 https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactured-fake-news-that-msnbc-personalities-spread-to-discredit-wikileaks-docs/

 Glenn Greenwald is a source I cautiously recommend. He's done investigative research on both Snowden and Manning, two of our most famous leakers. Some of his writing would put him on the left, some on the right, some in the middle--and he's very suspicious of bipartisanship--says that's when the most mischief happens. He's openly gay, and moved to Brazil for that reason some years ago. https://theintercept.com/staff/glenn-greenwald/

 https://theintercept.com/2016/12/10/anonymous-leaks-to-the-washpost-about-the-cias-russia-beliefs-are-no-substitute-for-evidence/

There are news stories about fake news stories and fake news stories about fake news stories. Odd that the left only became interested when Clinton lost, and not when she was distributing misinformation about a video that caused Benghazi deaths. I'm pretty good at sorting these out, but this is trying the skills I learned as a librarian in Slavic Studies, Latin American Studies, Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, to say nothing of all the clerical jobs in a public library (Mt. Morris, Illinois), college and university libraries (University of Illinois, Ohio State University), and a private special library (OhioNet). Librarians known that everything on the shelves has a bias just through selection of what to purchase, and who controls the publishing industry.

But social media are a whole new ballgame. Some of the news sources I read online are filled with bad actors, trolls, kids barely out of high school working out of mom's basement, disgruntled government employees, web designers with desperate bosses seeking clicks so they can make their profit, and little old ladies like me--that's really what LOL stands for

We're all Russians now

Clinton campaigner learns about values of Trump voters

Diane left her job as a CEO and was hired by the Clinton campaign to stay in touch with the "undecided" voters.  She was baffled.  How could anyone not see that Hillary Clinton was superior to Donald Trump?  She got to know George well, and soon his story sounded like the others.  He'd once had a good life, but now no one cared about him. . . he said he'd worked hard, but now can't afford health insurance and everyone was being taken care of except him.  He wanted his country back.

"Over the summer, I  found and interviewed over 300 undecided voters, and 250 of them agreed to stay in touch, to send me weekly diary entries about their emotions, what they were thinking about both Clinton and Trump, and how they were leaning when it came to their vote. I had no responsibility to change their views; instead, I synthesized the data that I was collecting, and reported in to the campaign. I also added the insights that I had and made regular suggestions about how the campaign might better articulate its positions and modify its strategies. . .

There was one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice. It wasn’t FBI Director James Comey, Part One or Part Two; it wasn’t Benghazi or the e-mails or Bill Clinton’s visit with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac. No, the conversation shifted the most during the weekend of Sept. 9, after Clinton said, “You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”. . .

If you had asked me to describe a Trump voter last spring, I would have been largely wrong about their motivations, dreams, and even their values. Sure, there are extremists among them, but it was eye-opening to realize how legitimate the concerns of many are, and to realize that, if I just listened hard, I would find that I have more in common with the Georges of the world that I could ever have imagined."

Boston Globe

Doing as well as parents

So only 51% of 30-somethings earn more than their parents at the same age? Have they looked at what MY PARENTS lived through? They were teen-agers and 20-somethings during a decade of the Great Depression, then WWII.  Of course we earned more than our parents at 30 in 1970. My dad enlisted in the Marines at 33. It wasn't too tough to earn more than that in 1970. But let's flip that--30-somethings today certainly spend more than their parents did on phones, cable, leased cars, student loan pay backs, mortgages, eating out (which we did rarely, and my parents about twice a year), manicures, pets, etc. They and we also tithed our income, which keeps one from getting too frisky with the money coming in.

 http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-american-dream-is-fading-and-may-be-very-hard-to-revive-1481218911

In 1970, 92% of American 30-year-olds earned more than their parents did at a similar age, they found. In 2014, that number fell to 51%. . . The percentage of young adults earning more than their parents dropped precipitously from 1970 to about 1992, to 58%.

Of course, the authors give the usual pablum for correction--more education and more taxation.  However, other studies show that 1999 was the record year of income, and that the top 2 quintiles hit a record income in 2015.  The average household income in the top quintile is $202,366 and the bottom is $12,457.  Also the number of earners in a household is vastly different.  About  2.2 at the top and  .45 at the bottom.  It's very difficult for a household with one part time worker to keep up with one that has more than two.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-quintiles

https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2016/09/15/u-s-household-incomes-a-49-year-perspective

Claiming Russia did it

"Over the course of the summer, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and from John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Some Democrats have suggested that the controversies and bad publicity generated by the emails dumps — which only affected their party — contributed to Mr Trump’s victory in the election." (Financial Times, Dec. 9)

Do you know any undecideds or independents or Democrats who changed their minds or chose their candidate based on DNC emails? Maybe they should have, but her people were very loyal. One video of Trump 10 years ago ago sent his supporters fleeing. No. No one left her. The tipping point, according to a Clinton researcher tracking undecideds, was her calling us deplorables, and that's not Russian hacking. That's her getting a laugh at a fund raiser. Did Russia issue that October report on Obamacare premium increases? No. The polls noticed. Jill Stein could be a Putin plant, but I doubt it. She pulled enough votes from Clinton to give Trump the electoral votes he needed.

Continental Ambitions; Roman Catholics in North America

I accept review copies of books--usually non-fiction. Next time, I'll ask the number of pages and font size. Kevin Starr's "Continental Ambitions; Roman Catholics in North America, the Colonial Experience" has 639 page, a 32 pg. index, a 38 pg. essay on sources, a preface, a prologue, acknowledgements and notes. I can barely hold it on my lap, and the print is tiny. It begins in 1511 and ends when John Carroll returns to Maryland in the 1700s. So there's more to come. The prologue covers the Christian missionary work in Greenland and Iceland in the 12th century. Because I'm a Lutheran, I know nothing between Paul's journeys/letters and the 16th century so this is some deep diving for me. Starr has been the city librarian of San Francisco and the state librarian of California. Publisher is Ignatius Press, 2016. ISBN 978-1-62164-118-6. And here's something I haven't seen in awhile: Printed in the United Sates of America!

  

"Starr begins this work with the exploration and temporary settlement of North America by recently Christianized Scandinavians. He continues with the destruction of Caribbean peoples by New Spain, the struggle against this tragedy by the great Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Jesuit and Franciscan exploration and settlement of the Spanish Borderlands (Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Baja, and Alta California), and the strengths and weaknesses of the mission system.

He then turns his attention to New France with its highly developed Catholic and Counter-Reformational cultures of Quebec and Montreal, its encounters with Native American peoples, and its advance southward to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The volume ends with the founding of Maryland as a proprietary colony for Roman Catholic Recusants and Anglicans alike, the rise of Philadelphia and southern Pennsylvania as centers of Catholic life, the Suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, and the return of John Carroll to Maryland the following year.

Starr dramatizes the representative personalities and events that illustrate the triumphs and the tragedies, the achievements and the failures, of each of these societies in their explorations, treatment of Native Americans, and translations of religious and social value to new and challenging environments. His history is notable for its honesty and its synoptic success in comparing and contrasting three disparate civilizations, albeit each of them Catholic, with three similar and differing approaches to expansion in the New World." Ignatious Press

"Asking Kevin Starr a question is like turning on a fire hose. First there's a blast of erudition. Then, as his intellect gathers, information rushes out in a deluge. He's talking, but it's as if an invisible scholar inside his head is yanking books off shelves, throwing them open, checking the index, then racing off to find the next volume. On the outside, Starr is an avuncular 72-year-old, but his brain is sprinting like an Olympian." LA Times, April 12, 2013

Was he just feeling the Bern?

In the January 2015 the SOTU speech President Obama proposed a zero tuition plan for community colleges, at $60B over 10 years and a $7.3B over 5 years loan repayment for college loan burdens. These programs always end up being more costly than the plan. Since our soaring education costs (aka bubble) have been caused by the federal government flooding campuses with money which causes them to raise tuition, I’m curious if these proposals went anywhere, and do they carry over to the next administration?  Was it a bone to the left wing of the party?

From the National Taxpayers Union website.  Lots of graphs and analyses.