20 Comments

1. 

   j.a.m. on 3rd September 2017 at 6:19 pm

   – What most certainly does not help the economy is to divert resources from productive uses in the private sector, and hand them off to politicians and bureaucrats to play with and squander based on politics. Doing less of that would be a plus.

   – I’d suggest there’s no mystery to the solid support for the president’s administration: Excellent executive and judicial appointments; mostly (not entirely) the right policies and priorities to clean up the mess of the last eight dreadful years; renewed, unapologetic confidence; and on balance, a massive improvement over both the last administration and the dreary alternative vision that was on offer.

   – Re the “missing” troops: Somebody putting out a press release added up the numbers wrong. Nothing to do with boots in the water. There are about 24,000 National Guard troops, including the entire Texas National Guard; 1,638 active-duty service members; and 1,254 DoD civilian employees and contractors. Additional Guardsmen and service members can be called in if needed.

   – Actually, nothing fails like cynicism. A national time-out over the holiday weekend for a little reflection and solidarity can’t possibly hurt.

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     nicky on 3rd September 2017 at 11:35 pm

     Excellent appointments? Mr Tillerson destroying the State Department by sheer incompetence, only rivaled by Mr Trump’s own incompetence. Mr Pruitt gutting the EPA by sheer shortsightedness, if not intent. Betsy De Vos, who hasn’t a clue about education, etc,etc. Half the Housing and Urban Development Dept. posts not filled, not just bad appointments, but no appointments. In what universe are you living?

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       j.a.m. on 4th September 2017 at 6:24 am

       Tillerson and Pruitt are superb, and are doing what they were appointed to do.

       De Vos has bravely taken on deeply entrenched interests and an intractable problem set. The real solutions (including abolishing the department) are beyond her authority to accomplish. But so far she’s given every indication that she will be an effective advocate for some of the reforms that must come. And meanwhile she can clean up some of the more radical nonsense from the previous administration. I don’t know whether she was the strongest available choice, but her appointment indicated that Trump understands the issues and backs reform.

       And unless there’s something you’re not telling me, we live in the same universe.

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         Mark R. on 4th September 2017 at 6:53 am

         hahahahahahahaha… thanks for posting your hilarious delusions. How embarrassing for you, but how funny for those looking at the cult from the outside.

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     Ann German on 4th September 2017 at 7:25 am

     Actually, cynicism is surpassed by delusion, denial and out-right lying as causes of failure. Any comment which assumes “the last eight dreadful years” cannot be taken seriously.

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       Mark R. on 4th September 2017 at 7:55 am

       I have found that pretty much anything j.a.m. writes on Heather’s site “cannot be taken seriously”. But it does provide insight into the deluded mind.

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       j.a.m. on 4th September 2017 at 9:50 am

       Dreadful is not too strong a word: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Iran, Ukraine, Russia. Obamacare. More than twenty thousand new regulations, many of them purely ideological and anti-growth, for which you and I will pay $100 billion every year. Twice the national debt, now up to $60,000 for every American. Two-fifths of the federal bench packed with ideologues who recognize no check on their own power.

       Anyway, we agree to disagree. That’s not the same as delusion or denial, let alone lying.

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         Heather Hastie on 4th September 2017 at 11:17 am

         There was no national debt when Clinton left office. It was GWB who created it, mostly because of the expensive and unnecessary war he embarked on in Iraq. You can’t blame Obama for that – he wasn’t a senator then. The deficit was reduced while Obama was president. The total kept increasing because of interest on Bush’s debt, and because although Obama reduced the deficit, he didn’t wipe it out completely. That would have been irresponsible in the economic conditions he faced when he came into office.

         The current good conditions are a result of change made during the Obama administration. There was a tweet about that a few days ago: https://twitter.com/ErickFernandez/status/898220319449677824?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heatherhastie.com%2Fpicks-top-tweets-20-august-2017%2F

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           j.a.m. on 4th September 2017 at 2:47 pm

           The only president to leave office with no national debt was Andrew Jackson in 1837. Luckily for Clinton, the GOP won control of Congress in 1994 on their pledge to check Clinton’s spending. Gingrich, Clinton and the GOP Congress gradually reduced the deficit over the rest of Clinton’s term. (Luckily for everyone, an exuberhant stock market, fed by the dot-com bubble, produced fat revenues during this time.)

           A similar scenario could have played out under Obama after the Republicans regained Congress in 2010. But Obama chose differently than Bill Clinton, and refused to go along with any semblance of spending reform. (He famously ignored his own Simpson-Bowles Commission.) Thanks to Republican efforts, the deficit did decline through fiscal 2015, only to increase again in the last two fiscal years of Obama’s term. But Obama’s stubborn ideologically-driven refusal to work the Republicans to control spending, as Bill Clinton had done, inevitably resulted in large deficits and a doubling of the debt over his term.

           The stock market is up 16% since election day. Going into election day, the market was up only 3% for the preceding 12 months, and only 2% for the 12 months before that. Independent of any other data, it is pretty inarguable that something happened on November 8, 2016 that significantly disrupted the established trend at that time. Investors are more optimistic; this is consistent with the results of recent business and consumer sentiment surveys, as well as the increase in labor participation. Time will tell if this confidence is warranted. But it shows that confidence is there for now, contrary to your views of the president.

           That fake news comedy clip is entertaining, but it doesn’t make any substantive points that would contradict the above. It notes that Congress hasn’t produced anything yet for tax reform, and that point is well taken.

2. 

   nicky on 3rd September 2017 at 11:59 pm

   – The strawberries indeed appear blueish if you see the yellow as shadows. It is probable the way cats and dogs -being dichromats- would see them, I guess.

   – I’m not really impressed by Lorde, most kids in the townships here do this on a regular basis. I mean, she’s good, but our urchins are at least as good.

   – On the Harvey disaster two points. We know how to avert -or at least mitigate- these catastrophes. But these measures were never implemented. However, we may blame the GOP for that, but not Mr Trump: his time in office is really too short for that. That being said, he does not appear the guy who would.
   I’m also not 100% sure climate change is to blame. I mean, we know these kind of storms will probably become more frequent, but even without climate change these things will inevitably happen, it is virtually impossible to ascribe one particular disaster on climate change.

   – The genocide of the Rohingya is a great Crime against Humanity. I have no clue what should/could be effectively done, but our respective govt’s silence comes close to complicity. Disheartening (and really very, very sad). Does that not merit a separate post? (No, I’m not telling you what you should post, but it appears right there in your alley, as it were).

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     Mark R. on 4th September 2017 at 7:15 am

     This or any hurricane can’t be blamed on climate change. What climate change can be blamed for is the intensity of hurricanes. Warmer oceans = more powerful hurricanes. Just as a drier/warmer climate intensifies wild fires. You can’t blame every wild fire on climate change, but you can blame the intensity/frequency of said fires on climate change.

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       Heather Hastie on 4th September 2017 at 11:06 am

       That’s what the video from Now This says – it’s the intensity that climate change can be blamed for, and also that there is more rain in the hurricanes. There isn’t enough data over a long enough period of time to conclude whether or not climate change can be blamed for increasing frequency. (That’s how I understand it anyway. I’m no scientist.)

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       nicky on 5th September 2017 at 10:52 am

       Yes, that is true, but not my point. My point was that even without global warming very ‘intense’ hurricanes are bound to happen sooner or later. We cannot -or it is at least extremely difficult to- attribute the intensity of a particular hurricane on climate change. We can only say they are projected to become more frequent.

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3. 

   Lee Knuth on 4th September 2017 at 2:19 am

   Another post with an interesting array of tweets. As usual I found a few new ones to check out. The situation with the Rohingya is very troubling. Most people in the US are completely unaware of this impending tragedy. To most Buddhists are considered peaceable, not instigators of repression.

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     Heather Hastie on 4th September 2017 at 2:55 am

     There’s going to be another tweet today about the Rohingya, and there was actually a reasonably lengthy on location story about them on our 6 o’clock news last night (3 Sep). I can’t remember where the clip came from, but it was GB or US.

     Myanmar has a pretty brutal anti-blasphemy law which a NZer has gone to prison over. They were very un-cool about an image of Buddha in headphones he posted on the Facebook page of the bar he managed, even though it was only up for an hour. At his sentencing there were dozens of Buddhist monks sitting outside the courthouse who were apparently a message to the judge to be sufficiently harsh. He got the maximum sentence (2 years hard labour) in the country’s notoriously toughest prison even though he had a clean record, was unaware of the law, and took the image down as soon as he was told it was a problem.

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       nicky on 5th September 2017 at 11:14 am

       I would nevertheless prefer a ‘Buddhist theocracy’ over an Islamic one.
       Note that Judge Dee (from the incomprehensibly underestimated author Robert van Gulik) was scathing about Buddhism, and Buddhist priests in particular. They are generally painted as lying and cheating scoundrels, not unlike the priests in Boccacio. As a staunch Confucianist, Dee was bound to have a ‘mixed feelings’ about Buddhists, of course.

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4. 

   Mark R. on 4th September 2017 at 7:49 am

   I love that dog on the slide…how adorable.

   A government that actually thinks prayer can help with anything (let alone a disaster like Harvey) is a failed government; or at the very least a government that lacks any form of ambition or imagination. That’s the government I’m living in at the moment. sigh…

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5. 

   nicky on 5th September 2017 at 11:18 am

   There is a whole program on the ‘hold my beer’ exploits. “The Science of Stupid” tries to explain by simple Newtonian laws why these kind of actions are, well, stupid.

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     nicky on 5th September 2017 at 11:19 am

     On National Geographic channel.

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       Heather Hastie on 5th September 2017 at 11:41 am

       I rarely look at what’s even on that channel these days. Or the History Channel. Everything that looks appealing I’ve seen several time before, and the rest is sensationalist or rubbish or both. Like Ancient Aliens.

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