El Nino Odds at 90%

This report from an expat website based in Ecuador says that odds are very strong we will experience an El Nino this year and next.

El Niño is a weather phenomenon that results from higher than normal temperatures near the surface of the Pacific Ocean and causes severe flooding and drought in much of the world.

In June, the Climate Prediction Center of the U.S. National Weather Service raised the chances to 90% for an El Niño to develop during the northern hemisphere summer and early fall. Ecuador’s Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology agrees with the analysis.

Watch for the weather variations caused by El Nino being cited as proof of Global Warming.

The Greek Economic Soap Opera Isn't Over

In case you thought the Greek economic clown show was over – nope, it rolls on and on.

Reports out of Athens are that the left wing of the ruling party tried to execute a seizure of the Bank of Greece’s reserves, a deal with Russia, and a return to the drachma.

From Reuters:

Some members of Greece’s leftist government wanted to raid central bank reserves and hack taxpayer accounts to prepare a return to the drachma, according to reports on Sunday that highlighted the chaos in the ruling Syriza party.

It is not clear how seriously the plans, attributed to former Energy Minister Panagiotis Lafazanis and former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, were considered by the government and both ministers were sacked earlier this month. However the reports have been seized on by opposition parties who have demanded an explanation. […]

In an interview with Sunday’s edition of the RealNews daily, Panagiotis Lafazanis, the hardline former energy minister who lost his job after rebelling over the bailout plans, said he had urged the government to tap the reserves of the Bank of Greece in defiance of the European Central Bank.

Lafazanis, leader of a hardline faction in the ruling Syriza party that has argued for a return to the drachma, said the move would have allowed pensions and public sector wages to be paid if Greece were forced out of the euro.

“The main reason for that was for the Greek economy and Greek people to survive, which is the utmost duty every government has under the constitution,” he said.

Financial Times adds in re Russia (quoted from Forbes):

Mr Lafazanis visited Moscow three times as Mr Tsipras’s envoy after Syriza came to power in January. In return for signing up to a new gas pipeline project, he hoped for at least €5bn in prepayments of gas transit fees, according to people briefed on the initiative. But the Russians rejected the deal the week before the EU summit.

“It was all a fantasy,” said a senior Greek banker. “The Left Platform’s dreams of free gas and a Russian-backed drachma have crumbled away.”

Forbes goes on to note that it is questionable at best that the pipeline will ever be built, anyway.

I’m glad the Greeks are back — they’re so entertaining.

Beer Shortage in Venezuela

One would think that a failed government would take pains to ensure a copious supply of alcohol as a way to deaden the senses.

Planned Parenthood Funding Sources

This purports to list companies (probably not all of them) that provide funding to Planned Parenthood, in case you’re interested in starting a boycott because of the recent videos about selling body parts.

I have some doubts about the list, since it includes Tostitos, which is not a company (it’s a brand belonging to Frito-Lay, which in turn belongs to PepsiCo, which is elsewhere on the list). Similarly, they list both Dockers and Levi Strauss.

Makes one wonder how carefully the list was put together.

Trump on Breastfeeding

This will not play well with female voters.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump called a lawyer and breastfeeding mother “disgusting” after she requested a break from a deposition in order to pump, according to a New York Times report on Tuesday.

According to the paper, lawyer Elizabeth Beck was questioning Trump in 2011 about a failed Florida real estate project. Beck, with her husband, represented clients who claimed to lose thousands of dollars in the deal. At one point, Beck, who had a 3-month-old daughter, requested a medical break which was contested by Trump and his lawyers, who wanted to continue, the Times says. That’s when Beck took out her breast pump to show that her request was urgent — she needed to pump for her infant. “You’re disgusting,” Trump told Beck before leaving the room.

The quote is not disputed by Trump’s camp.

Skin Orgasms:

Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ can do this to me.

The Coming Municipal Pension Disaster

Everybody knows about Chicago, of course, but there are a number of cities and states with huge pension shortfalls.

Moody’s, which in 2013 began using a lower rate than governments do to calculate future liabilities, has estimated that the 25 largest U.S. public pensions alone have $2 trillion less than they need. Cincinnati and Minneapolis are among cities Moody’s has since downgraded.
 

The credit-rating company said in a report Friday that the shortfall in Dallas’s police and firefighters’ pension system will more than triple to $4.7 billion because of the accounting-rule shift.

Houston is mentioned elsewhere in the article as having been recently warned.

Many funds have hidden their deficits by assuming unrealistically high returns on their investments.

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the largest U.S. pension, this week said it earned just 2.4 percent last fiscal year, one-third of the annual return it projects. The California State Teachers’ Retirement System, the second-biggest fund, gained 4.5 percent, compared with its 7.5 percent goal.

A Moral Dilemma

Let’s imagine that you are very much to the left on social issues.

As such, you are strongly in favor of gay rights, gay marriage, and everything those on the social right lump together and call the ‘gay agenda’. You are also 100% in favor of abortion on demand, with no restrictions, never, no how, no way.

So let us imagine further that science soon isolates a ‘gay gene':

A genetic analysis of 409 pairs of gay brothers, including sets of twins, has provided the strongest evidence yet that gay people are born gay. The study clearly links sexual orientation in men with two regions of the human genome that have been implicated before, one on the X chromosome and one on chromosome 8.
 

The finding is an important contribution to mounting evidence that being gay is biologically determined rather than a lifestyle choice.

I know many social conservatives don’t want to believe that anyone is born gay. But this isn’t a question directed at them. Remember, for this question, you are on the left socially. So, if this happens, would you, as the extreme social liberal described above, object to parents choosing to abort a fetus because it would be gay?

I find the question almost impossible to answer.

Bonus Question: Would liberals want to have such testing covered under Obamacare and/or require that it be covered under employer-provided insurance programs?

Landon by a Landslide: The Great Polling Disaster of 1936

There has been much breast-beating (some of it by yours truly) about the spate of recent polling failures (US 2014; UK, Scotland, and Greece this year).

For historical perspective, though, it’s good to look back on the polling disaster that almost killed the practice of polling in its infancy – the prediction by the Literary Digest (a leading magazine of the period) that Alf Landon would easily defeat Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1936 election.

This link takes you to the October 31, 1936 edition of the magazine, in which they publish their results.

For the record, Landon carried two states: Maine and Vermont.

Partisanship Indicator

It is not at all an original observation to note the increasing negativity of the political scown-opposing partyene, in which partisans of both sides see each other as not just wrong, but evil. I’m actually old enough to remember when it wasn’t like this, when people respectfully disagreed in civil discussions rather than shouting matches.

As an aside: Fox and MSNBC would not have prospered in such an environment.

At right is a graph showing how bad things have become.

Ban Dante!

A UN-affiliated group has recommended that Dante’s Divine Comedy be removed from schools around the world for being homophobic, islamophobic, and numerous other things they disapprove of.

The classic work should be removed from school curricula, according to Gherush 92, a human rights organisation which acts as a consultant to UN bodies on racism and discrimination. Dante’s epic is “offensive and discriminatory” and has no place in a modern classroom, said Valentina Sereni, the group’s president.
 

“We do not advocate censorship or the burning of books, but we would like it acknowledged, clearly and unambiguously, that in the Divine Comedy there is racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic content. Art cannot be above criticism,” Miss Sereni said.

There’s that classic formulation: “We do not advocate censorship or the burning of books, but …”

A happy note:

    Franco Grillini, the head of Gaynet, a gay rights’ organisation, said the suggestion that Dante’s writings should be prohibited marked “an excess of political correctness”.

The Benedict Option

What is it? It seems to have emerged from Rod Dreher’s blog. The Wall Street Journal quotes him as describing it thus:

    “… an inchoate phenomenon in which Christians adopt a more consciously countercultural stance toward our post-Christian mainstream culture.” Much as St. Benedict laid the groundwork for a later resurgence of Christian society in Europe by leaving Rome and founding the monastic movement in the early sixth century, Mr. Dreher argues, traditional Christians should partially withdraw from the culture, seeking to live moral lives together in like-minded communities.

WSJ goes on:

    … the recent Supreme Court decision establishing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges seems to have made many Christians particularly receptive to Mr. Dreher’s idea. The response has been so strong that he now says his next book will be on the Benedict Option.

I mostly support the Supreme Court decision, but I can see that a withdrawal from the political stage might to a reasonable (perhaps even attractive) option for many committed Christians who disagree with such things.

Swearing Maps

Jack Grieve is a linguist who has been mapping the frequency of use of different swearwords by geography, tracking words ranging from 'gosh' to things that might offend some of my readers..

Here's the 'damn' map – the others are here. I don't know about you, but I find this sort of thing damn interesting. Which I guess makes me a linguistic Southerner.

Why Can't Republicans Get Over the Gay Thing?

A Republican representative from New Jersey, Scott Garrett, has told his fellow Republicans that he refuses to pay his dues to the National Republican Campaign Committee, “because it actively recruited gay candidates and supported homosexuals in primaries.”

The Ruins of Pompeii Are Falling into Ruin

Not sure how much sense that header makes, but read the article and you’ll understand.

On the other hand, Herculaneum is doing quite nicely, thanks for asking.

Competition Raises Prices

Here’s how little understanding some folks have of economics.

Yesterday Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed a bill that would have privatized the sale of wine and liquor while liberalizing the rules for selling beer in the Keystone State. Wolf counterintutively argues that replacing the state monopoly with private businesses would be bad for consumers. “During consideration of this legislation,” he says, “it became abundantly clear that this plan would result in higher prices for consumers.” He also worries that letting private businesses sell beer and wine would result in “less selection for consumers.”

To be fair, Wolf probably knows perfectly well that competition lowers prices – the real motive behind his veto was most likely to protect the public employee unions.

The Truth Is What I Tell You It Is

President Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes in an interview on Israeli TV on April 6:

Rhodes also claimed the new arrangements ensure “anytime, anywhere” inspections of any and every Iranian facility — contradicting complaints by Israel that no such provision is guaranteed.

Asked directly if the IAEA would have anytime, anywhere access, Rhodes said, “Yes, if we see something that we want to inspect.”

“In the first place we will have anytime, anywhere access [to] the nuclear facilities,” he said, referring to “the whole supply chain.”

CNN's Erin Burnett Tuesday:

Taxing Drivers for Every Mile Driven

Here’s a great example of governments getting caught up in the Law of Unintended Consequences. The feds have offered incentives for buyers of electric and hybrid vehicles, and they have mandated (and the market has forced drivers toward) greater fuel efficiency in gasoline vehicles. But the states are dependent upon gasoline taxes for a significant portion of their budgets.

Solution: Tax people by mileage driven, coming soon to Oregon, (a system cleverly named OreGO), with twenty-eight other states considering such programs.

Oregon’s Department of Transportation has been working on it for 15 years as a way to eventually replace the gas tax, which has been flat due to an influx of high mileage vehicles and people driving less.

Right now the program is voluntary and being capped at 5,000 participants, but an ODOT official told Fox News the ultimate goal is to make it mandatory and change the way states pay for roads — forever.

However:

Two of the three OReGO systems track and store a car’s every move.

A Contract for Sex

I can picture it: “”Uh, babe, we need to sign this contract, and then we’ll take a selfie holding the contract, OK? Yeah, I know you’re naked, so what? It’s the law. Babe, why are you putting your clothes back on? Leaving? Why?”

 A “yes means yes” advocacy group, the Affirmative Consent Project, is instructing college students to take a picture with a contract before they have sex with each other just to make absolutely sure both parties are officially consenting. In fact, the group has been distributing contracts to schools nationwide as part of its Consent Conscious Kit, according to an article in the Washington Examiner. If no camera is available, students are encouraged to fill out the form on the back of the contract which states, “On this date [fill in the blank], we agree to have consensual sex with one another” followed by a space for students’ printed names and signatures.

What, no space for the witnesses’ signatures?

The kit does contain breath mints and a condom, though.

The Pope in Bolivia

From the Pope’s rambles through South America.

WTF??

Pope Francis has rebuked his host Evo Morales, the Bolivian president, after the left-wing South American leader presented him with a crucifix mounted on a hammer and sickle – the international symbol of the avowedly atheist creed of communism. 

The disapproving look on the pontiff’s face made abundantly clear that he was not impressed by the provocative greeting gift handed to him Mr Morales when he paid a courtesy call after arriving in the country. 

“That’s not right,” the Pope noted.

Morales is an extreme leftist who has been quite hostile to the Catholic Church, pre-Francis (he tried to prohibit the teaching of Catholicism in Catholic schools). Public ceremonies in Bolivia begin with an invocation of the Andean earth goddess, Pachamama.

NOTE: The Vatican later said that Pope Francis was not offended by the crucifix.