From Watts Up With That, some data for the continental United States over the last 100 years, in graph form. Here’s the lead graph.
Cooling? Say, what? Notice the year-on-year variability, too. Sort of puts the “warming” since the mid- to late-80s in perspective.
Other data are similar in vein: precipitation data—flat; drought severity, when we have one—slightly rising.
RTWT
Recall the fact of the tweet that the NBA’s Houston Rockets General Manager sent in support of the Hong Kong freedom protesters. Recall further the NBA’s abject cowardice in deeply kowtowing to the People’s Republic of China in response to the latter’s projected upset over the tweet and the NBA’s impudence. The kowtowing was rationalized from the league on down to individual players that they all had money at risk from the GM’s tweet—as if their personal pocketbooks could compare with the sacrifices of life and limb, in addition to economic loss, of those freedom protesters as they struggled for their basic freedoms.
That cowardice was only emphasized, not mitigated, by NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s refusal to tell his teams they had to limit what they said. That came lately.
Recall further, the hoo-raw over the picayune nature of the NBA’s kowtowing and the cynically fiscally-driven rationalizing in which the NBA engaged in defending its response to the PRC government—and its institutional abandonment of those Hong Kong freedom protesters.
Now some information is coming out regarding the cost of the NBA’s behavior—the cost to those pocketbooks the NBA has been so desperate to protect.
The loss “will be in the hundreds of millions,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said on Saturday, the first time he’d used such a number to estimate the cost to the league’s China business. The hit amounted to “probably less than $400 million,” Silver said in response to speculation that the losses could reach $1 billion….
Silver added,
We were taken off the air in China for a period of time, and it caused our many business partners in China to feel it was therefore inappropriate to have ongoing relationships with us.
The NBA is still receiving only greatly reduced coverage in the People’s Republic of China.
This isn’t a cost, or a loss. It’s the beginning (and, sadly, probably the end) of the price the NBA should pay for abandoning our American principles, and with them the good people of Hong Kong, in favor of the good opinion of an American enemy.
…and that makes it all better.
Doug Hodge, ex-CEO of PIMCO, wrote an apologia—I won’t call it an apology—for his participation in the Rick Singer-operated college admissions scandal in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal.
I have to wonder, though, just how sincere Hodge’s missive is, or whether he wrote it as part of his sentence—for how many hours of community service does this piece count? Or did he write it in return for the short jail term he got (nine whole months for a nearly one million of dollars fraud).
And: words of regret for the shame I have brought upon…my children, but not a syllable for the larger damage he’s done them: his statement, by his actions, that he had no confidence in their own abilities; his going-in assumption, demonstrated by those actions, that he considered them just not good enough to get into a good school without cheating.
No, it doesn’t make anything all better.
Ex-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says current Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) isn’t a unifier for the Progressive-Democratic Party. Clinton complained to Emily Tisch Sussman that
Unfortunately his campaign and his principal supporters were just very difficult and—really, constantly—not just attacking me but my supporters[.]
However.
Did Clinton unify the Progressive-Democratic Party? No, not with the shenanigans she and Party elite (possibly separately from her) pulled to block Sanders’ ascent in the 2015-2016 campaign season and the shenanigans being pulled now to block Sanders’ evident success—not least of which is the DNC changing the debate rules right before the next debate to enable an Evil 1%-er to buy his way onto the debate stage after he’s made a point, ever since he entered the race, of telling voters in early primary States that they’re just too trivial to matter.
Nor did Clinton unify the nation after she’d seized Party’s nomination in 2016—she moved actively to divide it.
Clinton is in no position to talk.
Of course Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D, MI) doesn’t help Sanders’ case with her booing of Clinton (her weak walk-back notwithstanding).
It seems the Progressive-Democrats’ attempt to impeach President Donald Trump was not all that fiscally expensive as such things go.
According to an estimate from the Heritage Foundation in December, the [Progressive-]Democrat-led House of Representatives inquiry, and eventual impeachment of Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress on December 18, cost taxpayers an estimated $3.06 million.
That compares with the effort against ex-President Bill Clinton (D):
According to CNN, the independent probe into Clinton cost taxpayers $80 million in 1994.
That bill includes the Senate trial, while the Heritage Foundation estimate doesn’t include the Senate’s in-progress impeachment trial, but it’s unlikely that the Senate trial will cost $77 million.
It should be no surprise, though, that the House’s seemingly slapdash effort was done on the cheap. The present effort has never been about actual impeachment and removal; it has been solely an effort to conduct a prolonged smear campaign and with that to prejudice the 2020 election.