Congratulations to Secretary Clinton for winning the popular vote in Nebraska.

May 10, 2016
By Cyra Master

Hillary Clinton (click here) won a symbolic victory Tuesday in Nebraska, taking 59 percent of the primary vote and rival Bernie Sanders getting 40 percent.
Democrats in the Cornhusker State held a presidential caucus in March, with Sanders emerging victorious. The two Democratic candidates appeared on the state’s primary ballot on Tuesday, as voters went to the polls to make their choice in the GOP race....

In all fairness, Secretary Clinton points to her ability to win the people's vote. She frequently states besides the delegation numbers she has won millions more voters in her campaign for President. It would appear Nebraska is exactly that win.

Has anyone told them the Arctic belongs to them solely, because, they really are struggling.

May 4, 2016 
The Hague-based Royal Dutch Shell (click here) plc (RDS.A - Analyst Report) owns one of the largest integrated oil and gas businesses in the world....
...Revenue: Revenues below expectations. Revenues of $48,554 million were below Zacks Consensus Estimate of $53,164 million... 

While Royal Dutch Shell had sustained losses with their Arctic Ocean relinquished plans, they were fine. Stockholders are little disappointed, but, they should seek solace in realizing the lives saved by a very wise CEO. The Arctic Ocean is a very hostile place to be.

Some made the mistake to think a melted ice ocean would be no different than the North Atlantic on a bad day. The North Pole is no picnic. People have technology that primarily tames Earth's natural world. It is easy to forget people live on Earth, a planet rotating on an axis (click here) and traversing around Sol.

27 August 2015
Suzanne Goldenberg

Survival of walruses (click here) threatened as they wash ashore on a remote barrier island just before Obama is due to visit region to draw attention to climate change....

This is a very good documentary.

Who do you suppose the Chinese sold the security clearance information to?

Congratulations to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in winning the West Virginia primaries.

Congratulations to Ted Cruz in his return to Congress today.  

Hm. Data base error.

Prominent white nationalist (click here) William Daniel Johnson was included on the official list of Trump’s California delegates to the Republican National Convention

Maybe it was Chinese hackers.

Homeland Security never has been able to stop them, especially with the F35 Strike Fighter that defies all odds in the least defensive a jet of it's pilot, yet a nation. None of that statement is a lie. Yep.

June 12, 2015
By Ellen Nakashima

The Chinese breach of the Office of Personnel Management (click here) network was wider than first acknowledged, and officials said Friday that a database holding sensitive security clearance information on millions of federal employees and contractors also was compromised.

In an announcement, OPM said that investigators concluded this week with “a high degree of confidence” that the agency’s systems containing information related to the background investigations of “current, former and prospective” federal employees, and others for whom a background check was conducted, were breached....

I do not lie. I take my country seriously. Chinese hackers have been doing this when everyone in the Chinese government thought they were in prison. No lie. The Chinese government finally took them out of prison and put them to work. They all work in the same building and live within a block or two of their place of work. That was so the Chinese government could keep an eye on them. They are suppose to give all the information they dig up to the government. I suppose.

The nukes aren't online, right? They were bombs a long time before computers. That is a fact. There haven't been improvements, are there? I mean how can anyone improve on nukes? Right?

I wonder if Chinese hackers know anything about non-proliferation. They do live a regular life worth living. I am sure they have developed a conscience with their lives and work appreciated. I am sure it's fine.

There is not an election that goes by when coal country worries about the economy. They are well programed.

In 2015, West Virginia had a total personal income (TPI) of $68,328,638*. This TPI ranked 40th in the United States. In 2005, the TPI of West Virginia was $47,989,066* and ranked 39th in the United States.

The people of West Virginia don't understand coal production and how labor is minimized by the industry. I don't know if anyone talks to them about the truth or they like to be scared for their own economic life, but, they are always scared for their jobs.

It is no big deal if there is coal dust covering the local elementary school, but, the most important thing is that coal jobs remain and regulation is putting the industry out of business. 

It is an age old paradigm and the people in West Virginia still believe it.

Illiteracy Statistics for US (click here)

West Virginia's rate far exceeds the US rate of 14 percent. I also found very interesting the illiteracy rate of prisoners in the USA at 70 percent.

20% of West Virginians struggle with low literacy levels. (click here)

December 20, 2010
By Jay B. Tabor

You regularly read columns (click here) that state businesses are poised on the state line, only needing the author's expressed cause celebre to be enacted and they will relocate here. Sometimes it's taxes, or it's lawsuits or other reasons. I suspect these are agendas driven by specific groups, already here in the state, trying to loosen their responsibilities to the community.
This is also part chimera. Downstate, the problem, outside of the larger communities, is road access. Hundreds of small towns are located on winding; narrow two-lane roads that traverse mountain after mountain. Unless someone develops a distribution model to tackle that, business in West Virginia will be confined to the cities....
...You continue to hear though, "If it were not for (some pet peeve), we'd be rich beyond our wildest dreams." But for all the benefits, there is a number they dare not speak, do not address and do not want revealed. "Just make my pet peeve go away," is their mantra, not actually working to correct the real problem.
What number could be so intractable that businesses won't consider the state? The illiteracy rate. The rate for the state is 18.9 percent. Here in Berkeley County it's 16 percent. Just as a reference, that puts us on par with Iran and Libya. Jefferson County is 15 percent and Morgan County is 18 percent. Many more residents are struggling to read simple instructions on medicine bottles or this letter to the editor. That 16 percent is as close to criminal neglect by the BOE and public officials as you can get without a hotshot lawyer on your side.
Why is this bad? Because the new, attractive jobs require the combined skills of reading and comprehension....

US Department of Labor statistics on Mining jobs in West Virginia. (click here) The graph below is from 2006 to present. If one went all the way back to the 1900s and before child labor laws the drop off to present day would look like the cliffs of Acapulco.

Really?

I suppose the F-35 project has a job training upside. Is there a need for sophisticated jet repair persons in the private sector? I am not sure of that. How many former US Air Force mechanics work for Boeing?

I know, I know; it will be a great aircraft once perfected. By the time the F35 is perfected it will be obsolete. Time to start all over again. Who knew the Russians already had already perfected it.

The F-35 looks good in a garage. 

May 9, 2016

By NYT Editorial Board

...While increased funding (click here) for some programs may be needed, total military spending, at nearly $600 billion annually, is not too low. The trouble is, the investment has often yielded poor results, with the Pentagon, Congress and the White House all making bad judgments, playing budget games and falling under the sway of defense industry lobbyists. Current military spending is 50 percent higher in real terms than it was before 9/11, yet the number of active duty and reserve troops is 6 percent smaller.

For nearly a decade after 9/11, the Pentagon had a virtual blank check; the base defense budget rose, in adjusted dollars, from $378 billion in 1998 to $600 billion in 2010. As the military fought Al Qaeda and the Taliban, billions of dollars were squandered on unnecessary items, including new weapons that ran late and over budget like the troubled F-35 jet fighter.

The waste and the budget games continue with the House Armed Services Committee approving a $583 billion total defense authorization bill for 2017 last month that skirts the across-the-board caps imposed by Congress in 2011 on discretionary federal spending....

Congress is irresponsible in handling the taxpayers monies. Having a majority of Republicans in the US House and Senate is not only a mistake, it is consenting to unethical practices in federal spending.

...The move will underwrite the purchase of more ships, jet fighters, helicopters and other big-ticket weapons that the Pentagon didn’t request....

The USA Congress will spend monies on unwanted military munitions and hardware for the military, but, not American infrastructure. THAT IS POLITICAL SPENDING. That is illegal. Spending on politics out of the federal budget is grossly unethical.

Domestic militarized police forces is simply changing personnel.

The militarized USA domestic police was possible because of irresponsible military spending. The USA military is giving away armored vehicles. Giving them away. There should be a law stating, "While the USA military is not allowed to attack Americans domestically, that includes the distribution of military munitions and equipment to civilian law enforcement.

The defined responsibility of the USA military is a defense force. The USA military cannot attack citizens. That constitutional reality enters into the deaths of radicalized Americans no longer living in the USA. But, that isn't the point. The point is, "Why is it domestic police forces are militarized?" That is simply changing personnel. The programs providing military equipment to domestic police forces is unconstitutional.

August 19, 2014
By Amy Swanson

My hometown is an idyllic place, (click here) a sleepy town of 3,500 set among the cornfields of Story County, Iowa. When I recently drove through it on a hot summer day, the only noises were insects buzzing above cornfields, and distant splashes and screams of delight from the public pool. Kids still ride their bikes by themselves to the pool in the summer and carry their skates down to the pond in the winter. They dress up in little Scandinavian outfits and dance in the street at our yearly town festival....

It’s hard to imagine what kind of dystopian turn of events would have to occur in sleepy Story County in order to make use of such a vehicle. “We should be protected from anything that would be thrown against it,” Story County Sheriff Paul Fitzgerald commented about his MRAP, apparently without irony. He did not bring up its efficacy in the event of a zombie apocalypse. The police chief of Keene, a small town in New Hampshire, gave a similarly unimpressive explanation for his department’s purchase of a $286,000 BearCat armored personnel-carrier. He said it would be used to patrol Keene’s “Pumpkin Festival and other dangerous situations,” according to The Economist....

The New Zealand government is reporting budget surpluses.

The New Zealand government practices economic investment that has tax returns producing a surplus. People are working and paying taxes. This model works. It secures the economic engine of the middle class.

The government also practices sound economic budgets. That is not necessarily a conservative achievement.

May 10, 2016
...The operating balance (click here) before gains and losses (obegal) was a surplus $167 million in the nine months ended March 31, compared with a forecast deficit of exactly the same amount, $167 million, in the half-year economic and fiscal update, the government's financial statements show.
Finance Minister Bill English is scheduled to release his eighth budget on May 26 and based on the Treasury's forecasts back in December, is facing an obegal deficit of $400 million in the year ending June 30.
The Treasury had previously projected a surplus of $200 million, but with little inflation, income tax, GST and resident withholding tax are down against historical trends. Still the better-than-forecast nine-month figures mark the third straight month that the cumulative data has exceeded expectations.
"Budget 2016 will reflect this government's continued commitment to responsible fiscal management," said English in a statement accompanying the Crown accounts release. "At the same time, it will build on the good progress we've made over the previous seven Budgets, with further investment in a growing economy and public services."...

Fiscal responsibility is about moral spending, but, with enough income to provide the economic governance to match.

The climate crisis is creating refugees that will last a very long time.

May 10, 2016
By AFP, Debra Killalea

They are the tiny islands that have literally disappeared. (click here)
Five islands in the Pacific Ocean existed as late as 2014; fast forward two years and they are nowhere to be seen.
A further six reef islands are also facing the same fate, in a disturbing warning to the world's scientists and other low-lying nations.
An alarming new study, published in Environmental Research Letters,reveals rising sea levels and coastal erosion are to blame for the predicament.
Scientists warn the findings could provide valuable insights for future research.
"At least 11 islands across the northern Solomon Islands have either totally disappeared over recent decades or are currently experiencing severe erosion," the study confirms....

Earth is flooding. Maps are changing. 

This is still going on. Forty years is a lot of documentation to wade through.

The law firm states it did nothing wrong. They mean they didn't do anything LEGALLY wrong. However, there is plenty wrong with their willingness to remove tax income from any country. It is a moral issue. There is a reason lawyers have ethics with brevity to leverage against attorney licenses.

9 May 2016

...The Panama Papers (click here) have shown how some wealthy people use offshore firms to evade tax and avoid sanctions.

The papers belonged to Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca and were leaked by a source simply known as "John Doe". The company denies any wrongdoing.

Last week it issued a "cease and desist " order to prevent the database being made public but the organisation that has the documents, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), went ahead.

• Who's been caught in the scandal?
• Ten things we have learned
• Tax havens and the new politics
• How assets are hidden and taxes dodged

The documents have revealed the hidden assets of hundreds of politicians, officials, current and former national leaders, celebrities and sports stars.

They list more than 200,000 shell companies, foundations and trusts set up in more than 20 tax havens around the world....

"Many of these homes have been rebuilt four or five times..."

May 9, 2016

Houston --

Montgomery, (click here) San Jacinto, Liberty and Fort Bend counties have all been added to the federal disaster declaration issued after last month's flood....

Americans are not taking these conditions seriously. It is one thing to have occasional storms and rebuilding, but, to defy the odds and staying in a flood zone is not and should not be a challenge to rebuild. This is about staying alive and not a personal priority to defy nature.

The USA spends considerable money to keep Americans alive and I am grateful it works, but, repeating the threat in ones' life is not advisable. It is troubling to realize Americans are willing to put their lives in the path of danger over and over again. I don't get it. It is heartbreaking when storms occur and people are effected. But, to allow that to happen repeatedly can't be good for anyone.

May 10, 2016
By Kelly P. Kissell

...BIG AND STRONG (click here) 

A twister 2.6 miles wide struck near El Reno, Oklahoma, on May 31, 2013, with winds measured at 290 mph about 500 feet above the ground. It was a bit larger than a tornado that hit Hallam, Nebraska, on May 22, 2004.

A May 3, 1999, storm that later killed 36 people at Moore, Oklahoma, had winds of about 302 mph at Bridge Creek, Oklahoma.

The wind speeds in these storms were measured using Doppler radar rather than traditional anemometers, which can be swept away when directly hit by a storm.

HOW TO STAY SAFE?

It's all about having a plan, and start planning early if possible....