Posts from — June 2016

Labour MPs prepare for leadership contest after Corbyn loses confidence vote 172-40.

OK, as Atrios said, the establishment/centrist Labour members have been looking for an excuse to dump Jeremy Corbyn, and are using a mess created by the Tories – Brexit. Corbyn lost a vote by the Labour MPs, but he won the leadership by winning 60% of the Labour Party membership.

If Remain had prevailed, they would have challenged him for helping Cameron. It is an excuse, not the reason.

A Canadian analyst notes that Untangling who belongs where after Brexit won’t be a breeze, Boris.

Boris Johnson keeps telling people that brexit means that Britain gets all of the benefits of being in the EU, but doesn’t have to follow EU rules & regulations and doesn’t have pay membership fees. That is not the way it works. The EU is in no mood to play nice and has already said it won’t negotiate anything until the process formally begins.

But you have to sue: Payout of $10,000 for Windows 10 update

Microsoft has agreed to pay a Californian woman $10,000 (£7,500) after an automatic Windows 10 update left her computer unusable.

Teri Goldstein said her Windows 7 computer had automatically tried to update itself to Windows 10 without her permission.

She said the update had made her machine unstable, leaving her unable to use it to run her business.

Microsoft said it had dropped its appeal to save on legal costs.

It’s nice that someone was ‘made whole’, because a lot of people won’t be.

In a 6-2 decision they ruled that domestic abusers can lose their gun-ownership rights and in a 5-3 decision they said that Texas wasn’t fooling anyone about
the purpose of their latest abortion law.

In the gun case the individual admitted he beat up his girlfriend, but felt that since he did it a fit of rage, rather than being a planned attack, that shouldn’t prevent him from having a gun available the next time he got mad. While that is not a quote, read his brief. That is essentially what he claimed.

The problem for Texas was that they have records of the debates in the legislature.

First Brexit, now this: Iceland bounces England from the Euro 2016 Tourney.

That’s in addition to having Standard & Poor’s downgrading Britain’s credit rating, and Bloomberg noting that Brexit has already cost the world’s 400 richest people approximately $127 billion. The markets are still dropping.

The EU members are not amused and want Britain to stop messing about and get on with the ‘divorce’. If Britain doesn’t go through with the exit, they can say good-bye to all of the accommodations that the EU has made in the past to keep the Brits happy.

On Thursday a fire took off near Lake Isabella in Kern County, California. Wind and weather conditions frustrated efforts to contain it and the Erskine Fire has burned through 43,460 acres of grass and brush while destroying 150 homes and damaging another 75. An elderly couple died trying to escape the flames. The fire is only 40% contained.

On the other side of the US in West Virginia they are experiencing a 100-year flood event. Three counties, Nicholas, Kanawha and Greenbrier, were approved for Federal disaster assistance on Saturday. More counties may be added after a better assessment of damage. The official death count was 25 on Sunday. West Virginia Public Broadcasting has continuing coverage.

I have been locating software to shift operations to my trusty XP box because in their push to make me upgrade my Win 7 laptop, they broke the Update function. I think I’m going to need to restore to my earliest restore point and start updating again. I’m back to May and it isn’t fixed. Their “repair tool” tells me Upgrade is broken, but they can’t fix it.

They probably broke it when they changed their “Upgrade to 10” campaign in May.

Now all they have to do is figure out how to pay for it, because Scotland will probably split off thanks to this vote.

The BBC has extensive coverage including: “How do I tell the cats?” – the world reacts to #Brexit online. Edward Snowden noted before the count was completed: “No matter the outcome,#Brexit polls demonstrate how quickly half of any population can be conviced to vote against itself. Quite a lesson.” Abe Lincoln put it this way: “You can fool all of the people some of the time; some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

My favorite response was from the Canadian highlighting the British Empire.

Six ways Brexit could hit Americans. Short term a good time for a vacation in Britain, but Brits probably won’t visit the US because the Pound is falling.

The vote is setting off a massacre of the leaders of political parties, as it should. What kind of fool does something like this to themselves?

Brexit is giving me 1980s flashbacks – Reagan, Thatcher, and The Clash. The British punk rock band had one big hit: Should I Stay or Should I Go. This morning in Britain they are hand counting paper ballots to find the answer concerning the EU.

The last time I looked “Leave” was leading 50.1% to 49.9%, but they had only counted about 4.5 million votes and it is estimated that the winner needs 16.8 million. It will be hours yet.

The BBC is reporting that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is warning the US over high poverty:

The US has been warned about its high poverty rate in the International Monetary Fund’s annual assessment of the economy.

The fund said about one in seven people were living in poverty and that it needed to be tackled urgently.

It recommended raising the minimum wage and offering paid maternity leave to women to encourage them to work.

The report also cut the country’s growth forecast for 2016 to 2.2% from a previous prediction of 2.4%.

Do the people in the Congress and Executive care that international organizations see the US this way?

After looking at the people running for the Republican nomination for Senate in Florida, apparently a whole group of people decided that Marco “No Clue” Rubio who said he hated the job and had one of, if not, the worst attendance record in the Senate, has filed to run again.

On the Democratic side you have Congressmen Patrick Murphy [Blue Dog] and the ever entertaining Alan Grayson with the world’s worst collection of neckties.

It apparently occurred to Rubio that he was going to have to find a job and he panicked.

Position: 21.2N 97.8W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: West [270°] near 8 mph [13 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 35 mph [ 55 kph].
Wind Gusts: 45 mph [ 70 kph].
Minimum central pressure: 1011 mb ↑.

Currently about 30 miles [ 45 km] West-Northwest of Tuxpan, Mexico.

The center of the storm is coming ashore just North of Tuxpan at 7PM CDT. The warnings have been canceled at 10PM CDT.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]

Today at 5:34PM [CDT] is the Summer Solstice, technically considered the “first day of Summer”, but the mid Summer by much of Europe.

Many Wiccans celebrate the day as Litha, while computer programmers honor their predecessors, the druids, who build the first solid-state computing devices, the megaliths, like Stonehenge.

The Slavs celebrate St. John’s Night, Иван Купала [Ivan Kupala], the battle between the White god [Белобог – Belobog] and the Black god [Чёрнобог – Chyornobog] for control of the Sun. The Black god always wins and the night begins to expand.

The sound track to the battle is Иванова Ночь на Лысой Горе [Night on Bald Mountain ] by Модест Петрович Мусоргский [Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky], which everyone should play very loudly.

Archæoastronomy tracks all of the important solar events, another of the many things I learned from Andante.

Position: 20.1N 95.4W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: West [275°] near 7 mph [11 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 35 mph [ 55 kph].
Wind Gusts: 45 mph [ 70 kph].
Minimum central pressure: 1009 mb.

Currently about 145 miles [ 230 km] East-Southeast of Tuxpan, Mexico.

A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for Laguna Verde to Rio Panuco, Mexico.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]