Tue: He's Not Herbert Hoover. He's Twice as Bad.

He's Not Herbert Hoover.  He's Twice as Bad.

In an interview posted Monday on Mike Lindell's new streaming network, Donald Trump told disgraced former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs that he really hopes the economy crashes as soon as possible.

While Americans are climbing out of the economic fall in 2020, numbers have slowly improved, charts posted by the Washington Post explain. Inflation is continuing to go down. Employment continues to go up. After Republicans blamed President Joe Biden for high gas prices, those have fallen.

“We have an economy that’s so fragile, and the only reason it’s running now is it’s running off the fumes of what we did,” Trump said. “It’s just running off the fumes.”

Over and over, Trump says he doesn't want to be Herbert Hoover.

“And when there’s a crash — I hope it’s going to be during this next 12 months because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover. The one president I just don’t want to be, Herbert Hoover," he continued.

Trump means that he doesn't want to be caught holding the bag, but the reality is that Herbert Hoover was attacked by Americans at the time for causing the Great Depression. He lost about 11 million jobs, while Trump's job crash was twice as large at 22 million at its worst point in 2020.

Good Luck With That. Biden Doesn't Crash the Economy. You Are the One Who Did.

Do You Like Your Plastic with Tomato Sauce?

Communities along the coast of northern Spain fear an environmental disaster as millions of tiny plastic pellets wash ashore after falling from a ship.

More than 1,000 sacks of pellets, known as nurdles, are believed to have fallen from the Toconao, operated by Danish company Maersk, on 8 December.

Hundreds of volunteers have been working to clean up the spill in the north-west Galicia region.

The alarm has also been raised on the Asturias coast, further east.

As many as six containers are believed to have fallen from the Liberian-flagged Toconao some 80km (50 miles) west of Viana do Castelo in northern Portugal. Of these, one contained at least 26,000kg of pellets, while the others were carrying goods such as clingfilm, tyres and tomato sauce.



Do You Like Plastic in Your Bottled Water?

The average liter of bottled water has nearly a quarter million invisible pieces of ever so tiny nanoplastics, detected and categorized for the first time by a microscope using dual lasers.

Scientists long figured there were lots of these microscopic plastic pieces, but until researchers at Columbia and Rutgers universities did their calculations they never knew how many or what kind. Looking at five samples each of three common bottled water brands, researchers found particle levels ranged from 110,000 to 400,000 per liter, averaging at around 240,000 according to a study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

These are particles that are less than a micron in size. There are 25,400 microns — also called micrometers because it is a millionth of a meter — in an inch. A human hair is about 83 microns wide.

Previous studies have looked at slightly bigger microplastics that range from the visible 5 millimeters, less than a quarter of an inch, to one micron. About 10 to 100 times more nanoplastics than microplastics were discovered in bottled water, the study found.

Much of the plastic seems to be coming from the bottle itself and the reverse osmosis membrane filter used to keep out other contaminants, said study lead author Naixin Qian, a Columbia physical chemist. She wouldn’t reveal the three brands because researchers want more samples before they single out a brand and want to study more brands. Still, she said they were common and bought at a WalMart.

What Comes Next for Gaza?

What comes next will be especially challenging, and Israel should steel itself for a long, hard slog. Politicians will claim that reconstruction can be done quickly and inexpensively, but America lost far more soldiers in the years after major combat operations ended in Iraq than in the short time it took to achieve regime change. Occupying Gaza unilaterally, which is what it seems that Israel will have to do at least for some time since it has closed off other viable alternatives, will require more than 80,000 soldiers if it is done correctly, based on a 2010 planning estimate from the Institute for Defense Analyses.

Israel should aim to minimize the phase where it goes it alone in Gaza because finding legitimate local partners and foreign allies is critical. It is also easier said than done and in Iraq the United States struggled with both challenges extensively. Many allies deployed forces for only a short span of the conflict, and some, due to national caveats that prohibited them from certain operations such as leaving secure areas, proved to be more of a burden than an advantage. In terms of creating acceptable domestic security forces and a viable political system, America failed at both, but in doing so learned many lessons. Like deradicalization, building capable military and police forces are exceptionally challenging multi-generational tasks, and Israel does not have units specifically organized and trained to conduct security force assistance, which makes the task more difficult. To have the best chance of success, a cadre of professional advisors is necessary, ideally inside the Israel Defense Forces, which would require the formation of new units during wartime, itself a complex task.

Rebuilding Gazan politics will be equally long and complicated. Although there is an incentive to select expatriates for leadership roles to bring in new blood, that worked exceptionally poorly in Iraq and should not be repeated in Gaza. Individuals who have not lived in Gaza or the West Bank will have neither the legitimacy nor the understanding of local politics to govern, especially in the myriad of crises that Gaza is likely to experience. While this means that members of the Palestinian Authority will likely have to take up most of the civil posts, there might have to be some posts filled with former employees of the Hamas government. In Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority decided to restrict former Baath party members from government positions based on the assumption that de-Baathification should create a “clean state” like de-Nazification in World War II. That order proved catastrophic, as the United States tried to stand up civil functionality with few technocrats able to serve in key positions. It was also not historically accurate, as the allies made the stomach-churning decision to employ some former Nazis.

The Pro-Labor President Acts Again

The Biden administration is releasing a new labor regulation that would make it harder for employers to skirt minimum wage and overtime obligations by labeling workers as “independent contractors.”

The final rule, announced Tuesday and slated to go into effect March 11, seeks to crack down on employee misclassification. Administration officials say that, though many workers may be legitimately independent, others are merely categorized that way as a cost-cutting maneuver by their employers.

It is likely the new rule will be challenged in court by business groups. But Julie Su, the acting labor secretary, argued that it was a commonsense regulation meant to prevent the most vulnerable workers from being taken advantage of.

“I have traveled and talked to workers across the country who are working full time year-round and still struggle to make ends meet because of misclassification,” Su said on a call with reporters. “They sometimes work side by side with individuals who are properly classified doing the same work. But misclassified employees don’t get paid for all of their hours.”

She called misclassification “one of the key ways wage theft and exploitation happen.”

“I have traveled and talked to workers across the country who are working full time year-round and still struggle to make ends meet because of misclassification.”

The independent contractor issue is a major flash point in the gig economy, with app-based platforms like Uber and Lyft built on the notion that drivers are in business for themselves rather than for the tech giants. But the new rule would affect all kinds of industries in which workers’ independent status could be questioned, including transportation, construction, health care and technology.

Jessica Looman, administrator of the Labor Department’s wage and hour division, said the rule rolled out Tuesday would apply only to the Fair Labor Standards Act, the law enshrining a minimum wage and overtime pay, and it wouldn’t affect other areas of labor law, such as a worker’s eligibility to unionize.

Stuff Like This Make It Hard to Sympathize with Israel

The threats were sent via Facebook on Oct. 9 to residents of Qusra, a Palestinian community in the Israeli-occupied West Bank: “To all the rats in the sewers of Qusra village we are waiting for you and we will have no mercy. The day of revenge is coming.”

Two days later, on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, a group of masked and armed Israeli settlers struck the village in what would be the deadliest attack by settlers in the West Bank since the Israel-Gaza war began three months ago, according to data collected by Yesh Din, an Israeli rights organization that closely monitors the settlements.

A Washington Post review of exclusive visuals of the attack, medical records and interviews with witnesses and first responders reveals that one of the Palestinians killed, 17-year-old Obada Saed Abu Srour, was shot in the back by settlers, probably as he was running from gunfire.

Israeli troops, meanwhile, did not forcefully intervene, despite their obligation under international and Israeli law to protect all residents of the West Bank, including Palestinians. Soldiers and police were photographed at the scene of the deaths only after the attack ended, even though troops stationed at nearby military outposts were within earshot of the gunfire and had views of an earlier attack by settlers, the visual evidence shows.

Abu Srour, the eldest of four children, with aspirations to become a policeman after finishing high school, was killed along with civil engineer and new father Muath Raed Odeh, 29. They were trying to protect the home of 30-year-old blacksmith Awad Mahmoud Odeh from attack. Musab Abdel Halim Abu Rida, 20, who worked in the fields and could always make his grandmother laugh, was killed near Abu Srour.

Settlers killed a Palestinian teen. Israeli forces didn’t stop it.

Do You Like Plastic in Your Bottled Water?

In spite of numerous studies that find that tap water in most metro areas is safer, better regulated, and better tested than bottled water Americans still love buying their water in bottles. Just more evidence that the IQ of many is close to that of a hamster.