August 9

 I think the predictions may be right for a dry and sunny day. I hope the more moderated temps forecast will materialize as well.

The Former Guy, as expected, is bleating about the FBI search warrant for his Mar-a-lago home for documents (some classified at an extremely high level) that should have gone to the National Archives according to the Presidential Records Act. He did return some, but evidently not all, last year. His presidency shows the fallacy of the frequently heard belief that "we need to put a businessman not politicians in charge." Unfortunately, a businessman is not necessarily a businessman is not necessarily a businessman. (apologies to Gertrude Stein) Yeah, he was a businessman. But he ran a family business--basically a little kingdom of which he was king. The only constraints on his actions were laws and he worked very hard to evade those laws and  the consequences if he was caught. He was his business and he tried to run the country the same way--as though he could parrot Louis XIV in saying "I am the state."

I am not going to weigh in on the legal process by which the FBI got its warrant. What I have seen and heard so far indicates it was entirely above board and by the book. On other aspects of the case, Infidel753 has a succinct post that reflects many of my own thoughts. 

Some time ago I saw a graph to illustrate a phenomenon anyone who has followed health care debates for the last decade would find familiar: Americans pay more for health care than citizens of any other advanced country and have a much lower life expectancy. This article from Naked Capitalism is a study covering the last 90+ years and comes to the conclusion that the U.S. is killing Americans.

To continue the health care theme I found this N.Y. Times article on the growing reluctance of parents to have their children vaccinated with traditional vaccines. That has been a growing phenomenon for a good while. That should worry everyone. The so-called "childhood diseases" used to kill thousands every year. The vaccines cut the death rate to a minute fraction of previous numbers. (You can easily look up the CDC stats on whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, polio mortality rates) But over the last couple of decades I have read accounts of groups of college students infected with measles because they were unvaccinated and traveled to a country where the disease was epidemic. Recently New York reported the first American case of polio in decades. And polio is rising in many of the world's conflict zones. I am old enough that I actually met a person who had been paralyzed because of polio. I was in seventh grade and my fellow student was a refugee from Czechoslovakia.