Trump weighs “limited” strike on North Korea to bolster mid-term showing

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Trump is corrupt beyond measure and fully capable of trying this:
From a South Korean paper, flagged on Twitter by The Washington Post’s Tokyo Bureau Chief …
Indeed, White House National Security Council senior director for Asian affairs Matthew Pottinger was reported as saying in a recent closed-door meeting with US experts on Korean Peninsula issues that a limited strike on the North “might help in the midterm elections.”

Non-Football Related Thought for the Weekend

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from RE Vanella
“Clement Greenberg’s remark in his article in Horizon, that the working class is the only class in England that seriously means to defeat Hitler, seems to me quite untrue. The bulk of the middle class are just as anti-Hitler as the working class, and their morale is probably more reliable. The fact which Socialists, especially when they are looking at the English scene from the outside, seldom seem to me to grasp, is that the patriotism of the middle classes is a thing to be made use of. The people who stand to attention during “God Save the King” would readily transfer their loyalty to a Socialist régime, if they were handled with the minimum amount of tact.”
----George Orwell, London Letter to Partisan Review, March-April 1941

Another “safe” Republican quits rather than face voters in November

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WASHINGTON ― Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, a 12-term Republican from New Jersey and chairman of the most sought-after committee in Congress ― the Appropriations Committee ― announced Monday that he would not run for re-election. Frelinghuysen’s announcement was a bit of surprise, considering he could still serve as the top Republican on the powerful Appropriations Committee for another four years under House GOP rules. But faced with the prospect of a tough race ― Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in that district by only 1 point in 2016 ― as well as internal discussions about removing Frelinghuysen as chairman after he voted against the party’s tax bill, the 71-year-old GOP moderate decided to call it quits.
Keep quitting guys. You certainly don't want to be associated with Trump's next two years in office.

Not Breaking News: Right to Carry Increases Crime

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It has been a slippery fact to pin down statistically, but the scientific jury is in. Right-to-carry laws lead to more violent crime - not less. It is a combination of every confrontation ending with murder, and the legal gun owners who like showing off their guns so much that they get stolen.
"American gun owners, preoccupied with self-defense, are inadvertently arming the very criminals they fear,"

China no longer buying our garbage.

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We've had a tsunami of policy garbage, now a tsunami of literal garbage is headed our way.
On Jan. 1, China made good on its promise to close its borders to several types of imported waste. By the next day, panic had already taken hold in countries across Europe and North America as trash began piling up by the ton, with no one having a clue where to now dispose of it all.
For more than 20 years, China has been the world’s recycling bin, accepting an enormous quantity of recyclable waste from nations worldwide. In 2016, China processed at least half of the world’s exports of waste plastic, paper and metals. The U.S. exported 16 million tons of waste to China that year, worth about $5.2 billion. Britain sent China enough garbage to fill up 10,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.