Documents show Flint filed false reports about testing for lead in water

Documents show Flint filed false reports about testing for lead in water | MLive.com
FLINT, MI – As concerns about Flint's water quality were mounting earlier this year, the city disregarded federal rules requiring it to seek out homes with lead plumbing for testing, potentially leading the city and state to underestimate for months the extent of toxic lead leaching into Flint's tap water.
City water officials filed certified documents with state regulators that claimed the city only tested tap water from homes where residents were at the highest risk of lead poisoning, but records obtained by The Flint Journal-MLive show those claims were false and may have delayed efforts to fix the public health emergency here.
Water samples sent to state labs for testing in the first six months of this year were all marked as having come from homes with lead service lines, but actually almost always came from homes at less risk of lead leaching – houses with underground plumbing made of copper, galvanized steel or materials that could not be identified, according to the city's own documents given to The Journal through the Freedom of Information Act.
In response to questioning, Flint Utilities Administrator Mike Glasgow said the city was struggling to collect the number of samples that were required following the city's switch to the Flint River as its water source in April 2014.
Records of the material in individual service lines were not readily available or did not exist, Glasgow said, leading the city to submit samples regardless of whether homes were at high risk of lead in water..."

An excellent resource-----RRW Monthly roundup for January 2016 « Refugee Resettlement Watch

RRW Monthly roundup for January 2016 « Refugee Resettlement Watch:
Longtime readers know that previously we provided a weekly roundup of top stories and top countries (from which visitors arrived at RRW) so that you would know what other followers were most interested in, and where they came from, but I’m thinking once a month is enough.

This roundup also gives me an opportunity to bring new readers up-to-speed on what we have published here over the years and how to find useful information.

Top Three Posts:

Here then are the Top Three posts for the month of January 2016 (top daily posts are in the right hand side bar):

Amarillo, Texas being destroyed by refugee overload

Merkel on Cologne sex assaults: don’t blame refugees

More evidence that big business is a driver of refugee resettlement in America

The Top Ten Countries from which visitors arrived at RRW in January (excluding the US) are in descending order:

UK

Canada

Australia

Germany

South Africa

Sweden

Netherlands

Norway

France

New Zealand

For new readers!  Here are some things you need to know:

I’ve started a new blog so that I can write about Election 2016 and immigration (the only issue that matters!).  See it here: American Resistance 2016!

We have over 7,300 posts archived at RRW extending back to the summer of 2007.  Use the search window with a few key words to look for information (LOL! before you send an e-mail asking me to find things for you!).  Also, see our Frequently Asked Questions and our fact sheet (out of date but still useful) in the header.

‘This was all planned’: Former IG says Hillary, State Dept. are lying

‘This was all planned’: Former IG says Hillary, State Dept. are lying | New York Post
The State Department is lying when it says it didn’t know until it was too late that Hillary Clinton was improperly using personal e-mails and a private server to conduct official business — because it never set up an agency e-mail address for her in the first place, the department’s former top watchdog says.
“This was all planned in advance” to skirt rules governing federal records management, said Howard J. Krongard, who served as the agency’s inspector general from 2005 to 2008.
The Harvard-educated lawyer points out that, from Day One, Clinton was never assigned and never used a state.gov e-mail address like previous secretaries.
“That’s a change in the standard.
It tells me that this was premeditated.
And this eliminates claims by the State Department that they were unaware of her private e-mail server until later,” Krongard said in an exclusive interview. “How else was she supposed to do business without e-mail?”
He also points to the unusual absence of a permanent inspector general during Clinton’s entire 2009-2013 term at the department. 
He said the 5¹/₂-year vacancy was unprecedented.
“This is a major gap. In fact, it’s without precedent,” he said.
“It’s the longest period any department has gone without an IG.”
Inspectors general serve an essential and unique role in the federal government by independently investigating agency waste, fraud and abuse.
Their oversight also covers violations of communications security procedures.
“It’s clear she did not want to be subject to internal investigations,” Krongard said.
An e-mail audit would have easily uncovered the secret information flowing from classified government networks to the private unprotected system she set up in her New York home..."
Read on!

FBI, Justice Department ‘Super Pissed Off’ at White House for ‘Weighing In’ on Hillary Clinton Email Investigation, Fox News Reporter Says | Video | TheBlaze.com

FBI, Justice Department ‘Super Pissed Off’ at White House for ‘Weighing In’ on Hillary Clinton Email Investigation, Fox News Reporter Says | Video | TheBlaze.com:

"Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge said her FBI and Justice Department sources are “super pissed off” at the White House for “weighing in” on the Hillary Clinton email investigation."

'Anti-capitalist' campus co-op faces shutdown because renters refuse to pay rent

'Anti-capitalist' campus co-op faces shutdown because renters refuse to pay rent - The College Fix:
Call it dwell-and-dash.
The Campbell Club at the University of Oregon is $17,000 in debt because, well, people take its anti-capitalist bona fides seriously. 
Or they’re just lazy bums.
The Daily Emerald reports that the Student Cooperative Association, which oversees campus co-ops, will shut down the Campbell Club in two months if it doesn’t pay its tab:
Over the last few years, the Campbell Club has struggled with a high turnover rate.
Though rent is cheap — between $300 and $400 depending on the room — members tend to move in, stay for a few months and move out, often without paying the owed rent, the source of the debt. The co-op’s lack of funds and “anti-capitalist” stance make it reluctant to hire debt collectors.
Known on campus for its “hippies” and the “police raids” that end its parties, the Club is also basically a roach motel.
If you’re a journalism student, learn how to write ledes like this:
The Campbell Club’s dish drainer was “fucked.”
“I cut through the pipe and gallons of stagnant sink waste started spraying out,” said Waldo Przekop, the job and maintenance coordinator at the University of Oregon’s oldest co-op.
Drenched in foul-smelling fluid, Przekop ran to fellow co-opper Jimi Wood for help.
“He comes upstairs covered in straight poop water like, ‘Jimi help me!’ ” said Wood.
Wood toweled off Przekop’s face and the two of them rushed downstairs to fix the dish system. After much trial and error, they managed to get it running again.
“But people still throw food in the sink,” Przekop said, laughing.
They could have called a plumber, but the Campbell Club is already $17,000 in debt..."
Read the fascinating story.

AM Fruitcake

History for February 1

History for February 1 - On-This-Day.com:
John Ford (Sean Aloysius O’Feeney) 1894 - Director, Clark Gable 1901 - Actor ("It Happened One Night", "Gone with the Wind"), Boris Yeltsin 1931 - Russian president 1991-1999 

Garrett Morris 1937 - Actor, comedian, Don Everly 1937 - Singer (The Everly Brothers), Pauly Shore 1970 - Comedian, actor ("Encino Man") 


1884 - The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. 


1900 - Eastman Kodak Co. introduced the $1 Brownie box camera. 


1913 - Grand Central Terminal (also known as Grand Central Station) opened in New York City, NY. It was the largest train station in the world. 


1919 - The first Miss America was crowned in New York City. 


1958 - The United Arab Republic was formed by a union of Egypt and Syria. It was broken 1961. 

1968 - During the Vietnam War, South Vietnamese National Police Chief Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executed a Viet Cong officer with a pistol shot to the head. The scene was captured in a news photograph. 


1979 - Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was welcomed in Tehran as he ended nearly 15 years of exile. 

2003 - NASA's space shuttle Columbia exploded while re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. All seven astronauts on board were killed.

REVEALED: Hillary's Chief Of Staff Did Something Unbelievable... Right Up There With Email Scandal

REVEALED: Hillary's Chief Of Staff Did Something Unbelievable... Right Up There With Email Scandal:

 "The use of personal Blackberrys by State Department officials has been a major focus of the ongoing investigation into Clinton’s communications protocol at the helm of the U.S. diplomatic corps. About a year before Mills’ lost her device — during Clinton’s first year as secretary of state — the man then heading up the department’s diplomatic security bureau issued a direct warning against the use of such devices.

He wrote in a 2009 memo that he could not “stress too strongly” the fact that “any unclassified BlackBerry is highly vulnerable in any setting to remotely and covertly monitoring conversations, retrieving emails, and exploring calendars.”

As with so many examples of questionable behavior, Hillary Clinton apparently felt the rules did not apply to her…or to her inner circle."

BREAKING: Major Biblical Discovery Rocking the Globe: Islam Livid!

BREAKING: Major Biblical Discovery Rocking the Globe: Islam Livid!:

"Archaeologists have exhumed an ancient discovery which proves Israel’s existence long before Palestine was even a thought.

Yes, Muslims – excuse me – ‘members of the religion of peace’ are totally pissed off about this!"

More Companies Recognizing That College Degrees are Unnecessary

More Companies Recognizing That College Degrees are Unnecessary | Intellectual Takeout:
Is it time to recognize that a college degree does not necessarily guarantee a good employee?
Due to the rising costs of college, some American students are beginning to wonder if a college degree is really worth it.
But many students trod the college path anyway, fearing that employers won’t glance at their resume without a B.A.
Fortunately for students in the U.K., some companies are beginning to recognize the folly of such a move.
According to The Telegraph, the Penguin book company has announced that a college degree is no longer a prerequisite for applying for one of its jobs.
This follows the announcement that U.K. recruiting giant, Ernst & Young, is removing its degree classification system from the application process. 
Their reason?
“[T]here is ‘no evidence’ success at university correlates with achievement in later life.”  
...More frequently we hear of American employers discovering that their new hires are ill-prepared for the workforce, in spite of impressive college credentials.
But if some American companies were to follow in Penguin’s footsteps and nix their degree requirements, is it possible that they might discover more intelligent, hard-working applicants for their workforce?
Is it time to recognize that a college degree does not necessarily guarantee a good employee?

Fascinating!-----When U.S. air force discovered the flaw of averages

When U.S. air force discovered the flaw of averages | Toronto Star:
When U.S. air force discovered the flaw of averages

In the early 1950s, a young lieutenant realized the fatal flaw in the cockpit design of U.S. air force jets. 

Todd Rose explains in an excerpt from his book, The End of Average.

REVEALED: You'll Never Guess Who Was 'Guarding' Hillary When She Snuck Off To Libya

REVEALED: You'll Never Guess Who Was 'Guarding' Hillary When She Snuck Off To Libya:

"The Barack Obama White House and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are infamous in conservative quarters for seeming to have a big blind spot when it comes to Islamic terrorism, but for them to allow a known terrorist to be intimately involved in “security” for an official Clinton trip to war-torn Libya is a level incompetence that borders on shocking.

According to British journalist Robert Verkaik, that’s exactly what happened when Clinton visited Libya in October 2011, after the fall of dictator Moammar Gadhafi but before the Benghazi attack."

You Ought to Have a Look: 2015 Temperatures, Climate Sensitivity, and the Warming Hiatus

You Ought to Have a Look: 2015 Temperatures, Climate Sensitivity, and the Warming Hiatus | Cato @ Liberty:
"What’s lost in a lot of the discussion about human-caused climate change is not that the sum of human activities is leading to some warming of the earth’s temperature, but that the observed rate of warming (both at the earth’s surface and throughout the lower atmosphere) is considerably less than has been anticipated by the collection of climate models upon whose projections climate alarm (i.e., justification for strict restrictions on the use of fossil fuels) is built.

We highlight in this issue of You Ought to Have a Look a couple of articles that address this issue that we think are worth checking out.

First is this post from Steve McIntyre over at Climate Audit that we managed to dig out from among all the “record temperatures of 2015” stories. In his analysis, McIntyre places the 2015 global temperature anomaly not in real world context, but in the context of the world of climate models.

Climate model-world is important because it is in that realm where climate change catastrophes play out, and that influences the actions of real-world people to try to keep them contained in model-world.

So how did the observed 2015 temperatures compare to model world expectations? 
Not so well.

In a series of tweets over the holidays, we pointed out that the El Niño-fueled, record-busting, high temperatures of 2015 barely reached to the temperatures of an average year expected by the climate models.

All of the individual models have trends well above observations…   There are now over 440 months of data and these discrepancies will not vanish with a few months of El Nino.

Be sure to check out the whole article here. 
We’re pretty sure you won’t read about any of this in the mainstream media.

....After tearing through the numerous methodological deficiencies and misapplied statistics contained in the paper, Neal is left shaking his head at the peer-review process that gave rise to the publication of this paper in the first place, and offered this warning:

Those familiar with the scientific literature will realize that completely wrong papers are published regularly, even in peer-reviewed journals, and even when (as for this paper) many of the flaws ought to have been obvious to the reviewers.  So perhaps there’s nothing too notable about the publication of this paper.  On the other hand, one may wonder whether the stringency of the review process was affected by how congenial the paper’s conclusions were to the editor and reviewers.  One may also wonder whether a paper reaching the opposite conclusion would have been touted as a great achievement by Stanford University. Certainly this paper should be seen as a reminder that the reverence for “peer-reviewed scientific studies” sometimes seen in popular expositions is unfounded.

Well said.

Venezuela is on the brink of a complete economic collapse

Venezuela is on the brink of a complete economic collapse - The Washington Post:

Leon Drolet shared Antony Davies's post.

15 hrs · 

Why wait for November's election? Those who want to "Feel the Bern" can move to Venezuela right now and feel the full burn of socialism.

Antony Davies

15 hrs · 

When early astronomers had the Earth rather than the Sun at the center of the solar system, scientists had to keep tweaking their theories to get them to comport with what they observed.

Try as they might to insist that the Earth was the center of the solar system, reality refused to cooperate. When astronomers finally admitted that the Sun was the center, all the convoluted tweaking disappeared, and the motions of the planets finally made plain sense.

So too are socialists constantly tweaking their economic models in an attempt to explain why reality never delivers the nirvana they promise.

Reality is finally having the last word.

"The only question now is whether Venezuela's government or economy will completely collapse first.
The key word there is "completely." 
Both are well into their death throes. 
Indeed, Venezuela's ruling party just lost congressional elections that gave the opposition a veto-proof majority, and it's hard to see that getting any better for them any time soon — or ever. 
Incumbents, after all, don't tend to do too well when, according to the International Monetary Fund, their economy shrinks 10 percent one year, an additional 6 percent the next, and inflation explodes to 720 percent. 
It's no wonder, then, that markets expect Venezuela to default on its debt in the very near future. 
The country is basically bankrupt.
That's not an easy thing to do when you have the largest oil reserves in the world, but Venezuela has managed it. 
How? 
Well, a combination of bad luck and worse policies. 
The first step was when Hugo Chávez's socialist government started spending more money on the poor, with everything from two-cent gasoline to free housing. 
Now, there's nothing wrong with that — in fact, it's a good idea in general — but only as long as you actually, well, have the money to spend. 
And by 2005 or so, Venezuela didn't."

Lunch video-----40th Anniversary of Ultralights Celebrated at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2015

Noon-toon

Hold On To Your Hats...Obama Just Sounded Off On The 'White Oscars': 'It Makes Everybody...'

Hold On To Your Hats...Obama Just Sounded Off On The 'White Oscars': 'It Makes Everybody...':

"With headline-hungry liberals claiming outrage over an all-white lineup in major Oscar nominations for the second year in a row, it’s no surprise that the complainer in chief in the White House couldn’t stay out of it for long. He is, after all, an expert on movie-making and artful cinematic performance, apparently."

See this movie!!-----13 Hours: a thoughtful war movie directed by Michael Bay... really?

13 Hours: a thoughtful war movie directed by Michael Bay... really? | Film | The Guardian:

“I’ve had just about enough of this 2012 Alamo bullshit,” says one of the besieged CIA security contractors in Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi.
And I know how he feels, considering how often it reminds me of every other movie of its kind, from Black Hawk Down through Lone Survivor, American Sniper, and such John Wayne flag-wavers as Sands Of Iwo Jima and – ah, there it is – The Alamo.
....As a lefty, I’m honour-bound to despise this movie, but I just can’t.
It deserves its place among the movies I opened with, and at the top of Michael Bay’s catalogue.

New CBO study shows that ‘the rich’ don’t just pay their ‘fair share,’ they pay almost everybody’s share

New CBO study shows that ‘the rich’ don’t just pay their ‘fair share,’ they pay almost everybody’s share - AEI | Carpe Diem Blog » AEIdeas:
"...major implication of the CBO report – almost the entire burden: 
a) of all transfer payments made to American households and
b) of all non-financed government spending, falls on just one group of Americans – the top one-fifth of US households by income. "

Scientists Want NOAA To Stop Hiding Global Warming Data

Scientists Want NOAA To Stop Hiding Global Warming Data | The Daily Caller
Hundreds of scientists sent a letter to lawmakers Thursday warning National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists may have violated federal laws when they published a 2015 study purporting to eliminate the 15-year “hiatus” in global warming from the temperature record.

“We, the undersigned, scientists, engineers, economists and others, who have looked carefully into the effects of carbon dioxide released by human activities, wish to record our support for the efforts of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology to ensure that federal agencies complied with federal guidelines that implemented the Data Quality Act,” some 300 scientists, engineers and other experts wrote to Chairman of the House Science Committee, Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith.

“In our opinion… NOAA has failed to observe the OMB [Office of Management and Budget] (and its own) guidelines, established in relation to the Data Quality Act.”

The Data Quality Act requires federal agencies like NOAA to “ensure and maximize the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information, including statistical information.”

...Of the 300 letter signers, 150 had doctorates in a related field. 

Signers also included: 25 climate or atmospheric scientists, 23 geologists, 18 meteorologists, 51 engineers, 74 physicists, 20 chemists and 12 economists. Additionally, one signer was a Nobel Prize winning physicist and two were astronauts..."

Watch: