Poll: Ted Cruz Currently Leads Among Voters Disputing Boundaries Of Neighbor’s Yard Onion (sherry)
The World’s Best Whistler Explains How She Got So Good Vice (resilc)
Up to 13 Million Americans Are at Risk of Being Washed Away Bloomberg
Knee Surgery Can Create New Pain Wall Street Journal. Don’t get me started on the topic of how many orthopedic surgeries are not what they are cracked up to be. Admittedly, many patients are not willing to hear, “You are better off living with it” or do do the amount of physical therapy and exercise to see real improvement after injuries or with underlying structural issues that get worse with age.
The End Is Near for Illegible Handwritten Prescriptions in New York New York Magazine
The U.S. Is Paying — Some — to Help Poorer Countries Adjust to Climate Change Foreign Policy in Focus (resilc)
The World Bank Is Supposed to Help the Poor. So Why Is it Bankrolling Oligarchs? Mother Jones (resilc)
China?
China and FX reserve adequacy, redux FT Alphaville
Labor Protests Multiply in China as Economy Slows, Worrying Leaders New York Times
Refugee Crisis
Merkel vows to stay course on refugees Financial Times
Idomeni refugees push to cross into Macedonia despite border closure DW
Russia/Urkaine
Ukraine’s pro-western reform project hangs in the balance Financial Times
EU Foreign Ministers Skirmish Over Russia Sanctions WSJ Brussels
Europeans Staring at Total Failure in Ukraine Russia Insider
Syraquistan
Putin: Withdrawal Of Russian Forces From Syria Starting March 15 Moon of Alabama
Did Putin just ‘smelled’ the Western trap? failed evolution
After the Obama Doctrine: Who Will Maintain Order in the Middle East? Atlantic
Syria: More US Weaponry goes to al-Qaeda Juan Cole
Africa targeted once more as rivalry between Islamic militants grows Guardian
Erdoğan’s Turkey: a disintegrating ally and imaginary friend Guardian (resilc)
Where did ISIS come from? The story starts here. Boston Globe
Saudi Arabia launches austerity drive to cut public spending Guardian
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Your next car will be hacked. Will autonomous vehicles be worth it? Guardian
DOJ’s Clear Threat to Go After Apple’s Source Code Marcy Wheeler
Trade Traitors
USA uses TPP-like trade-court to kill massive Indian solar project / Boing Boing. Reported earlier, but in case you missed it…
2016
The Trump Campaign Gives License to Violence New York Times. Editorial.
Trump Concerned His Rallies Are Not Violent Enough Intercept
From Wallace To Trump, The Evolution of “Law And Order” FiveThirtyEight
Speaker at Trump Event: Try Christianity, Bernie New York Magazine
hat President Trump’s Foreign-Poicy Team Might Look Like American Conservative (resilc)
Breitbart News in Turmoil, and Trump is the Cause New York Times
What America’s Prisoners Think of Donald Trump Vice (resilc)
Donald Trump’s Case for Big Government Atlantic
The Many, Many Reasons Republican Senators Can’t Stand Ted Cruz Bloomberg
Which Side Are You On, Hillary? New York Times. From two days ago. Deadly. Key quote:
A 2013 paper by Mr. Scott’s colleague at E.P.I., Josh Bivens, found that, on average, noncollege-educated American workers, the people who make up roughly 70 percent of the labor force, lose nearly $2,000 a year in wages owing to the growth of trade with low-wage countries promoted by free-trade agreements.
Hillary Clinton Has Long History of Collaboration with GOP on Foreign Policy Intercept
Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes Is Holding a Hillary Fundraiser With Chelsea Clinton re/code (Marshall)
Exposing the Libyan Agenda: a Closer Look at Hillary’s Emails Counterpunch
Another Major Union Just Endorsed Bernie Sanders Huffington Post (martha r)
Obama’s prisoner clemency plan faltering as cases pile up Reuters (EM)
Justice Dept. Condemns Profit-Minded Court Policies Targeting the Poor New York Times
The Left Wing’s Trump Atlantic. A bit of a hatchet job, but Grayson really was a dope not to have wound down his hedge fund (which has just a few friends and family members in it; he lost 17% for one investor and kicked him out, giving him all his original investment back). Grayson does have a reckless streak that works against him.
Legal marijuana is finally doing what the drug war couldn’t Washington Post (resilc)
Vermont legislature on track to be first in U.S. to legalize marijuana Reuters (EM)
Texas festival apologizes after Muslim Olympian told to remove hijab Reuters (EM)
Inmates Stab Warden and Post to Facebook During Riot at Alabama’s Death Row Prison Vice
Orthodox Jews Set Sights on N.J. Town and Angry Residents Resist Bloomberg
Gunz
The macabre truth of gun control in the US is that toddlers kill more people than terrorists do Guardian (resilc). !!!!
Oil
Many Shale Companies Are Unable to Ramp Up Oil Output Wall Street Journal
Crude oil slides back below $40 a barrel Financial Times
Special Report: The final days and deals of Aubrey McClendon Reuters. EM: “McClendon apparently thought he was TBTF, but being neither a top-level bankster nor elite politician, was shocked to find out otherwise.”
What Would Breaking Up the Banks Even Look Like? Atlantic. I don’t have time to critique this, but the short version is a wholesale only bank won’t work. Not enough margin in those products. JP Morgan (which remember had a very large number of established relationships with big corporates) was struggling with profits issues, hence its push to get into higher-margin investment banking and retail (its takevoer Chase, which kept the tony JP Morgan name). A split that would leave you with viable businesses is investment banking, commercial banking (retail and wholesale) and asset management (having investment banks have incentives to have their own funds and stuff their brokerage accounts is never a good idea).
Blackrock: Markets face headwind from central banks CNBC. Quelle surprise!
Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous
The other side of that disturbing Silicon Valley lawsuit CNN
Class Warfare
Hurdles to Multigenerational Living: Kitchens and Visible Second Entrances Wall Street Journal. More evidence of downward mobility…
Dogmas of Our Economic System Must Change, Says Former Economic Hit Man TruthOut (Glenn F)
Driver ‘blames Uber’ for shooting spree BBC
Universities Are Becoming Billion-Dollar Hedge Funds With Schools Attached Nation. Not news. Harvard (with Larry Summers as rogue trader), Yale, Northwestern and NYU have long been at this game.
The Problem of the Liberal Elites Part 1 Ed Walker, emptywheel
Antidote du jour (furzy):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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Comments are closed.
Interesting that Turkey is working out to be a “staunch democracy ally” so very much in the form of that other one, Israel. The latter’s “Israelite” rulers now demanding another couple of billion a year from “Uncle Sucker…”
What’s it gonna cost to keep listing Erdoganomania on “our” side?
And what’s up with Putin “declaring victory” and starting a pullout? Speaking of REAL chess mastery…
Russia’s proximate goal was to preserve access to the port at Tartus. Achieved. They demonstrated seriously more effective air superiority than NATO, and advertised their cruise missile capacity, which coincided with a US aircraft carrier dumping ballast and hauling it out of the Persian Gulf. I’m not sure why non-special operations forces were even there, but providing a human shield may have been an aspect. Much leverage was obtained from the shot-down jet.
An ultimate goal of Russia is preventing jihadi migration to Russian borders. Avoiding overextension is critical for internal support. A outline of a plausible scenario was linked to in the comments recently, by Ruben. Here is a repost:
gulfnews.com/opinion/thinkers/raqqa-idlib-markers-to-new-geopolitics-1.1686647
Clearly Putin and his commercial interests have calculated the costs of another Afganistan adventure. Last time it lead to the end of the Soviet Union. Russians know thier history. Americans see every new situation as unique and one-off.
Actually, before they left, the Soviet Union had largely turned the situation in Afghanistan around. Look up General Gromov.
Afghanistan didn’t bring down the USSR. Economics and rot did.
It did bring lots of heroin into the USSR.
With so many returning Russian soldiers dead or maimed in Afghanistan and USA funding the Taliban, it destabilized the Russian homeland and put extrodinary pressure on the Russian treasury. So with the cost of countering the illusionary Star Wars program, economics and internal pressure did put the Soviet Union under.
It was never going to be an Afghanistan scenario. This entire half-year campaign has been paid for out of Russia’s normal yearly military budget. They’re leaving because they want Assad to actually be genuine at the negotiating table, knowing he can’t rely on them to simply give him brute force, and because a good way to avoid a risk of WW3 via insane Turkish/Saudi/US behavior is to simply not be there.
Don’t forget also that Obama’s petulant response to Russia’s intervention and military success was to grumble that it would merely result in Putin getting bogged down in a Vietnam-style “quagmire.”
Now Vlad has taken away even that talking point. For someone who values talk over action and style over substance, it must be rather humiliating to watch.
Not that this strategy is without risks for Putin. A president-elect Hillary or another neo-con stooge will reassess the situation and 9 months isn’t very long for Assad to consolidate his gains before the neo-cons strike back.
Well, the Russians could always come back later, either a year later or a few years later, assuming Assad wants their help again. It might MAYBE make Putin look a bit bad to do so, but they could.
I just hope things don’t get worse in the next half year or so, as coming back like 5 months later would look pretty awful.
They aren’t leaving. They are removing ground support and special forces who likely served in advisory missions in the realm of 90% of the time if not more. They are also running out of targets to bomb.
The air defense, electronic intelligence, and the air base on the northern border are still there.
ISIS is the main event now besides relatively encircled rebels who have one route into Turkey. Convoys can be bombed at any time. Who knows how the fighters, especially the foreign ones might feel about Turkey not taking a more active role? ISIS has been cut off from international funding and can be squeezed to death by ground forces with the support of the Syrian air force which has received goodies, real experience, and first rate training in recent months.
Except for the one major route into Turkey, every other border crossing is under control or heavily watched or part of ISIS areas, and ISIS is rapidly running out of steam. Mercenaries like to get paid and live to pillage. Fighting isn’t part of the deal.
Very comforting words, NTG.
Looking around a little, I see that ISIS has been cut off and surrounded and contained and placed on the run at least a dozen times since what, 2014?
It seems to be a little hard to “contain” thr enterprise that apparently is ISIS, that “thing” that is actually admired for its tenacity and also freedom of action by our own brigand capitalists, http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2014-the-business-of-isis-spreadsheets-annual-reports-and-terror/#/
Humans being what we are, the voices are hardly any more unanimous than they are “light at the end of the tunnel” correct: http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/04/on-isis-barack-obama-is-baghdad-bob/
For a little dip into the vast complexity of “brigades” and shifting alliances and well-armed idiocy and opportunities for the Sneaky Petes and “Special Ops” to stir the pot and blow shit up, here’s one little article about one little “brigade” of many in the Game of Thrones/Call of Duty playstation that is Syriaqistan/Notagainistan: http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/liwa-dir-al-watan-a-new-pro-assad-militia-in-damascus/ And yes, I know that “brigade” of brigands is not ISIS… just part of the opportunistic list of characters in this latest round of idiocy, where some Wise Westerners are calling for a new Sykes-Picot dinner napkin sketch…
There’s lots more of the same at “Syria Comment,” http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/ , which is moderated as far as I can tell by people who try really hard to get it all right, as much as anyone can day to day where the Leviathans of Geopolitics lumber and crush supposedly to serve “national interests,” and GUN-men can proclaim themselves “Secretary General” or “Commander” or “Caliph…”
And one has to wonder if all those “under control” border crossings, and all the landforms and terrain in between them, are “under control” of the same denizens of the various cultures of corruption that have allowed weapons and money and of course “oil” to flow so freely into and out of “controlled” areas, just for a little baksheesh from one of the many players who are playing their Game of RISK! ™ and keeping the demolition of all the habitations and livelihoods of the mopes who were unfortunate enough to have been born or fled there from previous episodes of people like us injecting additional toxins of violence and instability where we Manifestly do our thing…
Maybe Western media said they were on the run in an attempt to show the US was actually doing anything meaningful, but it was only when the Russians started bombing that their oil trafficking business to Turkey was significantly impacted. And anyway, Iraq is the heartland of ISIS; Syria was never much more than a sideshow to them. The Russian goal was to prevent the fall of the Syrian government, and they’ve achieved that. The rebels, such as they are, are increasingly surrendering and some are being liquidated by their erstwhile al-Qaeda allies. The momentum is on the side of Syrian Arab Army and its ancillary forces, and it’s hard to see how that momentum can be lost now. AQ may attempt to stand their ground and be wiped out for their efforts, but ISIS will likely at some point give up on Syria and concentrate all their efforts in Iraq (and Libya, thanks Hillary!). The battle for Iraq will probably grind on for years. But Russia intervened to save (at least a significant portion of) Syria, not Iraq.
Ass-ad the facade pissed off the russians…
Comrade…now that we have spent our koppex saving your hide we would like to talk about…
Ass-ad: saving me..???
I was nice enough to let you shoot at some goat shagging camel jockeys for your ego and television ratings…you owe me since we made you look good…
Moscva: of course comrade you make big funyah…now we would like your handwritten on this dohkument…no need to read…basic Guantanamo type lease for naval plus now we add airbase too…
Ass-ad: look my non believer dog associates…i am the great oz…fearless leader…the tanks were nowhere near the airport…there is no badgag bob here…we dont have cnn here…no green screen magic takeover…you watch too much american cable news.. Here is your bill for unauthorized damage from bombing incompetence…
Moscva:comrade you make not much funyah…your tv show may get canceled if you dont get better script writers and show runners…
Ass-ad: I dont need you…i never needed you…there was never any threat of me losing or leaving…I didnt need you then and I dont need you now…so when are you goong to pay for the damage you did to my little feefdumb…
Moscva: ahxxx…no good deed goes unpunished…as you wish comrade…yevgenny…back up the truck we are moving the circus
Yevg: where to now boss ?
Moscva: maybe that other last remaining theater for fearless leader..call one dim sun and see if he still wants to send his own version of soyuz into orbit…maybe we call obama and tell him he owes us one…
i suspect the syrian forces trained by the russians will be more effective than the u.s. trained afghan or iraqi troops.
To quote Mark Ames from twitter: “Russia’s not withdrawing from Syria—they’re scaling back, going quieter. It’s too rational for DC foreign policy hacks. Cue Scanners GIF”
you all may want to take a look at this:
January Mortgage Delinquencies up 6.6%; 98,000 Bad Mortgages Face Statute of Limitations in 3 States (NY,NJ,FL)
skip past the routine details to the 4th paragraph…
here’s the punchline:
up to 98,000 seriously delinquent home loans with an unpaid principal balance of approximately $30 billion may be subject to such statutes of limitations (ie, mortgages that are more than five years past due in Florida or more than six years past due in New Jersey and New York). Moreover, roughly $1 out of every $10 of principal in private-label securitizations in these three states is tied to such a mortgage.
Kudos for lurking with Oak….
I’ve noticed a huge uptick in the legal announcement section of the newspapers in upstate NY over the last few months. A few sunday papers have had their own 10-20 page section dedicated to foreclosure related legalese.
Have any other readers noticed anything similar?
Yes. Here in Misisip, there come waves of forced sale announcements now. Old timers ‘on the street’ say the volumes of said sales are increasing.
An associated phenomenon is that older homes here are staying on the market for extended periods of time. A single mother across the street was just informed that the Hair Salon she works at is shutting down in a month. She has had her home on the market for six months now, reasonably priced for this market, and no serious nibbles. In a one city block radius from our house, I count 14 houses ‘on the block.’ In the sixty to ninety thousand dollar range, and nothing over sixty thousand has sold this year so far. (We live in a formerly solid ‘middle class’ older suburb, now ‘in transition’ to an owner renter mix. Crime is still low, and a crack house was recently ‘run out’ by local AAs. When it comes to crime, class dominates.)
New housing starts are way down from several years ago. No spec housing going up at all. Several larger apartment complexes being built, but the word on the street is that some sort of tax dodge is involved. These apartments aren’t going to be cheap rentals either.
(Anecdotally, personal observation shows the building crews to be heavily Latino in composition.)
But….but…but….the foreclosure crisis is over, doncha know?
These are 10/1 ARM resets, HAMP resets.
Let’s kick the foreclosure can down the road and the majority of the populace will forget all about the fact that it is the homeowners paying the prive for the unlawful behavior of Wall Street.
Very glad to hear the vultures wont be getting 98,000 homes!
Bankster lawyers are ignoring statute of limitations and filing suit expecting defendants not to hire lawyer and not knowing that statute of limitations must be pled as defense as there is no real sanction for attempting to sneak through a case in ny, nj and florida…sad but true…have seen the pleadings so not conjecture nor speculation…
Alex, of course the crooks are filing anyway. Hopefully, many homeowners will get their sh*t together and understand that the thigs can’t have yet another house.
Imagine what the economy would be like right now if we had pulled an “Iceland” on these thugs?
Cold…lots of fish…no bananas…volcanoes and one too many blue eyed blondes…we forget iceland did a pyrate trick…over sized financialized conversion…and no one has taken a good look at where the money went…hey everyone look at the pretty black stuff from the volcano…no need to ask who we lent the money to…trust us…it is Not collectable…and dont ask who sold the real estate that we loaned against…that might lead to the facts…and baloon popping is always a nice way to conclude deposit conversions…we were not stealing…its just the “normal” market cycle…iceland stalin show trials…follow the money…who cashed out before the crash and got the loan proceeds…ignore the cut out fall guys (and gals)…
Pyrate means “you took” plural in greek
This language suggests the states in question are able to “take care of the problem”, no doubt by lobbyists writting some nifty legislation,
[…] and now courts in Florida, New Jersey and New York are deciding whether statutes of limitations laws should apply
I thought the law was supposed to remain the same but apparently it can change depending on whether you are the mortgage servicer or the home”owner”. The statutes of limitations was in effect when they took out the loan, but now that they bank has made them pay RE Taxes for 5 plus years, etc., by putting foreclosure on the books but not taking ownership, they should not assume that largess – of making homeowner pay costs – extends to getting back their home.
Am I missing something?
If the courts and legislatures destroy the statute of limitations then we will be permanently reduced to a debt slavery nation. I’ll bet even the people not in foreclosure would help fight then…..of course, I could be wrongly catagorizing many lazy-ass Americans.
http://www.thenation.com/article/paul-krugman-raises-the-white-flag-on-trade/
After that mouthful of a correction, Krugman turns uncharacteristically modest about his own performance as an economic prognosticator. “I hope, by the way, that I haven’t done any of that,” the professor wrote. His students who know better should respond with spitballs.
Let me refresh Krugman’s memory. I offer a few examples from the glory decades, when he was leading cheers for globalizing capitalism. He did not see anything especially new or threatening about it, certainly not for the triumphant United States. To Krugman, the emerging system looked more or less like the textbook capitalism he taught.
In the Harvard Business Review in 1994, he belittled “a steady drumbeat of warnings about the threat that low-wage imports pose to US living standards…. The truth, however, is that fears about the economic impact of Third World competition are almost entirely unjustified. Economic growth in low-wage nations is in principle as likely to raise as to lower per capita income in high-wage countries; the actual effects have been negligible.”
Krugman was skeptical that very poor nations (like, say, China) could increase productivity in advanced goods like computer chips, but if they did, “these emerging economies would see their wage rates in terms of chips rise—end of story,” he wrote. “There would be no impact, positive or negative, on real wages in other, initially higher-wage countries.” Like, say, the United States.
But what if investment capital from the United States and other advanced economies decided to invest heavily in poorer nations (like China) to gain a foothold in their burgeoning consumer markets? “A likely outcome is that high-tech goods will be produced only in the North [advanced industrial economies], low-tech goods only in the South [low-wage developing economies].”
But couldn’t this low-wage competition undermine US wages, as organized labor warned? “The short answer is yes in principle but no in practice,” the professor wrote. “As a matter of standard textbook theory, international flows of capital from North to South could lower Northern wages. The actual flows that have taken place since 1990, however, are far too small to have the devastating impacts that many people envision.”
====================================================
One can posit that not living in the past, moving on, onward and upward, etcetera is a good thing.
However, in Krugman’s case, he was exceptionally and expansively wrong and won’t admit it. This inability to admit that he was wrong, besides being indicative of some profound psychological problems, gives cover to Krugman and his acolytes to continue to make policy pronouncements as if he has flawless forecasting ability and insights (e.g., on Bernienomics) when it is evident that not only is Krugman not all that, but is almost a flawless contra indicator…
Krugman is even worse than that, in that he uses his expertise in economics to opine on politics and history, with the same authoritative tone that he uses for purely economic discussions. His understanding of those other two subjects is rather unsophisticated, yet his perch at the Times somehow conveys his opinions with an unearned and undeserved gravity.
Exactly right. One of the biggest problems with the meritocratic paradigm is that within it becoming expert in a field transforms one magically into an Expert.
Economics is a particularly imperialist line of work, Baron Layard’s and Jeffrey Sach’s shock therapy vivisections qualified them for their happiness research.
Economics is also quite feudal.
Total output (GDP, not GDP per capita or actual distribution), available number of serfs, wage inflation being the focus, etc….all from the manorial master’s perspective.
They’ve got the whole world, in their hands
The whole wide world, in their brains
well, they’re eating it, and whatever is apparently waste will be treated like s**t
Once people are conditioned to Argument from Authority, it’s easy to get them to accept arguments from false authorities.
“I rather sign badly than popping in another music CD from one more authoritative Rock or pop celebrity.”
You can do it. Everyone can do it…just think through. Talk or think about your personal (serf) experiences or situations. Everyone’s unique.
By the way, be sure to vote today (when applicable).
Vote Trump, Rubio, Hillary, Sanders or Cruz…whomever you believe is the person. It’s your day…your right.
And if one were to pair Krugman with Bernanke, both of which having atrophied cranial organs, they’d be co-joined twins,…no?
You might have the expectation that someone who demonstrates intellectual integrity and incisiveness by achievement in one field, might be respected for bringing these skills to bear in analysis in another. But in both cases, respect derives from the quality of the reasoning demonstrated. Unfortunately, when experts achieve celebrity status, they often become talking heads, expecting their words to be accepted uncritically (apparently even by themselves!) in a kind of argument from authority.
While I have generally sympathized with Krugman’s views, I found his most persuasive arguments to be debunking what seemed to me patently fallacious politico-economical arguments. It’s a shame he applied these critical thinking skills so infrequently to himself.
I just talked to a guy that goes to India a lot doing consulting work. He says Indian programmers fresh out of school now make $2000 USD a YEAR! After a few years experience they can look forward to pulling down $4000 USD a YEAR!
Needless to say they didn’t get their degrees with a student loan to Princeton.
H-1B visa here I come.
Hey, the Indians are getting almost as much as our grads!
more–they’re getting jobs.
Interesting…the serendipitous $2,000.
I think if you give people $2,000, each, to vote, to exercise their parts in the People’s Sovereignty, the turnouts will be higher than the 12% Democrats or 17% Republicans we have seen so far.
And many of us can use that money.
“Voting is not just a job (think Jobs Guarantee)…it’s a profitable adventure.”
Having seen the product that issues forth from over there, I think it’s safe to say that their degrees are as good as Teach For America certificates.
For perspective, see Edward Luttwak’s LRB piece on the implications of “free” trade, also written in 1994, and highlighted in NC links just two days ago…
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v16/n07/edward-luttwak/why-fascism-is-the-wave-of-the-future
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/links-31316.html
This inability to admit being wrong is a very conservative characteristic…. since being wrong implies at least the need to change, and that would just be too libburrlll
You haven’t met many liberals, have you? Personally, I put down the inability to accept being wrong as a fairly common human trait.
The left brain is just as stubborn as the right brain.
And both believe in their own (moral, intellectual, etc) superiority versus the other.
That’s quite spectacularly interesting.
“Better taste.”
“Less filling.”
“More waste.”
“Least feeling.”
Why don’t you post this on his blog? His remaining fans need to see it.
Russia begins surprise withdrawal from Syria as peace talks get underway [WaPo]
The Village is confused – you mean some wars are not forever?
who will speak for the poor russians making money off the war? somebody give them a hug.
Pat Lang at SST or one of the regulars has suggested the Russian operation is small enough to fall well within training costs of equivalent units and clearing out older bombs and missiles which would have been used for training.
As far as Russian arms dealers go, they just produced a 5 1/2 month infomercial. South America, Africa, India, and a growing sector of the middle east await.
remaking the world in our own image isn’t going so well.
But… but… but YWH TOLD us to do it, in no uncertain terms! “Dominion over!” and the Elect! divinely predestined status proven by Having All The Money! Use it all up, before Jesus gets back, or He is going to be Really Pissed Off!
One cannot go against the Word of God!
If I had to guess this is merely Putin’s way of declaring mission accomplish for the domestic audience. The SAA has been re-equipped and trained with the new equipment they’ve been given. Their strategic position is much improved since the initial intervention. The Russian forces in Syria also experienced a surge after Turkey shot down that Russian jet which can be safely withdrawn.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2016/03/14/the-problem-of-the-liberal-elites-part-1/
In Krugman’s world, the forces facing these farmers would have been unstoppable. In the real world, as Stewart reports, the farmers organized themselves and forced legislative changes at the State and Federal level that protected them and enabled them to stay in business, the socially important business of growing food for their fellow citizens. They were able to transform the conditions of the markets they faced, using the power of government. They were able to slow the pace of change to a level that didn’t ruin their lives despite the best effort of the powerful. It’s a neat demonstration of Polanyi’s idea about people demanding protection from violent social change.
…….
Third, the central part of Stewart’s story is international trade in grain. The impetus for that change came from the powerful and wealthy shipowners, railroads, merchants and grain speculators, and not from the farmers. The roles of the people who operate railroad and overseas shipping lines, the merchants who import and export grain, and the grain speculators in Chicago is not even touched by Stewart’s account. He does not even discuss the fraud and corruption that dominated the lives of those farmers and all of society. He and other economists neatly hide the power structures that created the problems of farmers and the forces the farmers beat down to protect themselves.
That pattern is repeated over and over in the story of trade.
========================================
Wow – what a coincidence that I read this right after posting about Krugman at 8:08am…
I guess what so annoys me is best summed up in the new meme: “Its the economy stupid – no, its the people in the economy smart guy”
When people at the bottom get poorer and poorer, and people at the top get richer and richer, economists and their enablers take that as something as inevitable as the sun rising in the east. Of course, not. There are laws and rules – people make choices as to who benefits and who suffers.
And the other thing that really annoys me is these economists have such a child like naif view – as if fraud, and political payoffs have no part in these “trade agreements”
I think that the major point of separating Political Economy into Political Science and Economics was to render invisible (to academics, anyway) the feedbacks between political and economic power.
Yes, but not just to the academics.
In “Who will keep order in the Middle East” I notice that Martin Indyk repeats the brazen lie that “Assad used chemical weapons”.
martin indyk is a card-carrying neocon so, yeah, he will repeat neocon dogma
NPR, and later this morning “On Point”, let this statement go unchallenged regularly.
Have been avoiding the Nice Polite Republicans lately.
Did they let McFaul out of his room in the basement to pass on his expertise?
Any word on if they’re charging him rent yet? Does he at least clean out the sink after he shaves?
The macabre truth of gun control in the US is that toddlers kill more people than terrorists do Guardian (resilc). !!!!
“What do you say about the outspoken Florida “gun rights” advocate who left a loaded .45 calibre handgun in the back seat of her car and was promptly shot and wounded by her four-year-old child?”
============================================
Unfortunately, facts seem to have very little impact on Americans.
Why do people believe what they do? I can’t have schadenfreude, as I actually used to believe Krugman on trade…(at least I changed my mind when the evidence became overwhelming). I wonder if the woman who was shot will change her mind about making guns accessible to children…
no nonon, we need even more access to gun to stop those rampaging toddlers!
It takes a good toddler with a gun to stop a bad toddler with a gun
As a gun fetishist I know maintains, the only useful gun is a loaded gun that is ready to hand…there were over 100 useful shootin’ irons in his castle, “to hand” in every room. Kids and grandkids were instructed not to touch. Same rule with the candy dishes and cookie jar…
Hinsdale, IL is a notoriously dangerous city…
I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty terrified of the country club set, white thugs cruising up and down Ogden on their way to a “club” meeting… scary!
As I was taught, growing up in a gun-owning household (gotta put meat on the table, donchaknow?), you keep the weapon locked in the gun cabinet and the ammo locked up in the garage (i.e. far enough away from eachother that there’s zero chance of accidental firings). Also, you always check the chamber first thing upon handling a firearm, to make sure it isn’t loaded. You don’t put one in the chamber until your ready to take aim at your prey, and you never, ever, point a gun (loaded or not) at anything you don’t intend to shoot.
Some people are idiots. That’s always going to be the case. I hope that these stories of idiots and their guns serve to clue in people who otherwise might do the same, but their use as a tactic to push for gun control legislation seems wrong-headed to me, as it tends to lump all of us gun-owners together as morons. We don’t need gun control because some dipsh*t gave their five year old a loaded weapon. We DO need gun control for plenty of other reasons, but the stupidity of a few people isn’t one of them.
I got guns too — did not grow up in a gun household (parents hated them, even toys, my dad was a WW II veteran with “experience.”) And I keep the ammo and weapons separate too. But there is always that seductive little voice that says “When you were in Vietnam, did you carry an unloaded weapon while the other guy carried the ammo box, so you would have to survive under fire until you could jam some .223s in a clip and protect yourself?” Because you never know when Willy Horton will smash through the patio doors… and I do feel the need for that concealed-carry license, which the State of FL gives me (for a fee and my fingerprints) just on presentation of my DD-214 discharge certificate that evidences that I have “weapons training…” Because you never know…
I’m curious, given the absolute victory of the gun side in our Political Economy, what reasons we DO need gun control for… in a Great Free Nation, where “gun control is using both hands…”
But there is always that seductive little voice that says “When you were in Vietnam, did you carry an unloaded weapon while the other guy carried the ammo box, so you would have to survive under fire until you could jam some .223s in a clip and protect yourself?” Because you never know when Willy Horton will smash through the patio doors… and I do feel the need for that concealed-carry license, which the State of FL gives me (for a fee and my fingerprints) just on presentation of my DD-214 discharge certificate that evidences that I have “weapons training…” Because you never know…
If you are that worried about a siege and believe that everyday America is like a war zone than perhaps it is time to get help for PTSD.
The reality is there have been gun shop owners shot to death with a room full of weapons. You just aren’t going to remove all the risk of living…..even with a gun.
Don’t get me wrong I agree with diptherio, I’m anti taking guns from responsible gun owners that seem to understand their hobby carries a danger that something like stamp collecting doesn’t carry.
If Willie Horton smashes through the patio doors, a gun won’t save you either. Police studies have found that an assailant within 21 feet will get a cop before he can pull out his gun and get off a shot.
If you are really worried, take a course, and not “self defense” but one that teaches you how to “inflicts trauma” as they like to say, on an assailant first. Those courses assume you are smaller, slower and weaker than the person going after you. But fear not, the body have over 170 vulnerable spots, and if you hit any 2 in succession, you shut down someone’s central nervous system.
I never saw you as a survivalist.
http://www.fxnetworks.com/video/366089283752
i’ve been looking into this subject lately, somebody recommended krav maga for people probably operating from a position of physical inferiorty.
Make those common sense practices law, and enforce them, and maybe our rate of death from firearms would begin to appoach Canada’s. Up there they have more guns per capita than the US does, but far fewer deaths from firearms (per capita of course).
You got two problems there: no way in hell those common sense practices could become “law,” given the ascendancy of Gun Love and FREEDOM!, and it is so easy to say “enforce,” but what possible mechanisms are there to DETECT VIOLATIONS, let alone “enforce” via courts and penal sanctions? (And you gotta remember that “Law is only for the little people,” anyway. In America.) And how many HANDGUNS do Canucks have, “per capita?” Relative to shotguns and actual hunting rifles? And are those “sensible principles” also ENFORCED up in the Northern Neighborhood?
Of course there is always the Panopticon… Yeah, that’s it… have your Smart TV (sic) and cell phone cameras and the eyes and brains of our New Automotive Overlords and all the other devices linked into the IoT, watch and catch us in the act! And REPORT US! And for sure, all those places where the people just don’t cotton to Teevee and come up short on the internet link-ins and all that, you can betcha that the nice simple solution of “passing a law and enforcing it is going to even make a serious dent into the 4-year-olds shooting their mamas in the back…
Oooooh, great visual I just had! The Smart Car reports on Mama leaving the loaded .45 with one in the chamber lying on the back seat next to Junior Jerkmate, and Wheee-Ooooh here comes Barney Fife zooming up behind with lights and siren and a call for backup, GUN, PARTNER! COOL! Mama is gesticulating wildly, can’t breathe to speak onaccounta the collapsed lung from the .45 round, and the cops riddle the vehicle with 9 mm and .40-cal and 7.62 and .223 rounds! NOW we are talking PROGRESS!
Um, well, here in Canada it is illegal to kill people by any means.
knives in cars apparently are the exception
http://news.nationalpost.com/posted-toronto/lewis-acquitted-of-murder-charges
Melissa Lewis acquitted of murder charges in death of boyfriend Jermaine Gillespie
TORONTO — Melissa Lewis, who stabbed her boyfriend to death in front of their six-year-old daughter, was acquitted of all charges late Friday night, leaving court a free woman, surrounded by her tearful family.
“Melissa was found not guilty on all charges. She was cleared of second-degree murder. She was cleared of manslaughter. She was freed tonight and walked out of the courthouse with her family,” said her lawyer, Howard Goldkind.
At her trial, the jury heard two competing versions of the fatal outcome of her toxic relationship with Jermaine “Mec” Gillespie, 25. Mr. Goldkind told court she was a battered woman who lashed out in fear to protect herself and her family after years of abuse. Crown prosecutor Jill Witkin, however, portrayed her as a conniving, jealous woman who refused to let her boyfriend end their relationship.
Mr. Goldkind said it was rare for a jury to grant a complete not guilty verdict in a case where the attacker admitted doing the stabbing but argued it was a justified act.
At trial, Ms. Lewis, also 25, admitted she plunged a 12-inch knife into Mr. Gillespie’s neck on May 29, 2010, as he sat behind the wheel of a car in Toronto. Ms. Lewis was sitting in the back seat beside the couple’s six-year-old daughter. Her father was in the front passenger seat.
I’d be all for strict handgun and assault weapon control. Out-right ban or severely limiting restrictions on those things, I’m all for.
Just moved from the US to Canada and thought I was moving to a less gun obsessed culture.
Wikipedia sites GunPolicy.org saying Canada ranks 12th right behind the cheese eating monkeys in France. The US is of course numero uno (fist pump and chant USA! USA!)
The entire argument of guns in one corner, ammo in another, defies the reason for some people buying guns for protection. If the ammo is in another room when the prowler enters, how are you going to use the gun for protection?
Who said anything about another room?
There are lock boxes that are fairly easy to access.
It takes me about four (4) minutes to access and open my lock boxes (in the same room, and starting from the assumption that I am in that room) and stick a clip in the grip and rack one into the chamber, all the while imagining that Willie Horton (NOT the Imperial Storm Troopers) or my Duck Dynasty neighbors are kicking in the doors and windows and shooting into the house. Do that at 0300 when you are fast asleep, it takes longer you know. And then how quickly will you become tactically oriented and ready to identify targets and hit center of mass?
I still have the guns and ammo and lock boxes (and thank you so very much for the kindly advice to deal with PTSD — been there, did that.) Because Gunz are Cool! They are some of the neatest and most heady of all mankind’s “innovations” and machines! I love the way the parts fit and slip into alignment! My 5 year old grandson is drawn like a bird to the snake’s eye by his mommy’s new Walther CCK! And like I overheard one tattooed troglodyte in a wife-beater T-shirt mutter, as he perused the latest edition of “Tactical Handgunner” at the magazine rack at Walmart, “Ungh! Shoot like THUNDER!”
The only “siege” I am really currently very much worried about is the investment (love the ambiguity, see “Middle Ages” usage) of the FL legislature by one “Stand Your Ground, Concealed And Open Carry Anywhere Anytime” Marion Hammer, the NRA’s most effective local weapon — “Questions And Answers With Florida Gun Lobbyist Marion Hammer.”
But we’re getting into the German Protestant Immigrant/Irish Catholic Immigrant terrain now. Let’s all just agree to disagree on the gun thing, and see about working some electoral magic to keep from having an “accidental President” fokk things up for ordinary people and the rest of the planet any worse than they already are…
Yes, it’s interesting how a warfare concept (investment) came into the financial world
I’m not tactically going to do anything. I have no intention of taking a life ( Not even to defend my own, it’s that whole Christianity thing.) My husband would be another story. If he felt there was a threat I suspect he’d manage just fine. He spent half a decade with the SEAL teams as a communicator and before that grew up around guns. He’s fairly proficient. Now mind you Kyle and his buddy were also proficient so I don’t consider it a 100% foolproof guarantee. Then again, life isn’t 100% guaranteed. People can either choose to cower in the corner or they can get on with the business of living. I’m in the business of living category with or without a gun around.
My kids were never drawn to guns. They probably sensed my antipathy to them. My father was an armed paranoid schizophrenic who went to prison for shooting a police officer back in my freshman year of HS(In Titusville FL back in 1980s.) Before that though he’d go to bad places and sometimes threaten to kill us and himself. Fun times-not. Because of my family history with mental illness(my father and my brother both took their own lives eventually.) I didn’t feel it was a good idea to encourage my kids to have an interest in guns. I taught them to consider them weapons, not toys.
*shrugs* I’m used to liberal sits having a way more liberal view than I do on gun laws. However, I do think that they are going about gun control wrong. Guns don’t have to be an all or nothing proposition and demonizing responsible gun owners is only going to mean that it takes longer to get reasonable legislation.
Very easy to access, even for a 4 year old.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/07/28/researchers-show-how-easy-it-is-for-toddlers-to-open-a-gun-safe/
A lock box is not safe or secure. Secure, to begin with, is attached to a building. If it’s small enough to be picked up and carried away, it ain’t a “safe” either.
But, for $29.99 we’ll give you all the protection your family deserves!
Anyone who buys a gun for home protection just has a screw loose, imo. How many people do that and how many stories to we hear about people successfully defending themselves from criminals with them? Essentially none. It is guaranteed to make the cops more likely to kill you if they happen to barge into your house ’cause they got the address wrong, of course, and that happens all the time.
I agree, scews are loose.
It begs the question what are the reasons for owning a gun. I think it can be broken down into three basic groups and perhaps a fourth.
1 home protection
2 hunting
3 overthrowing the government when the “in the course of human events” clause kicks in
4 guns are neat things (a friend made this argument to me)
1 as far as home protection the results are in and you’re safer not having a gun.
2 unless you’re subsistence hunting there is little reason at this point in human evolution as we relate to the greater universe to be out blasting bambi and daffy
3 good luck with that, generally winds up in reigns of terror or chaos kind of scenarios
4 I suppose guns are neat things, so are fungi and back strap looms
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0804-hemenway-defensive-gun-home-20150730-story.html
how many stories to we hear about people successfully defending themselves from criminals with them?
There are, of course, at least two possible causes for that.
Oh look!
Here’s one from the day before yesterday: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/customer-shoots-dead-hatchet-wielding-store-attacker-washington-state/
Was it a machete, or a hatchet? To begin with….
There used to be a time where people with guns took great pride in not having to use them to subdue people. Now-
“CBS affiliate KIRO in Seattle reports Boulevard Park deputies are calling the customer who killed the attacker at a 7-11 in the city of Burien a hero.”
Hero? I’d need a lot more evidence for that claim. Some sort of news story might help.
“and you never, ever, point a gun (loaded or not) at anything you don’t intend to shoot.”
The last word was KILL in my version of training. You’re aren’t trying to harm an animal you are hunting for food, you are trying to KILL it.
Which goes into the even less PC- Anything worth shooting once is worth shooting a few more times– bullets are cheap.
The US Constitution has reached religious status in zealotry with fanaticism of true believers, selective of course. The 2nd Amendment and a vague generalized “freedom” and “liberties” sort of defined in the Bill of Rights,except for voting which is full of voter fraud and cheating and must be limited and withdrawn as god given from imprisoned convicts, the 2nd Amendment has achieved dogma like qualities of a religious identity. In Texas, gun ownership is such a shibboleth, that it is a right beyond actual religious practices as witnessed in the report of a young woman who was requested to remove her hijab to have her face photographed for an ID in Autin’s SXSW cultural extravaganza. Austin and this showcase is supposed to be the bright shining light in the darkness of Texas gingoism and reactionary backwardness. Apparently, having your face fully revealed but wearing a headscarf is too much religious freedom, but for guns, there can never be enough rights to carry, concealed or open in any place or at any time, no matter the tragic counter productive consequences.
The Invocation of the freedoms of the Bill of Rights, in particular the 2nd Amendment, has reached such hysteria of defensiveness and militant need to proclaim its inviolable qualities, provocatively marching around in open display with assault rifles, semi-automatic handguns, shotguns and all other personal armament has become the requirement to be a truly free American citizen, a necessity as much a holy pilgrimage to Mecca. The emotional anger and outpouring of violent threats against anyone besmirching this holy of holies, of omnipresent gun ownership, is the moral equivalent of Muslim riots over cartoonists drawing the Prophet Muhammad.
The willingness to senselessly get shot dead in a confrontation with federal authorities over the intangible beliefs in the Constitution, as seen most recently in the killing of the Oregon Wildlife militant, is used as a recruiting tool, invoking democracy, freedom, limited government and unfettered individual libertarianism, no different than a slick ISIS recruiting social media invocation of Allah and his Prophet. The intended result to raise up heavily armed combatants willing to kill and be killed from everyday civil society is a remarkable achievement of agitprop, from the American Conservative movement to ISIS. We used to say Amerika eats its young during the Viet Nam War/Civil Rights era, now the young are getting their revenge by shooting their parents in this neo-con/liberal twilight of the ideologies of the American Century.
Wait for the howling from the people with the guns grasped closer to them than their own children claiming they are not like to the other people with their guns grasped closer to them than their merciful god.
LDS, Mormons, are at least a part of this.
Question for self identified “Christians” in any national poll-
Does the word liberty appear in the bible?
====
New word- it shouldn’t– unless Joseph Smith wrote it in the 1800’s.
It’s pervasive…
omnipotence in a secular entity, in perpetuity…
infallibility of personalities, once every few years (my Messiah against your Messiah)…
sacredness of a document…
3 times in the NET Bible. I’m not sure what this means, but I was curious when I read your question.
Ezekiel 46:17. But if he gives a gift from his inheritance to one of his servants, it will be his until the year of liberty; then it will revert to the prince. His inheritance will only remain with his sons.
1 Corinthians 8:9. But be careful that this liberty of yours does not become a hindrance to the weak.
James 1:25. But the one who peers into the perfect law of liberty and fixes his attention there, and does not become a forgetful listener but one who lives it out – he will be blessed in what he does.
My guess is the word ‘liberate’ or ‘liberated’ appears more frequently.
“He liberated his people from the Pharaoh, or the Philistines.”
“year of liberty” refers to that silly “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” Jubilee Year… just sayin’… It’s in the Holy Scripture Bible…
Its a living document! Unlike our constitution.
What’s the Aramaic word for liberty? Latin?
Or even any mention of the word around the time of king james, in english.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=liberty
There’s much more, but no “liberty” that I can find in the time of christ.
Aramaic? Probably quite similar to the Hebrew: דְּרוֹר
The languages are very close (close enough that Aramaic is generally pretty easy to read for someone with decent Hebrew), but I don’t know for sure.
As in Leviticus 25:10 (the inscription on the Liberty Bell): וּקְרָאתֶם דְּרוֺר בָּאָרֶץ
Latin, why that’s libertas, of course (from which the English word originates via Norman French), from the adjective liber (“free”). Greek would be ἐλευθερία (as Samuel Beckett could’ve told you).
The English word “liberty” (originally spelled “liberte”) has been in use since Chaucer’s time. It’s used 39 times in the King James Version alone (if a quick and dirty text search can be believed).
So, then, no LIBERTY until when? liberte, maybe, i might give you that, but in a different context, a french one, which you seem to avoid.
Google doesn’t come close to liberty in translating your liberty bell-
“And Kratm Droֺr Bartz”
Am I missing something?
דְּרוֹר
Translates as “sparrow”
“Greek would be ἐλευθερία (as Samuel Beckett could’ve told you).”
Freedom?
Not liberty.
Libertas was a proper noun, as are most names.
Still striking out.
“Hence the phrase servos ad pileum vocare is a summons to liberty, by which slaves were frequently called upon to take up arms with a promise of liberty”
That’s liberty? I’d bet you get shot for claiming that in some places.
Funny how Libertas is mostly, associated with money and coins.
http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/search1611.php?hs=1&q=liberty
3 mentions, and all look like typos/misreading. Later altered/adjusted?
in the exact same passage the same word is spelled differently.
” Galatians 5:13
For brethren, ye haue beene called vnto liberty, onely vse not libertie for an occasion to the flesh, but by loue serue one another. ”
The first instance listed, Jerimiah, pre-dates Libertas, even. How is THAT possible?
The interesting aspect of this 2nd Amendment worship is how those people loudly supporting it have wildly misinterpreted it. A plain reading of both history and the actual language of the amendment make it rather evident that the actual intention of the amendment is to protect the rights of states to form militias, not for individuals to own firearms.
http://cdn1.theodysseyonline.com/files/2016/02/16/6359118906521238491618877634_bpp_demo_1969.jpg
Guns are dangerous, even to professional adults too…like friendly-fire casualty soldiers, or police officers accidentally shot by fellow officers.
Perhaps the solution is universal gun ban or, we go with robot cops and robot soldiers.
Like the robot cop from Omni Consumer Products? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9l9wxGFl4k
Or to quote John Drake, the fictional British spy played by Patrick McGoohan in the 1960s British TV show Danger Man (Secret Agent here in the States), who may or may not have been Number 6 in The Prisoner: “I never carry a gun. I don’t like them. They’re noisy and they hurt people.”
still remember the theme song. i think it might have hit the charts, as they used to say, back in the day.
“What President Trump’s Foreign-Poicy Team Might Look Like”. ATrump foreign policy will be dominated by relations with Mexico and the rest of Latin America, including California. The big question is whether or not the California DP will be able to maintain the internal discipline to treat a Trump election as a secessionable event. That would be much more of a political revolution than anything Bernie Sanders has in mind.
CalPERS is run by Democrats. So, probably not.
Actually, CalPERS is a “non-partisan” Executive Branch (Governor) agency made up of 13 members, some elected, some appointed, and some ex Officio state officers.
That is not to say they are not an insular, captured, and marginally talented group.
It just rained big in CA last weekend. I imagine Hillary will show up soon and take credit for it. Pandering to the Hispanic vote, of course. However, CA is majority Hispanic voters nowadays, so if Hillary’s ploy backfires, they could just vote to secede and then maybe merge with Mexico. We should have stole the whole place from Santa Anna back when we had the chance anyway. If anyone in the USG complains, they could offer to make San Francisco a tax haven, and I’m sure Washington DC would approve.
tell that to Albert Hammond and see what he says.
Hit it Boys! . . .
youtube.com/watch?v=-pyC7WnvLT4
da na na na, da na na na, da na na na, da na na na nana
California is NOT majority Hispanic VOTERS. While Hispanics make up ~34% of the ADULT population, only ~18% are likely voters. White voters make up ~60% of likely voters.
As for stealing California from Mexico, that’s exactly what transpired during the Mexican American War of 1846-47. Mexico lost roughly half its northern territory.
Not majority Hispanic yet but La Raza is the future. The question is whether the DPC can ignore that and maintain any credibility.
Exposing the Libyan Agenda: a Closer Look at Hillary’s Emails Counterpunch
The brief visit of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Libya in October 2011 was referred to by the media as a “victory lap.” “We came, we saw, he died!” she crowed in a CBS video interview on hearing of the capture and brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi.
But the victory lap, write Scott Shane and Jo Becker in the New York Times, was premature. Libya was relegated to the back burner by the State Department, “as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now desperately trying to contain.”
US-NATO intervention was allegedly undertaken on humanitarian grounds, after reports of mass atrocities; but human rights organizations questioned the claims after finding a lack of evidence. Today, however, verifiable atrocities are occurring. As Dan Kovalik wrote in the Huffington Post, “the human rights situation in Libya is a disaster, as ‘thousands of detainees [including children] languish in prisons without proper judicial review,’ and ‘kidnappings and targeted killings are rampant’.”
Before 2011, Libya had achieved economic independence, with its own water, its own food, its own oil, its own money, and its own state-owned bank. It had arisen under Qaddafi from one of the poorest of countries to the richest in Africa. Education and medical treatment were free; having a home was considered a human right; and Libyans participated in an original system of local democracy. The country boasted the world’s largest irrigation system, the Great Man-made River project, which brought water from the desert to the cities and coastal areas; and Qaddafi was embarking on a program to spread this model throughout Africa.
But that was before US-NATO forces bombed the irrigation system and wreaked havoc on the country. Today the situation is so dire that President Obama has asked his advisors to draw up options including a new military front in Libya, and the Defense Department is reportedly standing ready with “the full spectrum of military operations required.”
===================================================
Its like the dems feel compelled to prove they are as inept, incompetent, and incapable as the repubs.
I just don’t know – in a society that can’t forsee the potential disastrous consequences, and thinks making guns available to 4 year olds is a good idea, maybe this is just inevitable.
And why oh why would you bomb irrigation systems? Other than an evil conspiracy, hard to see how to reconcile that to what the US said was the threat…
I am not reading any more today….
Eveey bomb dropped is potential profit.
Come on, Dan. One lady does not a society make. Giving guns to toddlers is not something “society” thinks is a good idea, it’s something a very few idiots think is a good idea. And society doesn’t think destroying other countries is a good idea either. Like toddlers and guns, there are only a very few, very stupid, people (usually found in the upper echelons of power) who approve of that behavior.
I believe in my heart from studying the way Air Forces go about their business (which they always see as “strategic” “war-winning” bombing) that they simply follow a target list by rote. On that list are all the essential infrastructure that keeps a country going. It’s why in 1991 the US bombed the water and sewage systems in Iraq despite the fact that it was completely irrelevant to the goals of the operation and tantamount to a war crime as by its very nature it killed many civilians (especially children). Water, power, and sewage are essential systems, therefore you bomb them. No thought goes into this whatsoever. it’s just automatic. We did it even in 2003 when we knew we were going to take over the country, depose the government, and run it as a Mandate. It’s a brutal, callous form of Standard Operating Procedure.
How irrelevant could it have been? We always knew that the war was predicated upon oil companies making money off of Iraqi oil (Dick Cheney’s “Energy Task Force”), why not make it on infrastructure rebuilding by KBR as well?
http://www.ibtimes.com/campaign-2016-hillary-clinton-pitched-iraq-business-opportunity-us-corporations-212199
Feature, not a bug.
You assume that the Flyboys are conspiring with the politicos, when that rarely happens. The Flyboys in 1991 weren’t thinking about rebuilding anything, as the plan was never to occupy Iraq proper but to “defang” Saddam and leave him just strong enough to keep Iran from taking over but too weak to threaten Kuwait and Saudi Arabia again. The target lists exist for every country on Earth and are periodically updated, the coordinates all set for both “smart” bombs and cruise missiles. It’s just “plug and play” once the orders come down from the White House.
What is the Dr. Strangelove risk?
tantamount to a war crime as by its very nature it killed many civilians
Waging “aggressive war” is in and of itself a war crime.
So when Hillary describes Bernie Sanders’ talk of commie/Libyan-style government-funded college education and universal single-payer health care as “unrealistic” pie-in-the-sky fantasies, perhaps she is speaking from her own “vast policy experience” at using monies which could pay for such things at home in order to instead violently deprive others of them abroad. “The voice of experience,” indeed!
…can’t resist… It’s too much…gotta let it out…
He’s TOUGH!
He’s WHITE!
So believe he’s RIGHT!
TRUMP OVER AMERICA!
THE MUSLIM DIDNT WORK OUT
SO LETS TRY A CANADIAN!
CRUZ, BECAUSE GOD SAYS SO!
THE SECOND AMENDMENT IS THE ONLY ONE THAT COUNTS!
CLINTON!
BECAUSE
IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW
SHE’S RIGHT!
Wow! Beautiful bird. If I could start over, I’d be a falconer!
Harpy eagle?
That picture finally gives some scale to the size of them.
I drove by one who was eating away at a dead deer on the side of the road, I’ve sworn since then that it was looking DOWN at me sitting in the car. Great chance encounter, but I was glad that I was in the car.
It’s a big bird, but I think its size is slightly exaggerated by the bird being closer to the wide-angle lens.
Yeah, I get that. But, put his butt on the ground and he’s going to be lower than the bird.
That’s “taller” than a lot of what people call dogs these days, standing.
That’s pretty f’ing “big” for something that can still fly.
Also, the feet.
One of the most offensive articles I’ve read in awhile–National Review dumps on the white working class:
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/03/trump-inspired-classism
Yah, kakistocracy has made America grate.
According to the U.S. Census, in 2014, one in five U.S. children were living in poverty. That’s more than 15 million children. However, when you add in all the U.S. households designated as poor, near poor or low-income, the number of American children living in poverty goes up to 43 percent. To be more to the point: nearly half of children living in the wealthiest nation in the world are either living in poverty or near poverty.
http://scienceblogs.com/thepumphandle/2016/03/11/leading-pediatrics-association-urges-doctors-to-screen-for-poverty/?utm_source=widgets
And in broader perspective (put on foiling hat, salt shoulder, widdershins):
http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.it/2016/03/the-climate-emergency-time-to-switch-to.html
saw what u did there….
This price was just linked by Slate so the price will be getting a wider audience. I couldn’t believe that NRO posted such a piece.
Holds the presses–the National Review has discovered that WHITE PEOPLE TAKE WELFARE. Perhaps Reagan and his voters should be retroactively informed. But wait–those white Middle Americans who voted for Reagan are the very people this guy is excoriating?!? You mean its not just loathsome dark-skinned types who don’t just manfully take it on the chin and then lift themselves up by their bootstraps? What is the world coming to? (Yes, that was snark).
sleepy
March 15, 2016 at 9:44 am
great minds think alike – I just read that and commented on it too. It almost makes me wonder if the writer is a double agent for Trump, or maybe EVEN a SLEEPER agent for Hillary!!!!
Really, your just going to say to the repub base, your all lazy, stupid, drug addicted scum? He really thinks everybody in the country can be a banker??????????
AND THAN “It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be.” which is has been the INCESSANT blather from repubs for decades now!!! – – so it is totally inconsistent with repub propaganda as well. Just amazing….
I SO want off this Elite Crazy Bus !!
Oh lordy! Take Amtrak (please!) from Chicago to NYC, and see close-up the devastation wrought by capitalists’ need to squeeze the last drops of blood and profit from workers as they moved factories to ‘low cost’ countries. Jamestown, NY, now a white bastion of unemployment, underemployment, ill health and racism, struggling to ‘revitalize’ its architecturally rich downtown by staging a Lucille Ball (she left at an early age) festival every year, was once home to scores of furniture factories. Local forests, a river and a miserable winter climate which must have reminded them of home, attracted thousands of Swedish immigrants in the nineteenth century.
Nobody ever accused the Swedes of being lazy; dour, humorless, penny-pinching … maybe, but never lazy. Their descendants now live in the rotting hulks of once beautiful houses, deserted by the furniture factories which have long since moved to Asian countries, where we ship them wood stripped from old-growth North-West forests.
Meanwhile, back in Sweden (where they now provide universal health care, free tuition through professional schools, and 18 month-long paid parental leaves,) we visited an old furniture factory in a small town in the region of Småland, where most of the immigrants fled from. It’s now part of a museum, and all the machinery is run by an enormous water wheel situated on a small river, not much larger then a creek. The racket is horrendous, but it is amazing what kinds of intricate furniture the workers could produce. Of course, the water freezes up in the winter …. but that’s when the workers head off into the forests to cut timber. And, probably hunt a few moose for the larder.
The same is true of my small city in Iowa. I moved here 19 yrs. ago and it still had a Norman Rockwellish vibe to it.
But in the past ten years, it more resembles a mixture of Appalachia and Detroit. When the snow melts and everything’s muddy and saggy looking, I think of photos of small towns in Romania.
Lots of skinhead appearing white kids hanging around in the summer–looks like the English midlands in 1980. Sanders carried the caucuses here on the dem side. Trump got a close 2nd.
I often tell my friends here in Australia that America is everything, it’s a First World country…and it’s a Third World country. They rarely get what I mean when they return from their trips to San Francisco, New York, and Vail.
Yes, a good description you have there.
My area of Iowa used to be resolutely middle middle-class with few extremes. A poor family was considered a bad reflection on the community, and if a poor person’s house was raggedy looking, some volunteer group would go in and paint it and clean up the yard. Maybe that was a cultural vestige of the Scandinavians who settled this area.
Rough parts of US inner cities were always 3rd world in many respects, but it has now spread out to the small towns, at least here in rural, “idyllic” Iowa with no end in sight.
This is very revealing of the timeless upper-class contempt for the poor. I’m sure wealthy latifundistas, in Ancient Roman times, also sneered at the small farmers they displaced with slave labor on their huge estates.
How can anyone with even an ounce of humanity dismiss an entire human community as “morally indefensible?!!?” Here you see the latest neoliberal manifestation of the Calvinist notion that wealth equals virtue, and the lack of it signifies vice. Go to any of these places dismissed as “dysfunctional” in the article and you will find, like anywhere else on earth, people ranging from morally atrocious to downright saintly.
‘wealth equals virtue’……. and morality equals vice!
and the veterans whose lands they stole.
And a born tech-genius deserves wealth and fame.
P.S., thank you, Sleepy, for that piton.
Knee Surgery Can Create New Pain
My dad was an OR doctor for decades and his mantra is that too many things can go wrong in surgery; it should only be a last resort.
He wasn’t making what orthos do these days. 800k a year “average”, before the kickbacks for that $8000 screw that Boeing probably pays $1 for, at most. I do mean screw in the literal sense too, not the aptly figurative one.
“it’s titanium!” And it still doesn’t even come close to what you were born with. Lifespan- less than yours. Repeat business is crucial.
Labour neck-and-neck with Tories in poll for the first time since Jeremy Corbyn became leader
How dare he energize the electorate!
The blairite wing will be mighty torked off. Just as the Clintonite wing of Team D will be cheering against Bernie, and the chamber of commerce wing of Team R will do anything to stop Trump.
#ironlawofinstitutions
NYT: “It’s instructive to watch the video of Mr. Trump cowering as a protester stormed the stage in Ohio…”
Nooooo, really don’t think so. Mr. Trump’s reaction was so exaggerated and aggressive that I’m half convinced that it was staged. My main thought was, “he’s awfully old to be looking to get a punch in”.
You are saying NYT untruthful? Hard to believe. (sarc)
Humor. Better angle on the protester that stormed the stage. [Bernie supporters will get a laff.]
i835.photobucket.com/albums/zz278/bubbanomic/trump_zpseb2j1uvc.gif
(Warning: animated gif takes a few seconds to load.)
LOL! Damned armchair communists beshivering the crap out of poor citizens.
You mean this one? :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-9kZb9nDoE&feature=youtu.be
Coincidence that Trump was interrupted when talking about job losses at Carrier?
That bit about Carrier really, really pisses me off.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/07/nyregion/layoffs-by-carrier-corp-strike-syracuse-in-heart.html
Where were all of these people in 2003? When it might have mattered a bit.
“As it has across the nation, manufacturing has receded in the Syracuse area, where one of every five factory jobs — nearly 10,000 in all — have been lost since 2000. Carrier, which calls itself the world’s largest manufacturer of heating and cooling systems and equipment, was also the region’s largest manufacturer. At their largest, the East Syracuse plants employed 7,000. “
Why would Vermont legalize cannabis [Reuters article linked above] but prohibit growing it? You could possess the harvested plant, but not one that’s still growing.
Simple: the state wants to impose a 25% tax. Everyone has to be forced into the retail market so the state can collect its vig.
Of course, this policy could be extended to tomatoes as well. Slap a 25% tax on tomatoes, outlaw growing them at home, and watch tax collections soar.
In their dreams …
Worth remembering that a big argument during the Prohibition debate was that the government would lose all that money. Time was when it practically ran on booze taxes.
Do you know what the taxes are on booze these days?
Subsidized E85 (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) can be had for around the same price per gallon as for straight gasoline. $2 now?
Try to by any 170 proof booze for $2 a gallon.
Washington’s marijuana laws also outlaw the growing of the plant. The lawmakers are deciding to give the people their “soma” but tax the hell out of it. And our MJ rec stores are the only business in Washington that are booming. Someone should do a documenatry about the downfall of the “mall” and contrast it with the boom in “soma” business.
It appears Orwell and Huxley were future historians.
The irony is delicious. 20+ years of people pushing for the legalization of marijuana and explicitly saying the government should tax the hell out of it leads to complaints about the government taxing the hell out of it.
I can’t help but wonder if NORML never knew that Grover Norquist and corporate/PE interests existed, or if they were following the overseas tax holiday playbook.
Beer and wine are taxed, but you can still brew your own.
Most people don’t, because it takes time and effort, and the quality may not be up to commercial standards.
The same comment applies to cannabis. Weed is easy to grow. But it takes a lot of pampering and know-how to produce the exotic strains.
And liquor is taxed but is not distillable at home (in many places)…but I am still not sure why you think its relevant to my comment in the first place
“but you can still brew your own”
In some places and cases, with restrictions applied to the amount.
Yeah, and watch out for the ATF if you grow any tobacco.
History of the Mall:
http://backstoryradio.org/shows/counter-culture-2/
Daniel Shays anyone?
Back in the day, me and my buds smoked many a doobie on Daniel Shays Highway along Quabbin Reservoir in MA — Exercising our illegal freedom and enjoying the scenery. Hahaha.
Gee sounds like bit like present day to me.
Except that VT was a part of NY then. It had to buy itself from NY.
The thing about MJ is second hand smoking.
I think people can get cancer from that.
Growing tobacco at home was made legal only 10 years ago.
They’re just realizing that the biggest part of their local economy (by a factor of 10) is marijuana.
Straight cash out of NYC for all that good green mountain weed.
Unfortunately the full commentary is not available, but the secondary commentators comments are elucidating as well. It certainly clarifies that Romney thinkers have contempt for poor people regardless of race, creed, or religion…
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http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/432796/working-class-whites-have-moral-responsibilities-defense-kevin-williamson
Kevin Williamson kicked up quite the hornet’s nest with his magazine piece (subscription required) that strikes directly at the idea that the white working-class (the heart of Trump’s support) is a victim class. Citizens of the world’s most prosperous nation, they face challenges — of course — but no true calamities. Here’s the passage that’s gaining the most attention:
“It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.
These are strong words, but they are fundamentally true and important to say. My childhood was different from Kevin’s, but I grew up in Kentucky, live in a rural county in Tennessee, and have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand. Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim.”
….
Yet millions of Americans aren’t doing their best. Indeed, they’re barely trying. As I’ve related before, my church in Kentucky made a determined attempt to reach kids and families that were falling between the cracks, and it was consistently astounding how little effort most parents and their teen children made to improve their lives. If they couldn’t find a job in a few days — or perhaps even as little as a few hours — they’d stop looking. If they got angry at teachers or coaches, they’d drop out of school. If they fought with their wife, they had sex with a neighbor. And always — always — there was a sense of entitlement.
==========================================================
There are not enough pixels in the internet for me to fully express my contempt. I find it amazing that one would think that, and astounding that anyone would document it for posterity. Unemployment doesn’t cause problems if your only moral enough….
The commentator states:
“my church in Kentucky made a determined attempt to reach kids and families that were falling between the cracks, …”
So I take it the church gave up? How long did this “attempt” last before the god fearing stopped caring – because of course they have investments to make, BMW’s to buy, and Whole Foods is expensive. Turns out People with problems are sooooo undeserving!!!
Apparently, these people of whom he speaks came from people who did fine, and this plague of oxycontin abuse, marital infidelity, and kids who just give up sports just happened to coincide with the great de-industrialization of the US. What a coincidence!!! The only thing necessary for success in America is a U-haul….or losing so much money from your inept running of a too big to fail bank gets you more welfare than has been dispensed to every human in the US for the last 100 years….see, that’s capitalism (not in theory but in practice….)
But I am actually grateful to the commentator – for he unambiguously reveals that the repub establishment does not discriminate in its utter disdain and contempt for the downtrodden – they hate every poor person without exception. And people wonder why Trump succeeds.
What’s hilarious to me is how the RW has promoted all their “family values” crap for decades as the penultimate solution to “the breakdown of the family” and everything else that ails “the poor”. That problems of drug addiction, poverty, and lack of opportunity could be fixed with enough morality. Certainly not with money or a good job. Or a union.
And just as the pointy headed liberals have said, it hasn’t worked, even amongst their truest believers, apparently, for I’d bet you’d be hard, hard pressed to find a single unbeliever in “hardscrabble America.”
I would also point out the blatant hypocrisy of the RW Congress folk to think it can practice serial adultery, wear diapers while engaging in prostitution, ‘toe tapping’ in restrooms, cheering on supposed morally high-minded televangelists (who turn out to actually be gay), quaffing loads of oxycontin while pushing the ongoing war on some druggies, wall street insider trading, ad infanitum!…..all the while telling their constituents to be morally pure….
well,I gotta say, the plebes ain’t buyin what their supposed ‘leaders’ are sayin..anymore, with good reason! Same goes for the DW of Congress…
if you want to see poor hate you should hang around my family of democrats sometime…and they too wonder why trump succeeds.
That is projection.
Kind of like Mount Rushmore is a projection.
Wowzers.
I am not sure which is more stunning – the way the conservative elites so quickly throw entire regions of the USA under the bus for the sake of protecting their beltway status as lovable conservative losers, or the total lack of self-awareness.
Isn’t it obvious how much this piece sounds like a certain guy they criticized back in 2008 for claiming that much of “flyover country” was filled with bitter, angry voters clinging to their religion and guns?
ChrisFromGeorgia
March 15, 2016 at 1:16 pm
Well, I think you just hit the nail right on the head. And yeah, “bitter angry voters” – a cynic might think both parties have little concern for the dispossessed…- here I get the distinct impression that Trump, being an ostensible repub, is so, so, so much worse because he is a class traitor.
I wonder if we are conditioned to be this way or it’s a by product of evolution.
This is the puzzling enigma – we are more comfortable with a velvety, suave person who, under control, orders drone strike.
But we are quite alarmed (and rightly so) by another person who loudly proclaims changing laws to, reflecting an eye for an eye, ‘better equipped’ to take on beheading enemies.
Talking, in this case, is more scary than actually doing.
They are both shocking, but we’re more alarmed by one, and less by the other in our reactions.
MyLessThanPrimeBeef
March 15, 2016 at 2:00 pm
I agree 10000000% – the soft, silky, reasonably sounding calmness of “enhanced interrogation” and the bureaucratic justification that no innocents die in drone strikes because we just define anyone near a terrorist AS a terrorist….
Bitter angry voters?
Try having a rational discussion with a bunch of aging feminist crones about trade treaties, the Middle East and why supporting Hillary is national suicide for Working Class Americans.
I am glad no one interrupted his rant.
Now, we know a little bit more what we have to deal with.
Someone should tell the elitist buttwipe that Dick Cheney had a DUI, Jeb Bush’s daughter Noelle stole a prescription pad and the Bush twins got caught underage drinking.
The difference between them and middle class America is that middle class America is expected to face consequences when it screws up while the elites always fail upward.
I blame country music.
I’ve got swingin’ doors, a jukebox and a barstool
And my new home has got a flashing neon sign
Stop by and see me anytime you want to
Cause I’m always here at home till closing time
— Merle Haggard
Leave Merle out of this!!! He’s barely hanging on as it is!
I hope to God that Hag’s blissfully unaware of this primary hell.
Merle is a good guy, and most of his songs have huge doses of satire, which is lost on most. I’d bet he gets a kick out of that.
kuntry….
STAT goes to court to unseal records of OxyContin maker
March 15, 2016
STAT is asking a Kentucky court to make public sealed documents that could provide new information on how Purdue Pharma marketed its potent pain pill OxyContin — including what top executives knew about how addictive it was, and whether they downplayed the risks.
Purdue has faced hundreds of lawsuits and numerous government investigations over its aggressive promotion of OxyContin, which some blame for helping spawn the national opioid abuse crisis. In 2007, three corporate executives and an affiliated company pleaded guilty to fraudulently marketing the drug as less addictive than other pain medications and paid $634 million in fines.
Despite the years of litigation, Purdue has successfully kept millions of company records out of view through judicial secrecy orders or settlement agreements mandating their destruction.
A $24 million settlement in December of a lawsuit brought against Purdue by the Kentucky attorney general included such a provision.
But STAT learned that some documents in the case were not destroyed and are filed under seal in Pike Circuit Court in Eastern Kentucky.
The sealed documents include a deposition of Dr. Richard Sackler, a Purdue board member and former company president who is a member of the family that controls the closely held company — and that is widely known for the tens of millions of dollars it has donated to museums and universities. The deposition, taken last year in Kentucky, is believed to be the only time a member of the Sackler family has been questioned under oath about the marketing of OxyContin and the addictive properties of the opioid pain reliever.
The motion argues that STAT and the public have a constitutional right to the records that trumps Purdue’s interest in keeping them secret. The motion also states there is a substantial public interest in the case, citing the epidemic of drug addiction and related crime stemming from the abuse of OxyContin in Kentucky and other states. STAT is requesting the court make the documents available immediately.
http://www.statnews.com/2016/03/15/stat-seeks-oxycontin-records/
I have had knee problems for most of my life. About a decade ago, when I still had insurance, I went to an orthopedic surgeon with the idea that I finally had to address the fact that I needed to go down stairs one at a time more than once every few months anymore. Was scheduled for all the tests and a month’s worth of physical therapy. The doctor, of course, said surgery. I was seeing such positive things from the physical therapy. I said how about we continue that for the next five or six months and then reassess whether you should operate or not. His response was to tell me to get out and refuse the PT referral. I still had problems, but it came and went.
It is only recently when my knee is consistently bad. I still think a real overseen exercise regimen for that knee (obviously updated) is all that would actually be needed for at least another couple of years. But since I can afford neither the surgery or the PT, that is not happening any time soon. It is all what I can figure out on my own. But even if I could afford it, one of my first question would be “what would be your response be if you recommended surgery and I felt the need to continue PT for a while to be sure?” And if they said walk, I would probably do it before wasting money on the tests.
Walk down your steps backwards. Always. That will strengthen the VMO, the most important muscle in the knee.
Also do the Peterson step religiously if no one has shown you how to do it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=venxzC5TDfg
I’ve worked with Poliquin. He’s the top weight training and rehab coach in the world. Seriously. Trained and rehabbed more Olympic athletes than anyone.
does walking down steps backwards work as a preventative, also?
Yes…
I used to do a mile or two backwards in the military once or more a week and it served me well with the loads on my back and other stuff.
I have a very simplistic bar… put arms and hands out full length with over lapped hands… feet on tippy toes… like to do a push up… starting with you waist push up flat your entire body.
Skippy…. if you can do 25 or more your core and musculoskeletal system is well balanced.
thank you! i’ve been doing some stair jogging, i’ll incorporate some backward stair walking into my routine. i’m fairly old, so don’t know how far I should push my body, but i guess i’m finding out. the doctor is fine with it, but i only see him once a year, usually.
i’ve read poliquin and he knows his stuff
Rapid 164% Inflation in Price of Brand Name Drugs | Pharmaguy’s Insights Into Drug Industry News | Scoop.it
From lab.express-scripts.com – Today, 7:11 AM
Drugmaker consolidation, price hikes ahead of impending patent expirations and hyperinflation on older medications without therapy class competition all contributed to increased drug spending.
Express Scripts’ exclusive Prescription Price Index shows rapid inflation in the price of medications, with the average price of brand name drugs increasing 16.2% in 2015 and 98.2% since 2011. One-third of branded products experienced 2015 price increases greater than 20%.
http://www.scoop.it/t/pharmaguy-s-take-on-drug-industry-news/p/4061203268/2016/03/15/rapid-164-inflation-in-price-of-brand-name-drugs
Like, who cares about “inflation” (aka “gouging”) of retail prices of medications here in the US of A? The real and old and new story is the markups from active ingredient purchase to those pretty caps and caplets and tabs and sprays and stuff. Here’s one report from 2005:
The chart below speaks for itself.
Celebrex 100 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $130.27
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.60
Percent markup:
21,712%
Claritin 10 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $215.17
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.71
Percent markup: 30,306%
Keflex 250 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $157.39
Cost of general active ingredients: $1.88
Percent markup: 8,372%
Lipitor 20 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $272.37
Cost of general active ingredients: $5.80
Percent markup: 4,696%
Norvasc 10 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $188.29
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.14
Percent markup: 134,493%
Paxil 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $220.27
Cost of general active ingredients: $7.60
Percent markup: 2,898%
Prevacid 30 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $44.77
Cost of general active ingredients: $1.01
Percent markup: 34,136%
Prilosec 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $360.97
Cost of general active ingredients $0.52
Percent markup: 69,417%
Prozac 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets) : $247.47
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.11
Percent markup: 224,973%
Tenormin 50 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $104.47
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.13
Percent markup: 80,362%
Vasotec 10 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $102.37
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.20
Percent markup: 51,185: 51,185%
Xanax 1 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets) : $136.79
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.024
Percent markup: 569,958%
Zestril 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets) $89.89
Cost of general active ingredients $3.20
Percent markup: 2,809%
Zithromax 600 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $1,482.19
Cost of general active ingredients: $18.78
Percent markup: 7,892%
Zocor 40 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $350.27
Cost of general active ingredients: $8.63
Percent markup: 4,059%
Zoloft 50 mg
Consumer price: $206.87
Cost of general active ingredients: $1.75
Percent markup: 11,821% “The Cost of Medicines,”
There was a brave lower-level functionary woman at the Department of Commerce who, on her own, outside her employment scope, dared to pull up all that information as I recall even earlier, put it in a report or letter with the Agency letterhead on it, and got promptly fired.
There’s reasons the Few prosper and the rest of us can “Go die. Quietly. On the cheap. After we’ve been fleeced.”
And any apologists for this, spare us the BS about the cost of studies and packaging and advertising. At east the Euro faces of Pharma have to stay a little redder when they get slapped for gouging… does not happen here, for all the well known reasons (actually only one, Markets…)
Today and tomorrow are Fed Meetin’ days!
Predictably the market is down, but not that much because they’ve convinced themselves the Fed is on hold forevah.
Just to liven things up this go around, I dug up a youtube clip of the famous ET – Little Girl Scream Scene. Now, make believe ET is Mr. Market and Janet is the little girl…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld9kRxfEEcw
From the Bloomberg article on Toms River N.J.:
It almost surely violates both state and federal law to use public funds for gender-segregated public services, tailored to the practices of a particular religious sect.
Why don’t state officials intervene? Because bloc voting means “one-stop stopping” for thousands of votes. So it’s convenient to turn a blind eye.
That leaves litigation, which is being pursued in East Ramapo N.Y. where a similar situation prevails — a Hasidic-majority school board, using public funds to provide buses to their yeshivas, while slashing spending on the public schools attended by Hispanic and Haitian kids.
The bottom line for Hispanic and Haitian minorities in East Ramapo was summarized in a Journal News article a couple of years ago:
Girls in separate buses….why it’s almost like Sharia Law. Funny our MSM doesn’t talk about this much (more sarc).
A lot of religions are like that.
And people say they can’t find any common ground.
I’m all for religious tolerance, but as Haygood says if it violates the law then we lefties should get just as huffy as we do about, say, Hobby Lobby. The Bloomberg story in links said orthodox real estate agents are refusing to show houses to gentiles, a definite civil rights violation.
Have vowed not to use the T word today but one suspects that many of those outraged by the Republican candidate could care less about Muslims and are just using the issue as a club. Political correctness, like morality itself, can be a very selective weapon.
Carolinian
March 15, 2016 at 1:30 pm
I agree
Schwartz, a lawyer who since has been elected board president, thundered on about his right as a resident — and Orthodox Jew — to hold his seat: “You don’t like it? Find yourself another place to live!”
Irony, thy name is Schwartz…
Now, if people want to self segregate, or associate with like minded…..they can go buy all the acreage they can get their paws on and gallivant about nude, or whatever, all they want. But if your living in a municipality, you don’t get to ignore all those other laws…
A google search for Mehadrin bus lines should give a sense of the problems the orthodox community has gotten into on this issue. If I remember correctly, they were recently forced to end such practice in NY. If you take Haaretz reporting seriously, you should also be able to find a few articles re: public unhappinesses over the use of public funds to subsidize bus service.
School busses are HUGE business. First, they burn lots of fuel. Second, they supply lots of munis- someone has to borrow the tax free, fully collateralized money so that the busses, wall st, family trusts and the oil industry keep moving!
In some places busses are over half of the school budget. But..teachers make too much!
I did my small part today voting for Bernie. I went at what I thought would be a slow time (10am) and about half the booths were taken, so based on this anecdote expect high turnout in IL.
Interesting. Thanks for the update – and Bernie vote!
The Apple/DoJ link at EmptyWheel worked earlier, but now appears to have been taken down. I read it early this morning. If the DoJ actually takes the step of demanding control of Apple’s core intellectual property – it’s operating system – I predict IT companies reincorporating in other countries, out of DoJ control. Companies incorporate elsewhere to avoid US taxes. Incorporating elsewhere to avoid US property theft wouldn’t be unexpected.
More from ZDNet on the Apple/DoJ conflict.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-apple-decided-it-had-to-go-to-war-with-the-fbi/?tag=nl.e539&s_cid=e539&ttag=e539&ftag=TRE17cfd61
Your next car will be hacked. Will autonomous vehicles be worth it? -Guardian
There is actually a big difference between the shift from horses to automobiles and the shift of human driven cars to fully automated vehicles. Namely, the owners of the horse driven vehicles by in large got to make the choice. Horses remained available and legal for a long time and were not phased out by, say, mechanical legs and so on until all you could buy was effectively a car. The way automated cars are being phased in gives no such choice at all. I don’t know a single individual who wants to give up control of his or her car to yet another bunch of corrupt data-insane megalomaniacs yet the legislation is already being put in place to make it happen under whatever flimsy pretense they think up on any given day. The one person I know and the few I have met in passing who promote such automation regardless of the overwhelming evidence that it’s implementation will be a truly dystopian nightmare, stand to benefit financially by significant amounts.
Right now, global warming just isn’t killing us fast enough apparently; we need technology harnessed to unbridled greed to do it properly.
No place for humans in the coming techno-utopia.
I previously thought only humans could do consumption. But recently, I learned that robots could replace humans in propping up the consumption part of the all-important GDP.
Attempting the peeks of craazy:
See (but not without your version of pain relief and time control) Solar Crisis:
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/19088/solar-crisis-unearthing-a-forgotten-moment-in-90s-sci-fi
No place for motorcycles in the insurance industry’s seamless dystopia, either.
So when I become old and useless, I’ll bust out the illegal two-wheeler from its hiding place in the barn, and go on one last thrilling capital-offense joyride, till they take me out with rocket fire from their security drones.
Hell, might as well strap a shotgun holster on the front fork, in order to shoot back.
So I guess my dreams of an actual “WALL-E moment” are just… dreams?
I can’t wait for driverless cars to get here. I am sick of rush hour traffic.
You can get self parking cars now?
old school- trains– the OG self driving car.
Please nobody tell Lambert – he doesn’t need the aggravation:
Digitization? Check.
Innovation? Check.
Entrepreneurship? Check …
Don’t be angry.
Try anger management.
Populists are bad.
Is this where all of the “Progressives who like to get things done” hang out when not running for office? O should turn this into a speech for all of those “retards” who refuse to “eat their peas”. I’m sure it would be very uplifting for them./s
‘hope-inspiring alternative’……… there’s that weasel-word ‘HOPE’ being pro-offered again…….like a soothing veil of death!
Ah yes…….. lets never forget…..’hope’…..
We hope we don’t forget to hope.
I’m here to spew inspiring alternatives and hope…………..and I’m all…. out of…. alternatives!
apologies to R. R. Piper
One has to fight the impulse to gleefully imagine Mr. Piper unleashed on the PPI people before he heads down to the National Review to pay them a visit. If I recall correctly, his original target was a bank!
“Ha…….It figures it would be something like this”
well you know what they say about hope and pandora’s box.
What? hope Pandora keeps a lid on it!
……..was she ever in Kansas??
which is the way things are
allan
March 15, 2016 at 12:51 pm
Long story short – they advocate Beer goggles for everyone!
And has the nerve to support the T.P.P., of all things. I mean that takes some serious chutzpah, to support the T.P.P. as your response to Sander’s and Trump.
“Help families save for homeownership: Tackle the twin problems of declining homeownership and souring housing costs for both owners and renters by creating a new, tax-preferred mechanism for down payment savings—“Home K”—to lower obstacles to homeownership, like tight credit and down payment requirements, for first-time homebuyers and to promote savings.”
excuse me but how in heck does this benefit renters? or did you mean rentiers perhaps? Besides I think homeownership is only declining from the bubble peak of 2007 or so, which never was sustainable.
DNC deadenders bitterly clinging to their trade pacts.
“reinforcing political tribalism” Heaven forfend!
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/why-is-trump-driving-conservatives-so-crazy.html#
But the rise of Donald Trump has provoked conservative intellectuals to express their dismay in existential tones. Conservative writers have used terms like unmitigated, unalloyed, potentially unsalvageable disaster to describe a Trump nomination and have declared that they are “fighting for our movement’s existence.” Marco Rubio has made this kind of talk the lingua franca of his once relentlessly chummy campaign, warning that the Republican Party “would split apart” were Trump to prevail.
{{{{You go Trump!!! If Trump succeeds in destroying the current incarnation of the repub party, he will have done more good for this country than any other politician in 50 years. Oh, and we see how successful Jeb! 2, aka Little Marco, has been}}}}
But the basis for the suspicion lies in Trump’s long-ago-renounced support for single-payer health insurance and his more recent promises not to allow people to “die in the streets,” a line that provoked horror in Rubio and Ted Cruz at a February debate. Before Obamacare, those too poor or sick to afford insurance routinely died from illness or suffered horribly. By invoking their suffering, Trump implied that Obamacare did something good.
More important, his history of liberalism and his aversion to letting the uninsured die in the streets imply that Trump lies outside the anti-government consensus that has ruled the party for decades.
{{{{truly repub apostasy to even imply that the poor should NOT die in the streets – what are street for?!!??!!!!}}}}}
The conservative movement seized control of the Republican Party momentarily in 1964 during Barry Goldwater’s candidacy, and completely in the decades to come. It succeeded in large part because many whites, especially in the working class, identified the GOP as the party that would protect their security and tax dollars from black people. Conservatives prefer to deny this history. “Liberals may have been fond of claiming that Republicans were all closet bigots and that tax cuts were a form of racial prejudice, but the accusation rang hollow because the evidence for it was so tendentious,” wrote The Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens recently, citing as counterevidence William F. Buckley’s break with a small sect of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists to help found the modern conservative movement. “Not anymore.” Now, he said, Trump had besmirched the movement’s long record of racial innocence. In a similar spirit, the Republican consultant Rick Wilson, who has spearheaded the party’s anti-Trump backlash, recently lamented Trump’s refusal to immediately disavow the Klan: “A generation of work with African-Americans, slow, patient work … we’ve pissed that away because of Donald Trump in one day.”
In reality, Buckley spent the civil-rights movement mocking Martin Luther King Jr. and defending white supremacy and spent the ’80s defending apartheid in South Africa. The Republican Party’s “work with African-Americans” is mostly focused on making it harder for them to vote, and Republican presidential candidates’ share of the black vote has declined from the mid-teens in the ’70s to the mid–single digits in the last couple of elections.
{{{{I’ve said it a zillion times – repubs effective, well planned, well designed, WELL DISGUISED and well funded institutionalized racism far, far, FAR exceeds in evil Trump’s bluster}}}}
The secret fear lying beneath Rubio’s accurate depiction of Trump as a “con artist” is that Republican voters are easy marks. The Republican Party is constructed as a machine: Into one end are fed the atavistic fears of the white working class as grist, and out the other end pops The Wall Street Journal editorial-page agenda as the finished product.
{{{{trump shows that the repubs as a whole are nothing but con artists, and far, far more ruthless and greedy than he. Again, I state for the record that I don’t think the majority of Trump supporters are driven mostly by race, but mostly by economic hardship – something that is a dagger at the throat of repubs and something repub orthodoxy cannot abide}}}}
But if social liberals also conceded this they’d have to admit their culpability in the class war between the middle class and working class. Free trade agreements are filled with protections for middle class professionals after all. The appeal of identity politics, meritocracy, and other measures has worked for so long because it enables these people to maintain their privileged status while holding the moral high ground. Incidentally this is one of the reasons why I think the Democratic Party won’t survive a Hillary presidency.
According to John K. Galbraith in the Culture of Contentment (read: privilege) this era would be brought to an end by any one of the following; a foreign misadventure, a deep economic malaise, and/or a revolt of the lower order. That was most certainly alarmist back in 1992. In the present day we have suffered through or begun to experience all of the above.
Oh, I agree!
At one time I would have given them the benefit of the doubt, and thought they just got free trade wrong (I did!)….but with their support of TPP, it is pretty obvious they are just much smoother and silky liars than the repubs (because the dem audience likes chardonnay, while the repubs like pabst…)
If middle class professionals have so many protections why H1Bs? Hmm maybe not so many protections afterall …
I think there are certain subsets that may be protected but the flood of H1Bs into many professions proves it’s not every middle class job.
Rattner Wins SEC Approval for Dealmaking Role With Guggenheim
The former head of Quadrangle Group, Rattner has faced limits on his financial activities after the 2010 resolution of an SEC probe into kickbacks in connection with a New York state pension fund. Guggenheim stated that he would have to meet regularly with compliance staff and face restrictions in a new role, according to an SEC summary of the firm’s application.
“Rattner will not, directly or indirectly, solicit, receive, or manage investments from any public pension funds, and will not appear in any capacity before any public pension fund,” according to the SEC document. “Rattner will not maintain, or be the registered representative for, any customer accounts, and will not have contact with any retail customers.” Guggenheim also owns an asset-management business.
Rattner is chairman of Willett Advisors, which invests the personal assets and a family foundation tied to Michael Bloomberg, the majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP. Under the SEC order, Rattner is prohibited from providing advice to Bloomberg LP.
‘Fully Committed’
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-15/rattner-wins-sec-approval-for-dealmaking-role-with-guggenheim
no shame in financial crime…only upward mobility.
Wow!
I guess I shouldn’t be shocked. I guess just like working in a morgue inures you to human carnage, working in finance must make one nose blind to the stink of corruption…
the ‘RATMAN’
could be a new anti-Super Hero.
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/sanders-sends-vegan-thugs-to-attack-peace-loving-nazis
It’s human nature even the cruelest find opportunities for peace, when it suits them.
And also human nature that some vegetarians can be very blood thirsty. And vegans are not exceptional when it comes to having some black sheep, by extension.
if you didn’t read it, it’s satire. sanders didn’t actually send anybody, vegan or not. trump creates an atmosphere where violence is more likely to ensue, and i’ve read that he picks locations for his speeches with that in mind.
i don’t know anything about the relative percentages of violence prone vegans vs. violence prone right wingers, but in my experience you are much more likely to find these people on the right wing.
I sensed it was satire, but was not comfortable with the stereotyping.
One vegetarian gone bad could do just as much, if not more, damage.
hitler was a vegetarian, or so i’ve heard/read
This is the kind of humor one used to be able to find at the Onion. RIP the Onion.
USA uses TPP-like trade-court to kill massive Indian solar project
Not really. The panel wants the DCR (Domestic Content Requirement) modified so that it actually benefits Solar projects, Indian solar manufacturers and developers.
From the panel report,
Indian Manufacturers agree.
Indian Solar Developers also agree that the DCR requirement is not beneficial to solar development.
Also, India lacks the ability to ensure the supply of the raw materials necessary to domestically produce and utilise solar cells and modules, thus ensuring a continuous and affordable supply of solar cells.
The panel’s conclusion,
13 Million cannot be a good number. The analysis does not include the number of people who must relocate due to flooding of key infrastructure (sanitation plants serving suburban or urban areas), leaving an area uninhabitable.
For example the Orange County, (Fountain Valley) CA Sanitation plant alone serves:
In Southern California we’d need to include similar number from San Diego, Los Angeles, Ventura County, Santa Barbara County, and another half dozen areas in the Bay Area.
That’s 10-12 sets of 1 to 2.5 million people which blows past the 13 million, to 10 to 30 Million, affected from California alone.
Now let’s add Washington state, and then the Was-NY-Bos area and we can get to 50 Million.
I haven’t estimated the Florida-Alabama-Louisiana-Mississippi-Text gulf area, but that has to be10 to 20 million also affected.
Giving a range, based on my rough estimates, of 30 to 100 Million affected.
no no……..the State of WA. and the Prov. of BC. are gonna build a Lock at the entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca don’t ya know:)
polecat,
Who told you? WHO TOLD YOU?
Remain in your present location. Wait for the knock on the door.
I have the pontoon boat ready…..just in case the lock project isn’t completed……..in time.
Of course, there’s two overdue “events” in the PNW: the eruption of Mount Rainier, which likely will put a dent in the Microsoft-Other Tech lifestyles; and a big slip of a couple of those tectonic plates that when it happened in the past, sent a wall of seawater a couple of hundred high sweeping the landforms of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound all the way up to the feet of the mountains…
I’ll take my chances with “slow change” here in FL — even with the hurricanes. Like the Rich Sh!ts, I’m about to turn 70, and so I know that I will likely be dead and beyond caring when the outyear bad stuff happens… “Apres ils, le deluge” and all that. Though I don’t have a Gulfstream or megayacht on call, to whisk me away to Elysium if I ain’t right about the timing.
Oh Joy!….I have a front row seat for the 2nd event, should it happen in my lifetime ;(
Baker would most likely erupt before Rainier…..at least I’d be able to observe that event, just by walking several blocks (city, not fault) north from my home…..
how about central and south america?
Don’t ferget all the oceanside nuke plants, each of which has more stockpiled nuclear waste than Fuku….
oh great…heated water….for the big ‘lobster’ pot!
Well, I read the original article at latimes.com and MOST of the 13 million of directly flooded will be in the East Coast/Gulf Coast. California was listed at ~ 1-2 million people directly affected.
The 13 million number reflects a full 6′ sea level rise (not the conservative 3′ rise). However, you are correct to anticipate the effects on millions more people from loss of infrastructure. Sea level rise also affects stream/river flow which will impact inland areas with rainstorm flooding (see: Louisiana).
California has done initial studies on sea level rise and the most heavily impacted areas will be San Diego and Sacramento (delta areas).
Bank of America Hires Ex-Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt
Now this is a “a hope-inspiring alternative to populist outrage and the false remedies of nativism, protectionism and democratic socialism” [see Will Marshall quote above] we can all believe in.
Anybody, no matter their background, can grow up to be President or Prime Minister and then work for a TBTF bank.
RE: Antidote:
That’s one big, bad-ass bird.
My guess is: Ornate Hawk-eagle, Spizaetus ornatus
The possible clue is the handler and the white-wash adobe style building (South America vernacular).
South/Central America is its’ distribution. Of course, the bird itself has corroborating morphological characteristics. Anyone else have an ID?
That’s a big, beautiful bird.
The Mongols worshiped the gyrfalcon, a small, but fierce bird.
They made jade carvings of the bird attacking a big, fat swan – the swan symbolized the lazy farmers that populated China.
Well, after further review, my guess is wrong.
It seems the Harpy Eagle, Harpia harpyja it is.
Bill, in Chicago https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20160315/austin/bill-clinton-makes-quick-campaign-appearance-on-chicagos-west-side
Where is Bill?
not in jail, ….yet….apparently !!
o Re. “After the Obama Doctrine: Who Will Maintain Order in the Middle East? | Atlantic” — Is this some kind of sick-joke headline, or did the writer intend “Disorder”?
They left out “pecking”.
Giant cat protest!
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/artist-sculpts-giant-cat-out-of-sand-in-protest-against-london-gentrification-a3203851.html