World’s oldest person dies in New York City, aged 116 USA Today (EM)
A bunch of people lift a house and move it to a new spot Boing Boing
Dung Beetles Navigate Poop-Pile Getaways Using Celestial ‘Snapshots’ NPR
Breakfast Backtrack: Maybe Skipping The Morning Meal Isn’t So Bad NPR (David L). Don’t take this too far. There is evidence that if you don’t eat until the evening, you slow your metabolism down, which makes it harder to maintain your weight.
IBM Creates A Molecule That Could Destroy All Viruses PopSci (Robert M). Great claims require great proofs.
Mossack Fonseca
Donald Trump Named in Latest Panama Papers Leak TeleSUR (furzy)
Brazil
Coup in Brazil Defend Democracy
US Diplomatic Cables on Temer Wikileaks (guurst)
Brexit?
Brexit would prompt stock market and house price crash, says IMF Guardian
Bank of England may need cash from foreign central banks as Brexit vote nears, IMF says Reuters. Imprecise. The first sentence clarifies the real issue. The Bank of England can create as many pounds as it needs. What it will need is access to euro and dollar swap lines for euro and dollar liabilities of its banks.
Grexit?
What if Greece got massive debt relief but no one admitted it? (Part 1) FT Alphaville. The problem is with debt maturities already out to 30 years and interest rates as zero tending to negative, debt “relief” (as in no haircuts, no reduction of principal amount) will not give Greece enough real relief. This is what the IMF debt sustainability review said last year and Greece is in worse shape now.
Stay or go, Brexit vote bound to unravel EU Globe and Mail. Important.
Ukraine/Russia
Putin: Russia will consider tackling NATO missile defense threat RT (guurst)
Putin says Crimea now free of reliance on Kiev for its power Reuters (EM)
Removal of Top Editors Signals Trouble for Independent Russian Paper New York Times (Swedish Lex)
Syraqistan
gtonpost.com/opinions/david-petraeus-anti-muslim-bigotry-aids-islamist-terrorists/2016/05/12/5ab50740-16aa-11e6-924d-838753295f9a_story.html” rel=”nofollow”>David Petraeus: Anti-Muslim bigotry aids Islamist terrorists Washington Post. True, but killing the wrong people is an order of magnitude or more bigger recruiting hook.
U.S. Navy fires commander of sailors who were held by Iran Reuters. EM: “File under ‘Fog of PR Bullshit’.”
Proof Turkish Intel Knew All Daesh Border Crossings Both Ways, Gave Support Sputnik News (Wat)
U.S. official: ISIS declares state of emergency in Raqqa CNN (furzy)
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Hurled Spear Takes Out Camera Drone NPR (furzy)
Huge embarrassment over fisting site data breach The Register. I do not get out enough. I have heard e of vaginal fisting, but anal fisting? Dr. Kevin adds, “Amazing that fisting is so normalized that people would sign on from their .gov or .mil email accounts!”
Imperial Collapse Watch
The Great Leap Backward: America’s Illegal Wars on the World Counterpunch (resilc)
Washington’s Military Addiction Tom Engelhardt
Those Who Wage Peace Can’t Count on the Media for Support Truthout (resilc)
2016
Donald Trump masqueraded as publicist to brag about himself Washington Post
The 217 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List New York Times
Donald Trump Refuses to Reveal His Tax Rate: ‘It’s None of Your Business’ ABC (furzy)
Warning From the Syrian Border: Trump Reminds Us of Assad Rolling Stone. Resilc: “And clintoon reminds you of who? Dr. Evil?”
Flight logs show Bill Clinton flew on sex offender’s jet much more than previously known Fox (yg)
Sorry, liberals. Elizabeth Warren isn’t going to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate. Washington Post
America’s Exceptional Lack of a Female President New Republic. Article: “Hillary Clinton has been a leading champion of international women’s rights as the former First Lady, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State. In my new book, The Global Hillary, I suggest that as a leading advocate of “smart power”—that is, combining America’s ‘hard’ military power and ‘soft’ cultural power—Clinton is arguably better suited to tackle America’s global challenges than other candidates.” Resilc: “I just threw up my breakfast……..”
BREAKING: DNC Vice Chair Says Maine Super Delegate Changes Are Not Allowed Martha r:
Press release from maine gop presenting facebook exchange between DNC Vice Chair Raymond Buckley and Diane Russell, sponsor of the maine state dem convention amendment and resolution on maine superdelegates’ voting at Dem convention. Buckley responds to Russell in turn, down the FB page at may 10, 4:48 p.m.
This is so patronizing/misleading, and it seems obvious he is trying to crudely undermine her credibility because he does not have a sound argument.
NY Lawyer Brings Court Case Over Primary Chaos RT (martha r)
Exclusive: U.S. plans new wave of immigrant deportation raids Reuters. EM: “How dare these irresponsible reporters imply that what Obama says and does on illegals are two different things?”
Lobbyists and Corporations, Arm-in-Arm Barry Ritholtz
Release of list of ‘Bridgegate’ co-conspirators delayed Reuters. EM: “Headline in current version of the story has changed from the way it appears in my Reuters newsfeed: “U.S. prosecutors to reveal ‘Bridgegate’ scandal co-conspirators (Reuters) – U.S. prosecutors are expected on Friday to file a list of unindicted co-conspirators as part of the criminal case against two former allies of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in the “Bridgegate” scandal’.”
Art Pope’s money helped create North Carolina’s ‘bathroom bill’ Facing South (Sevla)
Report: Flint water bills set to double over five years Detroit News
Faced With a Fracking Giant, This Small Town Just Legalized Civil Disobedience YES! Magazine (martha r). The “legalized civil disobedience” frame is really troubling on a lot of levels. As in this is narrowly accurate but it’s more confirmation that our supposed Constitutional right of freedom of assembly is dead, dead, dead.
Pfizer won’t sell lethal injection drugs Slate (furzy)
Retail Department Store Carnage: Amazon to Blame? Mish 12-Point Summation Michael Shedlock (EM) versus US retail sales climb on wages growth Financial Times
Details Emerge on Global Bank Heists by Hackers New York Times
Lending Club, a Story Stock That Skimped on the Details Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times
US recession worries re-emerge Financial Times
One Big Worldwide Bubble”: Cusp of 30-Year Bear Market in Stocks and Bonds Michael Shedlock
Global equities suffer investor flight Financial Times
Reserve nears settlement with SEC over fees and expenses PE Hub. So the SEC is about to rouse itself?
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation just sold off its entire stake in a major fossil fuel company Business Insider
Jamie Dimon calls community banker ‘a jerk’ Business Insider (James R). Jamie Dimon and Trump bully in similar ways….and Dimon has also penned annual letters to shareholders so grandiose that his PR firm once had to threaten to resign to get him to tone it down.
Guillotine Watch
Barclays banker accused of rigging Libor rate ‘hit assistant with [small] baseball bat’ International Business Times (Dr. Kevin)
Class Warfare
Monopoly’s New Era Joseph Stiglitz, Project Syndicate (David L)
Top 25 hedge fund managers earned $13bn in 2015 – more than some nations Guardian (EM)
Slavery conditions in chicken industry show that robots are ready to take this sector too failed evolution
I loved Uber as a passenger. Then I starting working as a driver Los Angeles Times. The math works only if you have a well depreciated car, as in 6+ years old.
Antidote du jour (furzy):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
223 comments
Comments are closed.
Ok, who’s the victim here?
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/05/trump-on-smart-women-theyre-manipulative-killers-who-use-their-bodies-to-get-ahead/comments/#disqus
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/05/fox-friends-has-a-full-blown-freakout-over-bernie-sanders-enslaving-children-with-socialism/
Wow. What is with these people and their misappropriated individualism? How in the hell do they expect things to get better if we never come together in solidarity and work with each other, FOR each other? This shit isn’t going to pan out “eventually” on its own, or through any high class trickle down (as both parties have proven). Capitalism is just as big a slave driver. Nothing is natural or just “happens”. Any system run the wrong way for the wrong reasons will yield devastation and disparity.
All these fools need to stop thinking in one dimensional absolutes. Just because you ruin a lemonade stand by standing out front, mixing the juices with an erect penis, doesn’t make all lemonade stands bad.
The basic problem is the U.S. is a fascist country already. Elections and tolerance for wealthy individuals are too important to American identity to disregard. Fascists appropriate the good from the past and attack anything that threatens the order with old villains. Obama whining about strikers and explaining how MLK would bring everyone to the table together to negotiate is an example of the appropriation. The fascist class can’t call themselves fascist because “fascist” is a bad word from the past, and fascists consider themselves to be morally upright. Unlike the Germans, we don’t have a USSR to fear, but the country is being run by people brought up with the myth of Vietnam betrayal and who became successes in the 90’s when American power was supreme. Much like fascists of old, they seek out villains from Hussein, to Assad, to those dastardly Russians to justify their rule as guardians of the state. We don’t even have public debates on foreign policy because we have to trust our wise fathers. They will give us a mother this time to keep us quiet. Fascists say “please” and “thank you” as much as anyone. The fascists have two factions, but even their kinder followers are outraged plebes would interfere with the order of things by voting for Sanders or Trump. The two factions are united on corporate control, destroying freedom, militarization, using fear to keep everyone In line.
Sanders is a threat to the order, and the fascists are united against him. Trump isn’t likely a threat to the order but certain fascists who have rubbed him the wrong way. “Individualism” and “socialism” are meaningless buzzwords for protected class and the plebes.
Yep.
As we slide into our neo-feudal future, under the not-yet-fully-implemented TPP/TISA/TTIP regime, traditional “politics” will morph into War of the Roses style struggles between rival corporate empires. The transnational kleptocrats will likely maintain some sort of government-like structures, and their attendant electoral theatre. The pretense that “citizens” have any real power, through their vote, is already being dropped.
Naked Capitalism linked to a wonderful Lee Camp video interview with New York Lawyer Jonathan Clarke who is suing the NY Board of Elections to count the Provisional Ballots, and he is Calling for Volunteers to help in New York. Check it out as the appropriate time to check the provisional ballots is after certification, so don’t let that stop you.
Lee Camp also says that Bernie voters are being scrubbed from the California rolls now. Is the Democratic party still using the faulty on purpose “free” Microsoft apt to do what it was found to do from the beginning, scrub off young and newly registered independent voters–Bernie voters.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/05/links-51416.html
video:
http://yt2fb.com/ny-lawyer-brings-court-case-over-primary-chaos-jon/
NY Lawyer Brings Court Case Over Primary Chaos RT (martha r)
…….
Another important question:
https://twitter.com/leecamp/status/730051014150246401
Lee Camp [Redacted] Verified account @LeeCamp
The Elections Board was paid MILLIONS before the NY Primary??, Hillary’s new money laundering, and much more……
video:
http://yt2fb.com/elections-board-paid-millions-before-ny-primary-hi/
Instead of “individualism,” think atomized culture. One in which the only effective medium is a monetary system designed to extract any value it enables, through group effort.
Yes, it enables personal savings, but that eliminates a broader reliance on personal relations and more on the economy as a whole.
I’ve been reading Leviathan, as sort of a lead up to Adam Smith and Tom Paine, and they point out that there is ‘natural capital.’ Which is entirely your own physical person, capabilities, and character.
This is my second attempt at the book, and only now do I realize chapter 4 is titled (or remembered as) ‘The Kingdom of Darkness.’
All books back then were sort of about the church.
NC published another great discourse on the coming horrors– http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-i-%e2%80%93the-vision.html
Very much worth the read. The shock of recognition…
I feel like I have learned something important about lemonade stands.
Wow. Sam Sorbo actually thinks there’s a resemblance between the mild hybrid socialism of Bernie Sanders and the horrors perpetrated by Stalin, Mao, and their puppets. Such historical ignorance is appalling.
So socialism is like a more virulent soda industry? Or perhaps I should compare it to big tobacco?
“they weren’t taught that socialism is the greatest form of slavery known to mankind”
Speaking of things not taught, there was, you know, actual American slavery.
Regarding Fasting: “Don’t take this too far. There is evidence that if you don’t eat until the evening, you slow your metabolism down, which makes it harder to maintain your weight.”
Actually the evidence does NOT show fasting slows down your metabolism. Decreasing your calories, while eating frequently during the day does lower your metabolism. Sometimes permanantly as in Biggest Loser contestants are finding.
It’s all about insulin/hormone levels. Please seach for videos from Dr. Jason Fung, a Toronto based nephrologist, in them he reviews the facts/research and describes how the hormonal system probably works and why current “dogma theories” are crap.
That is fasting longer than one day, That is not regularly not eating until evening. That it not the same as fasting. If you tell your body you are not regularly eating until evening, it slows down your metabolism till the time you train it to expect food. That it during the day when people are normally most active.
In general, the body is an adaptation machine, and we are well tuned to fight off starvation. As in the body downregulates if you give it “instructions” to do so.
And I have to tell you there are a lot of people who have medical theories that are unsound. I see this all the time in the world of fad diets and training, which I’ve been following with some regularity since the early 1990s.
There was a large-scale, well designed study a few years back that had 2 sets of people eat the same number of calories in a day. One ate some at 6 AM. The rest did not until 6 PM. The group that didn’t eat until 6 AM gained weight relative to the group at 6 PM.
I am in contact with a group that includes people who read medical research and works with conventional doctors as well as alternative practitioners (more on the orthopedic side). They’ve been aware of and using hormonal response techniques for at least 20 years. They have a strong reputation in the elite sports community for being rigorous and cutting edge. They also know what makes the difference between a good and a bad study. For instance, they were stressing 17 years the effectiveness of interval sprints (short intense training) that’s only getting in the mainstream media now. And the MSM is still not giving the correct protocol as to how to do it given basic sports physiology.
Gary Taubes has done great work attacking nutritional dogma in a very accessible manner.
Come on. Going eight hours without eating is not starvation. And your body “knows” it.
I’m telling you what the study results were. You can disagree with how to characterize the mechanism by which the hormonal response took place that led one group to gain weight relative to the others. The terminology I used is pretty much what the MDs/statistician who read and validated the study said.
The bias of our metabolism, to react strongly to caloric deprivation, is an anti-starvation mechanism. That’s why long term dieters have trouble keeping weight off. Unless you diet in a particular manner so as to keep those mechanisms at bay, or are prepared to modify how you eat permanently (as in your dieting level is how you eat for the rest of your life), you’ll gain most of the weight back, and sone people even gain more back because they’ve permanently reset their metabolism lower through dieting.
The only way that I have lost weight was to exercise in the morning and eat 6 small meals during the day for 6 days and on the seventh day eating what I want. You are not doing yourself any favors by going “hungry.” When you are hungry, eat something.
Yes, eating small meals frequently is even better (keeps blood sugar level up, keeps from feeling hungry when dieting and hunger when dieting too often leads to not sticking with the program) and the eating normally one day a week keeps your metabolism from downregulating.
Best results I’ve ever experienced were on a PSMF. An “unappetizing” option both socially and mentally but it’s incredibly effective and quick and doesn’t weaken you (long term) if done alongside the right lifting regimen.
That gets to one reason why many dieting studies (and exercise studies) are shit. The two activities go hand in hand to determine lifestyle and body form, and it’s simply prohibitively expensive (in some cases impossible) to get a representative sample that can actually stick to useful programs in both domains.
Fartlek Training has been around for decades, and got noticed more in the US running community after Lasse Viren and his Finnish teammates did well in the 1970s Olympics.
Does it depend on the individual?
I mean, the person who just passed away at 116, she loved bacon.
That was her secret.
I don’t know if it works for others.
I remember reading another elderly person said her secret to a long life was Dr. Pepper(which made doctors cringe)
Myself?
I suspect the secret to a long life is luck. No one chooses the genes they inherit from their parents and while we may be able to limit our exposure to hazards, we likely are not able to eliminate things that may harm us in entirety.
The worlds longest living person ever was a french woman who drank wine, ate chocolate and smoked cigarettes.
Probably got lucky that she got genes that resisted lung cancer and such even while smoking. Most smokers are not nearly so lucky.
I always get a kick out of reading about the lifestyles of some of the long-lived. I had an aunt and uncle who lived to be 90. They were both farmers born in 1910. They not only put lard into everything–biscuits, baked goods, slathered on a roast chicken, etc.–they fried bacon and eggs in lard for breakfast.
But being old time farmers, they also probably worked-off 1000 calories at daybreak before they even ate breakfast. And the light meal was always supper, and almost always the same–crackers crumbled up into buttermilk.
The worlds longest living person ever, Jeanne Calment, drank wine and ate chocolate regularly, and smoked up to two cigs a day.
None of that is advised for anyone else who wants to live to 122. Well, besides maybe the wine.
No other way to factor in how she lived that long except luck.
I’m partial to dark chocolate. All the cocoa and only half of the sugar as regular chocolate!
If you get to a massively advanced age (100+) then I imagine you get very tired of people asking you what your secret is. The temptation to come up with a troll answer must be irresistible. Probably they consider it one of the perks of living that long.
An old bloke was asked by a smarmy TV reporter the secret to his long life.
“It’s ’cause I ain’t died yet” was his reply.
As a habitual crackpot on various philosophy and science sites over the years, it is coming to be my impression the deep conceptual insight being missed here(which several of these links bring to mind) is that since efficiency is to do more with less, the ideal of efficiency is to do everything with nothing. Much as an ultimate theory of everything would be to explain the most in the most compressed form. Which is why they keep breaking down and running into infinities.
So we have this problem in a societal and economic sense, where those in charge see themselves as more efficient(therefore deserving of the compensation) than everything else, yet the overall effect is that we are being sucked into the vortex of a societal/economic/military blackhole. Yet any attempt to stop this needs some other system and it also requires efficiency and finds itself competing for the same ultimate goals as the initial system.
There are ways to break this down, but they will only work after the system implodes under its own contradictions.
Just a thought for the morning.
The same problem (that “efficiency” conundrum) occurred to me while I was working as an assistant store manager for a national chain. Aside from the bit about being forced onto salary and expected to do “outreach marketing” where the customers played on our own time (sic), the only tools the corporate management could apparently find to compel “efficiency” were intrusive and burdensome tracking and reporting mandates, backed by (naturally fake-able metrics); getting rid of older employees who actually knew something about the products other than the contents of “features and benefits” flash cards; pushing everyone below the 32-hour benefits-payable cutoff (and making anyone who wanted to play the margins and keep the declining benefits use their “paid time off” to fill out their hours every week); “managing” the number of employees in the store to “match demand profiles” generated by devices that supposedly could tell buyers from lookers with a photocell hooked to a mechanical counter (a “magic improvement” by a consultant who played BS and personal contacts in HQ into five passes through the company’s P&L, each time getting “let go” because FAILURE but zombies are hard to kill); said “management of work load” leading to one employee present and responsible for sales, checkout, opening, closing, loss prevention and the rest for a 10,000 square foot store with two entrances… I distilled the model down to “more and more work for fewer and fewer people for less and less expense with less and less resources, until no one is doing everything with absolutely nothing.”
The phrase used among the mid-level regional and area managers was that we lower mopes were to “strive to be the ball.” They did not much like it that in a meeting, I noted that ‘the ball’ is the item in a game that is kicked, booted, struck, pounded, powdered, driven out of the park, has its cover ripped off…
What sickened me was the pathetic eagerness of so many to embrace the behaviors driven by that idiot notion of “efficiency.” That mind set seems to have been well spread by our Oligo-Masters across most of the population, to where so many employees are happy to give up their lives for the Company, and do a Milgram on their fellow humans who do not appear to be “effectively efficient.”
Meantime, executive compensation went up up up, sales went sideways and down, and interestingly but maybe not causally, each of the seven different stores I worked at over a 10 year hitch was closed, in favor of two “superstores” and on-line sales of stuff people would preview in the flesh, then buy through the web site.
One more blip: the founder wanted to go off sailing the world, brought in “outside talent” including failed “geniuses of retail” from other chains. They early figured out the options-for-paydays scam, so when a recession dropped sales a bit, and the Wall Street analysts decided that “fill rates” were the key metric to predicting prospective retail profitability, the new guys gamed the numbers and shoved product out to the stores (stuff like fresh water fishing gear to stores that only had salt-water customers, and “branded” merchandise where the “brand” was a dead weight) and even faked the shipping data, to bump the share “value” up so the charmers could execute their options at a multiple of the grant price.
Black hole, meet supernova… After ten years of that, I lucked into finding nursing as a calling… Discovering that the dysfunction has spread to “health care,” of course, too… Ask a nurse about “efficiency” and what they have to do to meet their metrics and somehow provide actual care to patients… Under the threat of being “sent out” if fortuity and randomness lead to not enough beds being filled on the floor to overload all the staff who were scheduled to work a shift. Efficiency! The Name of our New God! Feed the children into the fires from its insatiable mouth!
I wrote the following over three years ago, but the issue is still ripe for comment I see;
My latest rant is that everywhere I look, everyone is attempting to do the same thing, especially businesses;
They’re trying to do the work of ten people with five or six people, and those people are under-paid.
Competent people move away from these conditions if they can, so businesses are left to run under-staffed with low-skil, or incompetent employees, which results in low productivity and dis-satisfied customers.
Because those people are under-paid and trying to do the work of two, they are depressed, and dispirited, they reflect that reality into the market.
Recently I find that in managing IT/telcom projects involving multiple vendors, I have to enlist the help of independent engineers to do tasks that the vendors in-house people would have done in years past because vendors are trying to deliver services without the cost of deep engineering resources.
Last month, I had a pre-sales engineer ask me “Who’s going to do the heavy-lifting on this?” referring to the programming necessary to integrate some legacy Cisco equipment with the hardware/services he was getting ready to deliver. Throughout the sales process, this vendor had touted their Cisco expertise. In the past it had been my experience that vendors would be embarrassed to admit they couldn’t handle every aspect of the job.
In the retail business it’s an almost universal complaint that you have to search for salespeople when you need assistance, and when you find them they have bad attitudes.
How long until nothing works because no one wants to pay the cost of doing business?
Not to mention the fact that people making $6/hr can’t afford to buy your products.
It’s an obvious race to the bottom, and we’re making remarkable progress on that front.
Every time I think about this issue, I remember the biblical reference to bricks without straw.
The beatings will continue until morale improves…
but the beatings will be delivered more efficiently!
Here in Australia we are being told we need to reduce worker protections so the economy can be “more efficient”.
So the complaint is always about the efficiency of labor in the society. But why don’t we include the efficiency of capital in the society?
I would think that efficient capital use, so capital flows as broadly and freely across the society as possible, would be to make sure their are no big piles of it sitting unused. Trillions of dollars squirreled away in Panama do nothing for local capital velocity, so the shopkeeper has more customers spending that morning. This becomes the argument for helicopter money, which is always proposed in the form of new debt, not more even distribution of the existing capital stock.
Tax holidays for repatriating offshore $ and investing and hiring locally would work. But man’s history is the lords squeezing the serfs until the pitchforks come out…the lords eventually alway overplay their hands.
“flow of capital” — someone recently contended that “capital” is just mines, farm fields, factories and stuff. The French word for that category, I believe, is “immeubles.” But why in another breath are the same people running with the notion that “capital is being sequestered offshore secretly hidden away,” or contrary-wise, hidden in plain sight right in our very own homeland?
Lots of people think they have mastered conceptual stuff like “the velocity of money in the economy.” If they want to use the science-y term, they ought to note that “velocity” is a vector — a magnitude, and a direction of motion. What vector path does “money” take, again? If economics, of course, is a “hard science…”
The capital that “money” represents, that is supposed to flow freely, like water over the landscape? Looks to me like the magnitude of the thing is growing — derivatives and leverage and shadow banking and all — but the direction component is all anti-gravity, up toward the higher ground where the “estates” are located, and all “centripetal,” in toward the axis of rotation. Some “force” must exist that counters what intuitively ought to be the “flow” of ‘money capital,’ out over the lowlands to enrich the soil and irrigate the crops that keep us alive…
Who will have the will and the power to create the ‘helicopter money” that MMT shows how to do, and overcome whatever magical forces are in play that cause the vector of motion of that large and growing quantity to be directed where it so very compendiously is currently, ah, directed?
There’s obviously a very good reason why “politics and power” are included in the header of this site…
Part of the problem is that we do view money as both medium of exchange and store of value. To give an idea how stupid that it, in the body, the medium is blood and the store is fat.
Much of this stored “value” is as public debt, which is why the elites have no problem finding ways for the government to borrow more, not tax what there is.
For instance, they really don’t budget. To budget is to prioritize needs and spend according to ability, but they put together enormous bills, attach enough goodies to get enough votes and the president can only pass or veto it. Given the momentum of all the goodies, there is a strong incentive to override a veto.
If they wanted to budget, they could break these bills into their various items, have each legislator assign a percentage value to each one, put them back together in order of preference and the president would draw the line. “The buck stops here.”
Which would completely blow up the system.
Money is a contract, as every asset is presumably backed by an obligation. The problem is we experience it as quantified hope and politics runs on hope, so there is a strong incentive to manufacture lots of hope. Which requires lots of debt.
Eventually we have to accept the fact it is a social contract and a public utility. You no more own the money in your pocket, then you own the section of road you are using. Its functionality is its fungibility. Like water flowing through the environment, or blood flowing through the body.
The crooks currently running things are cooking their own golden goose.
The irony is the creation of the Fed might have made risk public and rewards private, but it was a first step away from a fully private banking system, toward a fully public banking system.
I keep hearing that “every asset is presumably backed by an obligation”. I have a very nice 1-ounce small gold bar in my hand, remind me whose obligation it is?
Seems to me that money is a store of labor (whether that’s a farmer sowing a seed or a shopkeeper turning over his inventory). And the best store of labor would be one that is stable over time, otherwise the effective quantity of labor being stored goes down. The other thing that must be stable over time is *acceptance*. Cowrie shells and tally sticks met that definition for centuries but they no longer meet it.
The periodic table contains certain elements that are exceedingly stable over time, some of them are very easily recognizable, are available in standard weights, and have maintained their “acceptance” quality over millennia.
The other piece that must be disentangled is “money” and “credit”. They are hand in glove with debt-based money but it need not be so, money could be a very stable entity designed to preserve purchasing power and serve as a unit of account, and the supply of credit of that money could be very elastic. So every credit crisis would not automatically then also be a monetary crisis, loans, banks, and bankers could come and go without threatening the basis of the entire commercial economy every time they get too frisky.
And just as a reminder, in 100 B.C. a high-quality men’s outfit cost 1 ounce of gold. In 2016, a high-quality men’s outfit costs…1 ounce of gold. Show me a faith-based paper system that has that proven longevity and stability and I’m glad to look at it. The unfortunate fact is that faith-based currency systems have an average lifespan throughout history of just 43 years.
“But oh! There’s not enough gold in the world” etc etc. Certainly there is, you could base the world’s financial system on one ounce if you wanted to. It’s a matter of price. Didn’t MMT’ers propose that the Treasury issue a single platinum coin and declare its value at $1 trillion?
Money can be stable, but like blood, you don’t want a lot of excess, or it will break the system of circulation. Remember the comment by an earlier Fed chief, about taking the punch bowl away, when the party got going?
Basically it is a glorified voucher system and their trick is to try to create the illusion of wealth, but keep it out of circulation. When the price of a loaf of bread goes up, its called inflation and we think we are poorer, but if the stock price of the bread company goes up, we think the asset has appreciated and we are richer. Now if your perch at the pinnacle of the power structure meant keeping the majority happy, where would you let that excess money go? The problem is that after thirty years, the can has been kicked about as far as it will go.
Even a gold backed currency is a contract. For gold.
I don’t get the platinum coin thing. Money does have to be backed by some consensus of equivalent value or obligation.
“In the retail business it’s an almost universal complaint that you have to search for salespeople when you need assistance, and when you find them they have bad attitudes.”
If and when, which is rarely, I use a large retail establishment, like Macy’s, I’ve found the best way to get help is to step behind the counter by the cash register and stand there. People appear out of nowhere
“Can I help you?!”
“Yes, you can, I thought it was self-service here, I’m glad you are here to sell me something”.
And it is rampant in medicine. Doctors are subject to stupid metrics and efficiency which leads to terrible medical care…..and much wasted money and effort on unnecessary testing and surgery to meet the metrics. Of course the CEOS make hundreds of millions.
Felix, may this unable-to-work-any-longer nurse second your comments, in bumpers, about many, perhaps most doctors, the ones who have not joined the Business Coup at least.
But please do not forget the nurses: most are people who are drawn to actual compassionate skilled caregiving, who work their tails off trying to deliver care, and are routinely (in the hospital setting or in nursing homes) “sent home”(without pay, of course) if the algorithms or the managers or both believe the beds are not full enough to “justify staffing” beyond 9 or in the nursing home example, maybe 35, patients per nurse. Nurses who raise “efficiency” to an art form — every move they make has to be multi-tasking, can’t go to the supply room without grabbing extra bedding or Chux for the patients s/he knows will need them, be sure to have extra syringes and IV sets in the many pockets of the scrubs to stay ahead of the medications and IV starts and changes, every time you pass the charting terminal be sure to update and document because the workload makes it impossible to catch up if you get behind, expect that you will be starting early and staying late off the clock if you want to stay with the paperwork, keep paper and mental notes about multiple patient conditions and needs for orders from doctors who themselves are overworked or (too often) doing “fly-by” assessments from the nursing station to keep their collectables up, all in an insane environment that just gets worse and worse as the real Takers keep tightening the screws, because “one more turn, or maybe a turn and a half, or can we get away with two? won’t kill the patient or the staff…”
One of the many reasons people die or get sicker “under care” is work overload on the caregivers. One of millions of anecdotes:I started my nursing in a hospital setting where as a complete newbie with a couple of weeks of following another nurse, I was handed a little portable device that reported on the EKG traces of nine (9) patients, and told these post-surgical or post-stroke or post-coronary patients were my complete responsibility for the next 12 hours. Other nurses were presented with sudden jumps in patient populations due to “buffing and turfing,” http://wydailyarchives.com/2008/10/13/buff-and-turf-the-zebra-medical-slang-and-what-doctors-are-really-saying/, or situations where scheduled nurses “called out” due to their own crises, so thay had to make do somehow and split up the care of 27 patients between tow nurses or one and an often reluctant tech staff.
And many doctors who got all that expensive training to actually help people, to “practice the art of medicine,” are leaving the work altogether out of fear and frustration. As are a lot of nurses, burned out and demolished by “the system.” Some reasons doctors leave (and what is happening to the calling (joint MD/MBAs, e.g.) http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/827680. And even Forbes is noticing some problems with staffing the wonderful privatized horror that is Obamacare (sic). http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2013/12/08/doctor-nurse-vacancies-soar-amid-obamacare-rollout/
…last person to leave, please remember to turn out the lights? The electric bill goes right to the bottom line, you know…
Much, much truth here.
thank you for your service, something which i can’t honestly say to most military personnel. these days, i try to avoid going to the doctor, much less hospitals.
Another excellent article on the crapification of medicine was posted here a couple of years ago.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/07/money-vs-mission-how-generic-mbas-vs-physicians-think-health-care.html
Given there are a lot of people being swept up by the vortex, the counterweight to it is only going to grow larger. The problem is this system is deeply embedded in the culture and so even those being ground up by it still see efficiency as more essential than a healthy society. Or at least a more easily recognizable goal. We are very linear beings, but nature is cyclical. The trick will be to catch the cycle at the right moment and start to educate people to a more yin/yang perspective, so that when the political salesmen/bs artistes/religious conmen, etc. do try getting everyone herded in the same direction, enough will know better and keep the brakes on and stay rooted.
I could go much further into detail, but the general idea is basic, though lost in detail. I can’t even get the philosophers and physical theorists to admit that “tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns,” since there is too much conceptual and historical baggage built around time as this foundational vector from past to future. The times are going to change and the more it is resisted, the greater the potential becomes and the more change is possible.
Dennis Meadows, co-author of Limits to Growth, has noted that human systems will change through crisis, not strategic management. We’re right on course, especially with Hillary versus Trump shaping up after 8 years of Obamaesque propaganda presented as public policy.
Nassim Taleb observes that efficiency is the flip side of resilience. The more you have of one, the less you have of another.
Also this preoccupation with efficiency stems from the “science-olatry” of MBA thinking. Everything must be measured, and if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. W was the “MBA President” who started school reform by testing kids and assuming the tests tell you something accurate.
Ironically, the founders of the “scientific management” schools–like Frederick Winslow Taylor, who inspired the Wharton Business school–would alter their experimental results to fit their theories. That’s right, the MBA was inspired by con men. (See Matthew Stewart’s The Management Myth for footnotes.)
Where efficiency takes you depends on its goals. According to the free market gods, the goal is to reduce financial cost any way you can (with this in mind, why anyone would think the profit motive by itself would engender a sane outcome puzzles me). If the goal of efficiency is similar to, for instance, engineering design goals, then efficiency can lead to elegance, to applying precisely the right approach and materials to achieve a primary objective. But the process of reaching such designs is itself rarely efficient since it requires large amounts of intellectual effort. Economics would have you believe that the primary goal is financial frugality. But arguably a more sensible “bottom line” is how well the intended activity performs its prima facie function, whether it be health care or software design.
In that light, I once read an argument for redundant employment in the high middle ages. It pointed out that many jobs were held by two people, and as a result functions were performed very “efficiently”. Redundancy kept the system running if one person became ill, and the low stress enabled the workers to do their work at a higher level of quality than otherwise. And society as a whole had a high standard of living. But the bottom line against which this efficiency was measured was a far cry from the one we’ve been taught to consider today. Sneaky, huh?
Flight logs show inevitability isn’t as inevitable as HRC’s supporters inevitably claim.
Once upon a time there was something called Clinton fatigue and it’s making a comeback.
Flight logs show that “Bill” took 26 flights on Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express.”
So naturally the Saddam’s WMDs paper runs an article today titled “How Trump Behaved With Women in Private.” Look over there — shiny!
If Huma is known as “Mrs Carlos Danger,” it follows that Hillary is “Mrs Lolita Express.”
Irony: the pervy spouse of the woman who wants to be our first female president is a molester of underage girls, who still appears on the campaign trail at her invitation.
On the Clinton coat of arms appears the motto Jus Primae Noctis, under the bar sinister of Cthulhu.
Cthullary 2016!
There once was a pres from Nantucket
Who flew on the Lolita junket.
While up in the air
He….
(sorry, family blog)
How about getting worked up over the fact that Epstein’s secret plea deal before indictment on what should have been hundreds of charges could be ‘handed up’ only represents the latest instalment in the long and ongoing pattern of international elite pedophile protection. See Jimmy Savile, Marc Dutroux, etc.
Yes. Apparently, two of Epstein’s victims (Jane Doe #1 and #2) have had a lawsuit pending since 2008, seeking to overturn Epstein’s extraordinarily lenient plea deal on the grounds that it was kept secret from Epstein’s victims until concluded, in violation of the federal CVRA statute.
If the victims’ allegations are correct, Epstein’s plea deal with federal prosecutors involved deep-seated corruption of the judicial process, at the behest of powerful, prominent people who availed themselves of the lubricious delights of Epstein’s Lolita Express.
That this lawsuit has been strung out for eight years is telling in itself. Can a federal judge upend a top-level conspiracy without being Arkancided? After reading this summary, you may feel that the system has been subverted beyond repair by a deep-state international pedophile ring which includes Hillary’s husband:
Jim Haygood
May 14, 2016 at 11:04 am
Federal prosecutors in Florida intentionally kept underage victims of billionaire perv Jeffrey Epstein in the dark about his plea deal, newly unsealed court papers reveal.
The documents also show prosecutors wanted to keep the extent of Epstein’s alleged sex crimes away from a judge reviewing the deal.
“I will include our standard language regarding resolving all criminal liability and I will mention ‘co-conspirators,’ but I would prefer not to highlight for the judge all of the other crimes and all of the other persons that we could charge,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Marie Villafana wrote to one Epstein lawyer in September 2007.
Another email shows she agreed to stop sending notifications about the non-prosecution deal to 34 underage girls Epstein allegedly sexually preyed upon after his lawyers complained.
The feds say they struck the deal in return for Epstein pleading to state charges involving a single victim.
===============================================
If even a fraction of this article is true, it just shows that as I have long suspected, the legal system of the US is thoroughly corrupt.
However, I am still actually shocked – corruption to get away with financial crimes seems indisputable to me – but to get away with sex crimes, and sex crimes with minors…..
Hey, those Afghan warlords and nominal “holy men” get to fokk lots of little boys, and our troops, those who think it is wrong, are supposed to ignore that stuff ” because it’s their culture.” All while our Brass are fokking up what there was of “their culture” left, right and center. Opium production, disappeared billions and disappeared people, oh and what happened to that R2P “the poor women and children?” Hypocrisy and corruption and pain and death and unaccountability and nought but pleasure for the fokkers who rule us…
‘However, I am still actually shocked – corruption to get away with financial crimes seems indisputable to me – but to get away with sex crimes, and sex crimes with minors…..’ — fresno dan
One constantly reads of lost souls who get sent to prison for decades, for having child porn on their computers.
These ostracized convicts didn’t personally abuse any minors. They were just downstream, secondary or tertiary consumers of the images. But they receive savage, life-changing punishment from our judicial system.
Whereas well-connected protagonists like Jeffrey Epstein, who actually recruit and molest minors and make videos to prove it, get off with sweetheart plea deals.
How low can we go?
Don’t ask.
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2013/06/roger_springfield_gets_10_mont.html
“However, Miller said he thought a sex offender registration requirement would be “unduly harsh.”
He said factors he considered before ruling out registration included Sprinfield’s age, clean record, lack of sexual contact with victims and willingness to seek treatment.
Defense attorney Jim McGraw presented the judge with a psychologist’s report in March stating that Springfield’s actions were not sexually motivated. McGraw would not elaborate on the contents of the report after sentencing.”
The same DA, fitzpatrick, who was co-chair of the moreland omission.
How can he be “willing to seek treatment” but not able to admit that it was “sexually motivated”, whatever that means?
This is also probably related to Bernie Fine’s wife, it happened at around the same time, while the NCAA was in town “instigating” for over 8 years?–
http://nypost.com/2012/01/31/bernie-fines-wife-had-sex-with-players-court-papers-reveal/
She sued ESPN for libel. It just got settled. She lost, but kept most of the nastiest stuff just under the radar of local media and national sports media.
And in case it was in any doubt, no the NCAA didn’t find anything, except that a few grad students did homework for one of the star BB players.
….actions were not sexually motivated….Done, case closed.
Jim Haygood
May 14, 2016 at 4:34 pm
Your exactly right. For all the advertising spent on “a nation of laws, not men” and “equal justice under law” it all depends on how much coin you have…
It just seems to me that it is getting more and more blatant, but – thus as it ever was – OR is it really getting worse and worse?
Maybe taking in account inflation, its no worse than Pat Nixon’s cloth coat and the cocker spaniel….(sarc)
From a February 2015 post in the abeldanger link:
Beyond UFB …
Think of all the pardons a Pres Hillary could hand out.
Or a President Trump. This is from a fawning profile of Jeffrey Epstein circa 2002, during the high tide of the Lolita Express:
Feeling ill yet?
Those must be the super predators . .
Yes. That is quite the sickening crowd at the top.
Almost as ill as all that BBC stuff. The Big Dog and Clinton, both flying on Epstein’s plane. How cozy!
No one’s counting the trips Bill (sometimes with Hillary) took there with Guistra. And like the behaviour that’s a shame.
Ghislaine Maxwell, the procurer and madame of Jeffrey Epstein’s harem of underage girls, serves on the board of the Terramar Project … funded by the Clinton Foundation:
These people are laughing in our face.
….while they are fucking your daughter
Absolute power corrupts absolutely —
“U.S. Navy fires commander of sailors who were held by Iran”
Getting fired in the military means a slight public disgrace, very slight, with no deduction in pay, no permanent mark in the service record, and usually either no impact on promotion, or more often a quick promotion — for being a good sport and quietly falling on one’s
swordfeather pillow vacation.Faux News — Bill Clinton
Just shows how disconnected is the empire of Rupert Murdoch, as the Daily Mail has reported several times on the log book starting from about a year ago. Fast Fly Bill has been on Epstein’s boat as well. At least this time they reference that Bill’s Secret Service escort has been on all but 5 of the flights. So when are these men going to be called to the witness stand?
No consequences (actual negative ones, that is, producing a negative- feedback effect), no changes for what maybe a majority would consider ” the better.” ( I bet a lot of us humans, male and female, secretly envy those tyrds, especially the ones who seem to get all that oral sex…)
Random teevee tuning just brought up PBS — Martha Stewart showing three comely young lasses the fine art of making Frangipane (brown butter only, my dear, and only the best REAL vanilla) and applying it to slices of brioche (her FAVORITE bred), over a smear of home made apricot preserves, topped with sliced organic unblanched almonds, baked in a pre-heated oven at 400° for exactly 13 minutes, then served to the guests within at most 5 minutes… With a mixture of pure fresh squeezed orange juice, the best Russian vodka, and true Brut Champagne, in equal measures…
True Life Adventures Of A Democratic Superdelegate
The Party Line … The Democrat Party isn’t ‘democratic’ … They don’t have to be. And don’t want to be.
This attitude has worked for most of our country’s existence. But we are on the verge now of a majority of independent voters. It will be VERY interesting to see how long the two dominating parties can last in a country where the majority of voters have rejected them.
That’s all fine – as long as they conduct and pay for the primary elections themselves. As long as they expect state and local governments to conduct and pay for their primary elections then they should be open to all registered voters!
Furthermore, the Dems and Republicans should be forced to dissolve their corporation that controls the Presidential debates and turn it over to a non-partisan group (like say The League of Women Voters? – just to cite a “random” example).
The parties should also be barred from putting their heavy thumb on the scale of ballot access. Their political operatives have succeeded in freezing out most alternative parties and independent candidates by establishing unreasonable hurdles to gaining access to the ballot in many states and municipalities.
So yeah, they can do what they want within their own “clubs” but if they want to manipulate the electoral process for their own ends at the expense of all taxpayers then they’ve gone outside he bounds of what they’re entitled to do within their own organizations.
Agreeing….
Why should independent voters (now a larger group than each party and soon larger than both together) continue to finance (through prblically funded elections) the Parties’s Primary deception?
Is it possible to file a class action law suit? Using interviews like this to prove that the system deliberately shuts out enitre groups of people.
We should put all candidates on the ballot.
No primaries. Just one general election.
And the ballot could look something like this:
Candidate A, Democrat
Candidate B, D
Candidate C, D
Candidate D, Republican
Candidate E, D
Candidate F, D
Candidate G, D
Candidate H, Green
Candidate I, Independent
Candidate J, Republican
The first question the Democratic Party will ask is, Are we diluting our strength?
So, naturally, they would want to have their private gathering to ‘unify’ beyond one person.
They should pay for that gathering.
And the same for other parties that don’t want to have many candidates split their own vote.
Yep.
If I, the taxpayer, are paying for your little soiree, then you don’t get to tell me that my vote doesn’t count because I didn’t make a pledge of fealty to your candidate of choice.
If the DNC wants to limit who can and can’t vote for candidates then they should pay for their own darn primary instead of forcing people they insist should be disenfranchised footing the bill.
I think they should reimburse the government.
Then, they can keep their primaries closed.
Public function by a private club? Can the class all spell “corruption”?
Or we do away with public function private clubs.
Well.
SMH
Good point. Until relatively recently (the last 20 years) most states had open primaries where independents or unafilliated registered voters could vote in either party’s primary (but not both in the same year). So being unaffiliated didn’t disenfranchise one from the nominating election process. It also tempered the worst aspects of the most radical wings of both parties since to get nominated required appealing to the broadest group of voters. Then the GOP/Dem parties started closing their primaries. Now there are voter-id laws (aka encumbent-protection laws) supported by both GOP/Dem parties. The parties are trying to privatize the most basic function of democratic (small ‘d’) govt.
In the not so long ago past, there were very few primaries at all.
Voters aren’t needed. The parties will close, have membership requirements etc. and the oligarchs will make sure the grift will continue. This can and does go on for hundreds of years. Every incident will just be sold as a reason to consolidate elite power.
I don’t see oligarchy/inequality being resolved by voting.
Today’s example of the unnecessariat… would be Boxer at the NV caucus. Shenanigans (electoral fraud) gets Boxer booed and she responds “Keep on booing and boo yourself out of this election.” Boxer knows the D/Rs don’t legally or financially need any voters.
What’s “Democrat”? A name. (We have got to develop some alternative parties!)
Re: Uber math
There is nothing new here. Anyone who has delivered pizza knows this math. The money is OK up front, then you have a breakdown. Poof. Gone. And every minute your car is in the shop is time when you’re essentially unemployed.
Uber math is nothing but the haves taking from the desperate.
more Uber Math of the desperate
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3590296/Uber-employee-accused-runs-cab-driver-shocking-Gold-Coast-hit-run.html
WaPo did a back-of-the envelope accounting last December. WaPo calculated that an Uber driver grossing $62,500 would take home $27,600 after taxes. But, of course, WaPo pulled the punchline: they calculated it for a driver working 63 hr./wk. A driver working 40 hr./wk. would net more like $17,000.
As “independent contractors”, the drivers get hit with self-employment taxes. This would be ok if Uber drivers were *really* independent contractors. They could pass their self-employment taxes (not to mention their direct costs) along to the customer.
I’m sure the same thing has been happening to lots of truck drivers and Lowe’s plumbers long before Uber came along. Pizza drivers maybe could file as “servers” and so at least escape the self-employment taxes.
The electoral poison pill in all of this is that, come April, all these “independent contractors” become rabid anti-tax Republicans.
Perhaps it’s just me but I’ve noticed all fed ex, ups, usps drivers at their most conservative being the definitive “bat out of hell” on the road the last year or so. Not safe at all…and they must be going through vehicles at a ridiculous rate due to abuse.
Also, USPS, in re my netflix DVD has dropped pace in turnover so much it’s the same as a 35 to 40 percent rate hike on my monthly rental with much fewer movies to show for it.
It’s not just you. It’s fleet telemetrics and it includes “real time tracking” to “reduce idle time” and help with “data driven solutions”
This is being promulgated by verizon, and NAPA integrated business solutions and other corporate slave masters of the universe.
Because increased efficiency, and running lean and mean solves a problem that didn’t exist until they had a product to hock.
The rich didn’t get that way stealing from each other. They got rich stealing from the poor and the ignorant.
Workers in general desperately need to organize again. Would it be possible, feasible in any way, to strike against Uber? Or can, say, UPS drivers be organized?
As long as the NLRB would buy the argument that Uber drivers are self-employed and not employees, the answer would be no. At least no to any union that would be recognized as such by the courts, Uber management, or the NLRB.
Regarding UPS drivers, I believe they are represented by the Teamsters.
Thanks. I realized that about later about the UPS drivers.
I wonder if the Uber drivers could game the app somehow. Like all, simultaneously, booking rides.
I’m sure that “where there’s a will,…” some kind of way to agitate creatively could be devised.
Netflix has a reputation for intentionally slowing DVD deliveries to high use customers. Supposedly Netflix loses money on thosecustomers and so they intentionally reduce service to them. They were sued on this issue some years back and they changed their terms of service. So I would look at Netflix first and then USPS, if you are having a slowdown in DVD service.
USPS is also tracking, but they appear to be undergoing a slowdown due to deliberate undermanning so as to accelerate the privatization effort.
One late afternoon in AL, I went to pick up the mail just as the USPS guy was delivering it. He was swiping a small box I had never noticed in her mailbox. It was a monitoring device. He was being monitored for every single delivery he made. We discussed it briefly., I did not want to hold him up.
Look for barcodes on certain mailboxes that show the monitored delivery points. One of my neighbors lives on a corner toward the start of a mail route and has the distinction of being one such monitored point. Imagine the thrill and prestige of participating, perhaps sub rosa, in such a delicate matter. She is no doubt the envy of the ‘hood.
The mailman I met said every box had a strip, that every stop on his route was time-tracked and logged.
Absolute insanity. It’s the workplace equivalent of ankle-bracelets. No wonder people are stressed out and half-crazy.
Fedex “ground” where the “ex” is green instead of orange, means the driver has bought his own truck, payments of course, buys his own uniform, his own insurance, his own gas, takes orders from the company, but is “not an employee” The more they deliver, the more they make. They are the bats out of hell.
“Reggie Gray is one of the many former FedEx Ground drivers who say the company illegally classified them as independent contractors rather than employees.”
http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/20/news/companies/fedex-driver-lawsuit/index.html
More here:
http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/302220/employment+litigation+tribunals/FedEx+Ground+Settles+Drivers+Independent+Contractor+Misclassification+Case+in+Maine+for+58+Million
Fedex was started by a cohort of George W. Bush. Boycott them where possible and use Unionized U.P.S.
Use the U.S. Post Office. That’s what Fedex and UPS do.
FraudEx is one of the worst abusers of the “independent contractor” scam. At least in California they have had to (somewhat) change their ways:
http://www.rightinginjustice.com/news/2015/06/18/fedex-settles-flsa-class-action-for-misclassified-california-drivers/
Yes, Fred Smith, fellow Yailie. Also has wormed his way into the University of Memphis–hometown of beloved FedEx–endowing chairs, funding buildings, sponsoring institutes and centers of this and that latest-technology-for-the-just-in-time-market type programs. All accepted with great cheers from the community. Nothing new or surprising in all of that. It’s what the titans do.
Part-timer package sorters at the FedEx hub, many of whom are UM students, are paid $11.36/hr with zero benefits. Hey, but like they say in Memphis, you don’t have to have an education to get a job, just a strong back.
From Wikipedia:
Typical “rules are for little people” Yalie.
does Links have an Apocalypse category?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3589785/Secret-meeting-150-scientists-considers-creating-synthetic-human-genome-decade-experts-warn-technology-lead-arms-race.html
an example from the comments:
Guess u haven’t seen it??
I read that as Pandora’s really big box ….what’s the end game in this and other hubristic god-like research?
..along with the IBM?? research into creating a synthetic ‘origami protein’ or some such……
what instantly came to mind was the possibility of creating an artificial prion !!! ….Oh Joy !!
……because Scientific ‘progress’………
I’ve told this one before, but a person I know who has the talent and (CRISPR and even less “sophisticated” older tools) now the means, is of the opinion that humanity is a plague on the planet, and that the best thing would be for “someone,” maybe a bored or severely misanthropic tech, or some concerned science person, to build a virus or other pathogen that was easily transmissible by all means and many vectors, was immune to any extant treatments, and was 100% tatal but only to humans. And turn it looße.
But that’s just fiction, of course… Never happen… We’re better than that… ALL of us…
‘The Waterless Flood’ MaddAdam series Book 2
From the Counterpunch article
Perhaps this should be required reading for some of the commenters around here who think a negative focus on Hillary Clinton is arbitrary or perverse. There is more than a whiff of fascism in the air but does one really have to point out that the most salient aspect of those 20th century dictators was their zeal for world domination. Just as the Clintons’ financial ideas and the repeal of Glass-Steagall represented a kind of domestic nihilism, the enthusiasm for military intervention is a rejection of accepted norms that threatens us all. That the Republicans under George W. shared many of the same ideas shows that both parties need a thorough upending.
+++
It serves the dems to be called dismissively “liberal” by the repubs to keep a good portion of their base that thinks that they are liberal. The dems believe the same insane “indispensable nation” (indeed, they originated the phrase, did they not?) crap and justify it with smooth, calming Washington speak that all the “serious people” accept that make what they propose to do seem not so batsh*t crazy, even though it is…
Not mentioned in the Counterpunch article is that Clinton’s Kosovo war was the first precedent for “out of area” operations by NATO.
NATO’s treaty describes a defensive alliance. Kosovo wasn’t a member of NATO. Clinton successfully advocated for involving NATO anyway.
Clinton’s Kosovo war paved the way for Bush’s “out of area” operation in Afghanistan, which continues to this day. And so it goes.
Based on her impressive neocon bonafides, Hillary can be expected to serve up more of the same, with bodies piled higher and deeper.
Re “fisting” Bellevue ER docs have stories of patients presenting with “erotic misadventures”… “you don’t want this sort of surgery,
let us…”
Huge embarrassment over fisting site data breach The Register. I do not get out enough. I have heard e of vaginal fisting, but anal fisting? Dr. Kevin adds, “Amazing that fisting is so normalized that people would sign on from their .gov or .mil email accounts!”
More than a third (37 per cent) of those affected by the Rosebutt Board were already included in the Have I Been Pwned? site, according to security researcher Troy Hunt. Victims will be able to use Have I Been Pwned? to check whether their data has been exposed once Hunt uploads the leaked data.
===================================================
I went back and rewatched the ending of “Citizen Kane” and listened to the famous last line (SPOILER ALERT) – but, did he say “rosebud” or did he say “rosebutt”????
If its the later, it certainly explains a lot about the personality of Mr. Kane…
Sorry, liberals, Elizabeth Warren isn’t going to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate
Liberals never thought she was. WaPo, in an effort to generate click-bait, was the only one trying to float that idea.
Not exactly correct. It was pushed by reporters at HuffPo. I got e-mailed 2x about their story and I am pretty sure HuffPo broke it. And worse it was a reporter I normally like and respect and his reporting verged on being insistent. I am loath to name names, but I was even writing people sputtering, as in I didn’t know why he was letting himself be spun this way, and I thought the biggest effect of this rumor was to hurt Sanders, which was presumably the point (as in saying Clinton is considering Warren is a VP pick completely takes the air out of the fact that Warren has not endorsed Clinton).
Gorgeous giraffes!
Giraffes!
at first, I thought they might be real.
At the Sacramento zoo, you can buy giraffe food and they let you feed them. Do not tease the giraffes, because they will strangle you with their tongues
Is there any calamity that Brexit will NOT cause?
hahaha!
Uhhh…….warts on ones’ palms???
spontaneous generation of newts from PM Cameron’s evening rice pudding bowl$$
I’m fairly sure cats will not start mating with dogs or Sauron’s eye will rise over Greenwich, but that’s all we can be certain of.
It’s all very reminiscent of the referendum last year and, barring some ‘shenanigans’, it might not work.
Check off at least one of those as already done: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_51BcmYbyVo lots more where that came from. And let us not forget GCHQ, and the ubiquity of surveillance cameras and intrusions in Olde Blighty and most elsewhere… Saurons essence lives on and gains strength…
“EYE SEE YOU”
The thing is, if the scaremongering works, a la Scotland, then the game goes on, but once someone calls the bluff, especially someone like England that is too big to impale, and everyone realizes that all the ‘do what we say or else grandma gets it’ ghost stories from the globalists are just that, then the cat is really among the Davos pigeons.
Rolling Stone.
Assad: “guilty of some of the worst crimes against humanity”
How anyone could write this with a straight face is beyond me. Really, guilty of some of the worst crimes against humanity, ha.
First prize goes to the US; conservatively responsible for the death of 20 million civilians since 1947, and let’s not forget the UK our staunch ally in all wars against humanity. Oh and what about France, so integral and eager to destroy Libya. I almost forgot about our good friends the suadis who fund isis and AQ.
Syria falls pretty far down the list.
Saddam is Hitler, said the neocons. Now Assad is Hitler, or at least Hitler’s valet.
Fool me twice, shame on … well, we won’t get fooled again.
Don’t forget Ghaddafi… he was the Hitler du jour before he was erased.
Of course before he was HDJ he was a BFF of Tony Blair and others when they wanted to do oil deals with him. Same with Saddam and Rummy, of course, when the US was selling chemical weapons ingredients to the Iraqis, and same with Assad when the US wanted to borrow his torture chambers.
Plus ça change…
The Libyan regime change (that’s the wrong word they didn’t change it they just destroyed it and walked away) and murder of Ghaddafi, was atrocious.
The man wasn’t perfect but he was still better than any “western” government to his people. Free education domestically and abroad, free housing, what amounted to free food, and free Healthcare.
Thanks hillary for saving the world from such an evil man! /Sarc
You don’t have to go too far down the rabbit hole to understand why Ghaddafi was taken out. Foremost he wanted to form a Pan-Africa movement using a gold backed dinar as currency. A gigantic threat to USD hegemony; obviously a no-no to the global banking cartel; just as were Lincoln’s Greenback and Kennedy’s Silver Certificate, both aside from central bank control or purview. Hmmm. Were the 3 assassinations really coincidental? Next there was the matter of the confiscation of the 200+ tons of gold held at the BOE for the Libyan people. At the time the bullion banks were running out of gold; problem miraculously solved. Third, albeit a future consideration, is that Libya contains the world’s largest pure water aquifer. Within 20 years, pure water will become the new gold.
NATO leaders are almost exclusively thugs. Thugs pick on who they can. Libya was an opportunity to flex their muscle and show how tough they were. Hillary borrowed from Caesar, who made his famous quip after smashing an army that was at least five times the size of his force during the midst of a Roman civil war which he took a break from. Oil and water promises are just to bring along the wary. “American exceptionalism” is the driving force.
@abper
While that could be true. I find it unlikely.
While it is sometimes preferable to assign institutions and corporations with an omnipotence and long term strategy or envision a cabal of Grand strategists pulling all the strings (because then at least someone has a plan for the future), the reality is likely closer to a bunch self interested and shortsighted reactionaries with no real plan beyond protecting their immediate interests.
I believe the sad truth is France saw Libya eroding some of it’s influence in North Africa, didn’t like it and pushed a campaign of regime change which hillary was all to happy to champion for the simple fact she wanted another notch in her experience belt.
That anyone in the government/financial industry with any level of operational control (meaning they could actually illustrate the potential negative effect of the gold dinar on USD and do something about it) was able to realize the effects of an African dinar is highly unlikely. Todays institutions just don’t have that level of foresight at the operational level ( I mean some Analyst likely wrote a report on it’s potential consequences 5 years off, but who would care or listen when there is so many things to react to today or tomorrow.)
The fact that the dinar, water etc could have some negative or positive effect 5 years (even a year later) likely didn’t even factor into the analysis to destroy Libya.
There was an article before on NC that it was actually the French who were super worried about an African currency. They convinced the Brits and Americans to go along.
If I remember correctly, the water aquifer project constructed the largest man-made river in history, and brought fresh water to all Libyan citizens. It was designed by Halliburton, who were dropped from the construction phase when the Chinese offered a better deal. Qadaffi knew how to make the most out of his oil money, and dangerous enemies as well.
And let’s not forget the deal to disarm Libya of chemical weapons. The lingering less will be to never trust Americans. Supposedly, this is why Putin came back. He couldn’t trust Medvedev to not sell Russia for magic beans after Medvedev approved of the NATO invasion in the Security Council.
The ROLLING STONE???? …….Zeus on a trident! What will they write next?
…that mag needs to blow away into oblivion….. It has surpassed it’s shelf date!
And remember he funded Africa’s first (and only)telecoms satellite, freeing it from the predations of europe’s ‘providers’ and the anual 500 million cost.
I can’t be 110% certain, but I think he wanted to be Nabuchadnezzar, whose kingdom the gods had proclaimed to last not just 1,000 years, but forever.
And the scared a lot of neighbors.
Quadaffi had tons of gold, and was doing fine at talking the leaders of other African nations into using it as the basis for a pan-African currency that would free them all from dollar-only economic strait jackets.
Somewhere, there’s a memo agreeing on how much of this gold France got, how much the US got, and how much went to Freedom Fighters of the Mideast, Inc.
If only Quadaffi had understood fiat currency, eh?
He also failed the commandment that he ‘shall have no other reserve currencies before the one true reserve currency.’
The one true reserve currency is a jealous reserve currency.
HBE
May 14, 2016 at 9:44 am
Washington’s Military Addiction Tom Engelhardt
“In Iraq and Syria, it’s been mission creep all the way. The B-52s barely made it to the battle zone for the first time and were almost instantaneously in the air, attacking Islamic State militants. U.S. firebases are built ever closer to the front lines. The number of special ops forces continues to edge up. American weapons flow in (ending up in god knows whose hands). American trainers and advisers follow in ever increasing numbers, and those numbers are repeatedly fiddled with to deemphasize how many of them are actually there. The private contractors begin to arrive in numbers never to be counted. The local forces being trained or retrained have their usual problems in battle. American troops and advisers who were never, never going to be “in combat” or “boots on the ground” themselves now have their boots distinctly on the ground in combat situations. The first American casualties are dribbling in. Meanwhile, conditions in tottering Iraq and the former nation of Syria grow ever murkier, more chaotic, and less amenable by the week to any solution American officials might care for.
And the response to all this in present-day Washington?
You know perfectly well what the sole imaginable response can be: sending in yet more weapons, boots, air power, special ops types, trainers, advisers, private contractors, drones, and funds to increasingly chaotic conflict zones across significant swaths of the planet. Above all, there can be no serious thought, discussion, or debate about how such a militarized approach to our world might have contributed to, and continues to contribute to, the very problems it was meant to solve.”
========================================
We get in Washington what we put up with. Maybe, but probably not, people are figuring out for all the treasure spent and lives lost, we, nor the world, is any safer.
We gotta keep doing what we have been doing because it would be soooooo much worse if we didn’t…..which is another way of saying it is the lesser of two evils…funny how so much of what we do is predicated on that.
“Two Evils don’t make a Good…”
Great claims require great proofs.
Not so … proof is binary. A fact is either true or not. Thus, there is no logical difference between a great truth a plain old garden variety truth. However, actual truths can be slippery little buggers & hard to find.
That is untrue. Facts do not sit in isolation. Facts are interpreted. If you are familiar with actual science, results are not binary. Things widely considered to be settled scientific fact are do not show up in tests 100% of the time.
In addition, in lists of “how to look for scientific/medical fraud” which has now become widespread if not pervasive, one of the warning signs is that the paper makes a very large claim that is contrary to prior research. Sometimes it is true, in the case of ulcers being caused by a virus. But things like that are most likely to be true when the original (bad) theory was based on weak forms of proof, typically correlation.
I believe it’s a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, not a virus.
so no truth to the rumor that ulcers are brought on by helicopter parenting? :p
My bright idea for medical research is an auto-correcting genome.
100% correct, sorry!
ulcers are giving me grief………must be all those blogs I read ;'(
Of course there’s this, including the part about the necessity of H. pylori for proper GI function:
Helicobacter pylori, previously Campylobacter pylori, is a gram-negative, microaerophilic bacterium found usually in the stomach. It was identified in 1982 by Australian scientists Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who found that it was present in a person with chronic gastritis and gastric ulcers, conditions not previously believed to have a microbial cause. It is also linked to the development of duodenal ulcers and stomach cancer. However, over 80% of individuals infected with the bacterium are asymptomatic, and it may play an important role in the natural stomach ecology.[3]
More than 50% of the world’s population harbor H. pylori in their upper gastrointestinal tract. Infection is more prevalent in developing countries, and incidence is decreasing in Western countries. H. pylori’s helical shape (from which the genus name is derived) is thought to have evolved to penetrate the mucoid lining of the stomach…
Mounting evidence suggests H. pylori has an important role in protection from some diseases. The incidence of acid reflux disease, Barrett’s esophagus, and esophageal cancer have been rising dramatically at the same time as H. pylori’s presence decreases.[85] In 1996, Martin J. Blaser advanced the hypothesis that H. pylori has a beneficial effect: by regulating the acidity of the stomach contents.[39][85] The hypothesis is not universally accepted as several randomized controlled trials failed to demonstrate worsening of acid reflux disease symptoms following eradication of H. pylori.[86][87] Nevertheless, Blaser has reasserted his view that H. pylori is a member of the normal flora of the stomach.[88] He postulates that the changes in gastric physiology caused by the loss of H. pylori account for the recent increase in incidence of several diseases, including type 2 diabetes, obesity, and asthma.[88][89] His group has recently shown that H. pylori colonization is associated with a lower incidence of childhood asthma. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori
It’s pretty easy to stamp out H. pylori in an “infected person” (that includes at least 50% of the world’s population) with antibiotics. It’s been done to me, years ago, when the real source of the ulceration was cured by a divorce. But on the other hand, there’s that obesity and diabetes and stuff…
So WHO FOKKING KNOWS ANYTHING? fer shure? All a Heisenbergian toss-up?
As a scientist with 20-years bench work behind him I can add this – there is no such animal as fact, except in the small circle surrounding religious fundamentalism. Outside of that, exception and provision riddle most every “truth” fragile and prone to complete dissolution. Maybe, hopefully, after all is said and done, some understanding survives.
Beauty is beyond logic.
And a claim can be judged to be great or not so great, with or without logic.
But if you’re making a claim that reaches far beyond accepted knowledge–this molecule destroys all viruses!–then your proof has to bridge the gap.
The simplest viruses are encapsulated RNA or DNA. This claim is equivalent to saying the molecule kills the basic structure of life on earth.
In science, facts are subject to the concept of falliblism. That’s why scientists get in so much trouble when thrown into Q&A sessions with the jackals that prowl in the media. Scientific facts continue to evolve with the best available information.
Scientific Facts
As far as “facts” are concerned, scientists will caution you that even though they will appear to be using the term in the same way as everyone else, there are background assumptions which are crucial. When most people refer to a “fact,” the are talking about something which is definitely, absolutely and unquestionably true. For scientists, a fact is something which is assumed to be true, at least for the purposes of whatever they are doing at the moment, but which might be refuted at some point.
It is this implicit fallibilism which helps differentiate science from other human endeavors. It is certainly the case that scientists will act as if something is definitely true and not give much thought to the possibility that it is wrong – but that doesn’t mean that they ignore it completely. This quote from Stephen Jay Gould illustrates the issue nicely:
Moreover, ‘fact’ doesn’t mean ‘absolute certainty’; there ain’t no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are NOT about the empirical world. …In science ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
The key phrase is “provisional consent” – it is accepted as true provisionally, which means only for the time being. It is accepted as true at this time and for this context because we have every reason to do so and no reason not to do so. If, however, good reasons to reconsider this position arise, then we should begin to withdraw our consent.
Note also that Gould introduces another important point: for many scientists, once a theory has been confirmed and reconfirmed over and over again, we get to the point that it will be treated as a “fact” for pretty much all contexts and purposes. Scientists may refer to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, but in most contexts Einstein’s ideas here are treated as fact – treated as if they are simply true and accurate descriptions about the world.
Fallibilism in Science
One common feature for facts, theories, and hypotheses in science is that they are all treated as fallible — the likelihood of error might vary greatly, but they are still regarded as something less than absolute truth. This is often regarded as a flaw in science, a reason why science can’t provide human what they need — usually in contrast to religion and faith which somehow can allegedly provide absolute truth.
This is a mistake: the fallibilism of science is precisely what makes it better than the alternatives. By acknowledging the fallibility of humanity, science always remains open to new information, new discoveries, and new ideas. The problems in religion can generally be traced back to the fact that they rely so much on ideas and opinions established centuries or millennia in the past; the success of science can be traced to the fact that new information forces scientists to revise what they are doing.
Religions don’t have hypotheses, theories, or even facts — religions just have dogmas which are presented as if they were absolute truths regardless of what new information might come along. This is why religion never created new medical treatments, a radio, an airplane, or anything remotely close. Science isn’t perfect, but scientists know this and that’s precisely what makes it so useful, so successful, and so much better than the alternatives….
http://atheism.about.com/od/philosophyofscience/a/ScienceFacts.htm
Faced With a Fracking Giant, This Small Town Just Legalized Civil Disobedience
What exactly is illegal about Civil Disobedience around the country? I mean non-violent protesting. I am just curious how it quashing works generally.
I thought Civil Disobedience MEANS the public and visible breaking of certain laws in order to make a point . . . hopefully by getting publicly arrested in order to direct public attention to the point being made by the conscious breaking of the particular law.
Blocking a street as Civil Disobedience. etc.
Perhaps people should be thinking of what “uncivil” obedience would look like. Grudging obedience without compliance.
“I’m just curious how quashing it works generally.”
Ask us Occupy members who were beaten with billy clubs outside of the reach of reporters’ cameras.
X10,000!!
I don’t think there’s any possibility of it happening but there is a petition to urge Bernie to accept the Green Party nomination at
http://movement4bernie.org/
If nothing else, it gives a middle finger to the DNC and that’s never a bad thing.
Say what you will about the G party but among the last thing it needs is a Demo party / MIC apologist such a Sanders. Let Sanders do his thang right where he is. Anyone who thinks the Demos are anything other than Grima Wormetongue on their best days should not just become a Green (or anything else) without actually changing their colors/ changing their ways. That goes for progs too.
I felt much the same way watching people during OWS. People didn’t actually want to change their ways they wanted their failed ways/failed alliances to become successful, to be something it wasn’t nor ever would be. Demo peeps more than any other element killed it off too.
Say what you will about the G party but among the last thing it needs is a Demo party / MIC apologist such a Sanders.
The next time you see someone call the Green Party a bunch of “unorganized dilatants” who couldn’t get 500,000 votes if they owned the voting machines, re-read your comment.
Yeah, uh, that is true though. And having Democratic apologist like Sanders wouldnt help that.
I agree the match makes no sense. Unfortunately, too many support our racist wars for giggles and profit.
I like Sanders, but for the greens to be viable they need to make their own candidates organically. Getting a celebrity like Sanders isnt going to help them look like a real alternative.
And also Sanders isnt the type to be a ‘spoiler’. I would be ok if he was, but I think he would be too afraid of being perceived that way if he went independent or Green.
Anyway, being the greens candidate would sort of be quixotic anyway.
For the Greens to be viable, they first need to get to 5% of the vote, that’s almost 8 million votes. Jill Stein couldn’t get there is she ran for the next ten elections. A “celebrity” could..
Yeah, sort of like how Ross Perot got the Freedom party into the next election, but then they failed to get 5% without him ever again.
I highly doubt Bernie helping the Green party this year would really help them get 5% in 2020. Anyway, before trying to get the presidency, the Greens at least need to organize local candidates, which they have been unable to do basically anywhere.
Yep.
I have tremendous respect for Howie Hawkins, and some other individual Greens, yet they as a party need to start getting elected at the local and state levels before they can seriously contend for national offices!
Stay or go, Brexit vote bound to unravel EU
I’m having a hard time understanding the players in this, or for that matter, much of anything about it. Why, for instance, is Jeremy Corbyn not exacting more concessions from Cameron for his “stay-in” support? Corbyn seems to be loosing some of his base who perceive this as a sell-out.
The article itself seems to address somewhat superficial aspects of the EU (grasping for small political privileges) and as always the way the Eurozone plays into this (or doesn’t) is obscure.
-Corbyn still needs Scotland. Scottish nationalism is dependent on the EU. At the same time, Scottish nationalism is a result of the Blairites. A lefty in Cornwall and a lefty in Edinborough will probably have different views.
-What happens with London plunging into darkness and arrangement with France. I was in the Summer of 2002 during a trade war between France and London.
-as bad as the EU is, many people aren’t ready to let go of the dream or admit no one is willing to move the EU to the USE to make it work.
-Corbyn personally doesn’t go for the English rah rah blow the queen stuff. Can the EU be reformed going forward? It’s been operating for a long time.
-What happens in a “Brexit?” The UK’s best export is Doctor Who and hopefully now that Captain Insomnia (it’s what I call Clara) is gone it will be better. How do European approach the UK? In one sense, the UK is more replaceable than Greece. Greece has the advantage of geography. The UK is an island. It can be ignored by the rest of the world.
It’s a divisive third rail.
Scotland is pretty much gone for labour (it has one MP with a very small majority), and the party has won westminster on english constituencies alone most of the times it has taken power.
The SNP still has the hangover of its old ‘independence within europe’ slogan, and some cling to the idea that a brexit would trigger a demand for a referendum.
I doubt it myself.
For the life of me I can’t see how a new country trying to find its feet while having them nailed to floor by draghi, juncker et al is a practical ambition.
Corbyn horsetrading with Cameron would recreate the problem labour had in Scotland, they’d dissolve the difference between them and the tories (not that there is that much difference in the bitter blairite faction of the parliamentary party).
Not a good look.
Scotland should do what people in Sardinia did, they launched Sardex. More than 100 million transactions and growing.
It’s a Euro that can only be spent in Sardinia:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/cf875d9a-5be6-11e5-a28b-50226830d644.html
On Brexit, it is reassuring to The City and The Street that GlaxoSmithKline is okay with the result, either way. Onaccounta the Suits have already priced and lobbied the desired continued “groaf” into the Master Plans.
I happened across this snippet in a random paper copy of the Daily Mail:
Brexit won’t damage us admits drug giant
Daily Mail21 Mar 2016
BRITAIN’S biggest drugs firm GlaxoSmithKline has delivered a boost for Eurosceptics after admitting that quitting the EU will not damage its business.
The firm has campaigned to remain in the EU, with boss Sir Andrew Witty one of around 200 business leaders signing a letter of support for David Cameron’s In campaign.
It has argued that membership of the single market is beneficial because it provides access to a common system for the approval of new medicines.
But in its annual report, the firm plays down the concerns associ- ated with Brexit, declaring it would not have a ‘material adverse impact’ on its financial position.
GSK said a victory for the leave campaign would ‘create uncertainty and add complexity… with some short-term disruption.’ But it said it had ‘plans in place to mitigate (the) effects’.
Ukip MP Douglas Carswell, of the Vote Leave campaign, accused the ‘remain’ campaign of double standards, saying they are ‘quick to tell us we have to vote to stay in. But when you look at the details of their business they recognise there is no real downside to us leaving’. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwj7sqOR-NnMAhUGHB4KHaSfDoIQFggdMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pressreader.com%2Fuk%2Fdaily-mail%2F20160321%2F281788513179967&usg=AFQjCNH_javgVijS5RXVWhnqDYUSiGyCjQ&sig2=DZA_QNKUgQZrNdzYEdBB0g
And of course one can go to the GSK 2015 Annual Report and read this more directly:
We have evaluated the implications for
our business of a possible exit of the
United Kingdom from the European
Union. In our view, there are advantages
in the UK remaining part of the EU, where
the Group would continue to have easy
access to a significant economic bloc, be
able to operate within an established and
harmonised regulatory approval system and
continue to benefit from EU advocacy on
international trade discussions. However,
while the UK leaving the EU would create
uncertainty and add complexity to a wide
range of our business activities, with some
short-term disruption likely, we have plans
in place to mitigate these effects, and we
do not currently believe that there would
be a material adverse impact on the
Group’s results or financial position. http://annualreport.gsk.com/downloads/GSK_Annual_Report_2015.pdf
The whole “CEO’s Statement” and the next several pages give some further insights, including into why costs of meds and care are so crazy high. And Markets. And Corruption.
As I understand it, the centralising tendencies of the EU have grown beyond what most people ever wanted. Back in 2005, an attempt at a more centralised EU via a new “European Constitution” was defeated by negative referendum results in France and Holland. To me, that tells a story about reluctance to go further. Notwithstanding the referendum results, however, a more centralised EU was forced down peoples’ throats via the Lisbon Treaty, which was not subject to referendum anywhere but in Ireland. Ireland rejected it, but was forced to vote again to approve it! That treaty came into effect on 1 Jan. 2009 and I think the EU has become increasingly unpopular ever since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Lisbon
America’s Exceptional Lack of a Female President
It never occurred to me before that the so-called doctrine of “smart power” was intentional deep messaging for Clinton herself. Hillary = smart! strong!
yeesh.
The part the stands out for me is the soft cultural power.
Everyone wants to be live life like us.
Well, not everyone, but many, especially the younger ones.
To be trendy, in many countries, means western. Russia is not western. Bulgaria is not western. Only a few select countries are western.
No, everybody wants to live life like they think we do.
Like one of the apartments in Friends would go for $5,000 a month, even though all the protagonists are broke.
There’s even a TV Trope for it: Friends Rent Control.
With propaganda, sorry, brainwashing…check that, with advertising, what they think is what is.
If not, that means more advertising money is needed.
That may explain why we will see lots of corporate logos in our national parks.
American soft power means that people live in Manhattan, on the beach or in the hills of LA, in a charming Victorian in San Francisco, and everyone is part of the creative class, everyone has a lot of free time, and no one worries about money. It’s an obvious fantasy to anyone who is familiar with real-life America, and this idealized America is no longer being lapped up by the rest of the world.
In East Asia and the Middle East, K-Dramas and K-Pop have become the biggest cultural import. You may scoff at this, but people relate to it better than say, The Real Housewives or Bieber.
And yeah, the obvious decline in US living standards combined with mean spirited, war mongering politicos doesn’t help with US soft power.
Pop is a western import (versus folk), and it’s like the operation system is still an import.
Very good point on K-Dramas and K-Pop.
There are avid Kpop fan groups in Latin America and Eastern Europe also.
If “wanting to be like us” is an underlying assumption of the purveyors of US soft power—it might be or it might not be (and I doubt for promoters of, say, Kpop, they expect people to “want to be like” South Koreans)—that says something about the purveyors, not about the people at the receiving end.
I would not assume that people in other countries who find US (or Western) things trendy do “want to be like us,” even if they like or want some of the things they see portrayed in TV shows or movies. They might like or want those things and remain, well, whoever they are. They have some agency with regard to how and in what manner they adopt things from other cultures.
K Pop fans may not want to be Korean, but their choice of entertainment options makes them more amenable towards Korea. _____foreign fans of Woody Allen may not have wanted New York residency, but the fans felt more positively towards New York because of said movies.
American politicians, including $hillary herself, have been alienating foreign nations since maybe 15 years ago? Endless pre-emptive wars, sabre rattling against many more countries, endless financial corruption, and the collapse of the American Standard of living (despite Hollywood’s best efforts to portray otherwise) all contribute towards the erosion of American soft power. Bad reality TV and music aren’t helping either.
Precisely—that’s the exact point of “soft power.” And I agree completely—it doesn’t work or work as well if other things (e.g., endless war, domestic corruption, collapsing standards of living, etc.) militate against it, as in the US’s case. But I suspect that the “Smart Power” candidate who informs us that “America is already great!” might have a different view of things.
Wow. All I can say is it seems one little mistake and you could end up with a lot of quashed people.
Or at least quashed feet.
The most striking feature of the Los Angeles Times piece was where the author said the ride-share companies originally bragged about how much drivers could make but now claimed it wasn’t meant to be a full-time job. This is similar to those who argue against raising the minimum-wage on the grounds that “those [minimum wage] jobs” weren’t meant to provide a living.
I guess the economy is increasingly one where any job provides a living wage, until, like Johnny in the movie “Airplane” who pulls out the plug on the runway lights, the higher-ups decide to say “Just Kidding” and your jobs wasn’t meant to provide a living after all.
I think you either
1. bring jobs back from Mexico, China, the Empire of Robots, etc.
or
2. pay people with enough money not to work
The latter reduces supply, while the former increases demand…both should lead to higher wages.
I dont think the first is happening ever and I dont think the second is happening any time soon. Sooo… Gonna be a few decades of crap for the wage class.
“the higher-ups decide to say ‘Just Kidding’ and your jobs wasn’t meant to provide a living after all.”
That’s always been true, but the Karmic Wheel of Crapification seems to be turning faster, these days.
‘the Karmic Wheel of Crapification’
Sounds like an excellent lense for viewing the world.
When does the book come out?
:-)
http://nypost.com/2016/05/08/bride-wont-sign-prenup-throws-wedding-party-for-poor-instead/
A meme from “Community Water Justice”
~Stolen Spring
Just liked them. Will wait and see.
https://www.facebook.com/438497542856364/photos/a.438943352811783.97079.438497542856364/1093325164040262/?type=3&theater
‘We have to fight this’: North Yorkshire village opposes fracking plans
http://tinyurl.com/h5g9ya9
America’s Exceptional Lack of a Female President may not make it obvious what a flawed choice Clinton is to change that, but it certainly damns her with faint praise. She wouldn’t be in the position she is to become the first woman President if it weren’t for being groomed by two previous Presidents, as in her husband and Barack Obama. Meanwhile. one of her achievements is as the chief architect of her husband’s winning campaign.
I guess I cannot wrap my head around writing an article like this. I agree it is long past time for America to have a female at the top job, but those who smash barriers are usually the people who cannot be denied due to talent, ability and timing. The author cannot make that case, and thus it means having to ignore her entire record as a public
servantmenace. The struggle to find reasons she can achieve this that actually involve HER abilities leaves the author with ‘grooming’. I recognize that part of the whole stick is that America is so deeply misogynist that the bar has been too high, but the author is unable to make the case that Clinton will break this ceiling on overwhelming merit. And thus ends up leaving the impression that much of this is an optics change not a game change because one woman got a pat on the head even if that was not the intention.But then that could just be me, because America does seem to have embraced the shallow. (As in her husband’s sexual proclivities may end up doing more to end the candidacy than her own abysmal record as Senator, Secretary of State and yes even First Lady.)
I should probably add, that I’m a bad female and feminist as anymore I find our exceptional lack of universal health care, a functioning election system and inability to guarantee housing and food to our citizenry to be a greater embarrassment currently than the lack of gender diversity among the 44 odd people who have headed the country in over 200 years.
I’m an even worse feminist. I’m embarrassed by the hawkish behavior of the females we’ve had as SoS. I would have hoped my gender would have had more respect for other people’s children and the lives of the men and women we expect to defend us.
Let’s not make this an issue of gender. In the past several presidential elections, a majority of voters were women. If one doesn’t like who our president is, talk to them.
(Superficial) beauty is only skin deep.
In our case, the focus so far is only anatomy deep. If one just reads the resume, Hilary is an alpha male. She is as ‘good,’ or maybe the word is neolibearlly efficient, as all the male politicians in DC.
For me it is not. Just as I would not vote for a Michele Bachmann or a Carly Fiorina because of theirgender, I will not vote for Hillary Clinton. I find this whole gender focus to be deeply insulting.
Look, I am not immune to it. Give me two relatively equal competent and qualified candidates and I would consider gender, not to mention race and religion (We have not had a Latino or Asian President , nor a Jew or Atheist). But “vote for the woman”, or “it’s a woman’s turn” should be an insult to the candidate and the voter.
Gender is to Hillary supporters as the national debt is to Republicans. Hillary supporters don’t give a fig about Hillary’s plumbing. Hillary is simply the rightful leader for simply being a celebrity and a name they recognize. Gender is simply a deflection from not being able to say anything else, and many Democrats don’t want to admit they are that shallow. Gender protects them.
Since so many years Democrats are both shallow and believe they are smarter than the average bear, they have concluded voters would be astonished Hillary is a woman and would flock to their leader.
I give you that is the case of most of supporters, especially the big donors, but it is not all. Some have bought the bullshit that everything is a conspiracy, and that Hillary is brilliant, strong and the defender of right and good that she claims. She is the woman to break through in their lifetime. Just as there are those who have bought the bull shit that Obama was more liberal and wanted to do more for the people but was hamstrung by not having 80 Democrats in the Senate and obstructionist Republicans. They may think they are seeing the forest because they have imagined that there are trees, but realizing that you have been taken in is hard for people.
From a Sanders email blast today:
Inhumane? What part of Nobel Peace Prize does the Senator not understand?
On the next debate, if there is one, Sanders should ask Hillary if Obama should return his Peace Prize.
Don’t hold back, senator.
Of course if Sanders asked such a thing on camera, he would lose every single voting member of the Race Card vote.
Sounds like he is untouchable then.
No Tuth about Neoliberalism and Reconciliation.
Americans are either uninformed or deep in denial or both. Otherwise Obama’s ratings would be at Bush 2 levels.
Sometimes under mass hypnosis.
I think that explains the 1992 and 1996 elections, among others.
“Can we re-do them?”
The red flags were there for Obama in 2008 and much earlier. Many people don’t want to acknowledge this, and Democrats were simply vile towards any questioning of dear leader.
I knew an Obama organizer who thought any supporter of Lieberman over Lamont should be tossed from the party. When I noted her boss campaigned for Lieberman, her face twitched, she paused, and then proceed if nothing had been said. The faith was strong.
$hillary is to women like Obomber is to African-Americans–Successful target marketing. Apart from genitalia and melanin respectively, neither one does ANYTHING to help their demographic. The marketing of both Hillary and Obama is as substantive as Benetton or Calvin Klein advertising.
They both however, serve their constituents perfectly well. But voters’ tribal loyalty has superseded their skepticism of their politicians and the politicians’ subservience to FIRE, natural resource, pharmaceutical, oil, defense, and tax dodging corporate monopoly overlords.
Another little tie-in to notions of “efficiency:”
When I was assigned as a clerk to the HQ company of the 2nd Armored Division after I got back from Vietnam, I helped process “efficiency reports,” then the Army’s system for recognizing “the best of the best of the best.” Humans being what they are, corrupt and venal, that was not working out so well, either then, or apparently in the intervening decades. So the military more recently paid a lot of money to consultants to develop a whole new system, one not so subject to “efficiency inflation” and other corruptions. Here’s a couple of links on the subject, starting with the most recent:
Why The Army’s Officer Evaluation System Needs A Complete Overhaul
By Ryan Cho
on December 10, 2015
Within the current system, we still truly don’t know who the best officers and noncommissioned officers are.
When the revamped officer evaluation system was introduced last year, Army Human Resources Command was very clear with its intent: eliminate the years of over inflation in officer evaluations. In briefings held all over the world, officers (and now noncommissioned officers) were told there wasn’t a clear way to differentiate between officers and “identify talent.” Indeed, the Army had a problem: It couldn’t tell which officers were better than the others.
(Screenshot via U.S. Army “Revised Officer Evaluation Reports 1 APR 14 Implementation” PowerPoint presentation)
In today’s Army, this is a big problem to have. Despite a drawdown and downsizing of the force, the Army is struggling to recruit and retain a “force of the future.” As David Barno and Nora Bensahel note in their recently published Atlantic piece, [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/us-military-tries-halt-brain-drain/413965/ ] the Army is suffering from a “brain drain,” losing some of its best talent to the private sector. They argue that a rigid promotion system is outdated for the millennial generation. And the Senate agrees, as it is now reviewing the military promotions and health care systems. It makes sense that the Army would want to know who its high performers are so that it can make targeted efforts to select and retain those individuals.
But knowing that helpful nudges to reign in an inflated system won’t solve the plagued system, the Army decided instead to automate it. In 2014, it restricted raters and senior raters to handing out the top block to no more than 49% of rated officers and 24% of non-commissioned officers in each rank during their entire career. Centralizing all evaluations from the active-duty and reserve forces in one place, it assigned each rater a profile to manage their evaluations, so that raters would not even have the option of going past their given percentages. In essence, the Army created a scoresheet for each evaluator that detailed how many and what kind of grades superiors doled out to create some accountability, and made sure they weren’t giving As to more than half of their rated population…. There is so much more in the link — anyone needing another dose of depressing reality, go here: http://taskandpurpose.com/why-the-armys-officer-evaluation-system-needs-a-complete-overhaul/
And here’s a lengthy piece generated by an Army Major, his thesis in support of gaining a degree of “Master of Military Science” which is about as scientific as “economics,” of course, deals with “grade inflation” of “efficiency reports,” a huge component of advancement and retention decisions by various military Boards. Note the date of the thesis, the study period that embraced my own time as a lowly E-4 enlisted man, and how little changed from then to now. It’s 224 pages including notes, but the abstract gives a little picture into the mindset of of our World’s Greatest Military Machine’s management problems, stuff that ought to be very painfully familiar to those who have administered and those who have suffered from “human resources management”:
A Thesis presented to the Faculty of the U.S. Army
Command and General Staff College in partial
fulfillment of the requirements of the
degree
MASTER OF MILITARY ART AND SCIENCE
by
Robert J. Dillworth, MAJ, USA
Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas
1971
ABSTRACT
Efficiency report inflation has been a significant problem in the U.S. Army for more than 40 years. In 1945, 99 per cent of the officer corps were receiving one6 of the two top ratings on the evaluative scale. Inflation has been partially responsible for the frequent changes in officer efficiency report (OER) format, in recent years .. Since the inflationary. phenomenon hampers accurate identification of. future leaders from the standpoint of comparative value and impinges on efficient: management of officer assets, any easement of inflationary pressure can serve to improve personnel management within the U.S. Army.
To gain an appreciation of the inflation problem, isolate causal factors, and develop possible means of combating the problem, research was conducted in two broad areas. First, the history of the U.S. Army OER system was studied, including a survey of contemporary thought on the subject., A large segment of the-Class of 1971 of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College was asked to complete a questionnaire as part of the contemporary survey., Historical review revealed- hat inflation has not always been associated with the OER system of the U.S. Army. It also indicated that measures adopted to control inflation have been largely ineffective.
The second approach to research centered on evaluation of the OER systems currently in use by eight foreign military establishments. Research in this area proceeded from the premise that the military environment acts to shape the performance appraisal process. For this reason, investigation included analysis of the military framework associated with each OER system. The systems of the Canadian Forces, the French Army, the British Army, and the West German Armed Forces ,were singled out for primary analysis.
The other four systems, covered in less detail, were those of the Australian Army, the Israeli Defense Forces, the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Forces, and, the Yugoslav Armed Forces. In-depth interviews of senior foreign officers served as a key source of information in pursuing this portion of the research effort.
By comparison, efficiency report inflation was found to be much less pronounced in most of the foreign systems studied than in the U.S. Army’s system. Almost all of the systems, were found to employ measures specifically designed to control inflation. In addition to methodology calculated to reduce inflation, some less tangible factors, such as an officer corps conditioned by tradition to accept realistic
ratings, appear to influence the level of inflation. A total of 6 basic techniques for controlling inflation were identified through review of foreign systems, most of them as yet untried by the U.S. Army.
The French Army is, free of an OER inflation problem because of the forced ranking and forced- distribution techniques being used. Canadian Forces have achieved control over inflation through application of firm centralized monitorship of the OER system. All eight foreign systems surveyed tie rating authority’ to command authority. In addition, five of the systems limit rating authority to field grade officers as a means of insuring that only experienced officers are entrusted with this responsibility.
Three basic conclusions of the research are that inflation can be controlled, the administrative environment within which the efficiency report operates is at least as important as performance appraisal techniques used, and certain foreign military OER techniques should be considered
for adoption by the U.S. Army. The more critical of several specific recommendations are (i) limit rating authority to officers occupying field grade, positions, (2) design’ OER format and processing to make maximum use of automatic data processing, (3) impose administrative discipline through establishment of a central monitoring office at Department of the Army level, (4) provide for adjustment of ratings at
Department of the Army level based on knowledge, of rating trends and rater standards, (5) require commanders to monitor all reports initiated within their immediate commands, and (6) emphasize objectivity and integrity of reporting.
If any overall lesson can be gleaned from this study, it would probably be that the key to inflation control lies primarily in the administrative sector. Rather than becoming ensconced in performance appraisal methodology, greater stress needs to be given to how an OER system is administered. http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/733385.pdf
When I was discharged in 1969, inflation of Performance Efficiency amounting to pure fraud was pretty common. Looking at the more recent piece and the evidence from how well our Brass do with self-advancement and the procurement part of the Force Structure and how painfully inept they are at “winning wars,” looks like “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…” And the bounty is what, $100k to drive a drone and launch Hellfires on “targets?” And besides, one gets paid so much better doing the same crap for one of “our” post-trans-supranational “contractors…” With better benefits too!
Hey, this was interesting reading, thanks.
Americans Don’t Miss Manufacturing — They Miss Unions
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-dont-miss-manufacturing-they-miss-unions/
Where is the US Surgeon General on the gender dysphoria argument? Is he just a token patsy who is going along to get along? Conventional medical opinion around the world is that gender dysphoria is a mental illness, and just like homosexuality, it may be reclassified. But using the cudgel of Title IX in the absence of qualified medical opinion seems like more PC pandering from the change you can’t believe in guy. Where is the US Surgeon general on this, and why is the obese AG not as reactive on the financial fraud front?
That is not true. There have been autopsies on trannies’ brains. They have found in the itty bitty area that differs between men and women (identified not that long ago, maybe in the last 25 years) and is seen as relating to gender, the brains of the trannies that were studied indeed were like that of the opposite gender.
Brazil gov change via impeachment, color revolution mutates into constitutional overthrow as tactic?
No. It’s not a “color revolution” at all.
Eric Tymoigne continues his excellent series on banking http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2016/05/money-banking-part-14-financial-crises.html
“”Do not provide liquidity against Ponzi finance inducing financial instruments.
Recent crisis: Fed provided advances at near 0% rate, against poor to toxic collateral (accepted at par), to questionable institutions, to non-bank entities””
Bill keeps dodging the bullet in the US Press, because all the media bosses would love to be Bill, and so would the reporters.