EU’s Proposed Ban On Canadian, U.S. Lobsters Inches Forward HuffPo
‘Star Trek’ creator Gene Roddenberry’s dynasty endures USA Today
The tide of globalisation is turning Martin Wolf, FT
Hanjin Shipping’s Troubles Leave $14 Billion in Cargo Stranded at Sea WSJ
Shrink the big container ship to fit the world FT
FBI’s Records on Financial Crisis Requested by U.S. Lawmaker Bloomberg
Wall St turns to machines to find better-behaved bankers FT
The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street Bank of England
A New Record for Job Openings Deepens Mystery Over Lack of Hiring WSJ
Indonesia: Haze investigators held captive, threatened with death Asian Correspondent
Syraqistan
The Mess in Syria by Robert F. Kennedy , Jr. & response by Stephen Zunes Tikkun
Brexit?
The Brexit clusterf**k Politics@Surrey
Black Injustice Tipping Point
Who killed Ferguson activist Darren Seals? WaPo
Poll: Support for Black Lives Matter grows among white youth AP
2016
FALSE PHILANTHROPY Summary Review of Selected Intentionally False Representations in Clinton Foundation Public Filings Charles Ortel
Hillary Clinton relies on Bush-era official for new Spanish-language TV ad campaign WaPo
Goldman Sachs bans employee donations to Trump, not Clinton Washington Examiner
In every state, pessimism about Trump, Clinton and the impact of the election WaPo
What Follows From a Presidential Campaign of So Many Negative ‘Firsts’ Matthew Dowd, WSJ
The first Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump showdown of 2016, annotated WaPo. They didn’t actually meet, although they were at the same venue.
Souring on Donald Trump, Republicans Pour Money Into Senate Races NYT
Why Trump Doesn’t Scare Me Scott Adams
Peas in a pod: The long and twisted relationship between Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani New York Daily News
The most powerful woman in GOP politics Politico. “It is Rebekah Mercer, according to these sources, whose frustration with what she saw as the political ineffectiveness of the Koch brothers’ network led her to redirect Mercer money to build a rival operation. ”
No Exit: Why are anti-Trump conservatives constantly trapped inside elevators? Daily Dot
Whoops: Independent candidate appears to have accidentally picked a running mate Politico
Clinton Email Tar Baby
FBI director: Clinton email case ‘was not a cliff-hanger’ WaPo
Who’s Banking on the Dakota Access Pipeline? Common Dreams
Jill Stein Spray Paints a Bulldozer and More Protesters Lock Down at #NoDAPL Truth-out
War Drums
Ash Carter Warns Russia Against Interfering in ‘Democratic Process’ WSJ
Trump praises Putin at national security forum WaPo. That should cause some pearl clutching!
Imperial Collapse Watch
The OPM Data Breach: How the Government Jeopardized Our National Security for More than a Generation House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
10 new wars that could be unleashed as a result of the one against ISIS WaPo
Guillotine Watch
The most outrageous fashion spotted at Burning Man 2016 Business Insider
Women ask for pay increases as often as men but receive them less, study says Guardian
Class Warfare
Life at the Nowhere Office TNR
The Geography of U.S. Inequality NYT
Fading College Dream Saps U.S. Economy of Productivity Miracle Bloomberg
In Brooklyn, Faculty Lash Out at University’s Use of a ‘Nuclear Option’ Chronicle of Higher Education. Locking out tenured faculty…
Does the left have a future? Guardian
How to raise a genius: lessons from a 45-year study of super-smart children Nature
The YouTube demonetization controversy, explained Daily Dot
Facebook’s Africa PR offensive masks quest for profits after rejection in India Daily Nation
Twitter Finally Gives People a Way to Make Money From Twitter New York Magazine
Your new iPhone 7 headphones will break all the time because of Apple’s obsession with minimalism Quartz
No, Your Crazy Homeowners Association Can’t Ban Drought-Tolerant Landscaping LAist
Antidote du jour:
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du jour here.
178 comments
Comments are closed.
You know you have a problem when you’re willing to start futzing with URLs in order to get your morning fix when the links don’t show up on the main page…
Thanks for the great links, Lambert!
Re: today’s antidote — when we were snorkeling in Hawaii 20 years ago, we were told that to approach or attempt to touch a sea turtle was a federal crime that would result in a $10,000 fine — if the crime was witnessed and reported, natch. Now I wonder if that was erroneous.
It’s what James Comey would term “a close call” for prosecution. Particularly if the creature approached you, and it’s your word against the sea turtle’s.
If you look closely at the pattern on the turtle’s shell, you’ll notice the silhuettes of the Cyrillic letters Б, д and П, which some experts (granted anonymity in light of the ongoing investigation) agree proves a certain Russian origin, thus showing the turtle has been planted to incriminate the diver.
The fact that Putin is clearly manipulating NC antidotes is reason enough to install more nukes in Korea and Poland. Byelorussia may have to be overthrown too.
Putin’s everywhere:
Ayn Rand Akbar!
When I’m in the shower, I’m afraid to wash my hair!
And blessed be the Holy Trinity: von Mises, Hayek, and Friedman.
Another bad case of Polytheism dressed up Monotheism [free ™ markets]….
You forgot token Saint Ayn Rand of the blessed sacred amphetamine convent… where the Sister wears the pants…
Disheveled Marsupial… Never could figure out why so many obviously misogynist patriarchal sorts – in public – have a secret penchant for some sadomasochistic pleasure in private….
It truly is a sad commentary on the poor quality of a candidate who sits there glassy eyed with thoughts of munchies and M&Ms dancing in his head that he could not respond to a simple question about a worldwide disgrace, the barbaric savaging of the people of Syria and the city under siege, Aleppo. Not since the halcyon days of Quemoy and Matsu has the highest, and I do mean HIGHEST, office been pursued by a woefully unprepared candidate in the person of Gary Johnson, Libertarian Party Nominee. How hard would it be to turn the tables on the lying liars of the MSM with liberal bias and point accusingly: “WHAT ANOTHER GOTCHA QUESTION? Well, I’m NOT here to play these games, I’m here for the American people who want the truth, not game show theatrics!” I mean, this is political deflection 101. Who trains these guys anymore? Social media misfits from tweetdom? Are we now on the expressway to Serfdom?
Have you taken a chance to read any comments on this story? Many of them are taking Johnson’s side and the few that are attacking him over this topic come off as Clinton-bots. I’m not sure where you stand.
Johnson bombed on that question. I thought he would get a 15 min segment not 4-5 minutes. Its not an easy question for someone to answer on Corporate News. I’m also not sure if you think that Assad is the butcher in this case. The SAA is fighting off a US proxy that has and will ethnically cleanse entire cities. The barbarians at the gate are at the gate of West Aleppo (Syrian held territory) not East Aleppo (ISIS territory).
In a previous segment Joe tries to link Aleppo to the Holocaust. The side that has regularly ethnically cleanses cities is the side that he supports. I doubt he understands this fact.
Mika on the other hand…she does not listen to her father who has repudiated his Grand Chessboard strategy and seeks reconciliation with China and Russia before the US Empire collapses.
To be fair, I think the situation in Syria is sufficiently complex that coming up with a sensible strategy is likely to take some time and effort for a candidate and is not likely to be a big vote winner regardless of what it says. There are also the questions of whether anything the US does will succeed or fail, and whether it will make things better or worse in either case (and for whom). The one thing we can say with some certainty is that things would likely improve if the US stopped using foreign countries as proxy battlegrounds in a new Cold War, and he did make that point. I would be tougher on him if he was a Senator or Congressman, but his political background seems to be in state government.
Personally I think governance from ignorance is a good deal more common than we would like to believe. Candidates are only human, they have limited hours in the day and they are obliged to spend a lot of them engaged in the mechanics of running campaigns and winning votes. Frank declarations of ignorance (especially if they come with an open mind and willingness to learn and assess facts) actually worry me less than faux declarations of expertise in the form of voter-friendly soundbites that have little or no basis in reality.
@RabidGandhi — LOL — love it!
PUTIN IS NO LAUGHING MATTER!
It’s good to see someone on the NC boards has woken up and smelled the coffee!! Maybe when Moscow is a smoldering, radioactive slag-heap we can finally get the unadulterated, uplifting antidotes we deserve!
Informed sources tell me that Putin once dated a notorious MMTer… any links out there to verify the story?
U.S. WARNS RUSSIA NOT TO INTERFERE IN 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.
Darn tootin Mr. Putin, we will protect our election fixing and color rrevlutions monopoly at all costs.
It’s OK to interfere with money though, perhaps indirectly or maybe even directly, just not by hacking.
Form a lobby and make all serious contenders come before you.
RabidGandhi
September 8, 2016 at 9:45 am
I’m thinking its a “Day of the Dolphins” kind of thing – I imagine turtles can “loiter” …uh, …float around yachts more unobtrusively than dolphins – I mean everybody goes “Flippers” when they see dolphins, and will see the attached bombs cause dolphins leap out of the water, especially if people are throwing them snackies. As well as being the attention whores of the ocean….
Ever see a dolphin with dark glasses – of course not! I think Bob Dole said the most dangerous place to be is between a dolphin and a camera….
Turtles? Who pays attention to them? Ever go to Sea world and see turtles do tricks? They’re basically the cats of the ocean – a turtle’s philosophy is you feed me and I do nothing. And they don’t roll over in the water revealing the bomb glued to them – and don’t need no straps to hold it in place either.
WAKE UP PEOPLE!!! Obviously a vast armada of turtle assassins has been dispatched by Russia to do away with our elite yacht riding 0.01%
Why, we oughta…
It might be a zoo type situation. The turtle is turning, but look at the top right leg.
Instead of a fine, should people who grope wild animals be groped by strangers at a Fed Pen? or does that sound too much like the East European prostitution racket in the closed camp areas of Burning Man?
It’s illegal, but so are securities frauds and drunk driving and murder. Only matters if one “gets caught” by someone who might try to enforce the laws. Obviously, humans will satisfy themselves with “wonderful experiences” like man/womanhandling sea turtles as they fin themselves through the oceans’ beautiful exotic margins, and collecting huge paydays on derivative rackets and selling “US national secrets” to foreign operatives like Mossad and “the Chinese…” http://crosswordtracker.com/clue/israels-counterpart-to-the-cia/
“A New Record for Job Openings Deepens Mystery Over Lack of Hiring”
Its easier to starve to death without work than with it.
Even though your three crappified jobs don’t pay enough to live on, there’s no time for a forth.
A few things I’ve noticed in regard to the posting / not hiring “mystery”…
– HR departments move at a glacial pace when it comes to the hiring process
– most jobs are posted internally as well as externally, and hires are often times internal
– there is little motivation on the part of the hiring manager to rush the hiring process. Often the work is being covered by other employees, who are often exempt, so overtime hours but no overtime pay. Meanwhile, the job posting provides temporary cover (“we’re trying our best to fill the position”) against employee disgruntlement. And, the manager comes in under budget, which means bonus time.
– posted job requirements are hyperspecific, as opposed to seeking transferable skills, which makes finding good candidates difficult
– and lastly, the employer is looking to hire “on the cheap”, and right now good quality employees have choices.
Don’t forget advertising. A “hiring” company sounds good to consumers. Was it about a year ago where every Comcast ad was about hiring?
i wonder if some sort of quid pro quo exists between the government and the mega corporations. Something along the lines of this makes us look good even though we don’t plan on hiring for this position. Maybe tax credits of some sort? I’ve been suspicious since every application asks me if i’m a veteran. What does it matter? And how does that reflect upon the job i’m applying to? Look how they collude with TPP and so forth? Just wondering out loud
Yes there are benefits for companies that hire veterans.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/04/05/incentivizing-employers-hire-veterans-through-permanent-tax-credits
They get tax credits.
the GI bill made sense, most of those men were drafted. This does not make sense, these people went into the army as a job. Is nothing upside down in this world?
Once you join you don’t get to quit and while they may not have been drafted many of the reasons people join the military is because it is a means to escape poverty and avoid burger flipping(the military pays for your training.)
Mystery? Not so much.
http://ritholtz.com/2016/09/cant-find-qualified-applicants-raise-pay/
Does that turtle want to be touched? Body language says no, head is turning away from human.
Exactly. In Hawaii one is advised to leave the poor creatures alone. They are endangered.
I wonder if the lady snorkeler would have any reaction to someone coming up behind her and fondling her flank… Gotta love homocentricity… “I had such an AMAZING experience, Brenda!”
Compare Trump’s Sep 6th national defense speech to Hillary’s Aug 31st American exceptionalism speech. Differences? Other than stylistic, none.
Both Depublicrat candidates are earnestly committed to defeating our ghastly nemesis du jour, Isis — just as former candidates in former races railed against the scourge of Al Qaeda, a US-spawned bogeyman who may have morphed into an ally of convenience in Syria.
Trump’s promise to “rebuild” our “depleted” military echoes Ronald Reagan’s 600-ship navy campaign of 1980. But it’s three and a half decades on, and the US economy is deeper in debt, more hollowed out, and less competitive after another half lifetime of value-subtractive military spending to rule the world.
While Trump is likely to win convincingly — simply because the lying liars of the MSM claim he won’t, and they are infallibly wrong — there will be no new Morning in America as plowshares are converted into cost-plus swords of polished crapalloy with handles of tungsten cowhide.
Ultimately the Depublicrat candidate, Trumplary Clump, is the same person. And he/she/it is dedicated to subserviently washing the feet of the military-intelligence complex that rules us, and then drying its cloven hooves with his/her hair.
Trumplary Clump will briskly conclude the euthanasia of the middle class. And you can take that to the bank for a negative yield.
Behold the white horse of the false populist: there is only one War Party.
The assertion that we don’t spend enough on the military would be comical, if there weren’t so many people who are eager to hear and believe such horseshit.
Few economists other than Michael Hudson will touch the subject, even though it’s the elephant in the room to explain and forecast America’s no longer concealable imperial decline.
Fiat global reserve currency – backed by noting but military might – tempts the one issuer to create as much as it wants, and in a very understandably human way, spends most of it on destructive toys.
It’s self-perpetuating.
I’m persuaded. Where do I vote?
Fortunately, there are lots of people who see a clear distinction between the 2 candidates and won’t support the Trump idiot who demonstrated last night that he doesn’t have a plan except to say that he has one.
Read it yourself …
LAUER: Let me stay on ISIS. When we’ve met in the past and we’ve talked, you say things like I’m going to bomb the expletive out of them very quickly. And when people like me press you for details like that gentleman just said on what your plan is, you very often say, I’m not going to give you the details because I want to be unpredictable.
TRUMP: Absolutely. The word is unpredictable.
LAUER: But yesterday, you actually told us a little bit about your plan in your speech. You said this. Quote, “We’re going to convene my top generals and they will have 30 days to submit a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS.” So is the plan you’ve been hiding this whole time asking someone else for their plan?
TRUMP: No. But when I do come up with a plan that I like and that perhaps agrees with mine, or maybe doesn’t — I may love what the generals come back with. I will convene…
LAUER: But you have your own plan?
TRUMP: I have a plan. But I want to be — I don’t want to — look. I have a very substantial chance of winning. Make America great again. We’re going to make America great again. I have a substantial chance of winning. If I win, I don’t want to broadcast to the enemy exactly what my plan is.
LAUER: But you’re going to…
TRUMP: And let me tell you, if I like maybe a combination of my plan and the generals’ plan, or the generals’ plan, if I like their plan, Matt, I’m not going to call you up and say, “Matt, we have a great plan.” This is what Obama does. “We’re going to leave Iraq on a certain day.”
LAUER: But you’re going to convene a panel of generals, and you’ve already said you know more about ISIS than those generals do.
TRUMP: Well, they’ll probably be different generals, to be honest with you. I mean, I’m looking at the generals, today, you probably saw, I have a piece of paper here, I could show it, 88 generals and admirals endorsed me today.
To claim that the 2 major candidates are the same is foolish, or perhaps just an il-informed statement..
How is Hillary’s plan different (then the I’m going to bomb the crap out of them part of Trump’s plan?)
Let me make this clear. I don’t particularly think Trump is a bright bulb but at the very least his plan isn’t to antagonize Russia, Syria and Iran while dealing with ISIL(who by the way at this moment appear to be at the very least coordinating with us on dealing with ISIL.)
From where I am sitting Hillary’s no fly zone idea is set up to start WW3.
Exactly. The US cannot “no fly” Syria because it IS Russia’s backyard. No-flying Syria when the Russians have a massive, PERMANENT military base right there in country (with aircraft) is similar to a situation where Russia would try to no-fly Germany with (many) US bases all around. Cannot be done without direct conflict with the one you CANNOT have an actual conflict with.
No war with Russia ends without nukes being exchanged all over the place. And that is 100% unwinnable.
I don’t really think anybody is saying they are the same? They are both awful, in mostly different ways but linked together in how jaw-droppingly bad they are especially given a starting pool of, what, 180 million First World adults?
Otherwise, yes, they have clear distinctions. I just can’t decide from the embarrassment of riches in those distinctions which mix is worse. The word to emphasize is, of course, “embarrassment”.
Or we are both informed, but simply interpret the facts differently.
He’s being unpredictable.
He has a plan. Maybe he knows more than those generals (but not some other generals).
He wants to hear out other plans, by new generals (this one could be tricky – is he antagonizing current generals and admirals?).
Can the bad guys predict which plan?
“Hinald Clintump”
Thanks for offering a write-in alternative to a rock and a roll!
Jim Haygood
September 8, 2016 at 9:45 am
Well said, though I suspect The Hillary will win (or more accurately, not lose)
Keynesian stimulative spending – scoffed at by “conservatives” except with regard to the military. If only we had spent trillions more on defense, we could defeat our enemies with their sophisticated Toyota pick-ups…how can the US military be expected to defeat such advanced…and reliable technology???????
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-isis-uses-toyota-trucks-2015-10
You need to correct that to we need to spend trillions to defeat their sophisticated Toyota pickups that we gave them to begin with.
Our great military plan seems to be sell arms to everyone and then insist that we must spend more money to protect ourselves from the horrible, terrible awful threat that we helped create by selling those arms to begin- at least with the “moderate” rebels the US has been arming.
cwaltz
September 8, 2016 at 2:38 pm
Your exactly right – and as I recall, auto loans had negative rates at the time…so we’re sending them interest too….
damn NIRP
Good luck with the air bags in those Toyota’s.
The one I have, I have to replace two.
Clinton is a neo-con’s neo-con. She will start a war with Russia over their Syria project.
Trump is a wild card but I like that he has the former DIA Flynn who is not a peace-nik but at least is competent. Trump does not want a war with Russia and he seems to want to negotiate away the US Empire while the US still has strong negotiating position.
The rhetoric is similar but they are not the same. I do not even know who that is difficult to grasp.
Clinton = WWIII
The bigger the hypocrite, the poorer the people he hurts:
Ash Carter Warns Russia Against Interfering in ‘Democratic Process’ WSJ
vs.
Uzbeks paid dearly for U.S. support of Karimov regime
Missing from the headline is the actual quote from Carter who said “interferring in OUR democratic process”.
In this case “interferring” means baseless accusations that the Russians were involved in leaks that categorically proved the US has no democratic process.
The fact that WSJ can publish such a phrase without its entire readership dying of laughter is a resounding testament to the effectiveness of the US education system.
Very good piece by Martin Wolf, echoing exactly what we’ve been saying here for a long time: distribution matters. Focusing only on economic aggregates (GDP, groaf) ignores something very important — which the numbnuts who practice mainstream economics refuse to see because i) they can’t quantify it, or ii) it’s not important to oligarchs. Or both.
Speaking of distribution, US food distributors have taken to invoking the D word:
How can ye have any pudding, if ye don’t eat yer meat?!
I shop mostly at a big chain, Publix. I see ZERO deflation, rather steady increases (looks like “”Chained CPI” to me) in prices of anything I can afford to eat, and that includes milk, cereals, canned and dry beans, canned tuna (now down to 4 drained ounces of distasteful flecks of flesh in the “6 ounce can” my mind tells me from my past is the amount to expect), chicken, the occasional piece of dead cow or steer, bacon (now regularly $7.50 for 16 ounce and a lot of 12-ounce “special center cut” pig products, yogurt, bell peppers (the red ones $4.99 a pound, even lettuce.
And how about that miraculous “stickiness” of stuff like gasoline prices, at least when measured against that ideal behavior of the supply-demand graph one encounters in Econ 101? Sticky on the down leg, greased lightnin’ on the up leg…
For scale: Worldwide visible annual expenditures (ignoring “out year” costs) on that overarching enterprise and racket that gets lumped into the monad called “war,” comes to what? $18 trillion?
But one cannot argue with the pronouncements of “market organs” which are of course totally dispassionate…
I guess I have to eat more cow, faster — or be accused of being a “zombie consumer…” http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/flowchart/2010/08/26/the-rise-of-the-zombie-consumers
Apparently the food companies’ “deflation” complaints derive from the CPI report.
It shows a 1.6% drop in the “Food at home” category over the past 12 months. Subindexes for Cereal and bakery products; Meats poultry fish & eggs; Dairy and related products; and Nonalcoholic beverages all show declines. Only Fruits and vegetables show an increase.
Who knew? Raising the dire specter of BLS-measured deflation is a good excuse for bad earnings. It’s like having a doctor’s note for skipping school — unimpeachable.
JTMcPhee
September 8, 2016 at 12:06 pm
Obviously, your not changing your diet in response to the price signals the market is sending you and substituting products with declining prices for products with rising prices.
I have taken advantage of the collapse in flat screen TV prices – not only is it an extremely economic sources of calories, easy to prepare, and so nutritious as well – before I started eating flat screen TVs I was seriously deficient in cadmium and other heavy metals!!! And the fiber effect – why, one flat screen TV is the fiber equivalent of 380,000 bowls of oatmeal.
Ah, the market….so, so perfectly supplying all we need at the optimal price. I mean, the FED tells us so…
you guys are on fire today
DVD players are lower sodium and fewer calories.
The Fed amuses the crap out of me. No food or fuel in the basket because volatility.
Meanwhile someone should ask them how the substitution principle is going to work on our “exceptional” health care system that keeps shifting more and more costs onto consumers but is “required” since markets are so efficient and everything.
cwaltz
September 8, 2016 at 3:06 pm
Meanwhile someone should ask them how the substitution principle is going to work on our “exceptional” health care system
3 words:
witch doctors
leaches
Oh, and thanks for the tip about dvd players – I have to watch my salt intake….
LOL! Nice riff.
JTMcPhee
September 8, 2016 at 12:06 pm
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-one-percenters-are-now-destroying-dollar-stores-2016-09-08
and this
“Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos spends a lot of time in stores, and he looks at research to understand his customers. His conclusion: Their earnings are holding up OK, but their expenses keep going up a lot. And this is hurting his business. The chief culprits? Health-care costs and rent that are rising at a “very rapid” clip, he told investors in the company’s most recent conference call. “Our core consumer continues to be under a lot of pressure,” he said.”
==================================
I just appreciate the chance to communicate with someone else that doesn’t buy the “there is no inflation” bullsh*t that permeates the media for some reason
JTMcPhee….
Sorry but don’t confuse manufactures messing w/ weight or volume with inflation or loss of PP… its just increasing their margins above the near term input costs.
Soft drinks cost cents on the liter including the plastic bottle and changing from sugarcane to Corn by products, yet look at the mark up, same same with sun glasses…. prices are administered more than supply and demand dictates imo…
Disheveled Marsupial…. bonuses are counting on it as equities is form of money et al thingy….
Skippy, what counts for most of us is what volume of nutrition goes into my belly for every cent I spend. That 4 ounce “6 ounce” can of tuna scraps not quite defective enough to go down the cat food line (cat food being more often “trash fish” anyway, except the Special Brands) costs more in absolute and even relative dollars and cents than the six ounce cans my mother bought to make all those wonderful casseroles. Some of that might be due to scarcity as us fokking humans “mine the seas” and strip out the ecology that got built over random thousands of generations. But I mean BPA and solder or now crimping and big presses cost money, so does maintaining that “Sorry, Charlie” IP and bribing lawmakers and regulators and enforcement people to look the other way or fix the rules to suit the looters.
I just looked up a couple of old cookbooks from the ’50s through 2003, all the recipes call for “6 ounce can of tuna.” I guess if I triple the current can count I double the recipe — now isn’t that special…
Same applies to the 59 ounce “half gallon of orange juice,” a slick switch worked on the momentum of the processing of us mopes, who are “used to” getting a certain volume of “product” from a certain category of package size. Because the pricing of the “product” that is in that “half gallon” mental category (morphing gradually into idiot acceptance of the Bezzle, over time) is at and headed above what I used to pay for 64 ounces of pesticide-infused “orange juice.”
Them bonuses come to the mid-range mopes who invent the trickery that suckers the rest of us into accepting “substitutes” even in the face of advert-learning we were once presented with, “ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES!” Remember that one?
All part of effectuating “Chained CPI” without even having to go to the trouble of suckering the mopes into accepting a legislative “fix” for a fraudulent claim that There Is No Alternative. Which, since we are on the part of the liturgy that says “deficits are good, buy more weapons,” is pure Bezzle yet as Clive notes in today’s posts, “we” are too stupid and distracted to hold the honest image of what’s being done to us.
It’s complicated, requires attention and focus to even try to keep up, as you know…
“The most powerful woman in GOP politics … Rebekah Mercer”
The Mercers are just regular folks. Here’s one of dad Bob’s little boats.
I know that Lambert objects to the phrase `low information voter’, but how anybody can think that these people have the interests of the downtrodden working class at heart is beyond me.
Hey! That little boat reminds me of Largo’s yacht, the Disco Volante, in Thunderball.
Low information presupposes the amount of information being processed above all else, when it could be the heart, or the mind thinking in different ways.
The Scott Adams piece provides some good laughs. E.g.,
Touche.
As seen on a T-shirt in my ‘hood:
“I’m not yelling, I’m Greek.
This is how we talk.”
Fifteen inches of annual rain (L.A.) vs 43 inches (NYC) affects culture.
As the L.A. Times headlined on a wet day (which wouldn’t even merit mention on the east coast):
You’d think it was heavy water or something.
Hah hah. Indeed. I had to do the same when I made the migration. Hardest thing for me was to stop honking my horn in traffic, or at people crazy enough to step into cross-walks. Nearly hit someone, actually, before I realized in CA pedestrians have the right-of-way. Whodathunkit?
Back in my day, the joke went something like this:
They said, “Once youse step off the curb, youse in play.”
Adams did not repeat his prediction that Trump will win.
I remember seeing a cartoon entitled “The difference between California and New York.” It was a split panel with the same scene, of someone greeting another person in the street. The Californian is saying “Have a nice day!” with a thought bubble saying “F— you!” The New Yorker is saying “F— you!” and thinking “Have a nice day!”
Very glad I have always been anti-Apple. This will not change with the latest iteration of the iPhone and the cynical cash-grab that is removing the headphone jack.
When a tech giant does something like this it makes me wonder what a phone would look like in a socialized, worker-run phone production company with input from the consumer, too? I have to wager it would lean towards durability, ie not scrapping headphone jacks that have worked just fine for over 130 years, and headphones that are interchangeable and cost almost no money to buy (really, I have bought many replacement headphones for a few bucks on eBay when they inevitably break). Or perhaps they would produce a line of durable phones but allow for a line of “innovative” products as well, to see what worked and what did not?
When the AT&T monopoly leased all phones, Western Electric made them to last forever. You can still buy antique phones at flea markets that work fine.
On the other hand, if that model continued today, they’d offer one brick-sized beige cell phone with a calculator-style numeric display and two functions: (1) dialing calls; (2) answering calls.
I still have two AT&T phones that I purchased in the early 1980s. They’re the only phones that work when the electricity goes out.
and that’s a bad thing…?
I gave away my first “smartphone” to a needy friend so she’d have something to access the internet with; I’m in an income bracket where I don’t give away something like that unless I consider it a (mental) health hazard. Bought a little Nokia stick phone and don’t miss the smart-contraption at all.
Can anyone here actually keep earbuds in their ears? One of my sleights against Apple involves their popularization and normalization of earbuds over ‘headphones’. I much prefer the separated speakers that clip around your ears (that as far as I can tell, no one makes). Instead we have a slew of cheap, poor quality earbuds to choose from.
Today you can either shove something in your ear canal, place something on the cusp of your canal that falls out easily (i.e. earpods) or choose to walk around with gigantic studio monitors on your head.
Roger Smith, snap a LEGO on your head. (Beats by Dre, subsidiary of Apple Corp.) I can’t help but giggle at the arrangement necessary to keep one’s head in the sweet spot of studio monitors. It just screams plank gag. (TV Tropes)
While I am not anti-Apple, having a few Macs (the fixable kind), I wouldn’t get the iPhone 7, or any previous model because of price and lack of straight forward repairability.
The new AirPods, even more than their “pencil”, look like a cash cow though. Easily lost and chock full of proprietary tech so that the price is high and can’t be forced down. They could have used improved audio bluetooth and sold to a wider audience but apparently decided that they’d have to compete on price in the wider market. Saying that they removed the headphone jack because of waterproof issues is so clearly bogus as to be embarrassing. The fact that even normal earbud usage is correlated to increased hearing loss doesn’t help either.
Of course Apple’s current business practices are beyond defense.
What bothers me the most is this means more wireless exposure, with more of it closer to the body.
Wired headphones were a way to create a little distance.
They really want to fry us, don’t they?!
I was also wondering about that.
Evan McMullin should be totally ignored. The guy has received more press coverage than Jill Stein yet is on the ballot in only nine states. Interestingly it’s the DC papers, mags & rags that are flogging his ‘candidacy.’ I had no doubt when I saw the headline that the ‘independent’ candidate was McMullin, not e.g. Andrew Basiago, and that the ‘whoops’ of the headline would be anything but. Lo, it is all coming to pass. Still waiting for the headline ‘Here’s What Joke CIA Candidate McMullin Actually Thinks He’s Doing.’
Re: the Trump v. Hillary/Trump = Hillary links: There IS at least one big difference between Trump and Clinton: Clinton has stoked the US-Russia ‘tensions’ and it’s clear that her first priority, far ahead of domestic policy issues, will be to put US troops into Syria, [nuclear] consequences be damned.
Trump may be at least partially handcuffed by his peace-mongering rhetoric.
He’s seen by the media as a Trump foil, and thus in their narrative he’s a-okay. Stein speaks negatively about Clinton & the Dems from the left, and is thus not okay.
Handcuffed to peace mongering, to which I say: BS…unless of course you ignore all the times he want’s to “bomb the sh*t” out of a foreign country. Cherrypicking is only good for actually picking cherries.
The concern is some accidental incident in the South China Sea might drag everyone in, including the US, even with a peace-mongering president.
clinton certainly has demonstrated her cherry picking skills; iraq, syria, ukraine. trump talks about it. why do you believe trump in this instance?
Mainstream press finally paying attention to election integrity
Bob Fritakis has written 6 books about elections. He works with Harvey Wasserman and lives in Central Ohio and had a front row seat in the stolen election in 2004.
Here is the article. It contains a link to an Election Justice Report and other recent articles.
Distrust of 2016’s Hackable Election Is a Media Landslide With Just One Solution: Hand-counted Paper Ballots
Greg Palast recently joined Rolling Stone and wrote about stripping voters
Rolling Stone exposé:
The GOP’s secret scheme begins purge
of a million minority voters from voter rolls
There was a follow up article on this work in salon.com
Palast has written a really great book on this issue: Billionaires and the Ballot Bandits. (2012)
Wait a minute…has Twitter figured out a way to make money from Twitter yet? This seems a bit like putting the cart before the horse, if you ask me.
thank you for the laugh!
+
How do I retweet this $$?
Scott Adams is right about New York speech vs. the rest of the country. I might even call it Northeast big-city speech:
“You know how Trump is always saying inappropriate and violent-sounding things? Most people see that type of language as offensive and even dangerous. The exception is people who grew up in New York. We see it as “talking.”
After college, when I moved from upstate New York to California, I had to relearn how to talk. My New York style offended nearly everyone. Let me give you an example of how a Californian talks compared to a New Yorker.
Californian: It looks like it might rain today.
New Yorker: Oh, shit. Fucking rain. I need that like I need a goddamned bullet in my head.”
The offense people take to NY speech when I leave NY makes me laugh after I realize that sarcasm is not the lingua franca everywhere else in the country (where I often get blank stares when I use it).
Good point. Coincidentally I had two conversations this very week with CA natives talking about NY (my home area). Not uncommon observations, either.
One stated that before she took her one and only vacation to NY City she was nervous and had low expectations. She ended up loving it and was very impressed with how friendly and funny the NY City natives were once she got used to their style. She also mentioned how much better and friendlier public service – restaurants, etc – was compared to CA. Too true based on my experience here.
The other was a co-worker who talked about a former Manager from NY City that took years to “fit in”, “He was loud, brash, and swore like a sailor. Eventually he calmed down and turned out to be a heckuva nice guy.”.
You can tell Hillary is not a true New Yorker. She still doesn’t have that New York speech
Hillary is more the “Big Stick” kind of lady… Speech = money, don’tcha know? Local and regional inflections drowned and boiled in the frog bath of neoliberalism…
Many people in Seattle either find sarcasm rude and offensive or give you looks of shame.
On The Tide of Globalisation Is Turning:
Why not?
Martin Wolf specifically ignores both the lack of liberalising migration/flows of people and the completely unmention Investor-State Dispute Systems that go along with Globalisation. Trade should not be a scapegoat, but Globalizsation, as designed today, is not just trade and it is a main driver of our ills.
I’d think Wolf would know a little bit of his history. Rising trade (or offshoring manufacturing) with China, rising demand by China to control trade routes. See: China now claiming “ownership” of the vital international trade sea lanes in the South China Sea. Globalization has more effects in the West than only rising wealth inequality. There are some voices in the West calling for less democracy. yikes!
Globalization of production, one reserve currency (backed by might), and less democracy in order to defend that one reserve currency – they are all linked.
On the other hand, when globalization of power is imposed first (i.e. when Genghis Khan’s paper money, backed by his Mongolian pony army, was good everywhere, for example, his power was globalized), globalization of production is smoother (and you see Persian artisans working with Chinese potters in Jingdezhen to produce the worlds’s first blue and white porcelain – evidence of which can be seen on portrait drawings showing western faces on many Yuan dynasty blue and white pieces, and also the telltale cobalt blue pigment – it fires to a deep, beautiful purplish blue that penetrates the clay body so you can feel the bumps, from the painted patterns, on the surface – that was imported from Persia).
He could have said globalization is actually good for us. But he didn’t.
Instead, he is saying either
1 Globalization is partially to blame.
or
2. Globalization, while not actually good for us, is not to blame.
I don’t think he has made a case for (2) above either.
That is, I think he is saying these following 2 factors (plus the third mentioned by JCC) contribute to all our ills.
1 Globalization and rising imports
2 Productivity and new technologies.
3. Migration
If so, we have to curb all three (he can claim, or not, we are ‘scapegoating’) to cure our ills.
Whoops. The link goes to a Times medical article
“What is Aleppo?”
Three words that mark the end of the Gary Johnson experiment.
Too late.
Too bad the TV host wasn’t quick enough on his feet to ask Johnson, “Who is John Galt, Gary?”
A rather substantial portion of the electorate can’t find America on a map. So why would they care that Johnson hadn’t heard of Aleppo? As the current BG PM once said to an adoring crowd: “I am a simpleton and you are simpletons, so we understand each other perfectly.” He keeps winning elections, too…
I actually own this pin.
I wonder if it’s a case of reading about Aleppo in the news, instead of hearing, so that, when people say ‘Aleppo,’ the brain doesn’t quite register.
There are foreign words (for places, names or otherwise) that I recognize on paper, but often don’t pick up, immediately, when people say those words in a conversation. Maybe his mind was stuck with the pronunciation accent on the first syllable.
.
I thought the top of scarborough’s head was going to blow off when he heard this.
What pissed me off royally, was that the question was NOT, “What would you do about Ferguson or Baltimore or Chicago?”
I know I read somewhere that when politicians cannot solve problems at home, they concentrate on foreign “policy.” It’s one of the perks, I guess, of being a citizen of the indispensable nation. We get to “elect” the king or queen of the world, and “Aleppo” becomes our cross to bear. Whether we can find it on a map or not.
exactly, “what is your position on ferguson?”; “what is your position on toxic water in detroit?”–the politicians that talk the most about aleppo want a war in syria. not that i support johnson, mind.
You have to remember, though, that the folks at MSNBC were in the process of giving each other a tongue bath after the “Commander-in-Chief” forum, and it was all about foreign policy and the Middle East and veterans and flag-waving.
Considering what a terrible job Matt Lauer did in his role at that event, I have no expectation that had the focus been on our cities and economic and racial inequities, he would have done any better, or that the post-forum discussion would have been any more on point.
It does not bode well for the “debates,” that’s for sure.
I was a little taken aback by Johnson’s deer-in-the-headlights reaction to being asked “what about Aleppo? If he didn’t know what “it” was, he could have said, “can you be more specific?” or simply thrown the question back at Barnicle. But he didn’t. He had to have known that he was being asked to be on the show to discuss issues that had come up in the forum the night before, so how could he have been so ill-prepared? Especially, since he and others have been pushing hard for the debates to include third-party candidates, and having a command of facts and issues would have gone a long way to help make that case.
The whole thing is at once maddening and depressing; we may set a record for lowest turnout for an election ever, that’s how bad it is.
That kind of ignorance didn’t hurt Trump.
I know where Aleppo is. I could probably point out its position on an outline map of Syria within a thumbwidth or so. So what? Aleppo is one of those details technocrats get bogged down in while they’re missing the big picture. That, I think, Johnson got as right as any of the Presidential candidates.
Besides the gotcha nature of this bit of news, the thing that honks me off is that both he and Jill Stein have been saying and doing lots of things in the last few weeks. What’s shown up on my news RSS?
* Gary Johnson didn’t recognize what the word “Aleppo” meant.
* Jill Stein flew to the wrong city in Ohio, and the crowd had to wait until she drove from the (wrong) airport.
That’s the first thing I’ve noticed the Guardian,Reuters,USA Today,or the BBC writing about them in at least a month.
Just stating the obvious, of course, so it doesn’t get forgotten.
Not to defend Johnson, but is “What is Aleppo?” any worse than “Wiped? Like with a cloth or something?” ?
And furthermore, it’s harder to pull a “we came, we saw, he died” when you don’t even know the place exists.
I think Clinton calling himself Robin Hood is much worse.
Blame the media. Bill was being truthful when he called himself a Robbin’ Hood.
Our elite media seems to have some issues concerning Syrian geography as well.
NYT Ridiculing Of Gary Johnson Failed With Four(!) Major Mistakes Pravda on the Hudson had to issue correction of the correction.
It depends upon what the meaning of “is” is.
To recite a quote from the spouse of one of his rivals.
“We wiped Aleppo off the map? Like with a cloth or something?”
Judge Nap on the FBI’s report about Hillary’s interrogation:
Just another example of the Clintons’ infallible reverse Midas touch: they corrupt everything they touch.
I call the gift you note in your last sentence “the Merdas touch.”
The Obamacare clusterf*ck rolls on…
[The Hill]: Poll: Half of Americans disapprove of ObamaCare
Who could’ve predicted (*cough* Lambert)…?
What are these malcontents so upset about?
Last year the maximum Obamacare penalty was a low, low $975.
This year it rises to a still affordable $2,085.
What’s not to like? /sarc
Heh.
So the exceptionally American options to health care is to either pay $200 to insurance companies for them to tell you that you need to pay out the first $3000 before they’ll even pay a dime out of those premiums and ignore your health care needs or you get or pay the government almost $175 a month to also ignore your health care needs?
How uniquely American!
– The OPM Data Breach
!. !. !.
Lest we forget:
“But not all, we are auction the best files.”
Compare:
“Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself.” – G. Spencer Brown
All of which lend to wyrd thoughts on the teleology of the Panopticon.
RE: The Mess in Syria by Robert F. Kennedy , Jr. & response by Stephen Zunes Tikkun
Amazingly informative history of u.s. involvement in the Middle East, explaining how we got into the bloody, expensive, unmanageable situation in which we find ourselves today. Also, no shortage of details of how the american public, to the extent they are even capable of understanding, are deliberately and consistently misinformed. A “must read” for anyone trying to make sense of the relentless barrage of conflicting information on the u. s. position on the Middle East.
And, although it’s not identified as such, a comment on Trump’s assessment of who “founded” isis:
Across the Mid-East, Arab leaders routinely accuse the U.S. of having created ISIS. To most Americans immersed in U.S. media perspective, such accusations seem insane. However, to many Arabs, the evidence of U.S. involvement is so abundant that they conclude that our role in fostering ISIS must have been deliberate.
Looking at a bundle of polls released from Emerson….Clinton is at 50% in Massachusetts and Connecticut, with Trump in the mid-30s (making it a big lead).
If a Democratic candidate for president can’t win an absolute majority of voters in the truest of true blue states, that’s a sign of trouble…
The results in Rhode Island also show something similar. However, a few years ago, I read an article (I think it was at Fivethirtyeight) that specified that there is a difference between swing states and swing votes. A state like Wisconsin has a lot of very conservative and very liberal people, and the level of turnout/interest drives which direction the state goes (which is how it elected Scott Walker and Russ Fiengold). While not a swing state, Massachusetts has a lot of swing voters (mostly blue collar whites), thus it’s percentage changes more, although it is a reliability Democratic state.
As someone who lives in Massachusetts, I see a lot of Trump signs in the lower middle class suburbs, while the only Clinton signs are in front of the US Rep’s house.
I plugged the Emerson results into a simple algorithm I use on state level polls, and it had quite an impact. It suggests a Clinton national lead of 1.8%. By comparison RCP’s 2-way national poll is 2.8, 4-way is 2.1, and Pollster’s national trend estimate is Clinton +5.3.
I have to think that the Rhode Island result especially is an outlier, but even so the race is far closer now than it was a month ago.
The fashion at Burning Man: Parasol. “Quirky.”
Much visual evidence of desperation.
Also, it looks like there was a big run on the clothes departments at Target.
Burning Man = If people think that heart-shaped glasses are revolutionary, I can hardly wait (or I guess I’ll have to wait forever) for incremental change.
See ,,,, Even Burning man has become crapified !!
what’s left …. ??
Who is she wearing?
Daft Punk – Lose Yourself to Dance – Burning Man 2013
Reminds me of the people on the roof top in the move Independence Day…. just before the energy weapon started the light show….
Disheveled Marsupial…. additionally were is the ATF[?]… one would think a raid would net quite a few high profile drug traffickers for questioning… or is this like Afghanistan goes Grateful Dead parking lot….
Either no fat people went to Burning Man, or nobody bothered to photograph them.
The gas masks are quaint. I thought the cybergoth thing had already played out?
Always see the stat about roughly a third of adults in this country that have completed degrees. It is usually accompanied by stats that say those with degrees command higher salaries. Are there any studies that suggest the reason for the higher salaries is because most people do not have the degrees?
And what would the effect on salaries for degree holders be once that field is over-flowing with graduates? Could a push for more degree holders also mask a push to cut the salary requirements for degree holders?
In the current economic system, from the corner store to the factory to the corporate office, labor is still on the liability side of the financial ledger. Whether that should change gets to the very core of how we value labor.
Actually, we’re already overflowing. I know a lot of people with degrees (myself included) who work in construction, food service, etc. While a degree holders have a higher average salary than non-degree holders, a few people are really throwing off the average. Every CEO is a degree holder, for instance, but their salaries are far from representative of most people’s.
How to raise a genius.
It’s telling we don’t ask how to raise a mahatma.
A sniper who fires a shot or a question only exposes/betrays himself or herself, making him or her vulnerable.
“I want to be the smartest guy in the room.” It seems that’s what we have been brainwashed into believing since kindergarten.
It’s about out-smarting others every time.
I noticed how they immediately defined intelligence down to “does well in STEM classes.” Maybe they should have had one of the featured kids write the article.
That’s an interesting point.
I came at the article from a different angle, seeing it as one example of poorly-conducted education research such as the work of “MacArthur Genius” Angela Duckworth. She’s been lauded for promoting the concept of “grit” as a factor for success.
As a concept, it’s straight-up pseudoscientific. Yet it has the proper Ayn Rand angle, so it gets applause from many who are thrilled to see “support” for what they always “knew” to be right.
I had a great conversation with a research psychologist who specializes in memory and skill acquisition, and he described the bogus concept of “grit” more or less like this:
I read that as griFt as a factor in success and thought “interesting … maybe Ayn Rand hates griFt too, but it’s still interesting I don’t care what you say …”.
Even my eyeballs are cynical at this point I guess and I actually think people are studying the obvious.
Most dangerous fashion in Burning Man 2016.
Fashion – another brainwashing tool, I guess.
It involves experts, conformity, peer pressure, order, money, status, etc.
Does the left have a future?
It’s bound up with class in the minds of class analysts. Marxism’s great failing is an over-reliance on class analysis, almost completely ignoring regional aspects of community (not to be confused with populist nationalism).
People living in the same places share experiences in ways that people in different places, while (nominally) of the same class, or engaging in the same work or politics or religion or entertainment, do not.
Local groups share: weather, immediate economic impacts (even people from different classes are affected by regional resource availabilities and pricing), impacts of local government (again, class differences may produce different reactions to such impacts, but they are still the same impacts, a common experience). These factors affect the biological organism as well as the conceptive identity. Humans have come to think of themselves as creatures of pure thought, which they simply are not. Unfortunately, contemporary technologies and the commercial (hence capitalist) culture increasingly isolate physical identity, with several collateral effects on health and consciousness.
Communities depend on recognition of peers, while class and other distinctions may obscure it, that recognition still exists. One way to find it is while travelling, once people from the same neighborhood or town become aware of each other, they have established a mutual peer-level recognition, class differences aside.
Trust requires community. Marxism theorizes that common class or work creates community, and therefore brings trust; it does to a slight extent, but other factors (regionality not least among them) can countervene that trust. Hence, the left cannot rely on class commonalities or shared circumstances in the workplace (or trans-regional unions) to build the trust needed for a political commitment and active follow-through.
Localized political and community action is still the bedrock of human cooperation. Globalists (the left is a globalist philosophy) claim that only conscious coordination can achieve global goals (and we face some important global challenges, manifesting in our various communities), but they dismiss a valuable quality of rational thought: rationality converges, irrationality diverges. Therefor, rational local groups will tend to converge, requiring only shared (verifiable/reproducible, or demonstrably trustworthy) information to reach common conclusions. We can see that this actually happens when we examine local attempts at cooperative community, which use similar methods to achieve similar goals from diverse local circumstances.
The thinkers of the modern left may have subordinate their fondness for class distinctions in order to offer support to local communities, as those communities attempt to self-organize and achieve reasonable and equitable goals for themselves, and support the process of their convergence towards necessary global considerations.
The answer to inequality is the same one that worked last time, i.e., a 91% marginal tax rate, starting at about $3 million in today’s money.
Plus taxing corporatons’ trillions overseas.
Those are important and some kinds of corrections have to happen. But the billionaires won’t suddenly become benign, and even with improvements in parity/equity, we have a lot of holes to dig out of. If we start squabbling unconstructively the gains will be short-lived or diluted/adulterated, e.g. Dems and identity politics.
Community identities can be a comparatively safer (as in, less hijackable) part of the power base to initiate these changes as well. And they’ll be essential for follow through and to sustain any gains made.
dk
September 8, 2016 at 12:02 pm
Interesting analysis dk.
” glaring example is the new politics of England and Englishness, which is as much bound up with class as it is with place, and has so far simmered away without finding a coherent expression.”
I think for a long time nationalism was considered by many on the left as a bad thing. The more “liberal” view was with regard to open borders, trade, and that nationalism was equated with xenophobia – I thought this way for a long time.
But now it appears to me that if you destroy the bonds that tie people together by the physical fact of political boundaries based on geography, whether local, state, or national, it begs the question of what ties the community together if not for physical proximity??? The Davos man visiting an island may be much concerned about the environment, but can scarcely be expected to be willing to pay taxes to support local education (although this type is the master of propaganda and can be expected to be LEVERAGING resources through the Clintoon foundation to help locals – and of course its all press agentery).
Boundaries transcend race, sex, age, sexual orientation, etcetera. As you (dk) note, trust requires community, and I would say a physical spatial community is a far different beast than an internet chatroom with its fluidity and impermanence.
If one is not loyal or bound to a nation state or physical location, can one expect a corporate loyalist (i.e., Davos man) to ever make an actual money losing sacrifice, when the “economic rational choice” would be to flee…uh, I mean relocate???
If I am in a flood in New Orleans, who is more likely to help me – a person of the same “class” in Budapest or a hairdresser who lives 6 blocks away?
Thank you for apprehending and expanding, i think these are very good examples. I had a paragraph with an attempt expansion but ditched it, you nailed the experiential/subjective aspect pretty well. And I think the subjective aspect is one we can readily understand and communicate about, and that can have broad appeal if unencumbered by irrelevancies/falshoods for the sake of power accumulation; it already has significant appeal when so encumbered, as seen in populist [sic] nationalism.
More objectively, phenotypes adapt to environmental factors, on several levels including neural pathways (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zBb3ogi1H8oJ:www.whatisneuroplasticity.com/pathways.php , hey look, dissapearing internet resources) and post-developmental gene expression (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25351750, http://www.endocrine-abstracts.org/ea/0016/ea0016s11.2.htm). Effects on conscious identity (in isolation and in community/society) remain largely unexplored in contemporary research, although I have some evidence that it was understood to considerable extent in past cultures (for example in The Art Of War, on examination of own/opponent cultures and economies).
I don’t think the failings of Marxism has anything to do with class analysis. Among the faults of Marxist thinkers were the overly optimistic musings of the nature of the proletariat. The proletariat kinda let those Marxists down when they proved to be just as venal and self-interested as any other individual or class.
Your emphasis on local/regional community and shared experience ignores the existence of inner-group competition between various individuals, groups, and classes contained within any community. I doubt that shared experience will overcome ego or self-interest.
Well, tomayto/tomahto. The Marxists failed to see it coming, offering little or no room for localized expression of principles, or for any divergence from their target model, which I would say is predicated on addressing class factors, to the absence of anything else. Somewhat like programming to the sensor in computing, when one tries to adjust the system based on a single or limited set of conditions, statuses or sensors; crazy feedback loops frequently result, among other undesirable consequences (apparently the expression programming to the sensor is no longer in use, couldn’t find it on google.. but automated high-speed traders probably know a current term). To my ears, the post-Marxists are saying the same thing I am, but filtering the conclusion back through the class analysis without further examination. Why would would the self-interest of proletariates diverge from broader policies? Maybe the proles just realized they were going to get shafted by centralized corruption (same as it ever was), as in the USSR, and contemporary China continues to wrestle with this (with scant help from the Party). Lefties have a massive blind spot when it comes to their own failings; which is why the article (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/sep/06/does-the-left-have-a-future) was so refreshing, an honest attempt to look past the constraints of dogmatic review.
Self-interest can (actually, should) have rational components. Inter-group competition isn’t necessarily destructive, it can even strengthen group identity (e.g., in athletic teams and sporting communities). Severe class differences within communities are certainly dysfunctional, and must be addressed. But today, In the USA and abroad, the range of economic/class disparity is supported and controlled by broad federal policy; that part of the problem has to be addressed on that level, as Robert Hahl and MLTPB suggest above (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/09/links-982016.html#comment-2665704). But not all communities exhibit the most extreme divergences, so there are locales where activity can begin prior to national/macro remedies.
But absolute class uniformity is not healthy for communities, either; communities compete with each other as well, and a degree for class diversity can be an asset in that scenario. There is a somewhat separate discussion of inter-class mobility (e.g., students, retirement) that I think post-Marxists should pursue, the model has its limits.
It doesn’t have to overcome it, it just has to be an available resource; shared experience has value to the self. If our local community offers us little or nothing (or if we fail to perceive the benefits, as is increasingly the case in contemporary culture), aggressive self-interested competition is a rational choice. But even today, local community involvement and activity is the major path to both social change and broader political power (Occupy, BLM, Tea Party as specific cases, but look at the career arcs of almost any Federal or State representative; the vast majority rose through the ranks from initially local seats).
And can we really call it self-interest when a tip-of-the-pyramid dominant 0.1% class is so energetically cutting the throats of the horses they rode in on, the classes below them? Those people are power-drunk and ideology-crazy, a rational self-interest would desire stability to balance aggregation. This kind of collapsed self-interest may be a perverse variation of community disenfranchisement, just to suggest an alternative explanation for the behavior.
lost fragment: one can’t use a method or philosophy to troubleshoot itself, because one may need to examine the factors the method or philosophy ignores or obscures /abstracts.
I would argue that many of us in the precariat are, at this moment, attempting to develop a personal strategy (of which there are a great variety) for hopefully surviving, as best we can, the ever oncoming (economic/financial/political/cultural) storm.
We know in our bones that there are presently no social movements or institutional structures that offer us real protection on any level (economic/financial/political or cultural.
Can a new political/ social//economic/cultural movement be created out of the apparent necessity, short to medium term, of finding shelter from this assumed, oncoming, macro-storm?
Is this storm assumption accurate?
Between bread and circuses, I think the former is more robust.
Especially with genetic engineering and pesticides.
Circuses, on the other hand, the modern version that is, are far more fragile, being heavily dependent on satellites, solar flares and non-combusting batteries.
When they go, I sense, we might get a real, genuine movement going. That’s my guess.
TLDR; I think a “new movement” is going to have to defy some of the common/current definitions of movements, and feature local involvement and action before larger coordination/convergence between local elements takes on national issues.
I have came to the storm assumption myself, some 50 years ago. My subsequent experiences suggest that local community identification/recognition and contribution/building can forge strong personal and economic bonds (driven, of course, by self-interest on the part of all parties). These have allowed me to survive several adverse scenarios. But it’s an inductive process: offer benefit in exchange for benefit (and honesty is a benefit).
Well, none of the ones discussed in the media, anyway. But (and I know this is going to sound hokey) grassroots activism is chimeral; it takes on the forms it has to, or it evaporates. When it’s driven by local interests/needs and circumstances, it may not attract outside attention or recognition. In the US, local activism can and does shape local and regional policies; unfortunately much of that activism is driven by ideological agendas, but this only shows that the model is viable, and that the left is missing the boat by dismissing local involvement in favor of national kite-chasing.
I am hoping that a “new movement” will take the form of ad hoc aggregation and convergence of disparate local groups. These groups will have to develop around local and regional issues, in order to have the numbers to take on national issues and opposing interests in aggregate. And I think the only challenge is a completely muddled activist mindset, that gets caught up in national media coverage and fails to do its ground work, and/or fails to maintain its value to its original constituencies, e.g. national unions, major US parties, et al.
I’d like to give specific examples but can’t easily find any especially clear ones, however they show up in Links/ WaterCooler every so often; local activist group achieves significant local/regional policy change. Lambert is recent involved in combating poor landfill regulation in Maine, I wonder how that’s going. And Yves’ focus on CalPERS targets a leader in a small virtual hyperlocality (state pension funds, itself a member of the general pension fund community), through which she hopes to influence the larger community set (and even investment thought in general); it’s like looking for a stress point in a structure: a relatively small but specific force can disrupt a vary large and generally stable structure (and martial artists, like V. Putin, take similar strategic approaches). And large power orgs like the Kochs achieve a lot by going down to more local levels to initiate policies and set precedents. To ignore the effectiveness of the strategy is just silly; it can be used constructively, and desperately needs to be.
hope this is low enuff on the thread but I wanted to Thank Everyone!, responding to the news of my brother. i reflected on every single post…twice. amazing how we really can & do brush against each other. i just picked up my daughter so we have 4 generation gathered…if one feels under it someone is there to make us laff enuff to change underwear. of course getting my daughter thru downtown at 7am with something called ‘train wreck’ (the gawds were with me), braced me for the house of painful decisions to come…concerning i can’t take care her alone without serious complications.
on a better note: peaceful Derrick & I were together the 1st time this was played…i’m sure many of you remember where you were too:
All that you touch
All that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
All that you love
All that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
All that you give
All that you deal
All that you buy
beg, borrow or steal
All you create
All you destroy
All that you do
All that you say
All that you eat
everyone you meet
All that you slight
everyone you fight
All that is now
All that is gone
All that’s to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.
<3
aby, I didn’t post a comment at the time, but I have had your moving post on my mind. The one and only person whose death I witnessed was my uncle’s, in 2005. I was somewhat fearful in the days and hours leading up to it, but when it finally happened, I realized that as painful as it was to be saying goodbye to him, it was also something of a privilege. I was in the presence of something much bigger than I was, and somehow, as he gently faded away into the next world, I felt like the essence of who he was, and the totality of his life became larger, not smaller.
I’m probably not explaining that right, but I guess when I read your heartbreaking wish to not have to keep being the person in whose arms a loved one dies, I wanted to share that, but not in a way that diminished how you were feeling, and I was afraid that was how it was going to come across. The pain of losing someone so important is something no one ever wants to feel – giving someone the gift of being present at such a momentous event is truly an act of love, selfless and unconditional and that, at least for me, was a comfort.
I hope it will be that for you, too.
Amen to that! I have always been grateful I was present for my father’s death, and sorry I missed my mother’s. Yet I’ve always had a feeling she arranged that, and it was her death after all, not a time for my wishes to count.
But it’s never easy, no matter what the circumstances.
My mom recently passed away, and I am so very grateful that I was with her at the end. It really is a sacred moment, and one that will offer comfort as time passes. It’s so hard to say good-bye, but as time passes for you Aby, I hope you will find great strength and solace in being with your brother in his last moments.
I agree. It’s important to be present.
Obama on Dakota Access is embarrassing, not quite on a par with “What is Aleppo?” but too close, especially if you hear it.
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/9/8/headlines/in_laos_obama_questioned_about_dakota_access_pipeline
But for a riveting must-read/listen/see, go to this last segment from today’s Democracy Now:
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/9/8/standing_rock_sioux_historian_dakota_access
As I write, the full transcript is not up yet, but I heard the broadcast and cannot recommend it highly enough.
Yes, LaDonna Brave Bull Allard’s narrative was very moving and troubling, It is good to be reminded of the terrible details of the genocide.
Obama is really checked out. He has no idea what is going on at Standing Rock. He is no longer even trying to imitate a caring, sensitive liberal. Just waiting to cash in his chips, I guess.
Amy Goodman, on the other hand, cares deeply and is a treasure.
I wonder if Comey’s comment of “was not a cliff hanger” will be equivocated with “slam dunk” from the Bush Administration?
Re: FBI Director-Clinton email case “was not a cliff hanger”. I wonder if Comeys’ statement will become as infamous as Tenets’ “slam dunk case” remark to George Bush about invading Iraq?
Fading college dream saps US economy of productivity miracle.
I thought it was about churning out more robot-like graduates to compete with robots, a struggle, I think, robots will win eventually.
“Let’s use machines to find better behaved bankers. Later, let’s find machine bankers.”
Next step, machine customers?
That’s the future – The Robots’ Republic of Mars, a self-contained world of robots producing and serving other robots only.
It will not be contaminated by humans from Earth.
I can’t help but think this is great news. Those robots won’t rise up and enslave their human drone overlords.
Hey, those robots are self-contained for a reason. Probably a good one.
I heard somewhere about a learning robot that escaped from the lab a couple of times. The scientists said if it happened again they’d have to dismantle it. I don’t recall where the original story was, but this follow-up was in the Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/06/30/the-brave-escape-and-untimely-demise-of-one-russian-robot/
I was expecting a mournful article on how noone wants to go to college anymore. Then I saw the peak they were comparing to was 2011. wth. The only reason so many were enrolled in college then was NOONE COULD GET A @#$# JOB. And if that is less the case now, that’s good. You can’t compare times deep in the Great Long Recession to anything and expect the data to be meaningful. Do these idiots not even remember how bad the Great Recession was? Still is for some but many have seen some recovery.
Hanjin Shipping’s Troubles Leave $14 Billion in Cargo Stranded at Sea : a small foretaste of societal collapse – and actually, just the sort of thing that could start the snowball down the hill.
In the piece on the Clinton Foundation, I don’t think Charles K. Ortel understands the difference between a 501(c)3 Private Foundation and a 501(c)3 Public Charity. He regularly interchanges the terms “tax-exempt organization” and “federally authorized nonprofit corporation” without recognizing that tax-exempt entities under section 501(c)3 must first be organized under the incorporation laws of the resident state of origin.
Ortel also relies on Breitbart for news on the relationship between the IRS and the “Clinton Charity Network”.
A quick search reveals Ortel’s occasional guest spots on marginally-antisemitic Sun News Network in Canada that averaged 8,000 viewers before shutting down. They were significant for having hired mayor Rob Ford and his brother, Toronto city councillor Doug Ford for a “show” that lasted 1 episode.
In short, this “extensive analysis” of the Clinton Foundation by Washington Times columnist Charles K. Ortel is factually suspect. I guess readers will have to wait for the (eventual?) release of the 20-or-so “exhibits” he cites.
The IRS does not recognize the distinction you are trying to make, which renders your comment off base. 501 (c)3s must be devoted to pursuing goals, which the IRS states must be reflected in the articles of incorporation to include “a clause stating that your corporation was formed for a recognized 501(c)(3) tax-exempt purpose (e.g., charitable, religious, scientific, literary, and/or educational).”
Organizations that engage in lobbying or political activities with an arguable public purpose (like Public Citizen) are organized as a 501 (c) 4. Their operations are not taxable but donations to them are not tax deductible to the donor.
I referred your claim to a recognized tax authority, who argued to junk your comment, noting:
o ‘Star Trek’ creator Gene Roddenberry’s dynasty endures | USA Today — This week marks the 50th anniversary of the first ‘Trek’ TV broadcast. The Decades cable channel is running a special retrospective of early episodes tonight.
o Women ask for pay increases as often as men but receive them less, study says | Guardian — Nag, nag, nag. (Kidding!)
re Brexit: It is nice to finally read an article that simply says we can’t know what Brexit will do because it has not happened yet and we don’t even know what form it will take.
Every time I see some hairjob saying how the doomsayers were wrong about Brexit and that Britain is doing better than the Continent, I want to slap them silly. Brexit. Has, Not. Happened. It will and then the hairjobs can can talk breathlessly about how the lame economy is not the fault of Brexit because that happened six months earlier.
Shorter the WSJ: “Supply and demand… how does it work??”
It’s a mystery! It seriously never crossed their minds that they could offer more compensation for their failed job offers? And these are our business elites?