Links 10/13/13

Readers, I gotta ask: If everything goes pear-shaped four days from now, will you want less Naked Capitalism — or more?

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Water Discovered in Remnants of Extrasolar Rocky World Orbiting White Dwarf Science Daily

U.S. Said to Open Criminal Probe of FX Market Rigging Bloomberg

UK court to hear evidence ahead of landmark Libor ruling Reuters

Markets dance to the tune of easy money FT. The Yellen put.

Janet Joy Paul Krugman, Times. “So Yellen is, if you like, a member of my tribe here….” Exactement.

The 41 Most Unusual Economic Indicators Business Insider

Shutdown Showdown

Talks between White House and House break down as action shifts to Senate McClatchy. “Senators believe that the differences have narrowed to the point where disagreements can be broadly listed on a sheet of paper, meaning compromise is possible.” That is the Grand Bargain part.

Reid, McConnell launch bipartisan talks on ending shutdown WaPo

Obama watches, waits for Congress’s best offer Politico

Dear Bernanke: Please Use Your Powers To End The Debt Limit Crisis Alan Grayson, Reuters

Rand Paul – “Cold Turkey Balanced Budget is a Good Thing” Warren Mosler. “Deep down, I suspect most of Congress believes what Rand Paul believes.”

All of the Possible Outcomes of the Debt Ceiling Fight Explained Truthout

Obama and Democrats, united by shutdown, looking for gains beyond it WaPo. The TPers just had to throw Obama in the briar patch, didn’t they?

Treasury Default Firewall Hatched in 2011 Crisis: Credit Markets Bloomberg

Anti-government anger fuels long-shot Maryland breakaway bid Reuters. Bless their hearts.

How Many People Have Signed Up For Health Insurance on the Federal Health Insurance Exchanges? Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review. 5,000 (!). That would makes the Daily Mail’s meagre estimate of ~50K from HHS sources off by an order of magnitude. “In summary, big market share health plans are getting maybe 50 enrollments per day per state from the feds and that little bit of new business is a mess.” Ouch.

Obamacare: No information in CMS training materials for navigators about narrow networks Corrente

ACA plan costs vary up to 20% across state Hays Post. Kansas.

Maine Goes Rogue on Importing Prescription Drugs Bloomberg

Reviewing Obamacare coverage: Week 2 CJR (week one).

Struggling with Precarity: From More and Better Jobs to Less and Lesser Work The Disorder of Things

Fast Food Workers Win a Union…through Zoolidarity BeyondChron

I got hired at a Bangladesh sweatshop. Meet my 9-year-old boss Toronto Star

How the machines will pick the best workers in the future Marginal Revolution. For some definition of “best.” And “worker.”

U.S. power outage shuts down food stamp program in 17 states Reuters. Devolution.

Fast Track: New Report Proves Difficulty of Defending the Indefensible Public Citizen

Arafat poisoning claim backed by journal Al Jazeera (Foppe)

Malala Yousafzai tells Obama drones are ‘fueling terrorism’ McClatchy

Dispute on immunity for U.S. troops blocks Afghan-U.S. security pact Reuters

China Exports Unexpectedly Drop Reuters. “Murky.”

In China, parents bribe to get students into top schools, despite campaign against corruption WaPo

Mobility is no answer to dispersion Interfluidity

Punished by Fate The Epicurean Dealmaker

Mom and dad spent $1,700 over five years keeping their daughter’s cell phone working so they could hear her speak after she died… only for the voice mail messages to be wiped when server was upgraded Daily Mail

Breast Cancer: Catching Up With Amy Berman, a Woman Who Chose Life Over Longevity Angry Bear

Antidote du jour:

honey_badger

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

70 comments

    1. HotFlash

      I believe that’s a baby badger. “The purpose of life is to dig. And love your home.” — T. E. White (spoken by a badger).

  1. craazyman

    Preaching God on a Sunday

    that’s pretty funny about Maryland. I might even move there ’cause when the shooting starts I think righteous dudes with experience on the rifle range and possessed of the kind of gravitas you see in faces in Civil War photos would display more self-control on the trigger than a bunch of university library metrosexual hysterical progressives who never shot a gun once in their lives.

    It occurred to me yesterday that every state should have its own currency, maybe even some counties if they’re big enough. This way, social organization is a local problem and not a national problem. or it’s less of one, since not every region has the same God-given abundance of nature.

    This would show people what money really is, since nobody knows. There are so many things done and some are done for money and some are done for virtue and some are done for love and some are done out of a righteousness that comes from the Lord of Hosts. Nobody knows how to separate all this, and so the heathen rage. If they had their own monies, they’d have to figure it out the way a man has to figure out his own soul. Hard in the face of a hard God.

      1. dearieme

        “every state should have its own currency”: I read once about a price list at a store in one of the small New England States in (about) 1820. The prices were listed in New England dollars, New York dollars, Pennsylvania dollars and Pounds Sterling. In an electronic age it would be easier to cope.

    1. Patricia

      We could design money based on our flag – assign each star its own color and our bills could be used in whichever states’ stars are printed on the bill. And if it has stripes on it too, the FDIC could back it up to 50% of the physical bill woohoo.

      Good as Obamacare, with all the recounting and accounting and plain old counting, but hey, we need slow money to go along with slow food, slow medical insurance, and the slow brains in Congress. I have gotten a lot slower over the last years, too — feels good!

      Keepin’ hearty in the face of our hardly God.

      1. craazyman

        The would be good for designers! :)

        Think of all the work it would take to launch state currencies. That’s some jobs right there. Good jobs. And then they could spend it without running up the Federal Govermint deficit and getting everybody all riled up.

        And if they spent it right, on things that help society, and if it actually worked, then they’d prove something that nobody now believes.

        Not that you can print your way to prosperity, but there might be a way to prosper if you print in a certain “right” way. The way you print is the problem — and that’s a problem of social organization and structure — not whether you print or whether you not print, because that ignores what you print into or what you leave as a printless void.

        It’s a matter of energy and form and the relationship between the two. Master Po would understand.

        1. craazyboy

          I’d prefer to skip all the middlemen and just print my own money here at home. We got color ink jet printers so you could come up with some really pretty stuff, if your artistically talented.

          Or if you are sorta old fashioned, get a 3D printer and make coins! Just think – a plastic trillion craazybucks coin!!!! Using plastic would keep cost down too.

          1. craazyman

            I recall reading a number of years ago, maybe in the 1990s, about an artist who would create immaculately perfect pieces of currency but they weren’t counterfeit because he’d put them in frames or behind glass of some kind and make it clear they were objects of art.

            Then he’d negotiate with various merchants and businesses to buy thing with them.

            He made the newspaper and had his photo there too! I guess it worked. Somebody would have to be really good and really clever, but they could probably pull it off.

            1. craazyboy

              Sure, it was inevitable that artists would realize they could barter pictures of money for goods and services. In the old days Andy Warhol sold a picture of Campbell’s Soup for $1500 outright, but that would be a taxable transaction.

              I think things got a bit more complicated for artists since, however. A picture of money is now known to be a derivative – and any transaction may be taxable.

              Unless the artist becomes a hedge fund manager.

    2. Massinissa

      Every state should have its own currency?

      Dude, businessmen do not want to have to calculate that many currency exchanges. Trust me.

      Not to mention that you would have to pay a f**cking fee every time you want to move money from one states currency to another.

      You really are NOT thinking this through.

      1. Patricia

        To print or not to print is not the question but whether tis nobler to coinate via the 3-D printer (PET-1 please) or to suffer the whims of some small outrageous bureaucrat who scrooges coins against the vast sea of citizens, printing merely for his friends.

      2. Yves Smith

        I dimly recall that California recently had a de facto state currency via trading in either tax credits or payments due, it was in 2009 or so. It was much like the private sector factoring business, when you sell receivables at a discount.

    3. Raging Heathen

      Any fool who thinks there aren’t Progressives who know how to use firearms is in for a very unpleasant surprise.

  2. David Lentini

    Automated Hiring

    Add this to the growing movement, spearheaded by the Common Core State Standards juggernaut, to add our chlidren’s school performance to Big Data. Our kids will have their entire lives—all their opportunities and outcomes—determined by machines.

  3. diptherio

    Wikileaks has a new documentary out, Mediastan, that looks at reportage in Central Asia, the UK and the US. Nothing too surprising here, for regulars of NC, but it is interesting to see how the empire’s grip on the media plays out in real-time.

    Here’s a youtube link to the full movie, but if you appreciate the film, you should probably give Wikileaks the 2 euro their asking to download it.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK6DDC4CV0s&list=HL1381671958

      1. JEHR

        Too bad that this sentence was not constructed so that the gerund would be preceded by the possessive. Too often the possessive is not used.

        For example, if the sentence were to read: “their asking for 2 Euros is well within their purview,” we could see the correct usage.

        1. diptherio

          I stand in awe of your superior grammatical mind. I always thought a gerund was some kind of mythical beast (half giraffe, half hippo or some such)…apparently it’s actually a “non-finite verb form that can function as a noun”…which, now that I think of it, is kind of like the grammatical version of a composite monster…

          1. Tim Mason

            Ha! If you do an image search for “Molesworth” and “gerund” you will meet the creature of your imaginings.

  4. Ned Ludd

    Some D-Link routers apparently contain a backdoor, which potentially allows them (or their subcontractor, Alpha Networks Inc., who modified the code) to login and inspect someone’s Internet traffic, impersonate websites, and exploit security holes to take control of someone’s computers. The list of models affected by the backdoor in this particular firmware is at the bottom of the post; however, the firmware used by other D-Link products could also be compromised.

    Here is an archive, in case the main website is unavailable.

    1. Ned Ludd

      Back in July, HP admitted that there were secret backdoors in some of its enterprise storage products. I wonder how many of these backdoors are made available to the NSA or other intelligence agencies.

      Until recently, RSA built a likely NSA backdoor into its cryptographic toolkit.

        1. J.

          Pretty much all that “enterprise equipment” has back doors for the support techs. HP is just the latest to get busted.

          1. Ned Ludd

            When somebody is caught red-handed, a smart person (or corporation) will make up a plausible excuse. If the backdoors had legitimate purposes, a trustworthy company would have revealed them upfront. Since HP did not reveal them, I do not consider HP trustworthy, and I do not think their ex post facto rationale should be trusted.

  5. MyLessThanPrimeBeef

    Water discovered in space.

    The crazy thing about that is that that was actually private water, owned by some long-gone corporation – but not dead as it was not officially dissolved, from a vanished world, and so, you have to pay to get it.

    1. AbyNormal

      im savin popcorn for behemoths T. Boone Pickens vs Peter Brabeck-Letmathe battle for earthly water

      http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/32828/nestle-corporation-vs-americas-water-supply/
      &
      http://www.naturalnews.com/035603_water_monopoly_privatization.html

      Full fathom five thy father lies;
      Of his bones are coral made;
      Those are pearls that were his eyes:
      Nothing of him that doth fade,
      But doth suffer a sea-change
      Into something rich and strange.
      Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Ding-dong
      Hark! now I hear them,—Ding-dong, bell.
      the tempest

    2. optimader

      Water discovered in space.

      All about frame of reference.. We’re both floating “in space” right now and I am sipping some water. No surprises here.

  6. MyLessThanPrimeBeef

    Choosing life over longevity

    This is an important issue.

    Actually, it’s choosing quality life over longevity.

    It’s like solving food hunger with lethal chemical pesticide in the green revolution. We have foolishly focused on quantity over quality.

    Again, with jobs. We just want the jobs numbers to look good, never addressing those with jobs but hating them or can’t escape from them.

    So with life expectancy.

    Maybe we live 78 years now. But no one asks if how many of those are happy years.

    Suppose

    Total happiness = life expectancy x happiness/yr.

    Are we have more total happiness?

    Or

    Total net happiness = Happy years – unhappy years (leaving out neutral years).

    Maybe out of that 78 years, we get 30 unhappy years, 5 happy years and 33 neutral years for a total of minus 25 happy years.

    This compares with 50 year life expectancy of before, where you had 30 neutral years, 15 happy years and 5 unhappy years for a net of 10 happy years.

    That’s just an example but it’s something we might look at.

  7. ambrit

    Friends;
    Bloody H—! That Bloomberg piece about Maines attempt to legislate with rationality concerning prescription drugs ends up being a piece of s— by Megan Mcardle! The piece itself is a cautionary tale about how to do bought and sold propaganda masquerading as journalism. Is she still married to that other neo-con stalwart? God help their kids.

    1. Foppe

      Geez that article was boring.. not even an attempt to do anything beyond rehashing all the usual clichés why trying to lower the cost of healthcare is a. immoral vs. the poor pharmaceuticals, b. immoral towards your fellow citizens because of how it will stifle research™, and c. useless, since big pharma will make sure it will be forbidden anyway.

      (Incidentally, it is pretty neat how her job — spouting bullshit — is also a bullshit job — since it has no journalistic value. I wonder if media outlets could get away with re-running the same piece when the new event is sufficiently similar. It seems to me a lot of efficiency gains could be made here, esp. in (disguised) op-ed sections.)

    2. optimader

      Ambrit..

      Re:Megan Mcardle

      Do you think MM has ever really had a honest to goodness productive job to use as a point of reference (no, I mean a real job that adds value in some way, not collecting a paycheck from a NFP “think”tank, or are her bandwidth filling pontifications merely theoretical in nature?

      I don’t know, but I’ll wager she has never really worked for a living.

    3. Bridget

      Canada has already taken steps tp reduce the number of Americans who purchase prescription drugs from Canadien pharmacies. You cannot legally fill a US prescription in Canada. The RX has to be written by a Canadian doc. And, they are clamping done on their docs, trying to require an in person, face to face, doctor patient visit.

      However, should you happen to live a reasonable distance to the border, or should ou have cause to visit Canada, bring your US RX and pertinent lab results and records with you. There are Canadian docs who will see you for a cash fee and write you a Canadian RX, which you can then fill at a Canadian pharmacy. The docs will also give you a receipt which you can use to file a claim with your insurance company.( really, it’s not hard to do at all)

      You still have to beware of not importing more thana 90 days (personal use) supply at a time.

  8. RanDomino

    “One characteristic of winning drives is that workers start acting like a union before the election.”

    No, it WAS ACTUALLY a union before the election. A union is made by workers acting in concert to improve work conditions- not by an election granting recognition by the bosses and NLRB. There were unions before elections, after all! We need to get away from this mindset that union = NLRB election. That is by far the biggest thing holding the labor movement’s head under the water.

  9. docg

    Four things that would motivate Congress to re-open the government and raise the debt limit:

    1. If shutting down the government forced the cancellation of all TV programming.

    2. If shutting down the government disrupted all Internet communications.

    3. If shutting down the government disabled all iphones.

    4. If freezing the debt limit forced the Fed to discontinue Quantitative Easing.

    Any one of the above four would do it. All would be restored to normal overnight. Guaranteed!

  10. Jim Haygood

    ‘Paul Krugman, Times. “So Yellen is, if you like, a member of my tribe here….” Exactement.

    Droll! Kurgman is just dense enough that he might not even get his own double entendre.

    His alternate connotation — that the folks who run the Fed don’t much ‘look like America’ — is undiscussable in a culture of pseudo free speech.

    Yellenschrift, oy!

    1. YankeeFrank

      None of our governing institutions “look like America”, and they never have. But I guess one that has a higher proportion of Jews than you’d like to see is the one you’ll focus on with your non-too-subtle little jibe. Really, the anti-semitism of petty minds is a sight. Sad for you, but Jews dominate and/or are disproportionately represented in many professions, you should spread your lame innuendo equitably if you are going to spread it at all. Do you hate Catholics as well? Ever ask yourself why it is that the Supreme Court is made up of almost all Catholics and Jews?

      And the rest of the power structure consists of a bunch of protestants using up and spitting out “their own”. Same as it ever was. But if the sh_t hits the fan its so much easier to blame “outsiders” isn’t it. You write some pathetic, lying drivel on this site but you are really digging deep now.

      1. craazyman

        it al reminds me of a funny story

        I had a friend once, a drinking buddy when we were in our late 20s, who was half Jewish.

        I made a comment about how Jews were very prevalent in Hollywood. He took it as an anti-Semitic remark and got very upset with me. I was taken aback and we got into a heated argument. Like most heated arguments between blockheads, we both forgot about it within half an hour

        The next day in the New York Times book review, lead article, was a glowing profile of a new book “How the Jews Invented Hollywood.”

        I called him on the phone and asked him if he’d seen the New York Times book review yet. He said he had but he didn’t say much else. hahah haahaha ahahahahhhh

    2. Massinissa

      At first I was willing to agree with you because I thought you were talking about class, but if youre talking about race instead im quite disgusted.

  11. anon y'mouse

    Punished by Fate:

    that is some weirdo ethics there. misery loves company, therefore it is OK to penalize others over things that they had no control over because of some kind of cosmic justice thingy? is this another study where they only looked at Americans, whom it has been shown (even in a link here) make totally alien test subjects vis a vis the rest of the world due to their skewed reality & choices?

    sounds like pure evil disguising itself with a lot of words about “no one told you life was fair, boy.”

  12. diptherio

    Branko Milanovic (@BrankoMilan) just tweeted this:

    How economics has changed in two sentences:

    “To determine the laws which regulate this distribution [into wages, profit and rent], is the principle problem in Political Economy.” ~David Ricardo (1817) Principles of Political Economy (Preface)

    “…of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and…the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.” ~Robert E. Lucas (2004), “The Industrial revolution: past and future”

  13. susan the other

    Speaking of going pear shaped. When we went pear shaped in 2008, according to a blurb on Max, it was because we embargoed the Mexican banks feeding drug money into our banks. It was the DEA not understanding that our economy was dependent on drug money. And when the drug money was cut off, voila! the “housing bubble” imploded. So why were the two connected? I still think it was a big laundry. Our financiers were up to their eyeballs in drug money. Why else would the CIA have been actively promoting the drug trade for all those years (assuming those reports are true, and I do)? It makes perfect sense out of MERS which was set up in the early 90s to “facilitate” the buying and selling of real estate. Real estate being the best way to launder lots of drug money. It wasn’t the “housing bubble,” it was the drug bubble. And innocent home owners and pensioners were destroyed. As was the entire economy. So far, this is the most believable explanation I have heard. But whatever. It still, even more now, stands to reason that we should legalize all drugs, standardize them, sell them over the counter and tax them.

    1. Lambert Strether Post author

      I’d want to see that idea worked out with numbers. Though I recall a story that drug money provided liquidity during the crash.* But only $350 billion or so.

      NOTE * I always thought that’s why Hank Paulson went so nutty, kneeling before Pelosi and so forth. For a little while there, he was dealing directly with people he was used to dealing with through intermediaries. I have no evidence at all for this, and Paulson had plenty of other reasons to go into flop sweat mode.

      1. craazyboy

        IIRC, M1 shot up to $12 Trillion late 2008, and much of it was common stock being liquidated and going to cash and 90 day T-bills (whose interest rate actually went negative!)

        So there was no liquidity shortage in a traditional sense. The generally accepted view of what happened was we had a “wholesale” credit crunch. Big banks feared lending to each other in the repo market because they feared their counterparties may fail – due to problems like subprime CDOs, high leverage financed 24hrs at a time, etc…Then the Lehman failure made them realize the Fed couldn’t or wouldn’t bail everyone out, so they really did have risk.

        I think Paulsen freaked because he knew that, in between accounting periods, banks were going to 30-100X leverage, then squaring their books in time for the monthly accounting day.

        That still leaves the question of why do banks have $350B in drug money held by the guys on the other side of our Glorious War on Drugs. But it would be better to address that issue without wrapping it in some kooky theory that somehow implies the drug money is good for the US economy.

        Besides, home equity loans were running at $600B a year, per Calculated Risk. There you can put your finger on a direct reason for the rise and fall of the American consumer.

        1. optimader

          “..That still leaves the question of why do banks have $350B in drug money held by the guys on the other side of our Glorious War on Drugs..”
          File under apocryphal Willy Sutton quote” “Because that’s where the money is”

          “..kooky theory that somehow implies the drug money is good for the US economy..”

          Indeed, at best rearranging deckchairs while the termites (bank parasites) consume the stock. At worst highly leveraged destructive force in our societ(ies).

  14. optimader

    RE: davidgmills sparsely informed post yesterday in which he cherry picked data regarding Antarctic surface ice.
    Coincidentally enough last night I had dinner w/ a friend who for the past 15 years or so has been spending the scientific season at various stations on Antarctica supporting science missions. Last year was at the Pine Island location ( the most remote aircraft skidway on the globe.) where they are developing an understanding of the dynamics of Glacier thinning. This is an important location and a relevant research program in particular due to the potential consequences of a catastrophic failure of the Pine Island glacier. The concern is Pine Island is melting due to progressively warming water (underside of glacier), surface melting, not so much.

    Ok all that said, MrMills should take pause to understand the practical significance of the relative difference of the coefficient of heat transfer between water and air which for Bar Talk, figure a factor of 25 or so ( probably more due to relative rates of forced convection due to moving water vs moving air).
    Mr. Mill can perform a little experiment for himself this winter –if he lives in a location that has a real winter season where snow occurs.

    After a nice snow storm and when the sun is shining again he can form two equal mass snow balls;
    –Fill a 5 gal bucket w/ water, put in ~ 50 tablespoons of salt and let it chill outside to ambient air temperature;
    –Put one snowball in the bucket of water and put the other one on undisturbed snow;
    –Record the time for each snowball to melt.

    Come back and report his findings and speculate about the implication of his data relative to air to solid sublimation vs liquid to solid melting and a trend of warming ocean water.

    http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/pine-island-glacier/

    Current melting, thinning and acceleration
    ….What is concerning is the current intense melting, thinning and glacier acceleration observed on Pine Island Glacier ice shelf22. Measurements from the British Antarctic Survey’s Autosub, the intrepid sub-ice shelf explorer, help scientists understand sub-ice conditions. Autosub is a remotely operated vehicle, loaded with sensors that measure temperature, salinity, pressure and so on, and it can map the sea bed using downward-pointing swath bathymetry. It can dive to 1600 m and travel 400 km, and it has a clever collision avoidance system. It’s a dangerous business; several iterations of Autosub have been lost under the ice. However, data from Autosubs that did return indicates that more warm Circumpolar Deep Water has been in Pine Island Bay in recent summers22. Meltwater production underneath the ice shelf increased by 50% from 1994 to 2011; this increased melting results from stronger sub-ice-shelf circulation. As the ice shelf thins, more water is able to circulate beneath it22, exacerbating the problem and encouraging further melting.

    Incidentally, he won’t be there for the 2013 Science season as he has been informed it has been cancelled and they are evacuating personnel. He anticipates long term facility and infrastructure damage as well as loss of experimental equipment, long term research. Many of the experimental rigs at remote locations need perpetual stewardship. Tragic stupidity….
    http://www.nature.com/news/us-antarctic-research-season-is-in-jeopardy-1.13889

    1. craazyboy

      Yawn

      At least here in America we finally convicted the Mayor of Detroit for corruption, gave him 28 years, and didn’t even blame Germany for everything. Including not monitoring Detroit’s debt closely enough and where the money was channeled. (tho Deutsche Bank and a bunch of other world banks coulda screwed up there too)

      1. skippy

        Detroit was abandoned because of legacy issues, bankruptcy is always the coup de grâce in a looting economic system.

        skippy… it like one of those Islands used for nuclear testing… it did its job… and now… they wouldn’t go near it till the wildlife recovers on its own… to loot it again…

  15. skippy

    O/T just gotta put this out there stuff…

    From War is a Racket

    Sanguine excerpt… In his penultimate chapter, Butler argues that three steps are necessary to disrupt the war racket:

    1. Making war unprofitable. Butler suggests that the owners of capital should be “conscripted” before other citizens are: “It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war. The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labour before the nation’s manhood can be conscripted. … Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our ship-builders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted — to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get”

    2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it. He also suggests a limited plebiscite to determine if the war is to be fought. Eligible to vote would be those who risk death on the front lines.

    3. Limitation of militaries to self-defence. For the United States, Butler recommends that the navy be limited, by law, to within 200 miles of the coastline, and the army restricted to the territorial limits of the country, ensuring that war, if fought, can never be one of aggression.

    Skippy… No wonder he got booed in con-grr[ass~ thingy…

  16. djrichard

    Looks like Democrats no longer need cover of GOP as bad guys for entitlement cuts
    Senate Democrats Press New Front in Budget Battle

    But Democrats say their biggest objection was that it would make it more difficult to reach their long-held goal: to replace some of the across-the-board sequester cuts with a broader budget deal that would include tax-revenue increases and cuts in entitlement programs.

  17. anon y'mouse

    kooky anime predicts future:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojp6vzOxOwU

    warning! watching may violate copyright.

    some parallels–

    corps own all but 10% of earth.
    spy on all transmissions via satellite.
    drone people out of existence, even in their homes.
    mechanical mini drone attack spiders.
    giant agribiz sells death-dealing plants to Africa.
    new bioengineered diseases unleashed.
    “terrorists” as freedom fighters.

    and i’m only halfway through!

  18. skippy

    Funny stuff… Why Do Economists Behave Differently?

    In the preceding sections we have seen evidence that economists behave less cooperatively than noneconomists along a variety of different dimensions. This difference in behavior might be exclusively the result of training in economics. Alternatively, it might exist simply because people who chose to major in economics were different initially. Or it might be some combination of these two effects. We now report evidence on whether training in economics plays a causal role.

    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/economics_frank/

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