Porn is making young people WORSE at sex: Agony Aunts from the Eighties reveal their fears for the next generation of lovers Daily Mail (Chuck L)
God Shoots Himself While Cleaning Gun Onion
Hundreds of Tanks Made of Snow and Ice in Russian Backyards English Russia
Nine reasons only a tool would buy the Apple Watch Guardian
Radical Vaccine Design Effective Against Herpes Viruses HHMI (David L)
Genomes project produces first diagnoses of rare diseases Guardian
Delhi rapist says victim shouldn’t have fought back BBC (Adrien). One of the rapists had also raped a five year old.
Irish-language version of same-sex vote text changed: Concern that marriage between heterosexual couple may have been found unconstitutional Irish Times (bob)
Ireland legalizes ecstasy, other drugs for 48 hours due to court loophole Associated Press (bob)
China’s path to global military dominance China Spectator
China Builds Nuclear Reactors in Earthquake-Prone Pakistan OilPrice
China’s Local Government Debts Could Go Under MarketPulse
Thomas Piketty on the Euro Zone: ‘We Have Created a Monster‘ Der Spiegel (Phil O). The interviewer seems testy at points.
Mark Carney defends Bank of England over climate change study Guardian
Euro slides to 12-year low against dollar on fears of renewed Greek debt crisis Guardian
Grexit?
Greek government presses social security funds to hand over cash Financial Times
ECB to reject all Greek requests ekathimerini
Germany’s Merkel narrowly avoided bigger revolt on Greece – sources Reuters
Germany insists on troika in Greece bailout talks Agence France-Presse
Greece Gets Hard Time over Reform Plan Boston Globe
From ZIRP to NIRP: Virtues of Germany vs. the Vices of Greece; What About “Speece” and Gold? Michael Shedlock (EM). Has a good overview of Target2 if you want to get up to speed.
Greece awarded financial breathing space with €550m lifeline Telegraph
Ukraine/Russia
IMF Assumes Ukraine To Get $15.4 Billion From Creditor Talks Reuters
Putin Eyes Single Currency for Eurasian Union Trade Bloc Moscow Times (furzy mouse)
Russia: Capital Flight Surges ValueWalk
Syraqistan
3 times U.S. foreign policy helped to create the Islamic State Washington Post
Iraq: 12th Anniversary: Major War Protests Coming to DC Spring Rising
Lebanese TV presenter cuts short interview with Islamist scholar Guardian
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
iSpy: The CIA Campaign to Steal Apple’s Secrets Intercept
NSA sued by Wikimedia, rights groups over mass surveillance Reuters (EM)
NEW ZEALAND TARGETS TRADE PARTNERS, HACKS COMPUTERS IN SPY OPERATIONS Intercept (Richard Smith)
Snowden revelations: Nicky Hager and Ryan Gallagher: New Zealand’s spy reach stretches across globe New Zealand Herald (Richard Smith)
Obamacare
If Obamacare critics win high court case, effects will be wildly disparate Center for Public Integrity
Obama announces changes for student loan repayment Reuters. EM” Want to ‘make the process of repaying student loans easier to manage’? How about not implementing or supporting policies that encourage runaway college expenses and consignment of students to debt slavery. Repeal of the bankruptcy ‘reform’ act would be a nice start. Instead we get this pathetic ‘let’s study the problem’ proposal from O.”
Clinton Tries to Quell Criticism Over Use of Private Email New York Times. Another Times story depicts the remarks as defensive.
Democratic donors unfazed by Hillary Clinton’s use of private email Reuters (EM)
Six years too late, media call Congressional Republicans ‘traitors’ Daily Kos (furzy mouse)
Ferguson City Manager, John Shaw, Resigns After Scathing DOJ Report NBC (furzy mouse)
Mr. Market Has a Sad
US stocks fall sharply on Fed fears BBC
Global markets sell-off as the world drowns in oil Telegraph
Emerging Market Currencies Rocked by Fed Fears Wall Street Journal
Kleiner ex-partner Pao testifies in Silicon Valley bias case Reuters (EM)
Improving the Oversight of Large Financial Institutions Janet Yellen. Text of a recent speech. Adrien: “I don’t know if it is just me but Yellen appears weaker and weaker on the regulatory front..What is the most striking is her continuing reverence towards “large institutions” and the complete absence of numbers on a relative basis..Talking about capital cushion without addressing the rest of the balance sheet is meaningless…The only encouraging part of the entire speech is her acknowledgement that the Fed failed to prevent the crisis ..It is an incredible dereliction of duty..not just a simple oversight! Why can’t we find better people?? with spine, charisma, energy and smarts? ”
Economics: It’s Much Worse than That! Brad DeLong
Antidote du jour:
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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McKinsey sets out POV on African infrastructure agenda table, which many in govt and private sector will reference. Of course, just coincident that would put McKinsey’s clients in position to “tax” the existence of everyone in that emerging continent.
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/energy_resources_materials/powering_africa
Re: The latest Supreme Court case involving ObamaCare
It’s my guess that the Supreme Court will, once again, rule in favor of ObamaCare. That’s because the Supreme Court, both left and right, is very much a pro-corporatist court and ObamaCare is very much a pro-corporatist law.
Oh sure, providing federal subsidies to purchase health insurance greatly benefits poor and low-wage working class families, but above all else, these generous subsidies greatly benefit the corporate healthcare industry. Ever since the passage of ObamaCare, there is no other good reason to explain why the healthcare sector has been, by far, the bigger gainer on Wall Street.
This is NOT because ObamaCare has mandated that more free-market principles be introduced into the business of providing healthcare. No, not at all. It’s because ObamaCare has mandated that more corporate welfare be given away to the healthcare industry, both provider and payer alike.
Thanks to ObamaCare, the healthcare industry has now surpassed the defense industry as the bigger beneficiary of the corporate welfare state. I suspect you’ll hear the term “medical-industrial complex” being thrown around more often to describe our healthcare industry. But unfortunately, we don’t have anything equivalent to the antiwar community to vocally oppose these corporate giveaways.
And because ObamaCare does absolutely nothing to reduce overall healthcare costs, it is also harming our competitiveness in the global economy. However, labor unions won’t complain about this as long as they continue to receive generous healthcare benefits. And industry leaders outside of healthcare won’t complain about this either as long as the “employer mandate” remains on hold. This leaves the largest bulk of ObamaCare now being paid for by the taxpayer, who’s spread too thin to have a meaningful voice against ObamaCare. Healthcare costs are being shifted in a very seismic way onto the taxpayer, but no one speaks out about this because the taxpayer doesn’t fall under any particular interest or lobbying group. Perhaps if taxpayers would see themselves as a special interest group to lobby against ObamaCare, we will finally see an end to this budget-busting, job-killing corporatist law!
‘Because ObamaCare does absolutely nothing to reduce overall healthcare costs, it is also harming our competitiveness in the global economy.’
You bet. Medicare and Medicaid, often reckoned to constitute half the market, impose their own low prices. Health insurers accordingly pay higher prices, and uninsured individuals charged the ‘rack rate’ may pay ten times the Medicare price.
Government-mandated price discrimination isn’t working. Medicare and Medicaid customers shop for health care based on [limited] availability, not price. For all other participants, prices are opaque, so competition is a joke.
Yet it’s almost impossible to find any explicit discussion of this fundamental policy choice in official studies. When it comes to cost control, the official sector earnestly focuses on treating the patient’s inflamed hangnail (primarily through criminal prosecutions of physicians and labs who overbill Medicare), while studiously ignoring the broken bone protruding through the skin (opaque pricing).
“Thanks to ObamaCare, the healthcare industry has now surpassed the defense industry as the bigger beneficiary of the corporate welfare state. I suspect you’ll hear the term “medical-industrial complex” being thrown around more often to describe our healthcare industry. But unfortunately, we don’t have anything equivalent to the antiwar community to vocally oppose these corporate giveaways.”
Have long believed the BIGGEST and most under-reported error made by non-elites who supported Obamacare is not realizing that giving trillions of tax dollars to the medical-industry complex, it’s power to make future changes to Obamacare will be so greatly increased as to make any improvement totally impossible and what will actually happen is that it will be made vastly worse over time, thanks to greatly increased political power of the medical-industry complex derived from all those tax payer subsidies.
Agree. Roberts will probably do the same thing as last time (on the government enforced and taxation paid for mandate for putting humans, rather than fish, in the corporate carnival – hey look what good aim I’ve got – shooting for profits barrel) and break a tie that lets everyone else stick to image.
Yes, and will also “change” his position at the last minute from gutting Obamacare to supporting it, for appearance sake?
Instead we get this pathetic ‘let’s study the problem’
Anytime there’s a serious problem that no one in power really wants to do anything about, the solution is usually to send it off to committees until everyone forgets about it. Amazing to me that people still buy that tripe. On that topic, I saw a bumper sticker yesterday with the face of W. on it and the words “I screwed everyone and blamed it on the black man”. I would have said before then that it’s offensive for the powers that be to consider the American public to be so thoroughly stupid that they buy such obvious sleight of hand, but I guess they’re more less right. A lot of people really are that stupid.
And God shoots himself while cleaning gun? Well that’s a good thing. Obviously there is a selective pressure against stupid entities(?) owning firearms. With any luck enough will remove themselves that the collective intelligence of the deity demographic raises enough for them to easily recognize that climate change is real, etc. So the obvious solution is to have more owning firearms, to fix the climate among other things.
Why would God need to do the cleaning?
And what happened to more destructive choices of torrential rain, hailstones, fire, and brimstone?
Deus ex machine gun
‘Mrs. Clinton said she turned over some 30,490 emails to the State Department in December, nearly two years after leaving office. But she said she had deleted nearly 32,000 others.’
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/us/hillary-clinton-email.html
Nixon’s aides (wasn’t it Bob Haldeman?) called it ‘vacuuming the files.’
Hillary Milhous Rodham: she’s not a crook.
The NSA has got to have all 65,000+ emails. All we need to do is put in a FOIA request and problem solved.
“All we need to do is put in a FOIA request and problem solved.”
They will give you a redacted paper copy put through a dirty copy machine a few times
Bzzt. Sources-and-methods exception. Nice try, though.
As Jeremy Scahill’s twitter feed showed of ex-CIA comment to WAPO, if they were in her email, no telling who else has them, and countless prospective security breaches.
This is impossible to fathom. Even low-level hospital interns and admins working with hospital medical records have high security on HIPAA controls and the mindfulness that goes with it.
Time to stop blaming Wikileaks on Julianne Assange and let Chelsea Manning out!?!
(although there is no point in thinking Clinton was the only beltway-bot unsecured….more likely the same is true for whole of US Senate, Congress, staffers, etc.) Every Tom, Dick & Harry from Beijing to Buenos Ares no doubt has copies of all unsecured emails out of DC from the past.
It is explains the paranoia on 1st & 4th amendment exploits and whistle-blower backlash!
I wonder if the iHoles pay him directly, or smuggle watches to him through pierre.
Where in hell is John Kerry when we need him?
and also about John Kerry… does he have control over Victoria Nuland or not? Why do we even have a “Secretary of State”?
Sorry, it’s about the tanks. I was ROTFL and couldn’t
type so well.
Amazing talent in creating those, awesome. Let’s go build a snowtank hahahaa
Reminds me of the inflatable tanks of Patton’s Ghost Army in southeastern England during the weeks surrounding D-Day in 1944.
http://www.americainwwii.com/articles/pattons-ghost-army/
It’s hard to believe this woman is seriously running for President (although she won’t mind if the job is just handed to her). I’m increasingly convinced that her real role is simply to block more progressive Democratic alternatives. That valuable service is ample reason for the money boyz to give her lots of support.
I did not have EX [email exchange] with that woman.
Hillary is not running for president. She is waiting for her coronation by divine right.
We give this divinity, the puppet masters, too much credit for imagination. They have noticed that a Democrat in the White House works very very well with a Republicn majority in the legislative branches (one or two of them have even connected the dots with the name, Clinton) and they want more of the same. So that’s what the people will choose.
I suggest it’s the puppets in the consent-industrial complex who go about imagining *for* dull elites that one ought not underestimate.
Where have I seen this movie before?
Around this time in the 2008 cycle, how many people though Barack Obama was serious contender for the Democratic nomination? Heck a lot of people probably hadn’t even heard of him, let alone considered him a viable candidate. The standard narrative was that Hillary Clinton had the nomination locked up and everyone else should basically get out of the way, or at least not waste their time running.
Low and behold, here we are in 2015 and we’re hearing the same thing: Clinton has the nomination virtually locked up. In some ways, Hillary Clinton is worse off this time—of the mistakes she made in 2007 or 2008, I can’t recall anything close to the recent revelations about her use of private email—than she was last time.
Will this email scandal destroy Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects? Not necessarily. However, I seriously question whether she has learned from her past mistakes. If she continues to approach a presidential bid with this much hubris, it will be game over much sooner than 2008.
Blackstone’s Fantastic News
Two news stories featured Blackstone, the giant private equity underwriter (PEU) founded by Stephen Schwarzman and Pete Peterson. The first involved a Blackstone Senior Managing Director in their private equity unit. FinAlternatives reported:
Anjan Mukherjee has left Blackstone and joined the U.S. Treasury Department as counselor to the secretary and deputy assistant secretary for financial institutions.
In his new role, Mukherjee will advise Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. In a memo to employees, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman said that Mukherjee was “a core member of the private-equity team. ”
Mukherjee appears to be both a political and financial animal:
Following several roles at Morgan Stanley, he joined the Department of Education during the Clinton administration. He joined Blackstone in 2001, but also worked in the transition team of President Barack Obama, where he focused on economics and international trade matters.
What might a PEU do for the Blue Treasury team? Help his former boss get richer while raising political money from his PEU brethren for the Blue team. How might Mukjerjee
…make Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman the first leader of a public company to be paid more than $1 billion in a single year.
I have faith our elected and appointed officials can optimize billionaire pay. Politicians Red and Blue love PEU.
http://peureport.blogspot.com/2015/03/blackstones-fantastic-news.html
Yikes! Euro sinks below $1.06, after starting the year at $1.21. Chart:
http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=EUR&to=USD
This is beginning to rhyme with when Britain unpegged pound sterling from gold in Sep. 1931, handing the strongest-currency old maid card to our goodselves.
But this time round, it’s all done with the magic of QE, in which central banks buy bonds with reserves that didn’t exist yesterday. Wags call it DOMO — Draghi Open Market Operations.
Yeah, sounds sustainable to me! /sarc
sadly the British pound hasn’t fallen that much. Edward Green Invernesses are still over $1000.
http://leffot.com/shop/index.php/shoes/edward-green/inverness-burgundy.html
Would be nice to get ’em down to about $900 or so. Maybe Corthays instead, but they’re $1700 and a little too syrupy for my taste. Not sure how far down they’ll go with the euro crashing.
http://leffot.com/shop/index.php/shoes/corthay/kleber-lie-de-vin.html
Looks like Granny Yellen may have problems with cognitive functioning. I didn’t read the whole speech but searched for the words “fraud” and “crime” and the search results came up dry as a grape months past its sell-by date. I think that’s called a raisin. But I’m not an expert on fruits. To be fair, the word “risk” came up 24 times and “regulatory capture” came up 6 times! That’s something anyway, let’s be fair while we’re taking umbrage, since bilious invective is so unbecoming to an intellectual practicing the art of erudition. Problems with reality perception may not be related to age or reproductive organs. In fact, they all seem to have that problem, when they get close to places like the Fed, even the guys in their 30s! Even the hot women who work at the Fed! There must be some there. They can’t all be geeky math guys in corporate casual blazers doing equilibrium analysis using Stationary Multivariate ARMA models and dreaming about partial differential diffusion equations. You wouldn’t think so anyway. I bet The Chairwoman could pull it all together and make it happen like a soccer mom on vacation — but it may be an uncomfortable topic to talk about in public. The confidence fairy and all that. Tinkerbelle needs a light touch or her wings break — so they say anyway.
Shoes for industry, as it were. Them Invernesses look way too serious for loafing and slacking, unless one is practicing the art of erudition. And even then, the audience for it is so limited. They’re as likely to pelt you with dessicated grapes as to hand you hundred-dollah bills and private rave invitations.
with the euro so low you can score yourself some cheap henrique enko’s. way more stylish than those invernesses to my eye and half the price. i do like the corthays, though.
http://www.henrique-enko.com/25-chaussures
those are absolutely beautiful! whoa. I mean really. Just wow.
I love the patinations
For some guys, shoe leather is not a distasteful thing to contemplate. hahahah
glad you like them. hard for me to resist some good shoe pr0n
“reserves that didn’t exist yesterday” – they did exist – they have always been there, like Evita – but we weren’t ready to take responsibility for them yet… screw that whore… which implies that now, maybe, the world is stepping up to its responsibility… funny I haven’t heard any brave soul discuss exactly what that responsibility entails.
Iraq: 12th Anniversary: Major War Protests Coming to DC
I have clear memory of protesting war in Iraq with at least a hundred thousand others in the streets of San Francisco and with thirty thousand arrested and jailed… some 24 years ago. In fact my protest banner began yellowing around the edges ten years ago. Let’s not dismiss 24 continuous years of war waged upon the Iraqi people…nor should we dismiss 24 years of protests.
Porn is making young people worse at sex
For about the same reason that World of Warcraft enthusiasts aren’t actually good swordfighters.
And the kid playing the Wii air guitar wouldn’t know what to do with the real thing.
Your example is way better than mine.
That explains that chick I was with that was looking off in the distance and smiling the whole time like she was looking into some camera or something. And don’t they take off their shoes anymore?
The wife of Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry, 54, she said…. thinking women have to be one way and it’s all about submission and domination when of course it isn’t.
Does anyone see any irony in this paragraph? Anyone? Irony? Anyone??
Tabloids seeking out the natural market for their moral indignation: traditionalist women who have removed themselves from the dating pool for better or worse and need some drama in their lives.
Note not the least mention of pulp-level romance media leading to poor relationship problem-solving skills and unrealistic relationship expectations. Nope, all the fault is with the “permissive society” and not treating sex as a gift horse.
The article was terrible and I haven’t any idea “agony aunts”, but the idea of pornography affecting romantic satisfaction and suitability is something of a truism.
For a couple decades now there’s been an almost ritual refrain of women complaining about how their brofriends want to do the stuff they see in the videos, which to the ladies is apparently neither sexy nor pleasant.
Re the Ukraine loan, here is what I said on RT TV today:
1. Peace in the East is one of the conditions for the IMF loan – has Kiev met it?
Kiev seems to have suspended fighting mainly in order to get the IMF loan package. Its rada parliament is still set on making war.
Christine Lagarde said last month that the IMF does not lend to countries at war. Its articles of agreement also prevent it from lending to countries that can’t pay and have no foreseeable way of paying. So if the IMF does lend to Kiev, it is breaking radically from its two rules.
This gives future Ukrainian governments the right to claim that the loan is illegitimate and reject it.
2. The previous loan proved to be a drop in the ocean of Ukrainian economic collapse – will the discussed tranche have a bigger impact?
The money apparently will be used mainly to pay existing creditors and bondholders. This will provide a quick gain for speculators who gambled that Ukraine would get the money.
3. Speaking of the previous loan – do you think Kiev could’ve managed the money better?
Well, the managers are basically the kleptocrats. They managed the money by giving it to themselves – and taking the money and running.
IMF staff members protested two years ago, at the 2013 meetings, that IMF forecast of the ability to pay were pure fantasy. The forecasts of how much austerity will help have been way, way too optimistic. By making a loan to Ukraine, the IMF is further destroying its credibility when it comes to forecasting the result of its loans.
4. Is there a danger of Ukraine repeating the financial fate of Greece?
Yes, in two ways. First of all, the IMF and Eurozone use debt leverage as a means of forcing privatization sell-offs. This is where negotiations have broken down with Greece. Seeing that Ukraine has no visible way of creating a foreign-exchange surplus to pay the euro-denominated debt it owes, there is only one way to pay: to sell off its farmland, its public infrastructure and real estate to U.S. and European buyers.
Second, Ukraine will have to support austerity and dismantle public agencies to privatizers – health insurance, etc.
From Reuters:
What a catastrophe. One couldn’t design a more certain train wreck.
IMF and NATO: disastrous together.
“Christine Lagarde said last month that the IMF does not lend to countries at war. Its articles of agreement also prevent it from lending to countries that can’t pay and have no foreseeable way of paying. So if the IMF does lend to Kiev, it is breaking radically from its two rules.
This gives future Ukrainian governments the right to claim that the loan is illegitimate and reject it.”
Or better still, take the loan then refuse to pay it back, on the grounds the loan is illegitimate because they knew they were breaking their own rules and have no reason to complain that it can’t/won’t be repaid.
it’s the equivalent of striking out your own contract language…
Even funnier, I guess member representatives at the IMF voting “no” could conceivably sue the board afterwards, accusing it of improper management.
Thanks, Prof. Link to RT interview:
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gAzND-p880o
Yours is a concise consensus analysis — outside the establishment: that the loan violates all rules and prudence, and that it’s pouring good money after bad, down a black hole (Martin Sieff). It’s an obvious extortionist setup for looting the country, straight out of Perkins’ “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” and Klein’s “Shock Dotrine”. The IMF’s goal is not financial stability; it is a tool for the neoliberal kleptocracy.
Reading your comment, I thought, gee, this sounds like Greece, then sure enough I got to #4. It would seem that Greece has a sound basis for repudiating the similarly fraudulent bailout of 2012, but are apparently unable to do so and are proceeding with austerity and privatizations.kraine may be in the same boat, though perhaps it has a better basis for self-sufficiency.
The stark contrast between the way the Ukraine and Greece are being treated really is an elephant in the room. I suppose the fundamental difference is the involvement of the US with Ukraine but not Greece.
RE: Nine reasons only a tool would buy the Apple Watch Guardian
What in the world is a “Breast Cancer” App? Or a “Parkinson’s Disease” App for that matter?
They are both, yet another way, for an individual to broadcast their personal medical data to anyone who can pay for it.
Why does Big Brother need to put a tracking implant Inside everyone when we all volunteer to wear one on the outside, on the wrist or in the pocket/purse?
I swear, those conspiracy theorists…they need to keep up with the conspirators.
+plus many laughs
You don’t suppose they might be indulging KonspirakiiTheory as a defense mechanism against KonspirakiiFact? That is, after all, what the Birch Society was for.
Maybe the cancer one gets from all the EMF noise?
Sure, it’s depressing to pay attention to the USA’s rigged neo-Soviet judicial system, but buried in all the totalitarian pus there are some priceless gems of pure Three Stooges slapstick as the government franticly makes shit up to salvage its fabricated case. CIA better hope they put enough slack-jawed morons on that jury, because that’s all that can save them now.
Dicking around with a fake twitter feed after the patsy is locked up? That’s so sad. At least with 9/11 CIA made their terrorists conspicuous ahead of time, as when one of their Attas blocked a runway at Miami international and walked away inconspicuous as could be. Now that’s entertainment.
China’s military dominance article is more crazed, extrapolative claptrap. The PLA has no significant combat experience since the punitive expedition against Vietnam in 1979 and that didn’t go very well. They have no network of bases from which to operate. They haven’t got a single general who has commanded so much as a battalion in action. And their nuclear force posture is purely (and inadequately) built on sufficiency (just enough to deter attack and nothing more). Things like ecological degradation, lack of raw materials, and water and soil problems aren’t even addressed. This is another moronic scare article that too many people who should know better take seriously and quote as if it had any relevance to reality. Pathetic.
They pale compared to the Teutons, Mongols and Visigoths as far as menacing Rome (new, old, the first, second, third, etc.) is concerned.
China doesn’t see a military emergency. China is way too smart. They might blast their way past Japan to get to the new island they just manufactured to protect their oil interests in the South China Sea, but that’s like swatting mosquitoes. I keep thinking about how vulnerable the invulnerable are. NATO is a joke because it has no oil. So no NATO troops can be guaranteed a back-up by all the military stuff necessary to hold ground – and newsflash – war is still about holding ground. War is not about ICBM mass devastation. That’s counterproductive. Funny, all this silliness.
Ah, aren’t US and Canada both petrostates and both founding NATO members?
I would like to vote for you as the first “Susan” President of The United States.
Sounds like a rehash of “team B” from ’70’s- Red Menace, missile gap, and bigger “defense” budgets.
In DeLong’s link, isn’t microfoundation-based macroeconomics, guilty of the very thing he’s accusing hyper-rationality based macroeconomics of? DeLong might reject hyper-rationality based models, but then if you aggregate all of the flaws in the type of modelling he appears to advocate there, you get pretty much the same type of poor modelling, no?
I don’t see how microfoundation-based macroeconomics can ever be a good idea – you need to start from the top-down, modelling the macroeconomy (particularly the monetary system) first; you have definite rules for how that works (much of it is basic accounting, ala sectoral balances and such, which all other models pretty much must follow).
I agree that it’s important to try and get the monetary system right.
Heterodox economists try and deal with reality as DeLong is trying to get at and this can be hard to model. Varoufakis is in this group. They consist of pure ‘describers’ and those who try and create a model based more on social connectedness rather than the individual actor.
“”Despite the well-known theoretical differences between Marx, Veblen, and Keynes, there is a common theme that unites these “worldly philosophers” and that sharply distinguishes heterodox economics from orthodox economics. They offer causal explanations of the social provisioning process”” (Tae-Hee Jo ‘Social Provisioning Process and Socio-Economic Modeling’, editied by Fred Lee)
um…. yet again, this is just a political conversation in disguise. ..this description of heterodox/orthodox in economics is how i have always understood left/right in politics… am i wrong? the exeption (annoyingly) being the austrians… also heterodox… though no social provision thingy…
I would say political conversation is the point. As has been mentioned, Syriza seems to be an example of ‘true’ social democrats that we haven’t seen in awhile with most parties buying into the neoliberal concepts. Social provisioning is quite different from rugged capitalism and takes a different mindset.
I suggest that “orthodox” economics strives to adjust the world to behave in accordance with its tenets (orthodoxy, in the sense of normativity), whereas heterodox economics, in not doing so, is forced to describe the world as it is. You could also think of it as theology on an average day vs. life science on one of its better days.
Not sure if it’s the first time I’ve seen it, but that is an incredibly beautiful photograph, and one worth replaying. A tribute to the impossible grace of the natural world. It’s a little off topic, however I thought I’d mention that after seeing Yves lament that the quality of discourse may have gone a little southwards lately, I must admit I may be one who has played a part in lowering the standards by commenting on things that I have only a marginal understanding of, and I apologise for that. I have always been amazed at the high level of intelligence evident in the articles here and amongst the commentariat, and I may have waded in out of my depth on occasion. To do my part to maintain the high standards expected at NC, I pledge that from here on out I will not use unnecessary profanity in any of my posts and will not jump the gun when replying to other peoples comments (apologies again James Levy). I will also refrain from posting on topics I do not fully understand (especially after I’ve had more than a few beers), unless I have a worthwhile question. Of course I will still comment if I feel I have something worthwhile to add to the discussion.
Cheers and best wishes to all. Peace!
The Spiegel interviewer seems testy at points? That’s an understatement. The interviewers (there are two) keep trying to substitute the Good German version of the situation every time Piketty tries to suggest there may have been fault outside of Athens. Piketty at points hardly seemed necessary for the interview, in fact, and probably should have walked out.
Here is the correct link to the NZHerald article:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11415172
http://parisiangentleman.tumblr.com/post/113356153856/dandyportraits-photo-by-rose-callahan-from-the
I think I know what he puts in his fanny pack when hitting the street at a civilized hour :-(
Fanny packs are uncivilized, by definition.
Last week this stargazer announced the coming scary Wednesday.
Now the aftermath.
http://astromundanediary.blogspot.de/2015/03/3.html
This guy Tom Lescher here gets 35K hits on his YouTube forecasts, also calls the dark skies
Pele Report
Which are given in “stonehedge voice” straight talk!
@ p.o.o.
35.000 or 350.000 hits … I don’t mind mass- hits, which only mirror your entertainment-quality.
In my opinion the only blessing in astrology is the astrology, you do yourself.