Video: San Diego Police Officer Kills Friendly Service Dog LAist. Horrible. Please sign this petition.
The Well-Tempered Clavier, by J.S. Bach Performed on the piano by Kimiko Ishizaka. Chuck L: “There must be some other Bach fans among NC habitues besides me.”
Robots rub shoulders with human buddies Financial Times (David L)
Key FTC Staff Wanted Antitrust Charges Against Google Wall Street Journal
FTC – We thought dominant Google abused its rivals: So we did NOTHING The Register (Bill C)
Florida employee ‘punished for using phrase climate change’ Guardian (Chuck L). Only in America….
Scientists Seek Ban on Method of Making Gene-Edited Babies New York Times (David L)
Nearly all fuel in Fukushima reactor has melted, says TEPCO Agence France-Presse (Chuck L)
Japan says difficult to reach Japan-U.S. trade deal without TPA Reuters. “It is difficult” in Japanese = “impossible”.
Accommodating China, disappointing US Financial Times
Burma’s bizarre capital: a super-sized slice of post-apocalypse suburbia Guardian (furzy mouse)
Yellen battles Draghi in euro-dollar drama Financial Times
The whys and hows of a single market for Europe Bruegel
Commerzbank raided over possible tax evasion DW (Richard Smith)
Grexit?
German tourists pay Greece WWII reparations News.com.au (Swedish Lex)
Tsipras vows to accelerate reforms Financial Times
Patience Wearing Thin on Vagueness from Athens on Bailout EuroMNI (free registration). They think privatization will lower electricity prices? Help me.
Ukraine/Russia
EU moves towards extending Russia sanctions Financial Times
Syraqistan
US soldier admits killing unarmed Afghans for sport Guardian
Libya Burning: ISIS Lays Claim To Another Country, Right At Europe’s Door CTuttle, Firedoglake
Sean Penn ‘thanks’ Dick Cheney — an ‘embittered bacteria of humanity’ — for creating ISIS Raw Story (furzy mouse)
NYU Professor Barred from UAE After Criticism of Migrant Worker Abuse Democracy Now (furzy mouse)
Iran Talks Stall Over Ending of Sanctions Wall Street Journal
Israel’s Netanyahu Reopens Door to Palestinian State, but White House Is Unimpressed New York Times
Imperial Collapse Watch
Alliance Crisis William Pfaff (Chuck L)
The View From Outside Archdruid (Chuck L)
Clinton Charity Tapped Foreign Friends Wall Street Journal
Obama to sign order cutting U.S. government greenhouse gas emissions Reuters. EM: “IBGYBG symbolism PR. Why not just Go Big and sign an EO committing the US to solving all the world’s problems by 2300?”
TV cook Sandra Lee’s hidden finances stir NY political heat for boyfriend Gov. Cuomo Syracuse (bob)
Black Injustice Tipping Point
The uncounted: why the US can’t keep track of people killed by police Guardian (furzy mouse)
No Justice, No Peace, Without Black Community Control of Police Glen Ford
San Francisco Catholic Church Installs Watering System To Ward Off Homeless Talking Points Memo (Chuck L)
Bank of New York to Pay $714 Million to Resolve Currency Suits Wall Street Journal. Adrien: One could wonder why it took 3 years for DOJ/NYS to bring this matter to completion when all the work has been done by the whistleblower(s) who brought the information to the regulators on a silver platter…”
Bank of America must allow shareholder vote on breakup -SEC letter Reuters. Adrien: “Maybe the market will do what the regulator(s) could not/did not want to do…”
Commodities Fall to 12-Year Low as Dollar Rises Amid Surplus Bloomberg
Philly Fed Growth Trends Lower 4th Month: Prices, Shipments, Workweek Negative Michael Shedlock
The changing geography of US employment FT Alphaville
The SEC’s Andrew Bowden: A Regulator for Sale? Bill Moyers. We appreciate sites that cross post NC regularly like Truthout picking this story up. The fact that Moyers wanted to run it (a first for his site) means it is reaching an even wider audience.
Oil
Banks Struggle to Unload Oil Loans Wall Street Journal
Quicksilver markets can catch out the unwary Gillian Tett, Financial Times
Class Warfare
Aneurin Bevan, stormy petrel of the Labour left New Statesman (Chuck L)
How Parents in One Low-Income Town Are Raising Hell to Save Their Schools Alternet
STEM Grads Can’t Find Jobs US News (Owen)
Turning Japanese Coping with stasis: how the supposed ‘sick man of Asia’ might be a model for us all Long and Short (Brent)
Fifty Shades of Fraud Counterpunch (Carol B)
Antidote du jour:
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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Comments are closed.
“Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, who died on Friday, was in the process of setting up a new political party that would have advocated scaling back Australia’s military ties to the United States.
Mr Fraser, who led the Liberal Party from 1975 to 1983, quit the party in 2009, shortly after Tony Abbott replaced Malcolm Turnbull as leader. He campaigned for Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young at the last election because of her stance on asylum seekers.
With an election due in mid to late 2016, Mr Fraser’s new party could have potentially run candidates at the next election.
Mr Fraser, who died aged 84, would not have led the party but would have driven its policy agenda. Fairfax Media understands Mr Fraser had developed a written draft policy platform for the party that included:
ending Australia’s close military alliance with the United States
a closer relationship with South-East Asian nations
ending the offshore processing of asylum seekers
stronger anti-corruption and transparency laws
tighter regulation of the sale of arable land
Mr Fraser discussed the party with confidants late last year.
In his last book, Dangerous Allies, published last year, Mr Fraser argued that Australia should become a “strategically independent country” and that the ANZUS Treaty with the United States was possibly the biggest threat to Australia’s security.
“If a war between China and the United States were to occur with a continuation of current policies, it would be very hard, if not impossible, for Australia to become involved,” he wrote.
Mr Fraser advocated closing down the US military base in Darwin and the Pine Gap communications facility
Mr Fraser had been a staunch defender of the US alliance during the Cold War but changed his view radically in his later years.”
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/malcolm-fraser-was-planning-to-start-a-new-political-party-before-his-death-20150320-1m46kd.html
Skippy…
Is there such a thing as a depleted uranium balloon…
Skippy… lead seems passe… methinks….
I was thinking of commenting on this earlier, but didn’t get around to it, so I’ll just say that the strange circumstances surrounding Gough Whitlam’s exit from Australian politics make me a little cautious when it comes to Malcolm Fraser.
Too me its not so much an identity issue, tho that of opinions evolution thought age and experience, which also acts as a point of reference wrt political party’s past and present.
In my worthless 2 bob opinion… today’s political operatives. on both ends of the spectrum, are emulating their heroes… in the C-suite. At least Whitlam and Fraser had a wider sociopolitical scope and disposition to change when needed.
Skippy…. Today we get neoliberal brand A or brand B with some CB head that can’t figure out why reality does not conform to models….
Not a worthless opinion at all, and to be fair I’m not sure if Fraser had much or anything to do with Whitlam’s removal. From the reading I’ve done it seemed to be the CIA and the Governer General Kerr who were the protagonists. I also note that Whitlam and Fraser were good friends in their later years, and that Fraser seemed to, at least in recent years, share quite a similar ideology with that which Whitlam put forward in his time as Prime Minister. All the constitutional crisis stuff was way before my time, and I haven’t done enough reading on the topic to build a decent image of what Fraser like was as a PM, though I know he was good to refugees and immigrants in the wake of the Vietnam war.
Your point about the devolution of politicians to lacklustre clones of their political idols is a good one, and if someone like Fraser was to emerge in current Aus. politics today he would put most (all?) others to shame, and reveal their lack of well, everything needed to be a good politician.
One from the gut here: methinks Mr. Penn has insulted bacteria.
Indeed, I adore to wander through one of Bach’s eternal boxwood mazes, surmising the oboe pungent as a bitch in heat… Thanks Chuck.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/28576
Or is that pitch in heat?
-Ahh, Bach
How could one doubt that the man for these times is Beethoven? And his ultimate interpreter was von Karajan. Although Lenny Bernstein was a damn good runner-up.
efs
Bach? The greatest music ever written? Who could ever deny it?
When I listen to a great pianist playing Bach, I’m filled with admiration for both the composer and the performer.
But when I sit down at the piano, the music I keep coming back to is late Brahms. It’s very different from Bach, but it has great depth and just speaks to me in a way that other music doesn’t quite equal. This is a very personal thing, though, and doesn’t take anything away from Bach or those who love playing his music.
The Goldberg Variations and the Well-Tempered Clavier are two of my favorite solo piano pieces. I made my little nephew a DVD with ocean-life footage from youtube & WTC for musical accompaniment for his 2nd birthday–pretty sure that’s why he’s a genius at four.
Roslyn Tureck
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WdvUB7MkbEM
The organist at my childhood church used to play Bach before services started. Didn’t fully appreciate it at the time but it was still rather awesome to hear it in that setting played on a old fashioned pipe organ. I’ve got fugues on my shuffle for bike rides, next to hip hop.
I’ve only got around to a few of the ones available at the link halfway down the page, but enjoyed them greatly; they’re all there.
When we lived in Louisiana, we went to Sunday Mass at St Benedicts Seminary north of Covington. Fr. Duggan was the organist. He also played with various symphony orchestras. After Mass he would often play a Bach piece. Hearing Bach played by an excellent musician on a formal church organ in a proper large church is an experience not to be missed. The lingering scents of the censer, and the cool languor gifted by the massive brick walls give a visceral sense of the “comforts of religion.” When asked why he played Bach, the Father said something along the lines of, “Bach composed for the glory of God, and God returned the favour with genius.”
Bach, the greatest music ever written? Tough call; music being music.
Most consider him the greatest composer of classical music though. And without his development of tempered tuning of the clavier (slightly flatting the black keys) to make playing in any tonality (musical key) a pleasing experience the forte piano might not have emerged. Well-tempered tuning is what allowed the forte piano to evolve into the modern piano, and for subsequent Classical composers to develop the range of musical harmonies we enjoy today.
I have that recording of the Goldbergs. I’m not a connoisseur, but I like the performance. I am a recording engineer, and I like what they did for Ms. Ishizaka.
We’ve been awash in Bach the last few seasons in Rochester. St. Matthew Passion, two different St. John Passions, the Magnificat, etc. Eastman School students have been running a series of the cantatas and tomorrow night JSB’s birthday will be celebrated with the Mass in B minor. Getting to record, and so to listen closely, to all of it has been great.
Back to Goldbergs: the harpsichordist Jory Vinikour played them last fall in one of the most astonishing feats of musicianship I’ve ever witnessed. Complete, with only a pause in the middle. The audience went crazy. His CD is here http://www.amazon.com/J-S-Bach-Variations-Jory-Vinikour/dp/B000056T8Y/sr=8-2/qid=1159467315/ref=pd_bbs_2/104-6566150-3232730?ie=UTF8&s=music
Bach not really classical, to be pedantic. Bach baroques. Stravinsky and Bartok tied for second place.
22 of the best insults in classical music
http://www.classicfm.com/discover/music/composer-insults/bach/
State Bills Would Limit Access to Officer Body Camera Videos article
MURRAY COUNTY, Ga. — Thursday 10:30am
Authorities are investigating a shooting involving a toddler in north Georgia.
Deputies in Murray County say a 2-year-old girl accidentally shot herself in the stomach.
The shooting happened at a home on Fullers Chapel Road Thursday at about 10:35 a.m.
The deputies have not said how she got her hands on the gun and they have not made any arrests.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is handling the investigation.
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
James Baldwin
uhhh how did the child pull that trigger Backwards? @ 24mos old??
Filed down firing pin maybe…
I wonder what that child might have done if the parents let it play with a straight razor.
Don’t be silly. There’s no Second Amendment right to straight razors.
Indeed, in most states it’s illegal for barberd to offer an old fashioned shave with a straight razor, even a disposable one — even one perfectly maintained and handled by an expert. It’s too easy to accidentally do serious harm to oneself or another with a straight razor, and too easy to cause deep and unsanitary wounds. They must be regulated as a matter of public health and safety.
Not having the gun secured somewhere when children are about is criminal negligence. Little ones don’t know what the results of their spontaneous actions will be. That’s why there are supposed to be adults around. (I see precious few adults anywhere nowadays.) We always assumed the kids would find and get their hands on everything. Childproofing a home is hard work, but then, why did you have the tykes in the first place? For laughs?
Catholic Church:
“We do the best we can, and supporting the dignity of each person,” he said. “But there is only so much you can do.”
Does the Church honestly believe that’s what Jesus would say?
too funnee sd. could be why the church leans harder into the mother mary entity…we mothers are notorious for throwing our hands up.
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
Voltaire
I am always interested in hearing the other side:
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2015/03/criticizing-cordileone
I’m no sure I’d use the word honest when describing the Catholic Church- After all this is a church that argues a fetus is not a baby to protect it’s assets from lawsuits while arguing that a fetus is a baby when it comes to birth control or abortion.
Intellectually inconsistent is what they do and what they are comfortable with.
The Archdruid mentions the genuinely frightening Clark Ashton-Smith. I had to go around turning on the lights after I finished one of his stories…..
Another aficionado of the outré it seems. When it comes to frissons of dread, California is the ‘place to be.’
Lovecraft had a running joke with CAS. He referred to him in a story as Klarkash-ton, a singularly unlucky high priest of ancient Atlantis. Ashton Smith would twit the ‘curious young man from Providence.’
CAS and the Weird Tales school wrote stories about monstrous egotists who come to grisly ends due to hubris and excess of pride. The present financial scene comes to mind. By all means, continue to turn on the lights, and shine them in obscure corners where monsters do dwell.
I’ve found the Archdruid’s recent posts on externalized costs very interesting. The influence of vested interests in corrupting areas within the scientific domain, and the resulting loss of trust in science as a whole in sectors of the non-scientifically engaged public may be considered in this context. For those not equipped with a working understanding of the mechanisms of the natural world (or even a modicum of good sense), and who are thus not able to efficiently make judgements as to the veracity of the barrage of ‘scientific’ information that swirls around in the media, it is easy to see how the baby may be thrown out with the bathwater.
How “externalized”? The earth is round….
Externalized enough for the perpetrators not to notice the immediate effects of the costs they are imposing on the other inhabitants of the planet, while they are enjoying their rewards for said behaviour.
Or were you were asking how can the debasement of scientific validity be considered an external cost of those who seek to profit from phony science? if so I would say that the answer is evident when looking at cases where babies who are too young to be immunized for measles are infected with the disease, as other parents have declined to do the responsible thing due to their last scientifically-proven miracle-diet not working, resulting in their loss of trust in the whole scientific paradigm.
Another source of scientific bias: “p-hacking”, where you keep re-analyzing the data until it’s significant:
http://phys.org/news/2015-03-scientists-unknowingly-tweak.html
re: San Diego Police Officer Kills Friendly Service Dog
WTF Trigger happy cops. After the first cop petted the dog, it was obvious the dog was just approaching the other (shooter) cop to be friendly.
Anyone else notice how all these shooter cops are Skin Heads.
Skin heads overlap quite a bit with returning servicemen. (Almost all are men it seems.) The application of the Apartheid method of Policing at work. Even when you’re ‘for them,’ you will get f—-d. A classic double bind, guaranteed to break the will of the public. The Reichs’ “Brain Buster” decisions forced on the Jews and others during ‘deportation’ are relevant. The book “Sophies’ Choice” would be a good place to start…
Yup. Military Troops hired for civilian policing. Train them to kill first, ask questions later. Drop them in a war zone to make killing second nature. Then hires them into police depts to terrorize the public. What could possibly go wrong — and does.
In order for the volunteer army to have enough numbers to deploy in Iraq, recruitment standards were lowered drastically. Many skinhead neo nazis and others with dubious backgrounds enlisted,some no doubt looking for legal thrill kills. Not sure how many returned to become cops though.
I’ve only seen an Indigo Bunting up close and personal one time, but it is every bit as spectacular as today’s photo.
Sorry. This wasn’t intended as a response but as a separate comment on the Antidote du Jour.
Thanks. I was wondering what kind of bird that was. Stunning colors.
Thanks to Alfred Hitchcock I’m not much of a bird person.
Funny thing is, when I first read “indigo bunting” I thought it was some kind of cop reference with which I was not familiar. You know, “indigo bunting” like “boy babies in blue.”
Yes. Maybe there is some connection between the presence of hair on one’s head and the ability to understand the concept of an address.
Anecdotally, it would also appear that the balder the pate, the bigger the ‘fraidy cat. Perhaps they are having their testicles removed so they don’t have to shave their heads as often.
All I know is that now we have TWO emergency plans in my house: what to do in case of fire, and what to do in case a cop bangs on your door. In the second event, each person is assigned a specific dog to pick up and hold onto.
I have already begged forgiveness, in advance, from my dogs for my inability to keep them alive when the SWAT team busts down my door in the middle of the night, mistaking it for the house on the next block. They will just have to understand that “freedom” isn’t “free,” and since they are each fluffy, white,15 pound hulks, all that aggressive tail-wagging is very scary for the nice men with machine guns in kevlar who are keeping us all safe but sometimes make little mistakes.
It is amazing how close we are getting to the dystopian worlds of Orwell’s “1984” and the movie “Brazil”. Makes me wonder if these authors thought they were writing Fiction or Warnings. Best of luck to your furry family members.
As a mostly bald guy who shaves his head, I totally resent this…
Really? I’ve never understood why anyone would do that (unless to look like a banker or a bouncer). Can you elucidate?
The uncounted: why the US can’t keep track of people killed by police Guardian (furzy mouse)
Paralysis through analysis. If they don’t want to know how many humans are killed by police….
But when one considers how much success the SPCA has had, maybe true police reform begins with police being FIRED for unwarranted discharge of their weapons when it kills a harmless animal.
i feel for the owner and the dog.
But one thing needs to be reminded here; Citizens, never open the door to cops.
Talk through the door until it is clear they have a warrant to be there.
I have a full length shatter resistant aluminium framed glass storm door. I can talk through it, they can see me, but it is not going to be opened. As a benefit, the door also works against run-jump-crash type door break-ins.
Whoa! Gillian Tett’s Hot New Pic next to her byline could put another few hundred points on the markets just by itself. Anybody notice that? Wow. I haven’t checked her column out for quite a while, so it’s new to me. See Ladies if you take care of yourself and don’t get too flabby and baggy you can stay hot for a very long time, like a fine wine you can better and better. And even if you are flabby, if the shape stays more or less symmetrical, you can stay very hot for years. But I’m not sure if what she wrote about is “news”. I was reading that kind of stuff 2 years ago and I lost so much money from it I almost started crying. I wouldn’t call it reporting or analysis anymore, now I call it “entertainment” , if somebody likes thinking about that kind of thing for entertainment purposes that is. For me, it was always a money-making urge that drove me to read, but after losing all my money, now I just look at the pictures.
I hate to tell you this, craazyman, but if you had checked her column more often you might not have missed this chance to have lunch with her.
If I hadn’t lost all my money reading Doom & Gloom articles like the one she wrote today, I might have been a contender! Did you see the price? 6,000 British Pounds!!! Jesus H. Christ. That’s 2 pairs of Edward Green shoes and a tailored Saville Row suit. If it was 60 Pounds I’d have bid on it for sure and talked about Magonia until she fainted.
I’ll wax philosophic all day for a pabst….
Of course, if you don’t want to vomit at the sight of my gag inducing countenance, you will have to provide to me a wave=particle duality visual obstructor for me to wear (i.e., paper bag over my head)….
Zigged when you should have zagged. It’s better not to torture oneself with what might have been. Just think, if your father had been an obsequious SEC regulator, you could have been hired by a private equity firm and GBP 6,000 would seem like chump change.
I think the key takeaway here is that bubbles love bagholders……Gillian’s article message, I mean. Maybe everyone has their 401ks set on autopilot gobbling up stocks like Oprah at an all -you-can-eat buffet. Then the HFT ‘bots know we don’t need an economy anymore, just frequent headlines from the Fed about how they feel about interest rates. The ‘bots can all buy and bang the market for 10 minutes, then sell before anyone asks if they really have any money. Who knows how long that can keep the bagholders satisfied? There was someone that remarked on the markets once and said ” It doesn’t matter what I think…it matters what [I think] everyone else thinks. Beauty IS in the eye of the beholder.
It occurred to me trading bots could keep the market going, pretty much as is, even if the earth was destroyed by a huge asteroid.
If the bots were in space, on satellites. That way if any humans survived they could start up their trading screens and re-create the entire economy from wherever stock prices were at that point.
Sure, and if only trading bots and cockroaches survived, everything would still work out ok.
in such a scenario, short ‘Raid’
Cockroaches are our friends.
My idea is to farm cockroaches on the Moon, harvest their protein, process and ship them back to Earth to cure world hunger.
I just need funding. The venture capitalist can get the Nobel. All I want is 10% ownership.
Love the Bach!
Re: Japan says difficult to reach Japan-U.S. trade deal …
Another great use of a word by the Japanese when a Japanese person says it is “prepared”. Prepared for, or to do what, exactly ? It’s often used obliquely e.g. “he wasn’t very well prepared for that meeting” (meaning, he’d not got very good arguments to put forward) or “she’d made good preparations in order to clinch the sale” (meaning she was willing to give a hefty discount to get the business).
If the source in the Reuters article is quoted correctly “prepared” in this case probably meaning (the U.S. needs to be) “prepared to make concessions”.
Junbi is also an excellent encapsulation of how deals work in Japanese firms, i.e. the particulars of a deal are worked out as a function of a long-standing pre-existing relationship, not of what gets said between people at the bargaining table. It’s entirely possible that “preparation” here means something like “once the Americans have finally gone through the process of establishing complex relationships between middle managers,” i.e. with the bureaucracy that actually makes things run there. At the end of the day, that all too American trait, an unwillingness to try to understand other cultures in their own terms, will scuttle a crappy idea, so I’m not too sad.
Maybe it’s a good thing the Japanese are not involved in the Greece-Troika, sorry, Greece-Institutions dialogue.
“It’s very hard unless you’re prepared.”
I noted this last time it came up, but I’ll reiterate: food is a non-starter with the Japanese unless you’re willing to accept their numerous protectionist regimes. Even a casual observer in Japan would be able to tell you that seasonal food products, regional food products, and what have you are closely tied to a widespread public discourse of Japanese essentialism. Add to that Japan’s numerous protectionist agricultural policies, and you have what amounts to a diplomatic brick wall against which to beat your head. It almost sounds as if the Obama admin has no one on its team with any Japan experience at all.
Not that I mind. The TPP is a complete mess, and if Japanese intransigence prevents it from happening, then bully for them.
Yes, I think that is absolutely spot-on. And I’ve always maintained that Obama’s big blunder with the TPP is letting U.S. Trade Representative Froman lead the negotiations — i.e. treating it like it’s just a matter of trade / economics. For it to succeed, the diplomatic and foreign relations aspects needed to be given at least equal prominence. Being a trade delegation, I doubt the USTR has anything much by way of staff with experience of dealing with Japan (and other Asian countries). Oh, that plus the fact that Froman seems to be a complete idiot who’s only claim to fame is his big bank crony connections can’t be helping much either.
Given the monstrous implications of the TPP for the U.S. and Japan (and any other country which misguidedly thinks it is A Good Idea) I too can’t help but relish the prospect of its downfall — especially as the proximate causes are entirely due to Obama’s now well-understood defects of leadership. The big risk of course is that, without continued public pressure in both Japan and the U.S., it might just possibly still get through by accident.
I suppose this is the kind of diplomacy you get when your appointed ambassadors are simply a list of your most prolific fundraisers, most of whom probably couldn’t locate the country in question on a map, and your state dept. is composed of careerist apparatchiks moving from one government agency to the next and eventually to some cushy job at a think tank writing white papers and spouting nonsense that has no grounding in reality.
And I agree, it’s always worth resisting a disastrous idea, even if there is only a slim chance of it ever being implemented.
Basic Income Guarantee on Counterpunch. Nice to see the idea being kicked around.:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/20/free-money-for-everyone-whats-the-world-coming-to/
Catchy title: Free money for everyone whats the world coming to?
The assumption is only special beings or omnipotent ones can have free money. Free money will not rob them of the will to be active…keep engaged in whatever they do or have to do.
You and me are not so virtuous. :<
Bread and circuses has a splendid record, even, or perhaps especially, in the imperial metropolis. I wonder why?
When Nixon proposed a BIG as part of the Family Assistance Plan in 1969, Fred Meyter used such imagery in the National Review, saying “for the bread and circuses [of Rome] substitute a federal dole and a television set in every welfare home”. Well, if it didn’t work in Rome, fuggedaboudit.
http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/guaranteed-income%E2%80%99s-moment-sun
We need more entertaining circuses, I believe, thought that does not necessarily have to mean animal or human cruelty.
And this time, the Christians are on our side – we are sending them to save the barbarians.
Work alone is plenty a distraction from the doings of empire. Or at any rate the level of commitment to work (and work when your not at work, and work you need to do to get and keep work etc.) it takes to survive in the modern U.S. is for most people.
One more time:
Basic Income is either unrestricted and substantial, a la many well-meaning but innumerate proposals – and therefore the most absurdly inflationary proposal of all time, which would last at most a year or so, and be followed by an Austerians Revenge.
Or it is restricted and/or insubstantial. In those cases we have it already. It is called “welfare”. So what? BIG f-ing Deal. That is a solution to real economic problems is a joke, a BIG Lie. Obtuse, comfortable “liberals” want to foist it on the poor and disadvantaged, who want decent, real jobs instead. But those are reserved for the obtuse, comfortable “liberals”, who hold the needs and correct reasoning of the poor in contempt. Until they join the poor in the Blade-Runner, Hunger Games, Elysium world a BIG will make.
Inflationary, huh? Nice theory. Seems like all the QE efforts of pumping money into the system only inflated equities, junk bonds and housing. Wouldn’t some money in the hands of consumers, who are willing to spend it in the economy, be a good thing, regardless of inflation? For that matter, the BIG could be adjusted to respond to inflationary pressures.
Where, exactly, are these “decent”, “real” jobs going to come from? Just raise the compensation on the McJobs and call it a day? Those poor serfs should kiss the ground that they are able to sling burgers and clean toilets for their betters, I suppose. With more and more basic labor being automated, what will be the great provider of “quality” jobs that you envision?
The unrestricted, substantial BIG, which is what I treat below – say $30,000 for everyone, tax free – is spectacularly inflationary. This is obvious to everyone, to small children, to the poor, who rationally don’t like inflation. (Of course, I and everyone else support restricted BIG – welfare – for those who need it. )
Seems like all the QE efforts of pumping money into the system QE isn’t pumping money into the system. QE is pumping nothing; it is monetary policy, basically changing a two-dollar bill for 2 ones. Mainstream econ is devoted to the proposition that this “making change” has magical effects, while actually spending your two-dollar bill will have no effect on the economy whatsoever. Nobody has ever dreamed up a fantasy as absurd as this theory purported to be true.
For that matter, the BIG could be adjusted to respond to inflationary pressures. No, it can’t be, short of making the society basically a command economy or one that doesn’t use money. The BIG isn’t “some money”. It is an incredible amount. The classic, unrestricted, substantial BIG is just not possible. It is like thinking that you can make everybody “be good” or “be smart” by just calling them “good” or “smart”, like thinking that just interchanging the words used for “master” and “slave” will liberate slaves.
In practice, a BIG without a JG is a great recipe for a dystopic movie future.
Where, exactly, are these “decent”, “real” jobs going to come from?
The real decent jobs are going to come from the same place all jobs have always come from: the State. The Rich get their money from the State- their job is “being Rich” (usually means insane, malicious, at best do-nothing – getting money from bonds)
The Poor need money to pay taxes, that is why money has value. So the Poor need to grovel before the Rich to get money, usually to further their insane or malicious ends. That is the ideal of a normal, natural job in a capitalist society. Amazingly their has been human progress – not as much as in the 1930s-70s or so when people basically understood how things work, but some.
So the answer is that people will decide on Good Stuff to do. And do it, directly, cutting out the insane middleman. That’s all. People don’t need a Rich Person to tell them what to do. They can decide themselves that people who contribute to common goals – like growing food in agrarian societies – get compensated – by being allowed to eat, say. Modern societies can decide that anybody who does some work for society (as defined say by a vote of your town, say) gets compensated by society. This will non-inflationarily raise the wage on McJobs, almost all jobs, enrich everyone.
Little children may agree with your theory of how inflationary a BIG, but that doesn’t prove your THEORY. Grownups who agree it might work include Martin Wolf, Charles Murray, Guy Standing, Michael Hardt, Friedrich Hayek, Gareth Morgan, Andre Gorz, Alisa McKay, Antonio Negri and Eduardo Suplicy, among others.
As far as pumping goes, because investors were unable to get any return on cash or treasuries as QE distorted the markets, they were forced to buy higher risk financial securities which PUMPED the values of equities and junk bonds. It also had a huge impact on wealth accumulation and growing inequality.
Taxes could be used to tame any inflationary pressures, despite all your hysterics.
The state doesn’t have enough good, fulfilling work to take the place of all the lost jobs as our economy becomes more automated. Try again. I know you think daddy can make everything all right and give everybody chores that make them feel important, but that sounds like wishful thinking to me. Sorry, but your vision sounds like a lot of kumbaya to me.
QE makes the return on cash and treasuries so low that people are forced into buying higher risk financial securities to receive any return on their assets. This pumps up equities and junk bonds, increasing the value of these assets relative to the rest of the economy. I call that asset pumping and it increases wealth of the haves and inequality in general.
When I was at a large land locked public research institution way back in the 90s, a freshman in the writing program in the English Department wrote this snarky op-ed in the school paper about how the Department was “a $15,000 dominatrix who whips and spanks you into submission, only you never get off.” **
My sentiments exactly! I was already on my way out the door, (which is not to say I got off. If you leave a thing for pay that’s bad only to pay for a thing you think is better for you, you’re not exactly getting off).
I have still have copies and copies of that article somewhere– really the whole thing was quite entertaining, and that phrase has frequently popped into my head over the years. I once saw him over at the HuffPo. He was in the middle of being argumentative about something or other.
I don’t know. Just popped into my head for some reason. Some people just like to make other people miserable. Real, genuine sadism is a huge motivating factor in social life. Do not underestimate it. Such sadism is not necessarily socially acceptable to all, however, including to the sadist him or herself. This is why Freud, making like God, was forced to invent rationalization, call it a form of “defense mechanism,” and well, here we are.
…Awesome! I just figured out his name and googled him. He’s still informing on the school’s latest scandale (along with Ezra Klein, LOL– it must be big!), and he likes Dusty Springfield. How cool is that?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcqPlGG5woI
** They were cancelling the writing program or something. No big deal.
Hayek? Well, I’m sold!
you’re a quick one, aren’t you? ad hom much?
“Taxes could be used to tame any inflationary pressures, despite all your hysterics.”
Good to see this part of MMT become conventional wisdom, at least.
I didn’t realize MMT invented the use of taxes in fiscal policy to control inflation.
http://www.taxhistory.org/Civilization/Documents/Fiscal/hst29026.htm
“The state doesn’t have enough good, fulfilling work to take the place of all the lost jobs as our economy becomes more automated”
Bollocks. Look around you. There’s a gigantic amount of work to be done. Amazing you could even make that statement. And I want evidence on your deus ex machina robots thing.
A GIGANTIC amount of work to be done? What, infrastructure jobs? How many jobs do you estimate that will create? Bollocks back atcha.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2015/01/job-site-of-future-unmanned-bulldozers_21.html
Yep. Used to be that computers were people. Then digital computers made that go away. So Komatsu “has plans.” There’s a lot of stupid plans in Silicon Valley, too.
What you’re really arguing — besides the lump of labor fallacy — is that human desires are limited. If robots built all the houses tomorrow, there’s be new work to put stuff in the houses.
Glad at least you concede that the work is to be done. I’d say start doing it, instead of waiting for a deus ex machina from Komatsu.
“Amazingly their has been human progress – not as much as in the 1930s-70s or so when people basically understood how things work, but some.”
“There” not “their.” Sorry to be pedantic.
Changing a dollar bill for two ones. Who would have thought that the Fed would adopt a twenty-year-old SNL skit?
Who woulda thought that all those gains on financial instruments doesn’t count as dollars?
I think this is the state of affairs:
In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), it qualifies “Declaration”, suggesting the geographical scope of the proclamation rather than rights for all humans. In any case, the “universal” rights it pledged were swiftly rendered into separate “generations” of broken promises floating above and outside social and juridical institutions, without any mechanisms of guarantee and bestowed piecemeal by leaders or in the warped forms of humanitarianism and charity, although it is obvious that the generalised nature of a human right theoretically distinguishes it from any privilege confined to a group, class or caste.
“Austerity” is the current reply of controllers. It’s an awfully global kick.
Umm, made earlier comment — snafu,
but, bending the time machine
what he said: “Almost every institution in America—from our corporations to our schools, hospitals, and civic authorities—now seems to operate largely as an engine for extracting revenue, by imposing ever more complex sets of rules that are designed to be broken” [David Graeber, Gawker].
Pardon, but is establishing a Basic Income for all enough? What’s to stop the 1% from shaping the laws and institutions of government and society to siphon up all that distributed income, like the classic “Company Store” situation?
A Basic Income will be paid for by redistributing the obscene wealth of the 1%. But what changes can we make to protect that redistributed income from being vacuumed up as fast as it is delivered?
There needs to be a maximum income as well, a certain measure of wealth beyond which taxation claims 100% of income. What is the value to human society of allowing one individual to have thousands of times more capital than another? Such discrepancies in wealth only allow the richer of the two humans to purchase laws and politicians, and to live above the law herself or himself. How does that help human society? If huge projects need to be funded, let them be crowd-funded by millions of investors, not funded by one Bill Gates, or by the Koch Brothers. There needs to be a ratio of about 25 to 1 in relative wealth throughout our cultures, worldwide. Let us be more equal in fact as well as in philosophy.
I agree and support a tight full-employment labor policy as the optimal means of achieving both a wage floor and weath ceiling. By removing the labor “slack” employers will be forced to increase wages, bidding against each other for the few available workers and shifting income away from profits. Their wealth will grow more slowly while wealth accumulation at the bottom accelerates.
Huh. how do you achieve this “tight full-employment labor policy” in a time of increasing automation? Where are the jobs coming from? Employers are just as likely to automate or outsource as they are to bid up labor.
I remember a moment when “the robots are coming” surfaced as an explanation/alibi for “the jobless recovery”; all the pundits (including Krugman) began talking about it, as if a switch had been thrown. I’d like to see something authoritative on this. It also strikes me that most things in life worth having probably can’t be automated. That’s where the jobs would be.
Well, I’m not the only one who is concerned. Glad you feel the future is so awesome and that work will continue to make us free with all those wonderful jobs that can’t be automated (such as?)
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/03/09/2120134/jobs-automation-engels-pause-and-the-limits-of-history/
I assume the link you dumped is in answer to my query on something authoritative on automation causing job loss. Here’s the conclusion:
Oh, OK. Shorter: The future lies ahead. The rest of the article is a fun example of on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-othering. Entertaining, but if this is the best of breed on “authoritative,” color me unpersuaded.
You ask: “work will continue to make us free with all those wonderful jobs that can’t be automated (such as?)” Such as? Kidding, right? Xeriscaping California comes to mind as an opener. Anyhow, the burdens on you. Your claim is that automation will lead to immense job loss. So, evidence please.
I would have linked to the Oxford Martin School/Citibank report, but its a pdf file (link below). Maybe you missed the link to it within the “dumped” link I put up. It doesn’t provide much hope for the vast number of jobs that will be lost (from those who are actually participating in the current job market), but it outlines how it will happen in detail.
But I suppose if you want to keep your head in the sand, and dream about all those xeriscaping jobs in Califofrnia that will be the answer (paying no attention to the automation of farm labor), while pretending that the future is bright, its up to you:
https://ir.citi.com/SpOPFQKaUI0CuZiKF7l3ng3BDRgvULDzh0PGQ%2Bbj5Vrl3VG6GOErsnpmB0p5bv6l
Call me impressionable, but I found the link within the article I “dumped” to the Oxford Martin/Citi research paper “Technology at Work: The Future of Innovation and Employment” pretty alarming. The idea that we could lose 47% to automation and magically find new ones to take their place seems ludicrous to me, particularly when so many are out of the workforce or underemployed as it is.
The link to the research is a pdf file:
https://ir.citi.com/SpOPFQKaUI0CuZiKF7l3ng3BDRgvULDzh0PGQ%2Bbj5Vrl3VG6GOErsnpmB0p5bv6l
So, is it because I put in a link to a pdf file that I’m in moderation, Lambert? Just wanted to point out that the meat of my support was in the embedded link within the FTAlphaville link to the Oxford Martin/Citi research paper “Technology at Work: The Future of Innovation and Employment”.
Did’t mean to do a double post of the pdf link there, thought the first one didn’t go through. Also feeling a little snarked out.
I’m in favor of a highly progressive tax system, including estate and wealth taxes, in addition to being in favor of a BIG.
Yes. The effective tax rate on the 1% and the pillars of the regime in the 20% must greatly increase (unless we want an aristocracy, of course).
“Pardon, but is establishing a Basic Income for all enough?”
Well, yeah. The problem is not a lack of good ideas. The problem is that in a collapsing economy run by oligarchs, only bad ideas can get implemented–or good ideas that have been reworked to become bad.
People are still running around looking for political solutions. There aren’t any. Damage limitation is often possible, and is worth doing. Also worthwhile are small-group activities that avoid established institutions. Think Food not Bombs. Not so much that you should support them, though that is all right. No, the idea is to create your own. For food, housing, gardening, whatever.
Globally, we have hit our resource limits and real growth is over. All the frauds and looting are to paper over the absence of growth. Our economy is now a downward spiral of musical chairs.
To avoid getting caught in it, you must get as much of your life outside the economy as you can.
–Gaianne
If you want any semblance of democratic control over capital allocation*, then you need a Jobs Guarantee and not a Basic Income Guarantee, which is, in the end (a) reinforces the idea of citizen and consumer and (b) reinforces all that rental extraction that Graeber talks about. I think a BIG as a supplement to a JG has merit (it’s one way to think about paying for housework, for example) but yes, it really is bread and circuses as a standalone policy.
* Which is a complete cluster right now; so much money sloshing around the rich don’t know what to do with it, and when they come up with something, it’s miles and miles of styrofoam pediments in the housing bubble, or the F35, or nuking the taxi industry, or ObamaCare instead of single payer, or rockets to Mars instead of water projects. Society could do better crowdsourcing these decisions on twitter. Kidding! But not really….
US can’t keep track of people killed by police.
Shouldn’t the public-safety people be concerned about this particular weakness in their system? What if the bad guys take advantage of this?
Seems so, if the numbers are so large we can’t even record them in that gov place in Utah where they are storing the internet and our audio-visual history of the United States.
Can’t even keep track of the dogs…
Worse, the bad guys might use migratory birds or northbound fire ants.
I say this now so our good guys can prevent such attempts. I remember there were calls to Hollywood writers more than 10 years to elicit possible scenarios so we can defend against them.
This is my feeble attempt to contribute.
During the early Forties, the German branch of IBM Corporation offered the Nazi government and military a punch card system for keeping track of all sorts of production, including the production of deceased Jewish persons, deceased Gypsies, political criminals, prisoners of war, and just whomever they needed to make deceased.
Excellent records and headcounts were kept at all times by these modern computerized methods. Could we not do domething similar and issue each police officer a punch card, and have him or her take one of those hand punches and make a little hole for each citizen they kill? A column for pets can be provided, as well as one for wild creatures like marauding crocodiles, stray buffalo or escaped circus elephants. And a column for the truly weird, like little green men, sasquatch, werewolves, or citizens who’ve ingested bath salts and are busy eating some hapless passerby.
If the officer is particularly efficient at his duties, he or she can be awarded with a three-hole punch in a nifty leather holster that fits right on their service belt, making it easy to keep up with their paperwork. Once a month, each officer feeds their punch card into a big IBM punch card reader connected to the internet, and instantly the entire nation can read online how many citizens and other living creatures have departed our ranks by police action in the past month. The most productive officer in each state, every 30 days, wins a one-way ticket to Somalia, where their style of unrestricted Lawn Order is highly valued.
Runners up in 2nd and 3rd place are automatically transferred to Internal Affairs for the remainder of their career. This allows police officers to enjoy the kind of results-oriented supervision that makes headlines out here on the streets of America.
Why, in no time at all we’ll have officers thinking before shooting, asking questions first and firing later, and double checking that they have the address right before kicking down the doors and shooting up the joint.
I thoroughly enjoyed this.
Re: US soldier admits killing unarmed Afghans for sport
There is a documentary on the group of soldiers that the subject of this article was a part of. It is titled The Kill Team and contains in-depth interviews with some of the offending soldiers. Suprisingly, it was shown on free-to-air TV in Australia, which is how I stumbled upon it. The most alarming thing in this documentary was the contention that the type of behaviour they engaged in is common, and they were just the unlucky ones who were caught. Not exactly a feel-good movie, however worth watching if you get the chance.
RE: STEM Grads Can’t Find Jobs US News (Owen)
Well, this was quite an eye-opener. And from US News and World Report too.
” The highly profitable IT industry, for example, is devoting millions to convince Congress and the White House to provide its employers with more low-cost, foreign guestworkers instead of trying to attract and retain employees from an ample domestic labor pool of native and immigrant citizens and permanent residents. Guestworkers currently make up two-thirds of all new IT hires, but employers are demanding further increases. If such lobbying efforts succeed, firms will have enough guestworkers for at least 100 percent of their new hiring and can continue to legally substitute these younger workers for current employees, holding down wages for both them and new hires.
The interesting thing is that, when I viewed this excellent article, it was under the “Opinion” tab as opposed to the “National Issues” or “News” tabs.
Lately, it seems the best way to obscure inconvenient “facts” is to call them “opinions” with which one can then “disagree.”
During one of my daughters college visits, I had lunch with the Dean of the School of Liberal arts. She was lamenting on about how the local employers were demanding the school produce more Computer Science grads. They were sending work overseas because they couldn’t find people. The school was responding by taking millions out of the school of liberal arts and into technology. She was angry with this. I listened and then asked at what starting salary are they offering? She was confused and I said, you are telling me I should “invest” $180,000 in my daughters education to get a four-year degree at your school to achieve a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science. If local employers are cutting IT costs and sending work overseas then are they capable of paying a starting salary commensurate with the cost of the degree? At some point the cost of education stops becoming an investment. She said, “I never thought about it that way.”
I know a recent grad with a degree in Environmental Science (Cum laude honors). Couldn’t find a job in his field for months and has now settled on doing Laborer work (on a piece work basis) installing units on residential roofs. That Bachelor of Sci degree could end up being fools gold. Meanwhile Tech companies crying they can’t find skilled workers — such bullsh1+.
U.S. software executives urge action on fast-track trade bill Reuters. Sure. What does our sovereignty as a nation matter, set next to the software industry extracting rents?
There’s probably a game program for it.
Hahaha. Letter signed by IBM which has run an annual program to fire 10-15,000 US workers and send the IT jobs to the BRICs. They also hire tons of H1Bs. All these tech companies have programs to drive down tech wages. Isn’t there a clause in TPP to double the H1B work visas? If not yet, there will be. Mystery solved.
Scary fact: These tech companies have lots of US Gubmint projects for military systems. So comforting to know they use offshore development teams (incl China) to do the software work.
Back around year 2000 or so, IBM did announce to investors that they were beginning a long term plan (10? years IIRC) to cut US employment in half and replace it “elsewhere”. That’s from a company that used to be known by employees as “I’ve Been Moved”.
‘Course in the ’90s we let the Big 4 Indies come in and scoop up contracts on the cheap, then have programmers back in India do the work ’round the clock at $5k/yr. By the end of the 90s, all major US software contractors set up shop in India and stole the programmers from the Indian pirates.
I always love (sarc) the argument for low taxes on “America business” and the “job creators” – true enough….they just didn’t tell you the jobs were in India, Pakistan, Malaysia….
John Cassidy offers some commentary on a recent Obama speech in Cleveland.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/obamas-well-earned-victory-lap-on-the-economy
Along with taking credit for low gasoline prices, the President offered this poignant accomplishment:
“The stock market has doubled since I came into office. Corporate profits are—corporate balance sheets are stronger than they have ever been—because of my ‘terrible’ business policies.”
Let me remind my readers that the president actually belongs to the DEMOCRATIC party. And I love the “corporate profits” slip up.
Obama’s also still punching at Mitt Romney of all people. 2012 was two whole election cycles ago. This guy is still president but already living in the past.
LOLOL also Cassidy from the article:
“To be sure, he didn’t create the surge in U.S. energy production that prompted Saudi Arabia to let the price of oil plummet, thereby putting smiles on the faces of American motorists. But nor did he do anything to prevent it, despite calls from environmentalists to do so.”
Once again, despite contrary evidence this is not actually a Republican president. I’m sure a Republican would have done something dreadful instead.
Republican – Encourage Union Brothers at US refineries to go on strike, keeping gas prices up at the pump.
FTC on Google: So we did nothing.
A government can be big, but weak.
A just and effective government can be small – all it needs is commitment and heart.
Bibi to reopen door to Palestinian state.
I guess only Nixon could go to China…or Clinton to reform welfare.
He meant he’s gonna have a sale on beachfront property.
There’s a documentary film about Jeremy Morlock and his small cabal of US soldiers which conspired to thrill-kill innocent Afghans, including children. I believe the film is simply titled “Kill Team”, I watched it at the Tribecca film festival in 2013. I don’t think it ever received a theatrical release but it did win several awards. It was deeply disturbing. I was also very disturbed by the link to the sad cop-kills-innocent-sweet-dog-for-no-particular-reason story in San Diego. Even before I saw the link to the Afghan Kill Team story the dog story made me think about it. As unrelated as the two may seem, I am convinced it is the exact same type of disturbed individual that perpetrates these types of atrocities. There was a lot of on-screen discussion in the film “Kill Team” about the personalities that frequently join the military: lost, misguided, angry, bored young men shaped by a steady diet of violent video games and films who only want to kill and don’t care who. Unfortunately I believe many of these young men end up in our police force and pet dogs are the easiest and most consequence-free target thanks to the ‘Kill Fido first, ask questions later” policies of most police departments.
As unrelated as the two may seem, I am convinced it is the exact same type of disturbed individual that perpetrates these types of atrocities.
Funny, actually not, you should mention this. In reading low integer’s “Kill Team” link above, I was struck by how similar the soldiers’ quotes were to what we hear when cops shoot unarmed civilians here in the “homeland.”
“So we talked about specifics, what was going to happen: ‘Hey, this guy was coming toward us, we told him to stop, he didn’t listen to our commands. Holmes identified something in his hand. He thought it was a grenade. Threw something at us and so we engaged him and took cover behind the wall.’ That’s what we talked about.”
They told him to stop and he didn’t. He had something in his hand. The soldier “thought” it was a grenade, the cops always say they “think” it’s a gun. Engage.
” He claimed to have fired on a car in Iraq, killing an entire family—something he had been “looking for a reason to do… for awhile.” He was never caught. “Yeah dude,” Gibbs allegedly told Morlock. “I just said this”—that the car was “charging” him—“and no one questioned it.”
He “just said” the car was “charging” him. Exactly the word used by Darren Wilson when he recounted what happened in Ferguson, if I recall. Brown “charged” him.
And what to make of the fact that people are actually prosecuted for killing innocent Afghans, but walk when they kill innocent Americans? It’s getting harder and harder to see where the Middle East stops and “america” starts.
For anyone who wants to watch it, this is part 1.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2jtykz_the-kill-team-part-1-tv
part 2 is on the site as well
What everyone missed about that article on Japan and the TPP negotiations is that the emphasis was on pressuring congress to approve the fast-track TPA bill. The article also mentioned the New Zealand foreign minister mentioning the same thing. This isn’t so much a sign of Japanese reluctance cloaked in conservative language as it is posturing to encourage Congress to abdicate it’s responsibilities to appointed(read bought) representatives.
This is not the reading in Japan. We’ve had Clive posting on this regularly.
Japan would also be required to throw its farmers under the bus. It isn’t merely that the farmers are a very powerful lobby. Even non-farmers have a deep attachment to farming. Thus at least in Japan, the “oh you have to get Fast Track before we can even take you seriously” is just the pretext du jour, and preferred because it shifts the responsibility onto the US. The Japanese are profoundly disturbed with the US refusal to negotiate, and have separately made clear that there is no deal unless the US changes its ‘tude.
Agence France. A TEPCO press release… We think all the fuel in all 5 reactors has finally melted… We don’t have any evidence, let alone proof, of this but trust us because this is a hopeful situation… We can now proceed to send robots in to find what is still there and then clean it up. And oh yes, at least 1/3 of Japan is extremely contaminated. The Fukushima site alone will take several decades to clean up. We don’t have anything to even say to the rest of the world, because we don’t have a clue how to clean up the water you drink and the air you breathe. But if Tokyo can drink the water, you can too. And we won’t be making anymore PSAs on this until after the Olympics, OK?
BTW – I’m sure the TPP will allow the Pacific Rim region – California, Japan and China, to all sell water to each other.
Geez. Left out India. My mistake. But I don’t think India export water will be that popular. Derrier water? In the brown bottle?
Guess what happens if you attack THEIR dog? A friend suffered a psychiatric episode and stabbed the dog they sent in to try to get him to “give up”. The incident ended as one might expect it would for a young brown man. RIP, brother.
Myanmar is really intriguing. Naypyidaw is empty, we didn’t try to visit when we were there in January. And Yangon is in it’s pre-bladerunner stage. In this city of 5.5 million, everything is “BladeRunner” already, minus the neon and high tech. The trade embargoes have reduced everything to being broken down much like Cuba. People living in the corridors of half abandonned temples. Even the buildings seem to have been harvested for their parts. I would walk around and enter random buildings, climbing up the steepest old wooden stairs imaginable. The steps were maybe 5 or 6 inches wide, and you had to ascend slightly sideways. Stairs warped and the pitch felt dizzying and one misstep would send you 4 flights down and out the front door. the walls between buildings were bowed and cracked so that you could see through to the adjacent stairwell and the roofs has been removed and replaced with tin. I don’t know how these apartments do not collapse under their own weight, there is little that is structurally holding them together. One man saw me taking photos of the trees growing off the sides of buildings and smiled at me as he opened this magical little 2 foot doorway on the sidewalk to reveal a tight space between two buildings that had been filled with a maze of bright blue PVC pipes like the ducts in “Brazil.”
Plumbing clogged? no way to get to it, just send down a new pipe…
No one caught the great line in the Cuomo girlfriend story-
“.The administration is glad to negotiate disclosure of all girlfriends.”
What about boyfirends? Sexist.
The Antidote du jour is just breathtaking…
Agreed. Just lovely to behold.
From the link, the practices the FTC decided warranted a voluntary settlement:
Cool. Primitive accumulation in its purest form; theft at the point of a gun. Remember “Don’t be evil?” What a laugh.
Keep in mind too, that paying a small fee for something as important as virus protection might be a good idea. After all, we want the folks who work on the project to be able to go a good job and keep doing what they are doing. In order to do that they do need to be paid.
kollpip http://www.kollpip.com