Rabid fox gets warmer reception than migrants Daily Mash
California condor: Shock therapy helping to bring rare vulture back from the brink Independent (Chuck L)
The Clean Power Plan Is Barely Better Than Kyoto; IPPC Says: We Must Remove CO2 From the Atmosphere Truthout
Australian academics seek to challenge ‘web of avarice’ in scientific publishing Guardian. Chuck L flags this quote: “Scholarly publishing is a bit like the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. It’s not totally clear what the hell is going on, but you can be sure someone is making a hell of a lot of money from it.”
Registered clinical trials make positive findings vanish Nature. More important than anodyne headline indicates.
With 10 Health Care Executives on it Board, US Chamber of Commerce Defends Big Tobacco Abroad Health Care Renewal
Uber to beef up security team in push to strengthen data safety Financial Times. End of first para: “…even protect its offices and employees from physical attack.”
Prepping for the Apocalypse at a Doomsday Training Camp Vice. This is hardly “doomsday”. It’s prep for a very narrow set of scenarios. Like maybe the sort Uber execs worry about…
$2b fee sticking point as Apple wrangles with Australia’s big four banks Sydney Morning Herald. Apple finds Australia has an advanced payment system. Oops. EM: “Under TPP/ISDS Apple could sue the pants off the Aussies for lost profits, a development President Obama would surely agree represents a positive exporting of ‘American values’ – USA! USA! USA!”
China Makes Debt Burden Heavier for Others Bloomberg
Public anger grows as China confirms hundreds of tonnes of cyanide were held at blast-hit port of Tianjin South China Morning Post
Vietnamese plea to Thailand: Don’t divert the Mekong The Nation (Jim D)
Scandinavian companies claim the moral high ground Financial Times (Swedish Lex)
A Finnish cautionary tale Frances Coppola
UK economy: the low-interest rate era is far from over Guardian
Liverpool fascist march cancelled after barely anyone turns up Independent. Chuck L: “Good news for a change.”
Fraud alleged at Berlin’s troubled airport: report France 24
Grexit?
Merkel fights to contain Greece rebellion Financial Times. Schauble is supporting the deal, so it looks pretty certain to win approval despite the mini-revolt. But the fact that Merkel is having to whip so hard is noteworthy.
After Eurogroup approval, Athens faces milestones amid election rumors ekathimerini
PASOK refuses to back Tsipras in any confidence vote Reuters
The latest on Greece: Towards the political constitution of the front of the “No” Verso Books (Sid S)
A Point of View: Why Greece and the eurozone aren’t playing games BBC
Brazilian president under fire as tens of thousands protest in 200 cities Guardian
More Argentine discovery shenanigans Mark Weidemaier, Credit Slips (Jorge)
Syraqistan
AIPAC: Headed for Defeat (But That’s Not Why It’s Bad for the Jews) Counterpunch
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Chelsea Manning denied access to legal library prior to prison hearing, she says Guardian
Clinton Defies the Law and Common Sense Wall Street Journal (Li)
Here’s where every single presidential candidate stands on Keystone — except Hillary Clinton Gristmill
Donald Trump’s New Version of an Old Political Fantasy Wall Street Journal
Bucks’ Owners Win, at Wisconsin’s Expense New York Times (EM)
Black Injustice Tipping Point
Exclusion of Blacks From Juries Raises Renewed Scrutiny New York Times
Texas woman forcibly stripped searched by police in public readies lawsuit International Business Times
An open letter to civil rights groups in the U.S. St. Louis Post Dispatch. Chuck L: “By Jeffery Stirling on the Black Misleadership Class.”
Police State
‘I dream about it every night’: what happens to Americans who film police violence? Guardian
Without Release of Video, Police Shooting of White Driver Gets Less Publicity New York Times
Sandra Bland and the Death of the Police Myth Eric Garland. From last month, but he’s offered a couple of proposals to curtail murder by police
Doubt Starts Chipping Away at the Market’s Mind-Set Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times
Housing Affordability in San Francisco & Bay Area Plunges; Stocks, Interest Rates Could Trigger Epic Bust Wolf Richter
Class Warfare
Poor kids should go hungry so they know they’re loved Daily Kos (furzy mouse)
Almost 97% of the Good Jobs Created Since 2010 Have Gone to College Grads Bloomberg. An awfully precise figure for a concept as fuzzy as “good jobs”.
Racial Wealth Gap Persists Despite Degree, Study Says New York Times
Anxiety over US student debt heightens Financial Times
Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic Village Workers Living in Squalor New York Times
Rents Rise Faster for Midtier Apartments Than Luxury Ones Wall Street Journal (Brant)
Fox flips poll results to falsely claim Americans support union-busting Daily Kos (furzy mouse)
Governments do not need the savings of the rich, nor their taxes! Bill Mitchell (Brant). Goes well beyond “fiat currency issuers can never go bankrupt” arguments.
Antidote du jour. Richard Smith decided to provide a prettier ocean creature after his handsome squid did not go over well with everyone. From @WorldAndScience via @SciencePorn:
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
108 comments
Comments are closed.
Re the Aussies waking up to the threats of the TPP: have the terms of that hibernating monster been disclosed YET, or only upon passage?
If not, where’s Wikileaks when you need it?
wikileaks is right there on the frontline releasing leaked sections of the conspiracy as they get them
Wikileaks has offered a $150,000 bounty to anyone who releases the full text of the TPP. You can pledge to support it at http://www.wikileaks.org/pledge. Scroll down. The first bounty on the page is for a leak of TTIP text, next comes the TPP challenge.
And it’s a pledge. We only pay if and when the texts of these horrendous documents are leaked. I have pledged to both!
If the benefits of Keynesianism were spread equally among the citizens, then perhaps one could be less horrified at the relentless expansion of fiat currency. But as it is, a Brit like Keynes couldn’t see the truth of his own country’s situation … that the monarchy and remaining aristocracy, and all the preferments for industrial and financial concerns … needed to go the way of the dodo. Americans are similarly blind to their particular absurdities.
Since human beings insist on marching off cliffs generation by generation, the idea of Francis Fukuyama … that we have reached the end of history … seems rather premature.
Even Fukuyama has walked back his “end of history” claim. Sometimes, even academics have to make concessions to reality…
I’m still waiting to see how this ZIRP thingie ends — well or otherwise. It’s been 6 years of ZIRP. Last Dec, Yellen said probably June-ish it would end. That deadline has come and gone, with all sorts of lame excuses. Is the patient ever going to wake from the coma?
I like Max Keiser’s proposal of tying minimum wage to the expansion of credit. That would make the fiat currency regimes in the official economy at least somewhat more honest.
Tying expansion of credit to minimum wage would be a step in the right direction too.
Adjust the min. wage to inflation.
And also adjust it to the real, after inflation, GDP growth.
Now, in a recession, the GDP contracts while those making the min. wage need help precisely at the time. So, we should suspect the GDP growth adjustment then.
In a way, this GDP growth adjustment is a truncated version of GDP sharing, where everyone’s pay is adjusted to the GDP growth.
no comment
Just surfed Tim Garrett and found him in an interview in July 2014 with Alex Smith on Radioecoshock.com – The Big Picture wherein he says the only way to stop GW is to bring economic growth to at least 0% if not less. And then this amazing insight about economics: he speculated that economies would have to go into permanent inflation to avoid new growth. In order to prevent a worsening of global warming.
I think zero growth – zero inflation could be made to work. It did for most of the past few thousand years. But it would take a global debt write down at this point (maybe half – doesn’t need to be all) because we couldn’t count on future real growth to pay off debt that got too big.
A lot of the intellectual work has been done:
http://steadystate.org/herman-daly/
Steady-state economics.
If we want to sustain human life on this planet, zero-growth, zero-inflation’s gonna have to work.
Great article on rents for mid tier apartments. Most telling line:
“Resource Real Estate [ ]owns … midtier apartment buildings around the country. About half of the monthly rents turn into profit for the company.”
That’s one helluva profit margin. That tells me to expect a surge in upgraded older apartment complexes, to appeal to the mid tier market.
Also, the glut of new luxury apartments will resolve itself into more mid tier properties, involuntarily through bankruptcy.
I don’t expect the rental squeeze to resolve until many more new complexes are built.
On a related note: Why Americans waiting longer than ever to buy first homes
A virtuous circle of not being able to to save for downpayments leading to more time in rentals leading to greater demand for rentals leading to higher rents leading to not being able to to save for downpayments …
True. There are a plethora of economic maladies in the US that could be cured by higher real wages.
One thing to keep in mind about both houses and rentals. The Millennial generation is even bigger than the Boomers. If you go back 50 years, the entry of Boomers into the housing market caused both apartment and condo building to soar, for rental vacancies to become even tighter than they are now, and for prices to increase.
So the issue of soaring rents should resolve with increased supply. But it will take a few years.
Also, everybody wants to live on the coasts, with their super-inflated housing markets. In places like NE Ohio, for example, it’s a lot easier to get into that first house. Of course, buying here means that unless you win the lottery, you’ll probably never be able to trade up to coastal real estate. But keep in mind: we have water.
Also too housing bubble. Also too population of the US grew from 225MM in the 70s (boomers were borne already!) to 310MM today. (and it wasn’t the boomers fault.)
And in the future, we will need homes for robots and their families as well.
i liked the ufo squid! the jelly fish is dynamic…is it reflecting an oil slick?
8/4/2015 http://www.chinookobserver.com/co/local-news/20150504/coast-guard-responds-to-oil-spills-finds-jellyfish-instead
Looks like a girlyfish to me. Wonder what craazyman thinks? An octopus could wear this for a petticoat.
It may be a Scottish jellyfish and that might be a kilt — not a girly man petticoat. The golden line around the edge might be the tops of its socks.
This gives me pause, to conjecture too liberally about it being a petticoat, because some of the Scottish kilt dudes weigh 250 pounds and throw logs and iron balls on chains for fun after downing a pint of whiskey. If they got mad at me and chased me around and caught me they could beat my ass to a pulp. I only weigh 180 pounds. They probably couldn’t catch me, but it”’s a theoretical possibility. Why take the chance?
If that’s not a 250 pound Scottish manly jellyfish in a kilt, then it looks like it’s a petticoat that comes down just below the waist. Very girlymannish. Of course, it could be a girl jellyfish in a miniskirt. That would make sense.
OK.
stomp’n hilarious craazyM
“It’s a kilt, dumb_ss. It’s only a skirt if I’m wearing underwear.”
Suede, Hot Head
Microsoft can now remotely disable pirated games, if you’re running them on Windows 10
Or any software any given government doesn’t want you running: encrypted chat, IP obfuscation, etc. etc. Hey, you agreed to it!
Which is why Linux Mint exists…
Well, ANY Linux actually. Stand-alone, in a VM, running a VM with Windows inside that, it’s all good.
Even Ars Technica and ZDNet, after more testing, say that Win 10 privacy settings don’t really work as advertised.
Mint is a good Linux wrt privacy. ( Ubuntu has some privacy issues. )
ZDNet has a good writeup on installing Mint and associated user applications:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/sick-of-windows-spying-on-you-go-linux/?tag=nl.e539&s_cid=e539&ttag=e539&ftag=TRE17cfd61
Thanks! I’ll look into Mint.
Actually doesn’t look bad at all. I’m a longtime Mageia user so inertia keeps me there, and no issues, but Mint looks solid.
Mint is a fine OS, I’ve got dual boot so I select which OS I want to use at start up.
Win10 looks like Win8 with all new, all improved problems. I can’t imagine how they will know when 3rd party software is pirated. And M$ will have to burn a lot of YOUR CPU cycles do this kind of check.
I’m more outraged by the forced Win Updates. I always do updates but I like to time them so they don’t rob an hour out of my day. And now according to this article the OS reboot after the updates is automatic (ie you can’t control when it will happen). Ugh.
M$ apparently Learned Nothing from the Win8 Fiasco.
Au contraire…they learned that no matter what BS they pull, 99% of their customers will do nothing more than complain. What they won’t do, though, is switch OS which means M$ can get away with pretty much anything they want. I wonder if they just came out and said “we’re tracking and recording everything you do on Windows, but it’s for your own good” how many people would switch to something else. I’m guessing approximately nobody….
We do this crap to ourselves. There really is no excuse when free, functional alternatives exist.
” And now according to this article the OS reboot after the updates is automatic (ie you can’t control when it will happen). Ugh.” I think there’s a window™ of time where you can choose when to install updates for W10. There’s a little notifications icon on the right side of your tool bar, if you click on it you can select when the updates will be installed–within some period of time.
These are screenshots of what I see:
http://scrimshaw-globes.com/w10-update.jpg
http://scrimshaw-globes.com/w10-update2.jpg
Ok, thanks. Good to know. I have not yet “upgraded” to win10 (waiting for all the early bugs to be found).
I read a ZDNet article where some users are in reboot h3ll. A graphics driver update causes a Win10 crash, when it reboots it reinstalls the driver causing another crash. Repeats infinitum. Who could have seen it coming. :-)
I had the little white box telling me my upgrade is ready for about a week. I finally set it loose (on my Win7) system last Thursday. After 3 days of “working on it” in the Win10 info window I finally decided to take a closer look (thought it was downloading the new OS via torrent or similar) to see it had tried installing Win10 twice and failed. I manually set it to update and it worked fine. Had to download the newest NVidia driver to make graphics work to full capability but no problems thus far. It’s way too soon to tell if it is a disaster or just problematic yet. I did de-select all the privacy violating crap possible during install. I’ll go hunting through the settings later at a more leisurely pace soon to kill off any other violations. No way does M$ get my browsing history, my emails, nor even my system for backup on their “cloud” (ugh, the “cloud” is a FILE SERVER, old news, old tech, new name). I wont be using the new browser, not be using the little help agent (spybot), etc. Windows only needs to run games and handle basic browsing functions, not do real work. No docs, no private info, etc – that stuff ONLY goes on my linux box.
Easy way around: install your pirate software or other “unauthorized” software in a VM. Microsoft can’t see into your VM. You can even run/play many games in a VM with a suitably powered and large RAM system. Games, encryption software, etc, all hidden inside you VM.
Suck it M$
But how many Windows users even know what a VM is, much less how to set one up?
There’s a blurb in the Linux Mint story linked above that points at the VM I use: Oracle’s VirtualBox. Simple, solid, good (and free).
Microsoft is supporting Windows 7 until 2020, so why switch to 10? Win7 is a pretty good OS.
I may yet go back. Some of the reviews I read indicated some not insignificant improvement, performance-wise, could be had. We’ll see. I can always re-install 7 as the disk isn’t going anywhere and I have another copy of Win7 on a different drive in my system – if I had to I could re-configure and go from there.
Regarding the article on California’s responses to drought: California may be acting more responsibly than other states, especially as its citizens have in general positively responded to exhortations to conserve in their households. However, overall I think Mr. deBuys gives us far too much credit. For instance: California state law bars measurement of how much water there is in certain underground reservoirs and aquifers, defeating even the basics of a comprehensive water-use policy; many large water users with senior rights (in agriculture, etc.) don’t have to measure or report their usage; use-it-or-lose-it laws in some cases award future water rights based on current usage, incentivizing waste; draining aquifers results not only in subsidence but associated soil compaction meaning aquifers can’t be replenished; developers keep building housing subdivisions based on dubious or no evidence that water will be available indefinitely for new homes; and so on. Finally, in the near future, California will be ground zero for that basic policy conflict: do citizens have access to water as a matter of right (the “commons” approach) or only inasmuch as they can pay for it? Unfortunately, already plenty of evidence that the latter approach will dominate.
Poor kids should go hungry so they know they’re loved Daily Kos (furzy mouse)
THU MAR 06, 2014 AT 09:41 AM PST
2014. Are you serious?
Paul Ryan’s not a candidate for president (yet; as it seems the field is appearing more a kitchen sink these days, who knows?) nor is he in the news for any reason.
WHAT THE HECK IS THIS FOR?!
Frankly, I look at most of the red meat spewing from both sides as utter crap, made up to distract from the ongoing sale of the country to special interests that will continue regardless of promises (sorry, Sanders and Warren, but Obama poisoned the well in a manner of speaking.)
I view the reporting of said crap as somewhat along the lines of dog bites man and college student arrested for underage drinking. I guess somebody’s interested, but I couldn’t care less.
But to link an old article to… what, rile the base here? pad your links? give an opportunity to feel better about ourselves by denigrating others without even acknowledging their underlying argument?… I just don’t understand. Could someone enlighten me please?
BTW, almost deleted this comment before sending it as it does come off as very antagonistic. Upon consideration, and in light of my first cup of coffee, I think I’ll let it stand with only minor apologies for being brusque. If you want to link to old news, fine, but there better be a darn good reason and I’m just not seeing one here.
You’re right that posting old news is questionable; at the very least it should be labeled as such. However, there’s value in repeatedly demonstrating what a creep Paul Ryan is. He’s the chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, and that makes him one of the most powerful people in the Congress. This is the sort of person who rules us on behalf of the oligarchs.
I agree about labeling items that are old news. In my experience, this has seldom been a problem in the daily NC Links; they are usually quite up to date. I have found considerably more out-dated material in Lambert’s Water Cooler.
The requirements for timeliness are less rigorous, yes.
While recognizing how satisfying the expression of moral indignation can be to some, especially along with morning creature comforts, you may want to go back to drinking it instead of injecting it.
In the meantime, alternatives:
Use the scroll bar more frequently (skip offending material)
Use the URL field more judiciously (this site is free, you don’t have to come here)
Try chilling or maybe take a few deep breaths when you feel the oracle of moral superiority coming on (a simple, “why include an old link?” question would have been more than sufficient)
We don’t know the motive beyond it, but I believe in reading old news at our own leisure.
Why? If news is manipulated, one way is via timing, as there is time value in any piece of information (a timely disclosure just before a presidential election, for example).
One good exercise, for me, is to refrain from commenting on the top, big news of the day, even if I don’t often succeed.
That’s also why I cut the cable cord a long time ago. I program, not completely, my own entertainment with books and videos from the library, on subjects that interest me, to be enjoyed at those times that I am open to receive them.
May I also recommend this from the BBC website: Bruce Gilden’s images of ‘invisible’ people.
I liked – SANDRA BLAND THE DEATH OF THE POLICE MYTH
But the solutions article on medium, while welcoming any thoughts on solutions, to me it fell flat. Yes the Justice department may have powers, but I rather think the fish is most certainly rotten at the head here and now.
It seemed like post author Eric Garland was standing at the scene of 15 thousand police murders (since 9-11-01) and asking us all to join him in calling for more police of the same ilk. Only with more money and more lawyers. Additionally, when has suing the taxpayers ever prompted meaningful change in police behavior? While people probably could chime in here with some examples, clearly decades of horrific stats suggest civil suits (sans real prosecutions) have failed us.
It’s time to do many things, but start with jailing officials – murderous thugs, torturers and liars whether directly or through obfuscation of evidence… while firing officials who so much as use speaking terms which frame American citizens like soldiers frame discussions of Iraqi sub-human beings in foreign wars. Everything from the way they talk to the way they act must be addressed if the system is worth having at all.
awaiting the blowback from this sign of the times: http://www.thinkadvisor.com/2015/05/21/sec-charges-atlanta-advisor-with-defrauding-police Gray Financial Group has collected more than $1.7 million in fees from the pension fund clients as a result of the improper investments.
i fear a hornets nest has been kicked…we’ll be in the line of fire not the culprits (mayor incld)
We must remove CO2 from atmosphere.
Why don’t we print and give new money to people who grow trees in their homes*?
$500 for each tree each year?
An extra $50 for playing classical music to the tree (to make it happier and take in more CO2).
And another $10 for hugging it every morning (also to make it happier).
*money will be spent into the economy, .e. existence, when used for water, fertilizing, etc. It’s a form of people money (instead of government spending it – one arms – into existence) and people tending their own trees in their own homes can be elevated into a GDP contributing economic activity, i.e. it’s a job, thus it’s an indirectly form of job guarantee (not just a hobby any more).
“The capacity for appropriately managed soils to sequester atmospheric carbon is enormous. The world’s soils hold around three times as much carbon as the atmosphere and over four times as much carbon as the vegetation. Soil represents the largest carbon sink over which we have control.
When atmospheric carbon is sequestered in topsoil as organic carbon, it brings with it a wealth of environmental, productivity and quality of life benefits. An understanding of the ‘carbon cycle’ and the role of carbon in soils, is essential to our understanding of life on earth.”
Quote from this article (pdf)
More at Dr. Christine Jones’ site: Amazing Carbon
“When atmospheric carbon is sequestered in topsoil as organic carbon…”
Isn’t that ‘atmospheric carbon turned organic carbon’ from vegetation?
Yes, and the pdf article says it doesn’t necessarily stay put either. Dang.
Depends on the form. There are anabolic and catabolic processes in soil. Plant decay is catabolic in that organic matter becomes fuel (liquid carbon) for decomposers which release CO2 as they use (“burn”) it (beneficial for soil health but not a good sink).
Humification (creation of humus) is anabolic in that the process involves turning the liquid carbon into more complex and stable organic compounds (humus — which is about 60% carbon) and over time builds soil and as long as the soil isn’t turned or otherwise disturbed. It is a stable sink and is what we should be aiming for wherever it can be done. Conventional farming is a$$-backwards and destroys soil humus as the soil is mined — releasing more CO2 and other greenhouse gases while preventing carbon from being sequestered.
Our salvation lies in humus and soil aggregation. It’s past time to stop worshiping sky-gods and technology and start worshiping what is beneath our feet.
Isn’t that ‘atmospheric carbon turned organic carbon’ from vegetation?
Atmoshperic carbon (CO2) is turned into organic carbon (CH2O = organic matter) via photosynthesis; using sunlight as the energy source. Soil bacteria take organic matter and convert it into elemental carbon ( C) that is attracted to soil particles and used again by plant root uptake. This cycle is what assists the “sequestering” of carbon in the soil.
The linked “Save Our Soil” article is excellent, but a bit scientific in its language.
Here’s an equation for photosynthesis that may be helpful:
Sunlight + CO2 + H2O photosynthesis> / <respiration CH2O + O2
(Respiration occurs when there is no sunlight, ie; nightime.)
… the amount of O2 (oxygen) at the right side of the equation was equal to ZERO at one time on this planet earth. Take a deep breath for photosynthesis!
We should be given money to cultivate our tree hugging souls.
i have long thought that the way to salvation (from the doom of climate disruption) is to plant as many trees and other plants as we can. it may not be enough, but it’s the best we can do.
While recognizing how satisfying the expression of moral indignation can be to some, especially along with morning creature comforts, you may want to go back to drinking it instead of injecting it.
In the meantime, alternatives:
Use the scroll bar more frequently (skip offending material)
Use the URL field more judiciously (this site is free, you don’t have to come here)
Try chilling or maybe take a few deep breaths when you feel the oracle of moral superiority coming on (a simple, “why include an old link?” question would have been more than sufficient)
Apologies for repetition. I was sure I had put this comment as sub-comment to lylo.
(snicker) NAHB Sentiment jumped to 61 – the highest since 2005 – despite weakening new home sales and collapsing lumber prices. NAHB chart Lumber
TRUTHFUL, adj. Dumb and illiterate. Devil’s Dic.
My sentiments exactly:
Karma virtually dictates that the bookends of Hillary’s career will begin with working on the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 to investigate Nixon’s cover-up, and end with defending herself against the FBI investigation of her own cover-up.
I couldn’t agree more with your observations about Hillary and the brazen way she is handling her email fiasco.
However, since when has the FBI been a paragon of ethical rigor? Since J. Edgar Hoover perhaps? And as to Bob Woodward, ugg! He has become about as honorable as Anne Coulter with the caveat that he is far more rigidly anchored to the establishment pov than she. These are crappy supports for the validity of Hillary’s way way overdue judgement day (by the public).
Judgement day (BTW, NSA, I do not mean, meets her maker, but rather, stands exposed before public opinion)
FBI director James Comey:
Just keepin’ white folks safe …
Sort of like the Chinese communists fighting the corrupt Nationalist KMT in 40’s, only to have its own, huge corruption problem today.
I was thinking the same. This is very Nixonesque. I can’t understand why there isn’t more discussion of the investigation. It defies imagination that the Clintons used a private email server in their house to conduct government business at the highest and most confidential level.
And Hillary’s public explanation makes no sense.
As any minimally tech-savvy Blackberry user knows, if she wanted to use one device for all her mails, all she had to do was add a second account to it. Does no one in the MSM even want to call out this..um…BS?
Rio, Brazil, Olympic village workers.
Time for the Nemean games…no commercialization, everyone can participate, it’s about the 99.99% fitness, wellness equality, and not about money, demigod athletes, or vicarious or delusional physical happiness for couch potatoes, especially those who are single (and apparently lonely, thus prone to substituting snacks – likely crunchy, reminding them of chewing through a bone to get to the marrow part – for healthy meals).
I wonder how many aquatic athletes will get deathly sick from participating in bodies of water that contain raw sewage with every virus known to man. And to top it off, the next Olympics are scheduled for Japan with its overhang of deadly radiation. Perhaps by 2020 Japan will have been totally evacuated.
May have to limit the games to yoga, meditation and tree hugging because 1) water and because 2) less CO2 release from these ‘more tranquil’ games.
Allow me to add an anti-dote of my own: For those of you who don’t have HBO and didn’t see John Oliver’s show last night, he did a masterful expose of corrupt televangelists, then ended the program by forming his own Church of the Perpetual Exemption. I laughed so hard my side hurt. Here’s a link to the HuffPo story, which I believe has imbedded video of the segment. (If not, I’m sure you can find it someplace.)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-oliver-televangelism_55d18b8fe4b0ab468d9da515?kvcommref=mostpopular
John Oliver Exposes Televangelism, Then Forms His Own Tax-Exempt Church
Call 1-800-THIS-IS-LEGAL for a special message from a “megareverend.”
Perfectly well aware that people will freak out about me saying this–although it’s certainly something that more than a few people are thinking.
There is a big difference between a society wanting something to be true very, very much and then communally agreeing to pretend it’s true, and the truth itself which exists irrespective of cultural desires.
For example, the idea that fracking will America the next Saudi Arabia–a lot of people want it to be true very much, but it’s not going to happen. Or the fact that Chelsae Manning is in fact, a male. A male who admittedly would rather be a female, but still a male nonetheless. I see the refusal to acknowledge this fact not as a sign of progressive values and open-mindedness, which I am not against per se, but rather as a sign that our society is terminally unable to grapple with reality, and thus has a short life-span left to it. Now I’m all for Chelsea Manning changing his name, as that is the right of every American, and having sex-change surgery so that he’ll at least physiologically resemble a female to some extent if that’s what he really wants to do. But come on, using the wrong pronouns is just infantile.
I don’t have time to track it down now, and the study is over 10 years old, which makes it hard to find, but autopsies on transgendered people (admittedly a small number in this study, I think about 10 brains) found that there WERE differences in the brains of transgendered people v. that of their original gender. Male and female brains are pretty much identical except for one itty bitty area. The male to female trannies did indeed have “female” brains in that section of their brain, and the reverse was true for female to male.
I am absolutely aware of what you said and have been thinking about it since I wrote that earlier. I suppose it comes down to whether or not you think the meaning of the words “he” and “she” has to do with the psychological and physiological make up of a person’s brain, or the of the physical anatomy. I happen to prefer the later, and so will continue with the traditional convention of the English language.
> I suppose it comes down to whether or not you think the meaning of the words “he” and “she” has to do with the psychological and physiological make up of a person’s brain, or the of the physical anatomy. I happen to prefer the later
Even when the physical anatomy is altered through surgery, or the person’s expressed preference is to be referred to with a certain pronoun? Come on now, it’s a pronoun. This stubbornness seems churlish and rude, an attempt to demean a sexual orientation you don’t happen to share. If a person presents as female why not refer to them as such. A sizable number of children are born every year with intersex characteristics. Is it so difficult to believe transgender individuals do not have their own innate differences? Do you also believe gays are gay by choice? There’s a ton of research that shows people have very little control over their sexual orientations and that transgender people become aware of their difference by the age of 7 or younger.
Perhaps I am the only one confused by a small problem I have.
And this is the my problem: Should I say ‘He is an animal’ or ‘It is an animal’, if, for example, hypothetically, that is, I want to make a statement about my brother-in-law that way?
‘He is an animal’ – the statement, it seems, lacks internal consistency.
“The Clean Power Plan Is Barely Better Than Kyoto; IPCC Says: We Must Remove CO2 From the Atmosphere ”
Well kiddies, we are a very, very long way from knowing how to do NET CO2 REMOVAL.
Tim Garrett, again.
Actually, we are very close. Soil carbon restoration, bio-char, etc. And if we could solve the social and property obstacles, re-flooding the several hundred million acres of drained wetlands that have been drained all over the earth, so they can resume sucking down the carbon and packing it under the water as muck and peat . . . the way they used to do.
…careful what you wish for. Recreating wetlands by reflooding can create some real stinky problems. A functioning wetland is much more than just wet land; there is a unique ecological balance going on within the waterbody, the hydrologic basin, and the immediate plant/animal biology. Get this balance wrong and you end up with sulphur dioxide: at standard atmosphere, it is a toxic gas with a pungent, irritating, and rotten smell.
Andrew Levine, writing in the Counterpunch article linked above:
AIPAC’s high-noon duel with Obama looms. Somebody’s gonna get hurt.
Re: the Bucks and Walker
A conspiracy nut would read this story and have no problem that Walker was set up so that his opponents could savage him in commercials over the election season.
Two ultra rich Hillary supporters buy the Bucks and squeeze a few hundred million dollars of Wisconsin taxpayer money out of Walker and his supporters who are marketed as fiscal conservatives?
You don’t suppose that this was a deliberate ploy? Heads you give us hundreds of millions of someone else’s money or Tails we move the team to Las Vegas and make it look like you cost the state large numbers of jobs. Brilliant.
The root cause here is fitness inequality – the 0.01% athletes vs. 99.99% athletes.
That money should go to nutrition/diet education for people of all ages, and for school and general public fitness programs.
…and George Soros is a Liberal, we are told…
Why can’t it just be “about” the fact that rich sh_ts, of whatever PR-front cover story, have been stealing from the Commons since farther back than the Wayback Machine ™ can travel? Here in St. Pete, FL, we got a set of carpetbag team owners (the “Rays boys”) who bought the *product* with money they got from selling, as I recall, the software/algoriths/whatever into the explosive derivatives idiocy. We have the shadowy presence of Stuart Sternberg, the principal “partner,” retired in 2002 as a partner in TADA Goldman Sachs, who has been trying to
trick sucker armtwist backroom finagleimpel the ordinary people of St. Pete and Pinellas County and if he can get away with it with the help of Skeletor Scott, our Governator, the whole idiotic state, to buy him and his buddies a World Class Stadium where, as one of his minions put it injudiciously, “the rich can go to see and be seen, the poor should stay home and watch the games on TV,” a snicker-and-nod to the proposed and even current ticket, parking, food and drink prices. Just a nice round billion, which of course these sh_ts could write a check for out of their personal petty cash. If “markets” and “{capitalism}” worked as advertised… Sh_t like this tripe story, to move us citizens to cough up $14,000 apiece to buy these people a place to go for their “pastime” 81 times a year… http://www.tampabay.com/sports/baseball/rays/stagnant-attendance-means-tampa-bay-rays-owner-stuart-sternberg-cant-buy/1195248When the rich run for office, they prefer their own money, not with public funding.
It’s public money when it comes to building stadiums.
we could call a meeting at the Dome diner on central and move to turn the rays into the packers with an emin domain move…
the owners have been playing games with the tv money…more than enough to buy the team as they foolishly handed in valuations that were low ball in attempting to get the state and local money to give them a berlin airport construction scam to play around with…
anyone open to a hometown owned team…it was MLB that forced st pete to build that stadium to mlb specs and then made the town wait…
emin domain….
people are corporations too…
this is a great local court system…great honest judges…this could work…
someone say yes…
Yes
Regarding the article about the ten healthcare executives who defend Big Tobacco abroad:
The only reason these healthcare executives can getting away with committing hypocrisy of this kind is because the healthcare sector in general has outperformed all other sectors of the economy by a long shot. When you are the biggest moneymaking scumbag of the bunch, you are elevated above the law in terms of committing not just moral hypocrisy, but verbal duplicity to outright fraud as well.
ObamaCare is largely to blame for this. Had ObamaCare reined in healthcare costs, causing healthcare profits to shrink down to more reasonable levels, these 10 healthcare executives wouldn’t have the necessary hubris to support the tobacco industry in the first place.
It’s also worth mentioning that ObamaCare has made the healthcare industry as a whole very profitable not because ObamaCare has introduced more market-based medicine into our healthcare system. No, not at all. It’s because Obamacare has mandated that trillions of taxpayer dollars be pour into corporate healthcare, and unfortunately, very few of these dollars are being spent on patient care.
It’s should be pretty obvious to most by now that the primary purpose of ObamaaCare isn’t to make healthcare more affordable to the average America. Its primary purpose to hand out corporate welfare checks to an industry that’s literally rolling in the dough.
fraud at berlin airport ??
did transparency international authorize that release…there is NO corruption in germany…only other countries have corruption…what is wrong with you people …
don’t you read the wonderful ratings germany gets from the credit rating agencies because germany is so effecient…???
ah…
that was so much better…
actually has there ever been a government airport project that did not magically have “change orders” and graft built into it anywhere ??
About today’s Antidote. Can you please confirm that the Spanish Dancer (nudibranch) picture is actually a photograph? I’ve tried to track down the photographer and the kind of camera used, but keep coming up with no camera and the name Francis Le Guen, a diver, who creates fractal art based on what he sees on his dives. The antidote picture is included among the pictures said in this link to be fractal art Le Guen created. So does the picture represent a factual animal or fractual imagination? http://www.divernet.com/photography/p298834-fractal-attraction.html
You can see the provenance from a series of science Twitter feeds. I have not tried going back to the site that was first in the Twitter chain.
Another one on Emailgate – Foxnews, but could be from any lefty site:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/08/17/officials-double-standard-in-clinton-email-scandal/?cmpid=edpick&google_editors_picks=true
I’m starting to think she’s going down. Doesn’t look good for Obama, either.
The War for Global Domination expands:
Only in the 15th paragraph is it mentioned that ‘Pentagon officials didn’t have immediate cost estimates for the plan, which is predicated on budgets subject to congressional approval.’
Love the Newspeak about ‘sprouting hot spots’ and ‘a cascading series of global crises,’ many of which the US instigated. Now recruiting arsonists to expand the fire brigade!
Now we know. You can address a “cascading series of global crises” by pointing a Hellfire missile at it and pushing the fire button. Sounds simple enough.
Someone should make a game program like that.
Fireman Bernank does his bit for the war effort:
Only a third! *gasps* Another round of QE can fix that, comrade.
because the military is the only growth industry? … Bernanke is pushing it, that’s too weird.
Growth industry!!???
I thought that the DoD was filling the function of “Creative Destruction” in the global economy.
Personally, I use the Big Mac Index.
Thanks for the Andrew Levine article on AIPAC. I was especially struck by this:
“The reason for that is that the lobbies of the self-declared “nation state of the Jewish people,” especially the one in the United States, are working hard to reintroduce classical anti-Semitism.”
It’s something I’ve been saying for a long time, so it’s good to see it posted so prominently.
Note: Israel has serious demographic problems. Fostering anti-Semitism is a way to improve their immigration rates. Are they thinking about that? Who knows – but it’s part of their reality.
i am surprised that aipac doesn’t have to register as an agent of a foreign government. that is crazy.
I liked the article, too. I’m so tired of the tireless effort to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. It’s demagogic bullshit, and should be called such.
Bucks owners win, at Wisconsin’s expense.
More government waste, in bed with the 0.01%.
There is something off about the article in Nature that reviews the findings of a paper published in PLOS One (Registered clinical trials make positive findings vanish).
First, according to the figure legends, the authors of that paper (Likelihood of Null Effects of Large NHLBI Clinical Trials Has Increased over Time) did not ” record their trial methods and outcome measures” prior to the start of the clinical trial. Rather, they registered their methods and outcome measures at clinicaltrials.gov “prior to publication”. In fact, 18 of the 25 registered studies began prior to 2000 (1991-1999)
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0132382id=10.1371/journal.pone.0132382
Second, the review does not consider rules changes that resulted in increased publication of studies having negative or inconclusive results, studies that may not have been published prior to 2000.
Third, it might have been useful for the author of the review to look at how the rules changes affected results for studies involving supplements versus those involving pharmaceuticals or surgery. In my opinion, many studies on supplements are purposely poorly designed. For instance, a couple of years ago JAMA published a cumulative analysis of the effects of fish oil on coronary health. Unfortunately, of the 20 studies included in this meta-analysis, in only three were participants receiving supplements of 3 grams of omega-3 (DHA plus EPA) or more per day as the FDA had previously recommended to reduce the risk of coronary disease. Of the e studies in which participants received the recommended 3 grams of omega-3, 2 showed the supplement resulted in significant benefits to coronary health.
Cynthia, you just won the double jeopardy question: what proves “them that gots, gets?” Why, it’s Obamacare, Alex!
Seriously, with shilling tobacco, split deductibles, hepatitis cures at $90,000 a pop, and generics shooting up %1000, these guys are cruising for a bruising. I just wanna be around to watch.
http://grapevine.is/mag/articles/2015/08/15/show-up-naked-on-monday-and-youll-get-a-free-phone/