Elie Wiesel, Auschwitz Survivor and Nobel Prize Winner, Is Dead New York Times
This New Shade Of Blue Was Accidentally Discovered By Chemists IFIScience
Marijuana Compound Removes Alzheimer’s-Related Protein From Nerve Cells Huffington Post (RR)
Brexit
Voter wishes we could just once have woman leader who didn’t openly despise us Daily Mash (Li)
Tory race narrows options for Brexit divorce Financial Times. Yesterday, we flagged a story that said the odds-on favorite, Theresa May, wanted to wait till year end to pull the Article 50 trigger. This report says she wants even more time: “The main contenders also make clear they will not rush to invoke the Article 50 exit clause — Ms May was most explicit in stating it would not happen this year.”
Europe can’t rescue Britain. It’s too busy trying to save itself Guardian (resilc). Important.
After Brexit: Reckoning With Britain’s Racism and Xenophobia Truthout
Brexit Is What A Dark Age Feels Like. Here’s Why. NDTV (SSV)
Britain doesn’t matter to the global economy, China does Quartz. Recall people also said Lehman was too small to matter. It’s not the size, it’s the tight coupling and what gets destabilized.
Roadmap Plan for UK Departure from the EU Nigel Farage (Chuck L)
Outrage as war crimes prosecutors say Tony Blair will not be investigated over Chilcot’s Iraq war report – but British soldiers could be Telegraph (guurst)
Dutch Populist Geert Wilders Wants to Leave the EU Der Spiegel (resilc)
Spain Runs Out of Workers With Almost 5 Million Unemployed Bloomberg (Chuck L). Some, perhaps a lot, of this is employers not willing to train people.
Emergency measure that feeds Greek crisis France24
China?
How China Took Center Stage in Bitcoin’s Civil War New York Times (TF)
Deflation Is Blowing In On An Eastern Trade Wind Ilargi
Syraqistan
Spotlight with Sibel & Spiro- Istanbul Airport Terror: Glaring Unasked & Unanswered Questions YouTube (Chuck L)
Joe Biden calls king of Bahrain to raise ‘strong concerns’ amid violence Guardian (reilc). The Fifth Fleet regularly docks there. Think we have much leverage?
Obama Releases ‘File 17’: Teaser of Secret Report on Saudi Links to 9/11 Sputnik News (Chuck L)
‘We Are Not Numbers’ shares the daily struggles and triumphs of Palestinian life Mondoweiss (Judy B)
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Singapore banks examine use of Facebook IDs for transfers Financial Times. This is SO evil. So now the officialdom will be able to tie information about you together much more easily.
Imperial Collapse Watch
Weapons trafficking questions remain unanswered in Benghazi report Politico. Resilc: “Press is braindead.”
Clinton E-mail Tar Baby
Bill Clinton’s Runway Meeting With AG Lynch Was Typical Clinton Political Theater. Here’s Why He Did it… Twist The Knife (martha r). IMHO, This is too convoluted. Even if the Clintons believed it would work, you can’t sell a story that complicated to Joe Public. Only Beltways inside baseball types would buy it. And they are already committed to one team or the other.
State Dept. Accused of ‘Wildly Miscalculating’ Number of Clinton Emails, Dragging Out FOIA Request LawNewz (furzy)
Why the timing of Clinton’s FBI interview couldn’t be worse CNN (furzy). Interview was only 3 1/2 hours. That suggests she effectively did not answer question, say by professing not to remember.
New York Post cover, July 2 (reilc). You must click through. And this really is the cover. I Googled for the New York Post covers, and you can see July 3 and 2 here (July 3 is about as lurid)
2016
Can Bernie Sanders Take Yes for an Answer? Mother Jones (furzy)
Hillary Clinton Wrote a Heartfelt Post for The Toast’s Final Day Vulture (resilc). Since I have never found groups of women to be welcoming, I have a nails-on-chalkboard reaction to any “heartfelt” stories about sisterhood.
America Needs a New Peace Movement—Especially if Clinton Wins in November Nation (resilc)
Did Clinton University Break The Same Law As Trump U? Daily Beast (reilc)
Trump’s message shines in faded steel city Financial Times. Important. Notice that he is being treated as a real contender for his economic message.
Strike against Atlantic City’s Trump Taj Mahal casino enters 3rd day, with no talks or resolution in sight Associated Press
Inside the Six Weeks When Trump Was a Nonstop ‘Birther’ New York Times
This Might Be the Trump Campaign’s Dumbest Legal Move Yet LawNewz (furzy)
Dr. Jill Stein Interview With The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur YouTube (Catherine A)
U.S. flag lowered to half-staff nearly every day in 2015 CBS (resilc)
FOCUS: The Supreme Court Decision OKs Legalized Bribery in Bob McDonnell Case Robert Reich
U.S. lawmakers seek more money, authority for derivatives regulator Reuters (Adrien)
How Chinese Students Saved America’s Colleges Bloomberg
Final Auto Numbers: Total Sales Down 4.6%, Much Worse Than Expected Michael Shedlock (EM)
Private Equity Funds Balk at Disclosure, and Public Risk Grows Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times
The Truth about Banks IMF. Phil U: “The IMF is becoming post-Keynesian?”
Class Warfare
Trains, Planes, and Automobiles: On the Left’s Ideas about Money and Freedom Corey Robin. I am uncomfortable with the formulation Robin discusses and don’t have the time to think deeply as to why. Perhaps it is because the examples are about using money to buy services. If I cannot buy the service, I am not free. But where does this end? As one of my friends said, “Society is very well ordered. There is always someone who has more.” I do not have the “freedom” to own a private jet, which would let me visit five cities in one day (as Trump can, which gives him an advantage in campaigning against Clinton), or rent out Carnegie Hall. Using this notion of “money = freedom” means that anyone who has less money than the very richest people is not “free” because he cannot do what the very richest people do. So that does not seem to make any sense.
Momentum Machines robot-powered restaurant is opening in San Francisco Tech Insider (resilc)
Clinton’s pledge to forgive student debt of entrepreneurs, not average workers, will benefit the elite Salon (Phil U). In case this was not obvious to you…
Who Benefits Most From Housing Subsidies? The Wealthy. Nation (resilc)
Business Leaders Have Abandoned the Middle Class Harvard Business Review (martha r)
In Praise of Ambivalence — “Young” Feminism, Gender Identity and Free Speech Quillette (Chuck L)
The Ones We’ve Lost: The Student Loan Debt Suicides Huffington Post
Antidote du jour (furzy):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
208 comments
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Blogwhoring? Sure, but another theory on Clinton/Lynch meeting.
Great blog, but consider adding value here, otherwise you’re simply exploiting NC.
Never heard the phrase “blogwhoring” before, and I take your point Lambert.
But thanks to the link I followed another link to an essay on William Gaddis’s amazing A Frolic of His Own … excerpt below. The review and especially the novel itself are highly recommended.
–The Millions: William Gaddis and American Justice
From an interview with a source who was on the security detail at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport on Monday:
Wait a sec … why CAN’T the attorney general’s security tell private citizen Clinton and his armed guys with guns “you can’t do that”? No law authorizes former presidents to barge in on current officials.
De facto, what happened is that Clinton’s Secret Service detail outranked Lynch’s FBI detail in perceived status. So in the same manner that Clinton barged into polling places in violation of electioneering laws, he pushed his way into Lynch’s plane without her having the opportunity to accept or decline his visit.
It was wrong on the FBI’s part, but Clinton’s ham-handed exploitation of his own limitless sense of entitlement may be just the break we needed to finally rid ourselves of these squalid grifter clowns for once and for all.
A common treatment for lice is branded “RID!” Turns out the lice have developed a tolerance, and maybe even an affection, for the toxic organic compound peddled under that name. I believe the current standard of care for an infestation involves one primate sitting behind the other, picking through the hair of the other, physically plucking the pests from the root area and squishing them and then carefully combing out the hair with a very fine-toothed comb to remove every last egg (which the bugs lay prolifically and which are very tenaciously glued in place and resistant to all but physical removal). And repeating as necessary, since one missed nit can refill the ecological niche in a couple of days.
And of course the critters are well embedded in the larger population, and re-infest with casual ease…
Yah, “rid of these squalid grifters once and for all.” You really think that is possible or likely or even thinkable for whoever the real “we” is tha would have the power and agency to do the “ridding?”
“The Precious Parasites you have always with you…”
Still, the parasites need a healthy host. If they actually kill it, other, meaner parasites move in on them…
You know that, and I know that— but do they know that…?
But they’re incapable of understanding that. They are not capable of reason. They are not capable of imagining the future. All they know is, “Oh! Food here now. Eat.”
Old school method: a buzz cut followed by washing with kerosene. Still the mst effective :) and cheapest way.
Along the same lines as what he did up in the Massachusetts primary, breaking the law because he was pretty sure he would get away with it. Well, his uncle was a gangster, his mother was from all accounts a semi-pro prostitute, so breaking the law runs in the family.
And–Bill was Lynch’s boss having appointed her as US Atty. in 1999. On that point alone, she should have recused herself from the start. And what is going to be Lynch’s role in a Hillary administration?
I think Bill’s misconduct in barging onto Lynch’s plane uninvited fits neatly with all of his other impulsive misconduct from Lewinsky, et al., to lying to the public about it, to calling out S.C. Black officials in ’08, to taking tens of millions from special interests, etc. That man really believes he can convince anyone to see things as he sees them. Bill’s optics are all that matters and he is living proof that he is powerful and in control.
Bill is reckless, not slick. He gets away with what he does because he has about 50 million enablers who have no problem with him going back into the Oval Office. Cut the man off from politics and watch his Foundation donations dry up.
If the President does it, it’s not against the law.
Please, let us not assume that a unnamed security agent alleged to have said this to them, is a true story. If you think you can explain the workings of a clinton or the words of one of their paid guards, you would have a job forever in DC, if you wanted it. Think about it, Lynch says it was about grandchildren. How gullible on a scale from 1 to 11?
“Primarily” about grandchildren. One wonders what the secondary and tertiary topics were…
Those are pretty rosy futures your grandchildren have ahead of them. It’d be a shame if stormy weather were to head their way…
Because a 1.5 year old and 1 month old just have so many exciting accomplishments to discuss…
And like we don’t have magical devices called smartphones that make arranging meetings from a distance very easy. It was all just a coincidence, nothing was planned…really?
Hillary’s sticking to her story that this was just a chance meeting, and it was purely social.
Please. Given the logistics, the security, the pending FBI interview, this was not like running into someone at the mall for a little impromptu chit-chat in front of Auntie Anne’s Pretzels. Lordy, I can only imagine the conversation that took place between Bill and Hill later.
I don’t know if it’s an ongoing problem with terminal entitlement, or proof that Bill would really rather his wife not be elected.
But I don’t know how anyone with a quorum of brain cells cannot appreciate that these people simply do not hold themselves to the same kinds of standards the rest of us are held to.
The surrogates are out in force this morning, spinning like crazy; not sure it’s going to undo the damage. Not sure it should.
Someone I know said they “couldn’t believe BC could be so stupid as to do this and risk damaging those around him”. I commented that they have a huge sense of entitlement and they’ve been getting away with this type of thing for years, why would they change their behaviour now? Boy, did I catch it then, the “young whippersnapper lecture”: “how dare you? I’ve seen more corrupt politicians because I’m older than you, etc etc”. She refused to even countenance the Clintons may have this problem or were possibly at fault for anything over their lifetimes. They have been raised to saint status in the eyes of Dem party members-like it has been said around here, they have been lucky in their enemies. The cognitive dissonance has been raised to 11. It’s impressive if it weren’t so sad.
Like a standing President seducing an intern and getting her to give him a blow job in the Oval Office? Who could possibly believe a crazy story like that….
I know! It’s killing me. *sigh*
I think it’s perfectly plausible that they simply had an amiable chat about grandchildren and such. This is politics at its most basic level; no need (yet) for threats or bargaining, you just remind the other party that you’re an old friend. Merely by being in the same room with her Clinton was reminding Lynch of who he is and what he’s done for her in the past. So my guess is that he knew having this meeting was a risk, but a calculated one.
I’m not so sure the problem is in what they talked about – it’s the effort he had to go to to make it possible to have any conversation at all that is the problem.
I don’t think there’s anyone outside of the Clinton campaign that believes Bill put two security teams to work making it possible for him to amble across a blazing hot tarmac so that he could chat with the Lynches about grandchildren (and I’m pretty sure that no one in the campaign believes it either – but that’s the message they have to stick with).
Whatever was going on his his head, it was a colossally stupid move, reinforcing for a lot of people that the Clintons are not to be trusted, and putting some doubt in the minds of those who, up to this point, were willing to give Hillary the benefit of the doubt.
One thing’s for sure: Bill Clinton has been a loose cannon who appears impervious to being controlled in any way. If Hillary is elected, it’s going to be a nightmare for the her and her administration to keep him from making all kinds of trouble.
This was a zero-risk meeting for Bubba, we live in an Age of Impunity for the Permanent War billionaire elite Panama Papers crowd.
Bubba knows that even the most strident outrage at the illegality and impropriety of this will be met with a giant yawn from: A.) the top law enforcement officials in the land, B.) the fully-owned Pravda propaganda media organs, and C.) the supine populace.
I don’t think so. This story is getting traction and it will be red meat for Trump. This completely taints inaction by the DoJ, which everyone assumed was the outcome (as no Bill shenanigans necessary). Obama endorsed Clinton, in case you missed it. That means no way will Hillary be indicted.
This could be used by the Republicans to demand the appointment of a special prosecutor (actually I believe they asked for it before, but they can make a big deal out of it). This will cost Hillary votes. I’ve had people come up to me at the gym to talk about it.
I’m half expecting a somber announcement by the clinton campaign that the ex-president’s seemingly inexplicable actions should not be taken seriously since he is suffering from early stage Alzheimer’s. Too many big macs early in his life are finally taking their toll.
It is with deep regret that they will announce his immediate commitment to a “home” where he will live out the rest of his days under 24/7 guard, and will no longer be appearing in public except for the white house Christmas party.
Could be good for a sympathy vote.
his immediate commitment to a “home”
House of the Rising Sun! :-)
Hillary’s last resort is a somber state funeral for “Bill.” Who could vote against a widow?
My wife is a hospice nurse and is very familiar with dementia. She posted: “Unless he has a vascular dementia (as a consequence of quadruple bypass surgery 2004, followup surgery 6 months later for complications, and 2 stents 2010), he was fully aware that this was going to cause a deserved uproar.”
Janet also notes that Hillary is on coumadin and flies a lot. She could have bruising over her body (thus the Kim-line wardrobe), and coumadin and flying increases risk for micro-infarctions.
Demented. The adjective may be clinically applicable.
Her economic policy is “my husband does the math.” How could she dump Bill?
Sexy Larry.
I’m expecting the announcement to be about Hillary Clinton. And her health problems.
Here’s the temperature at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport: “The month of June is characterized by rising daily high temperatures, with daily highs increasing from 98°F to 106°F over the course of the month, exceeding 111°F or dropping below 90°F only one day in ten. … Daily low temperatures range from 73°F to 82°F, falling below 67°F or exceeding 88°F only one day in ten.” (Phoenix also had a heat wave this weekend: 118°.)
The runway tarmac would be hotter:
Even in the evening, the heat would be brutal.
It beggars belief that Bill Clinton, who from photographs does not appear to be a well man, would crack the door of his air-considitioned cabin and take a stroll in heat like that without a very good reason.
Bit of an assumption that the AG was prepared to see a visitor. Was she trying to get dressed? Skype with her kids? Take a shower? In the toilet with diarrhea? There are all sorts of benign reasons that someone might not be prepared for an unexpected visit.
Did Clinton call first?
Indeed. Here in Tucson, the monsoon season is rocking hard. Up in PHX, different story. I don’t think that they have had their first big storm.
#HeatGate
RIP Michael Cimino
Um… Close the door? Pull the curtains? Shut off the light and lay on the floor?
Really? I’m a bit incredulous to think ANY private citizen, including Clinton can walk aboard an AF aircraft with out the explicit invitation of the Capt in charge as directed by the official on board regardless of the security detail perceived pecking order, or the status of the USG meatbag inside plane.
“Uh, no.. you can tell frmr prez Bill it’s not a good time right now?” “Well then tell him I don’t care that he’s hot or in heat or whateva he said, .i’m just not in the mood. Tell him that salmon mousse leftover from last night didn’t agree with me… and that’s that.”
I am even more incredulous that a visit would have been initiated without an invitation and mutual agreement.
“Golfing,
in late June,
in Phoenix, Arizona.”
Look at the temperatures for the last couple of weeks and imagine old sack of bones Bill–what the hell is wrong with him?–out there swinging a golf club.
So what was the real reason he was there?
“If I talk to her and it looks inappropriate, then she has to recuse herself.”
Watch Bill drop in on her underlings’ kid’s birthday party.
“Oh hi there, I brought a gift…”
What an enquiring mind would like to know: Who tipped local AZ reporter Christopher Sign to the Lynch-Clinton encounter? Becuz if private jets meet on a hot tarmac and no one sees, did it happen at all?
That’s an excellent question.
Yeah, because among other things, the answer might yield a clue about whether the story got into the press by serendipity or setup.
Serendipity: A source (local?) knows Sign, hears about what’s going down on the tarmac, and throws the reporter a savory bone.
Setup: Welcome to the Wag the Dog State. Motives, motives, motives. Example: For a national player to plant a story without fingerprints, who better to break it than an unknown reporter from beyond the Beltway?
An interest in skeletons generally requires digging.
Thanking maybe slick willy has a nice thick file or video on comey, or one of the brothers of comey…this whole thing seems like a way to let someone else take the public heat for the non indictment…
comey didnt exactly volunteer at habitat for humanity or seashepherd when he was in private practice:
lockheed
(nipponese vig…chirp chirp)
Hsbc board
nothing 2 see here folks keep moving
The tarmac noise seems as if it was to let her slip away with clean hands…
Comey will not be removed…he will wait for the next news “event” if the matter draws too much “attention”…
behind closed doors, whispers of important “pending” investigations being “disrupted” by his “resignation” will scuttle any real inquiries…
if all else fails, the california barking arsonist will be brought out to “viperize” anyone who needs to fill the news hole with questions that keep the status quo…but $ell$ advertising…
“Protected by Issa…Stand back…”
“Please step away from the investigation”
Comey takes the sword…
Speculation–yesterday in comments I think, linking to an SST comment–is that it was one of the delegation waiting near the tarmac to greet Lynch.
My Phoenix correspondent says nobody goes outside after lunch time. They’ve finally had a little rain–still in the 100s. A sizable portion of the city called the “snowbirds” flees during the brutal summers.
Having worked there over the summer, one gets things done early am and doesn’t come out till after dark when it cools off. There is oppressive heat and the bright sunlight is blinding.
Arizona is Trump country.
Why didn’t Lynch insist on multiple witnesses to their “purely social” meeting, or tell him to get the hell off her plane – since was putting her career in jeopardy? Is she really that tame? It seems unlikely.
This meeting was not up to the security people.
I don’t believe for a moment that it was not prearranged – how would he even know Lynch had time for him? And it was so obviously self-destructive, especially for Lynch (Bill was already disbarred), that I think there was some real urgency to it.
So what WAS it they discussed, right before Hillary’s little interview with the FBI? We now have a report – down in the comments? – that the FBI wants an indictment and “Justice” refuses – contra what Lynch is saying. Maybe THAT’s what they discussed.
Hilary is still calling the FBI investigation a security review in her interviews.
or tell him to get the hell off her plane
the cow is in the barn at that point. He would not have been allowed on the plane uninvited, and he would not have stayed for half an hour unwelcome. Really not too much to speculate about here.
Brexit is making people insane. How else could an educated woman write a sentence (Europe can’t rescue) that has the phrase “its democratic values shaken by populist movements”?
+1
Groups of women not being welcoming. Thank you for confirming what I have long suspected.
Am female, have had same issue over my lifetime. Glad to know it wasn’t just me experiencing it. Women being welcoming is a foreign concept to me. They’ve been openly hostile.
Same here. It has always puzzled me. Felt like I didn’t know the code.
Their called covens for a reason…. snicker…
+1000 over my long lifetime–never experienced “welcome” from groups of women. Have to hang w/them and schmooze for quite a while like months to be accepted. Even then, depends on the group.
+1000 backatchya. recent documentary’s swirling this subject present women around the world pulling together under shared hardships that create social comfort and success. BUT not so much in America.
And anyone who is really familiar with “rural america” knows that the women are in charge. It’s normally one woman, but she may delegate responsibility to underlings.
So, then, why is “rural america” also seen as more misogynistic? Never understood that. Way oversimplified.
Ahh, the memories……
One of my former jobs was at a big shop, where the worker bees were 100% men, and the front office 100% women.
All apparantly “on the same loving team”. Until one of them left the room…….
On second shift, I had a single receptionist/clerk. Every one of them, no matter what age, said they would rather work in an office full of guys, vs. office full of women.
Meh. I still prefer to work with women even with the cattiness.
Many of the men I worked with were whiners. For some odd reason they were under the impression that life is fair or that whining about it’s unfairness in any way, shape or form, changed that unfairness.
Big problem with America today is that there are way too many whiners. I believe that there is some dark and sinister force at work turning the American people into a bunch of inveterate whiners and belly achers who snivel whenever their subjective feelings about life aren’t immediately and loudly validated.
very interesting points. i’ve grown up with Appalachian ‘kin’ and i’ve never made sense of their female pecking order. for instance, i witnessed an 80yro woman chase her husband with a kitchen knife. she was a matriarch that ruled with an iron fist. the survival traditions she enforced were ridiculous compared to spine building interdependence she could have dispensed. my guess is she knew when to hedge.
i noticed men mostly hating on each other, unless a woman stepped outside ‘traditions’. another crazy was when i traveled south Georgia farms in the late 80’s. my ‘guide’ took me on a drive of intrigue…pointing out relatives shotgun homes and inhabitants that ‘escaped’ for college…too many that didn’t escape committed suicide. i returned home overwhelmed and more perplexed than ever.
i don’t remember President Carter reminiscing soy n peanut horrors…
“So, then, why is “rural america” also seen as more misogynistic? Never understood that. Way oversimplified.”
Well, per Cicero: Cui bono?
Who benefits by oversimplifying rural America?
Who benefits by seeing “rural America” as more misogynistic?
And what accounts for this?
Revlon?…”Because I’m Worth It” and the others aren’t ‘ ))
Dunno. It’s the same crap we did in middle school.
I imagine it’s cultural and class based. I’ve long believed clothes matter. Men’s public dress uniforms are linked to more egalitarian times. Watches are an exception, but men don’t make outward outward displays as much as they use to. Its coming back, but on the surface, all men are equally dressed, hence less explicit class status. Women didn’t work outside certain fields in large numbers, so public uniforms were never created. For the women at home (laborers wear what is comfortable and useful), they had time and resources to be creative.
Teachers have always had a uniform and maintain a very large union.
Men’s dress in the 17th century was outlandish and competitive.
I know well paid software engineers that dress like slobs. I knew people struggling to get by who tended to dress up very well (to conceal near poverty?)
Humans, like most primates, have a “pecking order” – a hierarchy. Traditionally, men and women have separate orders, though a certain amount of borrowing goes on – a high-ranking spouse raises your own rank. And of course, it’s becoming more difficult to keep them separate; though workplaces have their own, separate hierarchy (2, actually: official, and unofficial.)
It doesn’t usually work well for women to use physical force, so they mostly use verbal violence when needed – on each other, as well as on men. Lots of practice at being nasty. Men are more careful because physical violence is a possibility, however remote in some cases.
Of course, much of this depends on stereotypes, but the norms set the patterns.
Why would female ingroups be so tight? Possibly because women’s food-gathering is actually more important, in the wild, than men’s hunting. The group’s survival depends on their joint effort, so newcomers (and in many societies, women join their husband’s band) are going to be tested.
That said, the dynamics in male ingroups are similar: that’s what hazing is for.
Did someone think we’d escaped our evolutionary history?
Contemporary Western women have been told for years now that they could do anything. When that message is hammered home after millenia of not being able to do so much, the sudden freedom is likely very jarring and unnerving. Think of some physical system that has been existing behind retaining walls, and then those walls evaporate. What happens to the stuff behind the walls, in addition to flowing out all over chaotically? There will be quite a period of chaos impacting Western women.
It would be difficult to go from the competitive woman-on-woman crimes of the past to a new world where women may compete more broadly. The little slights and tweaks of clothing, makeup, status and such get magnified and distorted, particularly in the neo-liberal Internet-enabled Snapchat and Instagram world, because markets.
Of course, not everyone feels that way as some people don’t drink the Kool-Aid or enslave themselves to social media, and decide to think for themselves.
Save for education, I think women may make most progress when both supportive men and women make up a group oriented towards advancing women.
When it comes to education, all-girl schools are best for girls in achieving outstanding academic performance. They continually out-perform all-boys and co-ed schools….
Then co-ed K-12 schools must achieve some sort of product performance that decision-makers consider desirable. I don’t believe it’s a matter of cost, since pedagogical models aren’t all that expensive at the margins. Perhaps the value of the K-12 system lies in teaching children how to perform rote, uninteresting tasks to arbitrary standards for hours a day, 5+ days a week, and to learn to be ruled at arm’s length by homework and such.
Separation isn’t generally associated with equality.
Possibly more to the point, but admittedly from a male point of view: High school = adolescence. Separating boys and girls at this crucial stage is very destructive; neither gets to learn that the other are human.
It’s especially bad for shy adolescents (experience, obviously). This might be worse for boys than for girls, but it’s got to be bad for both.
As it turned out for me, I went through that part of my adolescence in college – in the late 60’s. it was sort of tough. I have no idea what it was like for women in the same boat, but I don’t think we’re THAT different.
Oregoncharles, I was explicitly referring to the learning environment. As for personal development during the transitional period of adolescence to ‘maturity’, it’s not confined to the classroom alone. According to this article based on UK research, it appears that if one experienced a single-sex education, the women fare better than men: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/why-single-sex-schools-are-bad-for-your-health-if-youre-a-boy-1831636.html
Maybe it’s my gender, but I’ve always felt welcome around groups of women.
Re: Spain runs out of workers with 20% unemploynent … Shortage of skilled workers holding back economic recovery … Rajoy targets education reboot … [the country needs] candidates trained in “Agile” project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems.
“Agile development”… I seem to remember how that works …
Oh, that’s right: “Rajoy’s People’s Party also vowed to put more emphasis on technology in schools and get more students learning English.”
Agile development: hire Infosys!
I especially enjoyed the list of “shortages”.
Quants……software developers….
So the education system has “failed” because not everyone has the brain matter to achieve this level of intelligence? And everyone else has to contend with cutthroat competition, and a quality of life thats circling the drain?
Let there be no mistake. “Free trade” and outsourcing, as currently practiced, is all about screwing the bottom 90%, for the benefit of the top 10%.
But……For the lack of job security, lost pensions and pay, and all of the other problems created by a crappy job market, the “consumer” gets to buy cheap, imported stuff. Of variable quality, the source of which the PTB are trying to hide all the time.
Of course, nobody has explained to me how a person “benefits” from a 20% cut in price, when their income goes down by 50-100%. And this assumes that he gets the 20%, instead of the guy who offshored the production, saves 20% on labor, keeps the product the same price, and pockets the difference
I think its good they don’t have enough Quants: Quants are useless to society. They would be more useful teaching basic math or something.
“Agile” development is tehcno-snake oil that impresses managerial types who have never pushed two lines of code together in their lives (and would die of a stroke if they tried). Little-a agile was based on a simple philosophy by people who actually understood software development that metastasized into a cult-like business that empowers highly-paid consultants and hucksters who excel only in creating layers of bureaucracy on top of a creative process in attempts to turn it into an assembly line that can be run by low-skill types.
Having a shortage of people who have bought into this nonsense is a good thing.
You mean agile development is not a silver bullet?
Well, I personally would not try to kill a werewolf with it.
Agile = Crapification
Although it does make more jobs for ‘rent-seeking’ managers to make graphs and shuffle BS figures around as if they understood their projects.
It should really be called ‘fragile’, since it is systematically crapifying and under-architecting many vital systems.
As the joke goes I never trust anything with “Manifesto” in it’s name. Although I’d rather take my chances with Marx or maybe even the uni-bomber (although it was not actually called that) over the Agile manifesto. So I’m unfairly biased, I’ve seen Agile go badly wrong and create nothing but nightmares and while sometimes disastrous to the company as well, it’s pretty much never a benefit to the people who actually have to do the work (software developers etc.). It makes their jobs suck more.
Who phrases this stuff:
“Pimentel’s client asked him for list of candidates trained in “Agile” project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems.”
Agile has nothing to do with using more I.T. systems (whatever that even means) it’s a management methodology. Maybe something is getting lost in translation from Spanish here or maybe we have a recruiter who has no idea of the job he is recruiting for.
““This society urgently needs digital professionals but there aren’t really enough places where you can learn those skills,” Pimentel said. “Spain is a country that is not really investing enough in technology.””
The problem is most places that might even decide to “invest in technology training”, Agile methodology is probably not what they would be thinking. In the U.S. they might think basic computer science training, or they might even think the flaming hot skills of the moment (for instance Big Data). They might offer a general project management certificate although project management isn’t just I.T. focused. I don’t think you’d have an easy time finding a U.S. taxpayer funded (or even entirely tuition funded at a respected public institution – that is the college extension programs) program that would teach Agile. And I’m not sure you should. And that’s the U.S. where our technology training is supposedly so great. You would find a lot of private business training programs in such, mostly offering their services to companies but maybe training individuals. Maybe they could add it to MBA training :).
Well that would be a first /extreme-snark
Agile is good if it’s done well, although I agree it’s not automatic or even easy, and like any methodology it can turn out badly in the wrong hands. Coming from a waterfall background, the thing I liked best about Agile is that it seemed like a better fit for how software actually gets built in practice, and doesn’t require you to (pretend to) believe so many things that manifestly aren’t true. For example: the scope and feature set can be fully known/is fully knowable in advance; nothing will change during the course of the project (technically waterfall handles change, but grudgingly, at extra cost, and with a faint stigma of failure attached).
Hilarious comment.
Also, brilliant.
wow! had to look that one up… Agile, huh.
I escaped the corporate gulag back around Total Quality Management andwhen sixsigma Nazis were making it more difficult to get stuff done.
Funny, it used to be the absolute duds that were peeled out of Departments to form the “crossfunctional” teams like TQM, Y2K hardening, Six Sigma, etc etc because they were the first choice to get rid of. Ill have to keep an eye out for tis agile stuff in customer/vendor organizations.
Hell just the “I just wanted to reach out” corporate bromide is all it takes for me to get an eye twitch. I guess II am fortunate that I can be less tolerant of the BS anymore.
“U.S. flag lowered to half-staff nearly every day in 2015 CBS (resilc)”
Thanks for pointing this out. I remember when it was a really serious occasion when the flag was lowered. Recently, I’ve noticed that I always seen it lowered. I reasoned, because of churn, someone in the federal bureaucracy had the regulations changed so that was its normal position.
The article finally explains what has happened. A good start would be to take away the authority to lower the flag from state governments. I had no idea until today that they could do this, which doesn’t make any sense at all.
Here in Utah, the flag always seems to be lowered. I’ll notice and say to myself, “must be something”—so underwhelming is the occurrence of the half staff flag. I wonder if the constant lowering is a way of reinforcing a siege mentality of the general populace.
Like the gates of Janus in the Roman empire:
Flags should be at half staff tomorrow to mourn the demise of the constitution.
+100
Same where I live. If things are that bad perhaps they should start flying it upside down.
Plus around here some businesses like to treat the flag as a form of commercial advertising and sport huge ones. Lower one of those flags too far and it could knock somebody down.
We should have been flying them upside down ever since the 2000 Election…
Noticed that at my school too. The kids were always asking why it was lowered. Turns out the custodian has an app on his phone that tells him when to lower it, and there is always a reason somewhere……
re:
The standard answer should be, “Because the neoconservatives have a strangle-hold on US foreign policy.”
Need less line on the Chinese mad flagpoles.
It’s so common to see the national flag at half staff that I’m currently talking to some venture capital folks about a startup to purchase and saw off the top half of every flagpole, from sea to shining sea. This would automatically put the flag back on top of the remaining pole (a bigger boost for national morale than crystal meth), and supply us with an astronomical number of rather short aluminum flagpoles.
So we’re all down in the Virgin Islands this week sipping on umbrella drinks by the pool and brainstorming ideas for what to do with our immense stock of half-poles.
Some of the better suggestions are to sell them all to Syria as pipeline pieces, sell them here at home as really tall fence posts around gated estates, sell them to Donald Trump for his wall (which actually means selling them to Mexico, since they’re paying for the wall), and my favorite — start a national craze for Giant Pickup Up Sticks. A crane or helicopters drop a pile of 60 flagpoles in a random pile in a stadium filled to capacity with 60,000 paying customers there to watch two competing teams try to pick the pile apart without disturbing any other flagpoles.
The winning team is the one with the least injuries or fatalities. Now, how American is that?
Bahrain … The Fifth Fleet regularly docks there. Think we have much leverage?
What, you don’t subscribe to the Clinton surrogate theory of leverage,
whereby backing down and endorsing your opponent leads them to change their long-held stances?
Give me a concession and I will move the world. – Archimedes in an alternate universe.
I found the Toast intermittently very funny (and occasionally deadly toward the right targets; Mallory Ortberg’s epic takedown of Jonathan Franzen, for example, is a jewel of its kind), but no amount of fondness for the site or sadness that it’s closing down could make that Clinton contribution anything but cringe-worthy. For editorial reasons, mostly: it’s not a Toast sort of piece, no matter how famous the author is or how many of the site’s editors or contributors now work for her. It would have been a lovely comment on the posts about the site closing down, and it’s a pity that what would have been a terrific (and equally attention-getting) gesture was transformed into something quite so hamhanded. A pity, but oddly characteristic.
. . . but mostly, I’m commenting because this seems like a safe place to mutter darkly about The Atlantic’s incredibly cringe-inducing piece about it, which might as well just have said, “Senpai noticed me! Squeeeeee!!” and been done with it.
We’re going to have years of this sort of thing if she’s elected. Years of it. The aesthetic horror may be trivial compared to the various policy horrors, but my brain hurts already.
Dolan was first on that schtick, and better, IMO-
http://exiledonline.com/jonathan-franzen-will-rim-bobos-for-book-of-the-month-fame/
“Yes, it’s time someone said it outright: Manhattanites are the new hicks. The mall kids are generations ahead of them. Things that are stale jokes to the mall kids strike the NY publishing world as fresh and hilarious. Maybe they just don’t watch enough TV, or they spend too much time drinking cocktails with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ghost — whatever the reason, the Manhattanites have lost it completely.”
Dowd on Boris and Donald as secret twins. She makes a pretty good case but miscalculates the odds. Boris’ opponent was the entire British establishment and the EU. Trump is only taking on Hillary–not so much a David v Goliath type contest as the Three Stooges poking each other in the eye. One stooge, however, likes to bomb third worlders into atoms. There could be more at stake than hair styling.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/opinion/sunday/in-paris-with-boris-donald-and-lemon-tarts.html
BCC:
He talks, she does. Interesting that when people say that Trump is scary they often keep warning that when in office he may turn into Hillary.
Trump has also said that he’s not into regime change, wants to get along with Putin, sees the world as one where people “make deals.” He’s an America firster but that’s not the same thing as saying that he’s into the hegemon.
The truth is that Trump has said lots of things while running in a Republican primary where his opponents kept accusing him of being a RINO. It’s hard to say which statements he really means but if you’re going to quote, quote them all.
Trump has contempt for the beltway. That is why the beltway is apoplectic about him.
He has mismanaged his racial message being portrayed by the media. I’m surprised he cant find people smart enough who agree with him and polish his message for the high nosed media types.
At least i have seen no evidence of him being a racist (we may have reached peak penis envy in the US here – any white male in the media who is not gay or pierced in the right places is object of attack by the ones with too much time on their hand). He seems to have been branded a racist by default. He needs to tailor his message to include other races explicitly, just because penis envy is becoming an issue.
Basically we have reached a point of psycholgical fragility here. People just cannot handle the truth anymore, so they keep repeating what they find comforting. This is the LGBT/media/school bathroom crowd – basically – i deserve a great life because i am a deviant or say the correct PC thing. And if i dont have it then i have to blame it on Trump.
Donny Trump is an asshole. He may well be a useful asshole, even a valuable one for the nation. I dread seeing him lose, because our duopolistic power elite will take even a skin-of-the-teeth win for Clinton as a confirmation of their Right to Rule. So I don’t wish him ill, even though on a personal, individual basis I’d kind of like to.
He is a moderately shrewd dick with a lot of money and a weak opponent. You can stop crying for him now.
I wouldn’t say it was Trump’s contempt that explains their apoplexy. I don’t think those sitting in our capital care very much about perceptions of their contemptibility. If that’s true, this alone ought to tell us how bad things have become. And what we will have to go through to make things right.
No, the emotion that rules them is far more human.
It’s fear.
Trump is the first undeniable sign that identity politics have come home to roost.
Just as Brexit was in England.
Now Rudyard Kipling was of course a thoughtcriminal, but he penned a rather obscure war poem that, to my mind, illuminates the cause, not only Brexit and Trump, but of the tide of nationalism that is gaining strength throughout the West. I can’t imagine Garrison Keillor ever reading it on his Writer’s Almanac. But if he did, it might give people something to think about. Fittingly, It’s called “The Beginnings.”
http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/beginning.html
Trump is a racist and so are most americans…but racism is not the same as klanism…and most men on the planet are misogynist…including american men, but that does not lead to viking pillage and taking of the women folk…
Trump is using the bernaze sauce to gather up the unenchanted to follow him down a yellow brick road…
£ucky for him, he caught a wave of adlei Stevenson lemmings and the private partnership known as the democratic party has chosen to keep it close by first giving a scare to any “real” opponents and then blocking the path of mister nobody when he got close to the prize…
But his doing the kojak lollipop in the mouth “who luvzya baby” routine is not going to get him that view of the rose garden…
$hi££ary will be a one term hoover type pre$ident…
Govern Yourself Accordingly…
Trump is a racist and so are most americans…
link?
£ink ?? u need me 2 find u a link trump & most of america is racist ?? The guvmynt has something called an EEO-1 from the eeoc…go look at how many “waivers” guvmynt contractors “get” cause they can’t find enuf knee growz to fulfill requirements…
Have no idea where you live or background, but in most parts of america, black folk and white folk dont spend too much time together…and last I checked, the real estate family he comes from had a checkered past in respects to housing…
not that it matters…in sarasota a few years ago, the “human rights” commission insisted a report on blatant housing discrimination in apartment complexes was just a misunderstanding by the non white applicants who were obviously biased and used trickery to hypnotize the property managers into not showing them amenities and refusing to even show them apartments without verifying income, even though they made no such “adjustments” for the white applicants who were part of the testing…
find me that bar where black and white folk sit together for a few drinks…
show me that bar b que today, on the fourth, where black folk and white folk sit down for some grilled veggies or hot dogs / cheeseburgers and a few cold ones…or at least a rootbeer…
Separate and unequal…
not much has changed since ike instructed the supreme court to start to fix things in 1954…
Most school systems are segregated even in schools where there are children “bussed” in to make the stats look nice…
forgive me if there was any snark intended by your question and request…
someone does not need to be keeping a white hood in the attic to be a racist…
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/obama-continuing-bush-cheney-torture
That is an abhorrent thing to say and support, but let’s not forget the things he states crassly, amount to current US policy positions. There is no change there from current US standard operating procedure.
Well except obama and former SOS hillary have shifted more to just turning humans into pink mist instead of rendition. It is so much easier to just track meta on phones, not bother figuring out who’s on the other end and launch a “signature strike”. Right?
That bastrd trump should be more subtle (like hillary), when he talks about US murdering and torturing foreign policy. That way I can keep pretending it’s not happening! /S
Right.
And it’s not like obama found a “compelling” reason to close the Torture University also known as Guantanamo.
Try reading Murder at Camp Delta: A Staff Sergeant’s Pursuit of the Truth About Guantanamo Bay by Joseph Hickman.
Yes, you might almost think torture was institutionalized by a Republican administration, and that a Democrat administration refused to prosecute any of the perpetrators. Oh, wait…
Reich is too short by a mile here.
Consider the entire banker class here escaping punishment. Add in to that the slippery Clintons, lawyers both, openly and repeatedly flouting legal procedure in a potentially criminal case. And Reich is worried about a little common bribery?
Hell no. This is just the other side of the aisle deciding to dance in step; declaring themselves also as exempt from legal oversight.
People like to say there is a separate courts for the elites. Not really. For them now, there is no court at all.
Actually couldn’t get to this article for some reason, but from the title…….
Couldn’t help wondering how I had missed the “supreme” court taking up the issues of highly-paid, top secret “speeches” to criminal financial firms, or solicitation of “contributions” to a “charitable” slush fund from foreigners wanting big favors from the secretary of state and getting them.
Then I realized that this was not the “bribery” he was talking about.
the antidote depicts the Fed better than ‘pushing on a string’
“100 Years Is Enough: Time to Make the Fed a Public Utility”
Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics
sunday morning giggle: “To expose a 15 Trillion dollar ripoff of the American people by the stockholders of the 1000 largest corporations over the last 100 years will be a tall order of business.” Buckminster Fuller
The Fed is a public utility already…just a really poorly run one (depending on your perspective I suppose).
Yves didn’t pick it up this time, but I did episode number 4 of Economics for the Rest of Us on this topic (now with video!…kinda):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPAj4lvAXs8
‘public utility already’ …maybe they’ll be a poorly run one when they open their books to the public. THANK YOU for sharing your labor Dip…no.4 is exactly what i need to plow thru today.
Okay, I’m learning some things. I think the added visuals helped a lot, and you should add more, and you could even bring back a little of the music. The help wanted sign at the end was very neon-ish-not sure what that meant!
Thanks–I was waiting for the next episode.
I’m glad you revealed at the end those were real birds. I honestly thought you’d gone wild with the background again! If you do another in a lovely setting like this, perhaps you could “invite us in” at the beginning.
This was a great introduction to where money comes from, and the various mistaken ideas that many people have about it. I like your idea about combining participatory budgeting with a job guarantee. That could do so much to improve quality of life.
Make commercial banking a state function (for example like North Dakota) and require that investment banking firms be unlimited liability partnerships, just like they used to be. As for the Fed and its regional mini-feds, require its board memberships to be made up of a diverse mix of main-street business people, labor representatives and otherwise non-affiliated citizens. A commercial and/or investment banker or two might be included as ex-officio members, for advisory purposes only. The latter would not be voting members.
Ref – Antidote du Jour
I know some that are scrounging for some fine ‘Possum Wool’
http://www.queenslandcountrylife.com.au/story/3603666/at-125kg-no-wonder-kiwis-love-possums/
Disheveled Marsupial… clever NZers… figured out a solution to rid the place of an invasive species… now Oz just need one for feral cats… and some fundamentalist ideological politicians…
“now Oz just need one for feral cats”
Food. Eat ’em. The cat will start eating you a few minutes after you pass away. You’re a giant meat pile, they are patiently waiting.
Which brought up another line of thought- Rescue cats. Does the shelter have to disclose that they found the feline feasting on the remains of it’s former owner? Does the taste of human flesh make the cat more likely to eat a living human in the future? We need study!
Questions for the ages.
Catch and feed feral cats feral cat meat exclusively, then turn them loose!
What’s the next problem in OZ I can solve?
Apparently, possum love to eat deer ticks, which makes them quite useful in reducing the numbers of these often-Lyme-carrying critters. Hey, when your woods are full of deer (speaking of “invasive” species), anything that helps in that regard is a plus.
Kinda like the way the bats I see flying at twilight are hoovering up the mosquitoes. Yeah, bats are kinda creepy, too, but I appreciate the work they do as part of this ecosystem we live in, and which we humans just somehow can’t seem to stop fking with.
Living out in the country, one tends to get a much different perspective on nature and our place in it, and one has to resist the impulse to impose ourselves on it to the point where we are doing more harm than good.
” Hey, when your woods are full of deer”
This drives me insane. I live both out in the woods and in a city, depending on the time of year. In the woods, there are far fewer deer. In the suburbs of the city- TONS.
Huge debate on “what to do about the deer?” How about people stop trying to keep them as pets and start making themselves a threat to deer again? Throw something, chase them, let the dogs loose. Instead, everyone stares at them and pretends that the deer are some sort of “proof” that they live in the woods.
Completely backward. The deer that are a problem these days are much more akin to the geese that no longer migrate- they’ve found a safe space, your backyard.. They have too much food, and no predators, real or imagined.
Well, I actually live on almost 6 acres, about half of which is wooded. There are more woods that adjoin our property (4 acres wooded on one side, over 100 acres on the back side – you get the picture, I hope – we aren’t in suburbia, though it’s been creeping ever closer in the 30+ years we’ve been here).
Our son-in-law hunts the property during the season. Sitting in his deer stand, he has observed hundreds of deer moving through the woods. We tease him about that all the time, that with hundreds of them around, he ought to be bagging the limit on a regular basis.
We don’t regard them as pets. My husband grows grapes for wine, and he’s had to deer-proof them so the vines don’t get eaten down to the wood. We had to put 10-foot fencing around the vegetable garden to keep them out. Driving the roads near home can be a challenge, having to be on the lookout for them. So, no, while we appreciate their beauty, we don’t appreciate their destructiveness.
But here’s the thing: in the 33 years we’ve been out here, we’ve seen a lot of property go for development, huge plots of land cleared for houses and business, eliminating the natural habitat for what used to live there – and a lot of what’s been pushed onto smaller and smaller areas of undeveloped land are the deer. If there are yards nearby with tasty flowers, shrubs and such, they are going to come out of the woods to eat them.
And why not? In the deer world, we are the intruders.
Urban archery. Give a strong suggestion that venison can be donated to the food bank.
I know a rural guy who puts out corn and basically assassinates them (bow/arrow–shoots in downward trajectory) in his yard when they are fattened up.
He gave me some tenderloin and sausage once–delicious.
Food for him, not sport. It’s all organic!
A retired friend of a friend supposedly had a sliding glass door installed in the bathroom of his cabin so he could open it and take potshots at the deer wandering through his yard while he was attending to other matters. Not sure how well this solution would work in a suburb; aside from the general outrage that would likely ensue, most of the ‘burbs around here forbid hunting within a certain number of feet of houses (hence, of course, the large number of suburban deer).
Holey moley, in many states you are not allowed to shoot deer at all except during hunting season, and then you need to get a license.
Apparently, possum love to eat deer ticks
Is it a Opossum delicacy cause they’re no too good at catching them??
Skippy,
Thanks for this. I didn’t know about the possum-fur industry in NZ. Those possums were introduced from Australia (the only native mammals in NZ were bats) by people who are ignorant of ecology, that’s for sure.
“Possum” applies to some small marsupials in Australia and New Guinea (and NZ, as above.) Our own marsupial here in North America is an immigrant from South America where there are other marsupes, and people who study them all got together, in the 1950s I believe, with their Down Under colleagues and agreed that the New World critters would be called “opossums”. I don’t know if our opossum has usable fur but I do remember that my mother’s old paperback “Joy of Cooking” had a recipe for it.
I don’t know if our opossum has usable fur but I do remember that my mother’s old paperback “Joy of Cooking” had a recipe for it.
The fur? could be a Three Stooges episode
With a peace movement of the type outlined by Tom Hayden, ” America Needs a New Peace Movement—Especially if Clinton Wins in November”, who needs a war party.
Yeah…’Peace Protesters for Killary’………
Tom Hayden needs to take a long nap in a pasture!
? I thought Hayden has already endorsed Clinton…?
He has. That’s what makes his piece particularly ludicrous. “Let’s elect someone who doesn’t reflect our views or desired policy outcomes, so we can then work against them!”
Yves, what might be bothering you about Robin’s argument is his not very good representation of Cohen’s argument, upon whom he heavily relies. Ultimately, Cohen isn’t actually talking about money, which is merely his go to example, but access. So to use your own private jet example, a better reformulation to get at what Cohen (and Robin) are saying is to imagine a complete toady with unfettered access to the private jet of his patron/friend. His “freedom” lies in his access to use/abuse resources in ways others, who are just as physically and mentally capable as the today, would like to but are prevented by way of a system that permits access to some and restricts it for the many. In this context, money is simply one, very common, barrier.
Another example would be the painter throughout history, whose freedom of expression is largely constrained by an art world whose rules are dictated, or at least managed, by the wealthy or, nowadays, by state-run institutions (especially in Europe, where most theater, for example, is state sponsored). The artist could buck this system, but then she would be far more limited (i.e. “less free”) both as to the means she could employ and to the mode of dissemination. Of course, many would argue that real creativity emerges within constraint, but that’s a different argument.
On THC helping remove the beta amyloid plaques of Alzheimer’s, can I tell you how sad that type of research makes me?
Alzheimer’s is a lifestyle disease. The plaques are the result of inflammation and they are formed in an effort to protect the nerves cells from oxidative stress. (See “Reexamining Alzheimer’s disease: evidence for a protective role for amyloid-beta protein precursor and amyloid-beta” and “Simple amyloids to provide protection in MS?”.) But instead of seeking the cause of the oxidative stress, industry funded researchers only look for ways to treat the side effects of resulting inflammation because money.
And if these plaques are protective, do the researchers ask themselves what will be the side effect of artificially removing these protective plaques?
Amyloids are misfolded proteins and do not only appear in the brain as their are many different types. They are implicated in everything from diabetes to heart disease which are also oxidative stress indiced diseases.
It is very easy to lower oxidative stress in the body, but there is no money in it. So people keep killing themselves with diet and environmental stressors and they complain about the high cost of medications.
Those 2 links are interesting. You raise good points. Joel Wallach adds some interesting perspective. Another bit here about carnivores, and about cholesterol being an essential nutrient & raw material.
In any case, the mental / emotional / soul-level aspects of disease mean there is no one size fits all in the healing process, and different bodies need different foods.
just ask the insiders about agile.
nothing that you cant learn on the job in a few days or on pluralsight over half a day.
anyone paying 200k euros for incremental agile knowledge is insane.
agile is what happens when you put programmers in charge of the asylum. (no documentation, no specs etc etc – basically a programmer’s wet dream). agile is the case study in echo chambers. programmers say what the managers want to hear (lower costs! only code and nothing else! testing on the fly! you want mustard on that?) and get to create some mystique (the programmers few years in the limelight these days, especially after the scum Zukerburg got his scam going).
credit based capitalism cannot function without collateral – that is its fuel. At some point there is little real collateral left because PE ratios have become so high (this is what Michael Hudson seems to be calling “deflation” – I am mystified by his vocabulary).
So now we have reached a point where collateral has become a mind game, because real collateral is either all hypothecated or just too expensive to be available to young folks (a topic for the generational scam – for some other day).
Something you do not understand (because only asians or the tribe seem to have the discipline for STEM), becomes collateral with divide-by-zero PE values- because you can always hope to find a greater fool later who understands it even less. This is basically SiliCON valley’s business plan in 10 seconds or less.
100% backwards! Agile is what happens when project management types create the lunatic asylum out of their own wet dreams that people who have no talent and understand nothing about software can turn what is essentially a creative process into an assembly line.
in reality of course programmers cannot be in charge. It is the project management types who by definition have to be.
The story of agile starts with Martin Fowler and his asinine “manifesto” which was basically a programmer’s wet dream, and a completely childish one at that. These people have made software coding into some kind of semi political hippy shamanistic activity. In reality it is a somewhat disconnected-from-reality sort of engineering (which is by definition connected to reality – so the mess is right there).
Then the PM types noticed it and saw 1) a way to squeeze more out programmers and 2) to say all that the management wants to hear.
In my experience, software types have a lack of understanding of the real world and they are the wrong people to consult for real world issues – that work by nature is un-social and can turn into solipsism. In particular they make poor managers.
Bullshit stereotype. I have been a developer for > 30 years and not only do I have a good understanding of the real world that’s also true of many (but not all) of the colleagues I have worked with in my career. Clearly there are tech utopians and techno-libertarians who have warped, self-serving views of the world but these types are no more endemic to programming than they are to the managerial, financial, political and journalistic classes. And while we’re at it, just does your experience consist of?
More ignorant bullshit. Writing code is no more unsocial and likely to turn into solipism than any other technical pursuit than requires intense focus. Yet most projects of even moderate size require teamwork and coordination (which most developers of any worth are well able to manage on their own without the “help” of project management pukes and worthless “methodologies” like Agile).
So do most people (Peter Principle). The problem is with the structure of corporations They’re run by salesmen, accountants and lawyers meditated by layers of useless bureaucrats many of whom who have little or no experience in the function they’re
mis-managing. People in creative areas like software development are typically independent thinkers and have little tolerance for corporate politics, bureaucracy or low- or no-value overhead imposed on them by corporate functionaries.Many of the programmers or other technical types who become managers have either 1) lost interest in their technical field 2) sold out to climb the corporate ladder or 3) couldn’t cut it technically. Of course most of those people will make poor managers. The ones who remain in touch technically and do not become kiss-up kick-down toadies and self-serving players are rare indeed.
The rest are uninterested. Its hardly an indictment of programmers in general to say they make “poor managers” when most of them would rather have red-hot pokers stuck in their eyes than accept a management position and the ones who do go into that area are hardly exemplars of the breed.
Thanks for the interesting insight. What you say matches my experience. I never really like anything that has “evangelists”, so I was turned off to agile from the outset.
However, in retrospect, it seems like it was quite a good idea in the kind of game projects I worked on. Even though the end result is compromised, the risk of the project amounting to nothing and never getting released was somewhat mitigated. So for the person paying the bills it is helpful.
management is basically social politics 101. this requires people skills. ie, reading people and saying the right things. I’m saying of real management, not MBA buzzword BS.
Software as a career denies the ability to develop these skills, in fact it may destroy them by “aspergizing” the brain. That’s why they are the awkward nerd steotype.
The gender ambivalence article magnificently illustrates the reductionist mess resulting from filtering ideas through inferred intent. Brings to mind the devil’s options:
It’s a result of reaping what you sow.
It isn’t like the author didn’t get into the mess by making her own inferences. The reality is that transgender people, like their cisgender counterparts, aren’t all going to be the same and aren’t going to like being categorized as all the same(particularly by someone who isn’t transgender and who doesn’t have to live with the realities of the condition.)
It’s ironic that the article would be defending people’s rights to categorize others(people who aren’t transgender but write about transgender people as a subset) while calling “others” out for returning the favor(categorizing these people as transphobic or hateful and therefore not credible when it comes to discussions on societal norms,)
The Guardian article is definitely important:
UK financial markets are improving in the wake of Brexit. FTSE closed @ 6,577.83 Up 73.50(1.13%) on Friday. A 6-month high, wiping out the loses from last week’s panic selling.
Merkel cannot obtain any material wins from a rebounding UK. This leaves her trying to ‘spin’ the situation for domestic consumption. Refusing to start negotiations to ‘appear strong’ as positioning for the 2017 German elections.
There does not seem to be any way to make forward progress in the near future. With luck, the next German regime will come to the table without preconditions and be strong enough to offer necessary concessions on economic migration.
Why does the idea of money as freedom (or as speech) rankle? I think it rests on a consideration of the methods used to obtain such “freedom” as Mr. Trump and the other oligarchs possess. As Balzac famously wrote, “behind every great fortune is a great crime.”
Or to put an even older spin on it, “It is easier for the camel to pass through the needle’s eye than for the rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” While I’ll pass on the divine overtones, it does suggest a long-held belief of we commoners about our “betters.”
“Ah, but if only the tsar knew….”
The link to “File 17” or AKA “Document 17” is chilling. Two of the 911 hijackers were living w/an FBI informant. There are many threads back to the Saudi Embassy including the chilling fact that one of the would-be hijackers flight credentials were found in a Saudi Embassy envelope. This isn’t a conspiracy theory report, this is a congressional investigation document…
We will never admit, of course, that the Saudis did 911 to us for multiple reasons. So we would go get SH for them, to boost the price of oil from $20 to $120/bbl., to funnel more arms into the ME. But the link to the FBI informant is even more chilling as it hints at US foreknowledge if not complicity in the attacks.
Old news, I know, like JFK. After a while it all just fades. But remember, “The past is never dead, it is not even past.”
Here’s an amusing tidbit —from a local news outlet — about that FBI informant:
ABDUSSATTAR SHAIKH, CO- FOUNDER OF SAN DIEGO’S ISLAMIC CENTER, HONORED FOR 50 YEARS OF SERVICE PROMOTING RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE
October 8, 2009 (Lemon Grove) – Community leaders gathered at the Masjid Usman-Center for Religious Tolerance in Lemon Grove on Saturday to honor Dr. Abdussattar “Sattar” Shaikh, co-founder of the Islamic Center of San Diego. State and city leaders as well as representatives from the Sheriff’s Department and San Diego State University all praised Shaikh’s leadership in fostering multi-cultural understanding and religious tolerance.
“He has helped Muslims from all over the world form a thriving community, even in times of adversity,” said Lemon Grove Councilman George Gastil, who organized the event and issued a commendation on behalf of Lemon Grove. “We honor you, Dr. Shaikh, for the love and devotion you have shown to your adopted country. You have touched countless lives.”
http://www.eastcountymagazine.org/abdussattar-shaikh-co-founder-san-diego’s-islamic-center-honored-50-years-service-promoting-religiou
I assume that the local officials didn’t consider Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar (the two September 11 hijackers that Abdussattar Shaikh had living with him — at the same time he was acting as an FBI informant) as a part of that “thriving community”…although they most certainly “touched countless lives” by their actions.
The Lobbying Reform That Enriched Congress
“Nine years after Congress tried to halt the revolving door, the influence industry is larger and filled with former members. This wasn’t an accident.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/the-lobbying-reform-that-enriched-congress-224849#ixzz4DMJvhTe8
“Reform” should not be used to characterize Congressional actions without ironic quotes.
“The attempted putsch against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is being mounted by a right-wing cabal, working in intimate collusion with the security services in Britain and the United States. Its main propaganda organ is theGuardian newspaper. The aim is to overturn the result of the June 23 referendum and ensure British membership of the European Union (EU) through the election of a suitably refashioned Labour Party, or its incorporation into a coalition government.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5ugmNoanx8
apologies…
this should be the link for the above quote. http://www.defenddemocracy.press/statement-of-the-socialist-equality-party/
Nobody has correlated the Brexit vote with the Second Amendment die-hards over here, either.
The belief being, basically “As long as I own my guns, I can’t be a slave”.
Which is ironic, as I saw people spouting this stuff, while buying AR-15s with credit cards.
Same with Harley Davidson. You have “freedom” to chuck it all and hit the open road at any time, if only you owned a Harley. As they sign the papers for a 72 month loan.
Like it or not, in the 21st century, your level of freedom is totally based on your checkbook balance, and your ability to put money in it. Your freedom goes away, when you have to start paying for essentials with credit.
No need to borrow…
Whoever controls the money supply (and owns money created), controls the nation.
The nation of the Little People, for the Little People, by the Little People.
No other entity (private or public) should control/own it.
How even a doctor has to invoke shortcuts to navigate the health care system and why it’s designed this way:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/opinion/sunday/the-illicit-perks-of-the-md-club.html
Alzheimer’s is a largely invented condition, like so many other modern ailments. Taking fiber out of the diet and bombarding gut ecology with antibiotics triggers disturbances in insulin sensitivity and the immune system. Friendly bacteria decline and can’t prompt the production of incretins like GLP-1 [PMID 23836895], which directly reduces beta-amyloid accumulation [PMID 23999914]. Disturbing the flora balance like this also drastically affects the network of cannabinoid and mu opioid receptors (which we’ve known for a decade now, but largely still ignore [PMID 17159985]).
The FDA, by the way, has classified the bacteria in fecal matter as a drug. They didn’t classify blood transfusions as a drug, but they did this with poop because a $700 course of pills can cure conditions like Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis and multiple sclerosis which can requite $50-$100K of drugs a year.
New mothers should expect arrest soon if they don’t get C-sections since pooping on their babies when they come out – as nature intended – is now considered production and distribution of an unlicensed drug.
Fecal transplants have gone through clinical trials for treating intractable C. diff infections and are now the gold standard – which means the FDA is breaking the law to punish patients with other diseases. If a “drug” is approved to treat one condition, doctors should be able to “prescribe” it for numerous others as an off-label application.
Isn’t it interesting how when drug companies market Lyrica and Gabapentin to patients with no proven benefit, they get slapped with criminal fines but no one goes to prison. On the other hand, the FDA is blocking the only source of probiotic species that can reverse some chronic pain conditions and numerous other problems caused by antibiotics.
The FDA never warns us that processed food causes Alzheimer’s or that fiber is a cheap way of preventing it. Instead they go out of their way to prevent fiber supplement makers from telling customers that fiber prevents insulin-resistance conditions caused by fiber-deficient diets. There is no black box warning on antibiotics or NSAIDs warning us about the consequences of how these drugs dysregulate out immune system.
The FDA has two simple standards of risk evaluation. If a rent-seeker wants to do something, you have to spend millions of your own money proving it causes harm – and then cross your fingers hoping the FDA will act. If you want to use a public domain chemical to solve a problem caused by a deficiency in said chemical where rent-seekers are profiting by its confiscation from the public, then you have to spend millions proving that an unpatented chemical solves the deficiency you claim.
It’s another enclosure fight.
” The bill for the 12-minute orthopedist’s appointment was $1,125, and about half of it was covered by insurance. I wrote the doctor a letter — please revise this bill, as it is clearly erroneous — and included my “M.D.” Instead, the doctor left me a message saying he was waiving the bill entirely as a professional courtesy.”
This appears to miss something: the orthopedist had already been overpaid – assuming the bill was really erroneous – by the insurance company. That’s why he could afford to cancel the overage for his fellow MD. He probably wouldn’t have for a layman, who might not have known the bill was erroneous, but in fact he lost little by dropping it.
this is the biggest problem for Medicare, and would be for a single-payer system.
Fecal transplants don’t really work. Fail all the time, then back to antibiotics.
On the HBR article,
“Brexit tells us something urgent. There will come a point when abandoned people are willing to see the whole playing field burn down, so that it can be level again. And they might burn you down with it.”
I am assuming the “you” they are referring to is not anyone in the Middle Classes (or lower).
Fixed it for you, NYT.
It’s almost as if she’s going to use Listen, Liberal as an operations manual. PUMA.
She builds bridges for H1-B visa holders, not walls.
Breaking down “barriers.” Inspired.
On Corey Robin: “…that anyone who has less money than the very richest people is not “free” because he cannot do what the very richest people do. So that does not seem to make any sense”
It makes senses in terms of the classic statement of positive and negative freedom by Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Negative freedom is freedom from constraint or interference, while positive is freedom to choose, including exercise of freedom for self-determination. I would distinguish them as three — freedom from, freedom to, and freedom for, since all are necessary conditions for social, political, and economic liberalism, while none of them is a sufficient condition, nor is any two of them.
This might be called the trifecta of liberalism. Getting the concept of freedom right is required to navigate the paradoxes of liberalism, one of which is that economic liberalism leaves a lot of people unfree with respect to at leasts one of the other two factors. This is a problem with homo economicus wrt to homo socialis, for example.
Regarding freedom of the richest versus the freedom of other to choose and determine themselves, the question arises as to the amount of wealth that derives from individual contribution versus the endowment of previous social contributions and the extraction of economic rent. In other words, what is the social, political and economic cost of that “surplus” freedom that the rich enjoy, and is it justifiable in terms of a holistic view of liberalism that navigates through the paradoxes of liberalism and harmonizes social, political and economic liberalism.
Failure to take this into consideration and answer it adequately as a society risks dysfunction, and even revolution.
“Momentum machines”.
I’m wondering if a new word could be coined to describe the pleasure or sense of purpose that people get from vandalizing, stealing from or thwarting, job-destroying machinery?
From the ‘self-checkout machines’ at Safeway, to ATMs, to robocalls, to offshored humans who call you day and night offering some local service, there’s a whole cadre of people who take perverse pleasure in doing what it takes to keep their fellow Americans working.
Telling the cold caller in India “Just a moment” and putting the phone down and walking away, or, ordering whatever service they are promoting–at a non-existent address is a way to fight back.
The opposite extreme is the bank teller I read about who lost his job to automation and squirted a bit of maximum-expansion spray insulation foam into the card slot of every ATM he could find late at night. Or maybe he was an ATM repairman?
So, what would an appropriate term be?
Jobarbarian? Foamateur? Luddhero?
‘sabotagi’??
It seems to be a chemical reaction in the brain that produces pleasure through obtaining vengeance for maltreatment. The result is that people very much enjoy carrying out what Bugs Bunny called “sabotagey” in his cartoons.
The wascally wabbit often very openly sought the pleasure of complete revenge upon his malefactor, and this delighted audiences of all ages, then and now.
This is exactly what was associated with the Luddites.
“Luddery” – Luddite.
The present meaning, for someone who is suspicious of new technology, is a considerable downgrade from the original.
With the connotation that this is a reactionary, backward fear; the Luddites have been cast as irrational opponents of mechanized progress by the early capitalist manufacturers. Sure, it was costing them their traditional lives and rights and driving them into misery, but you know, capiitalism.
I embrace the term myself. Do we want to be the Borg? The “internet of things” = “matrix creep”? “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t let you do that…..”
Chinese students saving America’s colleges.
What is wrong with American students? Why can’t they save America’s colleges? Are we test-scoring lower than Chinese students in ‘college saving’ as well?
Why are our high school graduates not as able at ‘college saving?’
One more failure of our educational system?
http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/renters-worse-off-today-rents-income-lease-rent-prices/
Inflation adjusted rents have gone up by 64 percent since 1960. During this same period real household income is up 18 percent. What this means is that more net household income is locked up by rents. In places like Los Angeles it is not uncommon for households to spend 50 percent of their net income on rent. In San Francisco you have many high paid tech workers shacking up with roommates just to get by. On a nationwide scale this trend has been happening consistently.
=====================================================
Mish said it best, “Inflation in what you must have, deflation in what you don’t need” – and though not considered that way by economists, it applies to labor.
So the jobs are in San Francisco, but no poor people can afford to live there….but whoo hoo, the aggregates make it look like everything is grand….5% unemployment! (sarc)
“but no poor people can afford to live there”
“There were 12,691 people living in 6,054 units of public housing and 19,110 people living in 8,954 privately owned units subsidized by Section 8 vouchers, a 2013 audit found.” That’s from an article in the San Francisco Examiner about Meghan’s Law violators, sex offenders living in public housing.
Most of the housing project units are occupied by the children and grandchildren of black sharecroppers brought up from the south to work in in the WWII shipyards. They moved into the housing left by the Japanese sent to the concentration camps. Then, when that housing was torn down through “urban renewal,” a.k.a. “negro removal” in the 1960s, many were guaranteed a replacement unit in the new concrete tower housing projects that were build in the demolition zone.
Those towers have been torn down and replaced with low rise housing projects that are scheduled to be torn down and replaced with the third generation of buildings. All tenants given a life occupancy that can be passed on to their children. Criminal behavior out of the unit is grounds for eviction.
So there are lots of poor people who can afford to live in San Francisco, in spite of your knowledge projected from distant Fresno.
So, that’s a total of 31,801 poor people grandfathered in to living in SF, out of a total population of 864,000 … or, about 4%. I guess you could call that “lots,” if you think the number should really be zero. And it does nothing to create housing for people who want to work there, which was the point of the original post.
You need micro-homes and micro-people.
If Japan and Sony can miniaturize, so can we,
We are number 1.
Nope, nope, nope. Don’t want no short people ’round here.
Countering CNN’s take on the Hillary-FBI chat, journalist David Shuster has been Twittereporting various points based on his own sources: The CNN spin is exactly that, from the Hillary Camp; the FBI requested interview 2 months ago, but lawyer David Kendall stalled up until yesterday; at yesterday’s interrogation there were 8 DOJ/FBI questioners, and 5 Clinton lawyers, session was recorded and Clinton was under oath; and most pointedly, the FBI expects an indictment, “evidence + laws are clear,” but DOJ says no. James Comey has battle on his hands?
https://twitter.com/davidshuster/status/749081005269606400
The FBI can expect an indictment, but they don’t do indictments.
The DOJ does.
Is it ‘evil’ to leak that the FBI is expecting an indictment?
is that lesser evil?
One of the weather plane ahead of Enola Gay was Necessary Evil.
Evil……………..Good
Is More-Evil = Less-Good?
Is Less-Evil = More-Good?
Is everything good (to varying degrees) on the above spectrum?
Is everything evil (to varying degrees)?
Do we ‘not let perfect be the enemy of good (anything/anyone is good to varying degrees)?’
Is anyone perfect? Sanders? Hillary? Trump?
Are they all good (and evil – even necessary evil) to varying degrees?
Entertaining video montage of sherrod brown and Donald Trump’s positions on “trade” on abc’s This Morning today. Brown was appearing as a clinton surrogate and contender in the clinton veep-stakes.
RADDATZ: You support Hillary Clinton. But listen to what you and Donald Trump have said about trade.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BROWN: Hard-working men and women who have made America the strongest nation in the world are betrayed by Washington’s trade policy.
TRUMP: Our workers’ loyalty was repaid with total betrayal.
BROWN; It will continue to cost us jobs unless we renegotiate a better NAFTA.
TRUMP: I’m going to tell our NAFTA partners that I intend to immediately renegotiate.
BROWN; There’s no guarantee that China can’t backdoor into this agreement.
TRUMP: China will enter the TPP through the back door.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
RADDATZ: Sounds like you have similar views.
BROWN: Well done. Good research.
——
RADDATZ: But throughout her tenure as secretary of state there was all-out advocacy for TPP. How are your voters going to believe that she’s changed?
BROWN They’re going to believe because she clearly understands these issues and she talk in great depth about them in individual interviews and rallies. You get none of that from Donald Trump.
And she was secretary of state, her boss was advocating a trade policy. It was her boss. She was the secretary of state for the president. Of course she’s going to the take those positions.
No mention of all the TPP love in the democratic party “platform.”
LOL
It is an amazing aspect of Washington yammering culture, that if you speak in the calm, measured tones of great, verbose, eloquent geysers of bullsh*t, it somehow transmogrifies left into right, black into white, up into down, and than all back again to what you originally said when it is profitable and convenient.
Wow Raddatz is doing her job. Go her.
Hillary’s “just trust me” stance seems vaguely familiar. I was reading an article that said back in the day Hillary expressed sympathy for LBJ on Vietnam because Johnson supposedly just inherited the no win situation. Doubtless this will be her excuse when she announces that she can’t abandon all the trade promises made by Obama. The ice cream cone self licks.
LBJ didn’t “inherit a no win situation.” A bit more than a month before he was assassinated JFK signed NSAM 263 which codified a decision made at an NSC meeting a week or so before that called for the DoD to develop a plan to begin withdrawing US advisory troops from Vietnam by the end of the year. Less than a week after his inauguration Johnson issued another NSAM that countermanded # 263.
Your point is a bit controversial but in any case I was stating Hillary’s belief….a bit odd for an avowed antiwar person at the time.
And I say Johnson deserves all the blame regardless of what Kennedy would or would not have done.
You missed the part where she rather coquettishly batted her eyes and told Brown to call her “Martha;” I cringed. It rather took away from her calling out Brown for the Clinton toady he is apparently happy to be.
Later, she and Rick Santorum had a little giggle over him using her first name.
Martha, Cokie, Steve Inskeep from NPR: blergh.
Teachers wage class war in Mexico, which our own famously free press has largely ignored:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/06/mexico-teachers-union-cnte-snte-oaxaca-nieto-zapatistas-strike/
An infuriating and heart rending look at U.S. student debt, or how the rentier class gobbles up the seed corn of a nation:
https://www.revealnews.org/
Re Brexit: Apparently freedom of movement across borders is a non-negotiable policy for the EU. But I wonder what percentage of people across the entire EU would favor restricting such movement. Is anyone aware of any polling on this?
I ask because if a majority of citizens in the EU favor restrictions and the EU itself insists that there be none, the question arises as to exactly what the EU is. Clearly, an institution so at variance with the will of its people on such a bedrock issue could claim no democratic justification for its existence.
As for the allegation that the UK suffers from racism and xenophobia — and I question the judge-and-jury implication of such assertions — if we make the frankly astounding concession that this is the case, I ask the following: If in order to alleviate some of the fear and hatred, the majority of people insist not on violating any fellow citizen’s rights but instead demand less immigration, should they be accommodated or not? If not, why not?
“In Europe, 52% want lower immigration levels”: http://www.gallup.com/poll/186209/europeans-negative-toward-immigration.aspx
Are there such things as ‘digestible’ rates of immigration?
Or is everything that oppose immigration, in the slightest, racist and xenophobic?
Years of austerity + waves of immigration
The elites are insulated from these realities, yet they insist on imposing them on the masses.
This will not end well for anyone.
Brits are generally relaxed about foreigners working in Britain. My impression is of a few hot topics that make them go grrrr – areas of London and some nothern cities where the sidewalks are filled with burkhas on a Saturday afternoon (yes, they do exist + the burkhas cover up some glamorous outfits).
Overall, Brexit is probably a sorites of little things: reaction by first-visitors to London to burkha-style exposure, Daily Mail style selection of extreme cases as typical, resentment of Square Mile privilege and subsidy, the decades long grind of supply side economics. Of these, the latter is the greatest.
My view is the British constitution is about to be twisted into a new form, and things will work themselves out. With time and plenty of humour. Hopefully.
I believe the rabble here reacted the same way to our wise leaders’ Big Bank bailout.
What we need are more ‘education’ for the low information voters (not privy to ‘classified’ info, thus low info).
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2595531
As bad as the repubs are at candidate selection, it makes me wonder how much better the dems really are. How far away from a Dr. Strangelove are we?
Were the candidates of yesteryear actually better, or are our candidates really declining in quality???
We are definitely working with less statesmanlike material these days; it is a reflection of the much reduced role of the President in the direction, policies, and focus of the government.
The Oval Office is still described as the most powerful office in the world, but anyone watching the waffling, double-talk, double-dealing and open contempt for the Constitution that has become the norm there will recognize it is just a sandbox, a place for an elected figurehead and spokesperson to speak the words of the people actually in charge.
The President is no longer the chief executive. We are governed by committee, and they keep their discussions private.
The Democrats in the White House are all, “the presidency really is powerless. My hands are tied.” The Republicans are all, “Elections have consequences. We can do whatever we want.”
The billionaires win either way. See?
Link to a tweet from Brian Selter at CNN with embedded interview with Jill Stein on Reliable Sources today. 5 minutes (better than 0 minutes)
Agree, the Greens are very slowly getting a little teeeveee time. I do wish it was more.
“The Truth about Banks IMF”
This seems huge to me. The IMF is an entity many ‘seriously economists’ will listen to, and here it is outright saying that not only does the fractional reserve banking that is ubiquitous in textbooks not exist, that it is a historical artifact that hasn’t existed for the better part of a century. Banks create money out of thin air. This is an objective fact. First get that down, then we can have a discussion on the ramifications of it.
Not holding my breath that economists will take note of this paper though.
Looking at that ‘dark-age’ hand-wringing, I thought, How could an ethnic Indian guy writing in an Indian medium have such star-spangled American blind spots? It was so weird I checked his background. Aha. Ivy League/potted Ivy indoctrination.
Kapadia accurately notes US efforts to crush alternative social models. But, nowhere to go? No reasoned idiom? Nothing but [gasp]… violent nationalism?
That mannered, despondent groping is exactly how US intelligentsia are taught to perform. They act out learned helplessness as the only response to There Is No Alternative.
What Kapadia overlooks is the formal consensus of the G-192 – the whole world – with the sole exception of an isolated USA. The world is not searching for an alternative to development as growth. They have one: development as rights, progressively attained. The USA is fighting this alternative tooth and nail in Latin America, in Eurasia, in much of Africa, and in international forums like UNCTAD and UNESCO. The USA is losing. The USA’s a joke. The wheels are falling off the bandwagon, the beauty pageant winners are puking and flopping off the floats, the marching bands are down, trampled to a pulp. Nobody’s watching their stupid-ass USA parade. The world is kindly trying not to laugh as they keep on doing what they’re doing:
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/RightToDevelopment.aspx
http://unctad.org/meetings/en/SessionalDocuments/td445_en.pdf
Even behind the iron curtain in the USA, the alternative is percolating in through civil society and international capacity-building initiatives. It’s going to destroy this regime.
Well maybe the U.S. but I think you’d have to include the EU in the cluster@#$# at this point as well.
Basic bond know-how from a fixed income pro:
You would be surprised how many economics and business graduates are acquainted with theories such as the Capital Asset Pricing Model, but lack practical chops such as choosing the right bond duration.
As it happens, the broadest investment grade bond benchmark, Barclays Aggregate, has a duration of about 5.5 years, putting it squarely in the intermediate term range.
Ben Carlson’s love letter to the BarAgg:
“Weapons trafficking questions remain unanswered in Benghazi report Politico. Resilc: “Press is braindead.””
The odd(?) thing about the Republican Benghazi “investigation” is that it served as a very effective coverup of the real issues: not only the arms smuggling, but basic issues of competence. It was, on its face, a gross failure of intelligence and security. Not only was there no warning(?),but the attackers knew where the “safe house” was. Incidentally, there are also accusations that the “consulate” was a black site, holding Libyan prisoners. That would be a really good way to attract an attack.
Personally, I think it’s a really good example of collusion between the parties; they’re actually protecting Hillary while pretending to attack her, a classic red herring.
UK to set new corporation tax below 15%
Rate cut part of Osborne’s five-point plan to woo investment to post-Brexit Britain
Never let a crisis go to waste. Especially one that you helped create.
poor dears, they have such a hard time keeping track of their millions, much less pay a little tax
I read NC daily especially links. It’s very good. What do “resilc”,”furzy” and “guurst” mean for the uninitiated?
Those are hat tips to the people who provided the links.
Thanks Yves – appreciated – that’ll save me some time too.
So Tony Blair won’t be investigated-but he could be impeached: (The Guardian)
Farage, Murdoch, Lebedev and Fox break bread: as told by Lily Allen
He has railed against the “out of touch” media and political elites in the past. On Sunday, however, the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, attended a garden party with the media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Evgeny Lebedev, as well as the Tory leadership candidate Liam Fox. And the whole thing was documented on Twitter by Lily Allen…
Allen also said that other guests at the party had told her she should not post pictures or videos of Murdoch. “His publications have been making money from publishing pictures of me, though,” she said.