Eager beavers experts at recreating wildlife-rich wetlands, study reveals Guardian
Bizarro Life-Forms Inhabiting Deep-Sea Vents May Be at Risk Scientific American
Electric vehicle realities Izabella Kaminska, FT. “Questioning the cost structures of the industry in general is not allowed in public forums.”
The Accounting Tack That Makes PayPal’s Numbers Look So Good Gretchen Morgenson, NYT. File under The Bezzle. But where were the editors on this? Surely that headline should read “This One Accounting Tack….”?
The Hijacking of the Brillante Virtuoso Bloomberg. “Because if the hijacking of the Brillante Virtuoso wasn’t a case of fumbled piracy, it would be the most spectacular fraud in shipping history.” Fun!
There’s No Magic in Venture-Backed Home Care Medium
Airbnb dominated by professional landlords Deutsche Welle
Beyond Bankruptcy: How Failed Stores Come Back Online WSJ
Google blocked every one of the WSWS’s 45 top search terms WSWS (MT). I tried “Trotsky.” Nothing from Google 10 pages into the search results. Bing had a WSWS hit at #75, six pages in. WSWS was at #70 on DuckDuckGo’s infinite scroll. Trotsky is seven pages in at Yahoo, five pages in at the DogPile aggregator, three pages in at Yandex, and two pages in at Yippy, oddly, and on the front page at #19 at Unbubble (a neutral European search engine). Certainly, some, er, invisible hand seems to be operating at Google. Readers, try for yourselves!
For the New Far Right, YouTube Has Become the New Talk Radio NYT
Chinese chatbots apparently re-educated after political faux pas Reuters
Imperial Collapse Watch
The end of the “wars on the cheap” for the United States The Saker
In Blackwater Case, Court Rejects a Murder Conviction and Voids 3 Sentences NYT
Present and Perspectives of the “Triangle” Between China, Latin America and the United States COHA (MT).
American petro-topia Aeon (MT). Plastics.
Venezuela
Venezuela suspended from South American trade bloc FT
Venezuela’s chief prosecutor Luisa Ortega rejects dismissal BBC
North Korea
United Nations bans key North Korea exports over missile tests Reuters
US, North Korean neighbors step up campaign of isolation AP
China, China, China 38 North
Brexit
Britain willing to accept a £36bn Brexit divorce bill The National
Failure to reach Brexit deal ‘suicide’ for UK, says former EU chief Guardian. Interview with Romano Prodi.
Amsterdam shines as financial groups eye EU access FT
A Creative Brexit? Cable
New Cold War
What’s Worse: Trump’s Campaign Agenda or Empowering Generals and CIA Operatives to Subvert it? Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept (ChiGal).
Louise Mensch’s New Conspiracy: It Wasn’t the Russians; It Was the Jews Tablet. Ah yes. I’m so old I remember when Larry Tribe called Louise Mensch “incomparable,” and the NYT gave her Op-Ed space. Good times…
Trump Transition
Trump and the Leaked Transcripts The American Conservative
Keep the Trump Leaks Coming The New Republic
Republican Shadow Campaign for 2020 Takes Shape as Trump Doubts Grow NYT
Trump now has the votes to feed U.S. fracking frenzy with new gas pipelines McClatchy
Fears rise for US climate report as Trump officials take reins Nature. A red-team approach.
This is a Post About Drought. And Farmer Suicide. Prairie Center
A changing electrical grid may make Snake River dams expendable — and help save salmon Idaho Statesman
Wyoming Residents Reject First New Coal Mine in Decades Global Citizen (GF).
How Air-Conditioning Conquered America (Even the Pacific Northwest) NYT
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
Report “Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life” – Info Institute for Critical Digital Culture (full report).
Our Minds Have Been Hijacked by Our Phones. Tristan Harris Wants to Rescue Them WIRED (Re Silc).
Health Care
Italy may have a struggling economy but its people are the healthiest in the world WEF
Medicare-for-All Isn’t the Solution for Universal Health Care The Nation (GF). Lambert here: Good on transitional costs, but I think holding up systems like Germany, France, and the Netherlands as models for the US isn’t a good idea. They have complex systems that depend on tightly regulated private health insurance companies, and policy wonks like that, because they think we live in the First World. However, for a political economy in a large country like ours, with health inequity, corruption, and poor governance — and with the dominant culture based on cheating — the complexity is an open invitation for corruption and rent-seeking. The simple and rugged Canadian single payer system is more appropriate for us (and it’s also proven to work; you can think of the US vs. Canadian health care systems as the largest competitive testing trial in the history of the world).
Pritzker, Pawar unveil health insurance plans Crain’s Chicago Business
Will Colorado’s Health Insurance Industry Run One Of Its Own For Governor? David Sirota, International Business Times. A Democrat. Naturally.
Cleaning a Dirty Sponge Only Helps Its Worst Bacteria, Study Says NYT (Furzy Mouse). “The thrifty among us may try to clean a sponge that starts to stink, but it’s probably time to let it go.” Just like the health insurance companies!
Soft Money Is Back — And Both Parties Are Cashing In Politico (Re Silc).
Democrats in Disarray
In the key 2018 battlegrounds, Trump’s support is as high as ever Vox (Re Silc). “[I]n congressional districts held by Republicans, there remains a core group of right-leaning voters who don’t seem concerned about the messy dramas emanating from the White House. The pattern is the same when we narrow the focus to the closest 25 congressional districts on either side. (The pattern also persists when we look at close counties, which rules out gerrymandering as an explanation, since county lines are not regularly redrawn for electoral reasons.)”
Bernie, Kamala, and the Left’s War of Mutually Assured Destruction Washington Monthly
Ex-DNC Chair Howard Dean: ‘Whiny’ Left Doesn’t Want to Win, They Just Want to Be ‘Pure’ Mediaite
Hillary Clinton Hires Two Former Campaign Aides For “Resistance” PAC Buzzfeed. Of course she did.
We Need a Plan, Not a Brand Moyers and Company. Naomi Klein.
Warren: ‘I am not running for president, I’m doing my work’ The Hill
9 questions about the Democratic Socialists of America you were too embarrassed to ask Vox. “In the last year alone, DSA’s membership has ballooned from 8,000 to 25,000 dues-paying members. DSA boasts that it is now the biggest socialist organization in America since World War II.”
Democratic Socialists of America Celebrate Record Membership in Chicago. Now What? The Intercept
Why These Millennials Refuse To Miss The Democratic Socialists Of America Convention Bustle
A Turning Point on the Left? Libertarian Caucus Debuts at Democratic Socialist Conference Truthout. (I’m not sure that caucuses exist until formally approved, though.)
The Connective Party Jacobin
Class Warfare
Slate’s Biggest Enemies Are Donald Trump and Its Staff Trying to Unionize Splinter News
While Boeing touts profits, workforce shrinks Seattle Times
Opioid Prescriptions Across The U.S. FiveThirtyEight. Nice to see the Better Dealers tackling this. Oh, wait…
Race to the Bottom Kimberlé Crenshaw, The Baffler
Jim Plunkett’s painful journey: ‘My life sucks’ The Mercury News
Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture The Verge
Why Relying on People’s Vices Backfires Ian Welsh (MR).
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
201 comments
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Link recommendation – An excellent paper that systematically lays debunks the loanable funds theory with the help of first defining what terms such as ‘investment’, ‘saving’ etc mean for economic units, how the units relate to each other and how loanable funds mixes all the terms up. Would thoroughly recommend it.
https://www.boeckler.de/pdf/p_imk_wp_100_2012.pdf
“Saving does not finance Investment: Accounting as an indispensable guide to economic theory
Abstract
The paper analyses the accounting relationships between the
financial and the real economy. It will be shown that accounting
can clarify the nature of economic phenomena and be an important
building block for economic theory. The paper will argue that the
–
re is much confusion about key macroeconomic concepts like sa
–
ving, investment and finance. This confusion is best summarised
in the statement “saving finances investment”. After clearly defining
the accounting relationships between lending, financial saving and
physical investment it will be shown that this is a nonsense
statement. The theory behind it – the loanable funds theory – will
be analysed and critiqued. It will be shown that the loanable funds
theory confuses the concepts of income and production, lending and
saving, and financial saving and non-financial saving. It will further
be shown that this has not only theoretical but also important policy
implications.”
Thank you. On page 10
It is also common to designate the sum of all non-financial assets as the capital stock, K. Equation 7) shows that, by pure accounting, the aggregate (closed or world) economy cannot save in the form of financial assets but only in the form of non-financial assets.
OH oh. Paper is useless!
Thanks Catherine.
You might also enjoy the work of Dirk Bezemer. If you search for him on google scholar, you will find his 2009 paper (linked then on NC IIRC !): NO ONE SAW THIS COMING.
Maybe Economics as Accounting will become a thing (Cf. Sir John Hicks, McCloskey’s Accounting as Metaphor, etc.)
Trotsky (without the typo) and WSWS both come up as No. 1 in DuckDuckGo results from the UK.
Thanks for the introduction to Unbubble. I’ve been looking for a Euro-centered search engine and this is speedy and finds interesting results. It’s getting to be like the old days before Google where using multiple search engines was the key to good web research. Really, it is a shame that Goggle ruined a superb tool.
I stumbled on Unbubble y-day, looking for Udo Ulfkotte (whose book is having trouble making it into the US., unsurprisingly). Yandex had good results, too. DDGo is powered by google – so no surprise there. Thanks to Lambert’s remark once, I now know about Opera and its vpn. Also, found this on other search engines: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/five-apps/five-free-alternative-web-browsers-for-windows/
Unbubble won’t let me use it, said I made “mass and/or automated queries” and locked me out when I have never accessed their site before!
That happened to me as well, but it gave me an option of proving i was human by doing a simple math problem. The link did include a search term, trotsky, which I guess their computers found to be automated.
It looks like you csn go to firefox addons an add unbubble there.
Yeah if I use my UK IP address Trotsky and Flint Michigan bring up WSWS on DuckDuckGo and Unbubble.
When my VPN is active (US location) WSWS not there in DuckDuckGo.
Very good test concept, using a VPN!
I am surmising that the difference between DDG and Google is “secret sauce” at Google.
Bing mobile page 6. Google mobile I gave up at page 23. I even saw horse racing sites with horses named Trotsky but no wsws.
There used to be a way to get Google to show 100 results per page by just adding a tag at the end of the search URL but I believe you now have to “personalize” your search which means you have to be signed into Google account settings. IMO what crapified Google was their decision to compete with Facebook as a social media company. It was no longer about being the best at what you do and more about market power and spying.
Late to the party: 7:40 AM MST, on MSN home page, Bing! assisted by Google ! I typed in what is WSWS and got a much jucier hit, including at # 3 a link to the site/ address.
Garbage in , garbage out, starting with my 58 years young dumb approach, on a crappy home page called MSN, and Bill’s pride and joy, Bing!
WSWS was at #70 on DuckDuckGo’s infinite scroll.
#70 in Aus. DuckDuckGo results also.
Also, I got to pg. 21 in Google and no WSWS to be seen, but guess what I found?
That’s so meta.
FWIW, search term “socialist websites” brings up WSWS as #1 on Google.
True. That doesn’t affect the 45 search terms, though.
I mean, a socialist website doesn’t have the term “Trotsky”? WTF?
“Socialism site” does the same. I tried “socialism” by itself and gave up after not finding it in the first seven pages (I did find quotes, TV tropes and Ayn Rand links, which I guess were all considered more relevant).
That seems weird to say the least. If it was due to site issues then I’d expect it to apply uniformly across all search terms. The explanation in the link does seem to fit the evidence.
If you google “Trotsky Minneapolis” the Minneapolis general strike comes up first thing! Proving that direct action gets the goods.
At least two articles related to socialism cross linked on Yahoo’s main scroll at the moment.
9 questions about the Democratic Socialists of America you were too embarrassed to ask
The socialist movement is getting younger, thanks to one 75-year-old
What am I missing? I view Yahoo’s main scroll as enemy propaganda.
I believe what you are not seeing is Google’s change results in no listings returned for the “blacklisted” (my word) sites appearing in the general search results.
Not showing a relevant link to said sites reduces traffic to said sites, which has a significant reduction in these sites’ advertising financial income. It appears the Google change is aimed at financially harming a list of sites that an unknown group has decided should be “blacklisted”. The links you found and posted were to Vox and Yahoo. Yet, WSWS also has stories under this search heading that were not presented in the search results.
This isn’t saying no results on a topic should be shown. It’s saying no results from certain sites should be shown (causing these sites financial harm.) The said “blacklisted” sites are right, left, and center but they are not MSM sites. What is the criteria for inclusion in the list or recourse to present argument to be de-“blacklisted”? No one knows. Kafka-esque is a word that comes to mind.
It’s hard to make the claim the NC should be “blacklisted” as a fake-news site. NC is a respected top-10 financial site in many rankings. The reporting on Greece, ACA problems, and the mortgage, subprime loan frauds are outstanding reporting. NC, however, is not part of the MSM. (Though the MSM picks up NC stories and re-reports them in many cases.) And, yes, NC appears to be on the “blacklist.”
shorter: it’s not the search topic that’s the issue; it’s refusing to show results from the “blacklisted” websites that match the search topic criteria, financially harming the sites by reduced traffic/advertising revenue.
This looks to me like an effort to financially harm the non-MSM websites that WaPo (see Propornot) and others would like to shut down for some reason; not an attempt to rigorously vet stories for accuracy. (see WaPo, Propornot for example.)
To clarify: you can get Google to include “blacklisted” site links the returned results if you add the “blacklisted” site name to your search string. But that’s like Google saying,”Say the magic word.” The point of a search engine is to return general results that are inclusive of sites you may not know about in an impartial manner.
adding: there a many ways for Google to game the algo: show no listings from sites; show some listings but not for a sites’ highest ranked search hits; show listings but deep deep down the list past the point most people would stop looking. All of these tricks would result in a fall off of site link clicks/advertising revenue. I don’t know what algo G uses now, but the results it produces are…. uh….. odd. Much odder than a few months ago.
Interestingly, a Google search for “Socialism” brings up “paid retrieval” (Ad) for an article in Jacobin at the bottom of page three. So I guess it’s no problemo if you pay them enough.
It’s important to remember that there are two aspects to a Google search: Indexing and Rank Ordering. If Google indexes a site then its content will almost certainly appear somewhere in the search results. To see whether or not a particular item from WSWS has been indexed, use the Google advanced search page,
https://www.google.com/advanced_search
and specify,
http://www.wsws.org
in the “Site or domain” field, and put the title of the item in the “All these words” field. If Google has indexed the item it should appear at or near the top of the retrieval.
But Google also uses a sophisticated “Ranking algorithm” to decide where (i.e., how far down) in the displayed retrieval a particular item is displayed. This is most likely where the bedevilment is going on. Google does not make its ranking algorithms public.
California Prepares for Solar Power Loss During the Great Eclipse (June 8)
I wonder what they do at night?
Sleep.
Is it more difficult than when the whole state is blanketed by a Siberian storm…for days?
Wow, people were wasting their time on the internet arguing about sub-Saharan individuals in Roman Britain. Even Professor Taleb was wasting his time doing that? Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Hahahahahahahahahahahah.
Makes me feel like a paragon of time efficiency! LOL
What’s up with this dude from Google on how the internet engineers waste people’s time sucking them in to things like Youtube? NO way! Snapchat for sure. And Facebook, for sure. Yes. But Youtube! No way! Dudes, this is what they said about TV when it came out. The same shlt. You can always get off your butt and walk outside. But it’s hard to do that when Stark Trek is on — and then after that is the Leave it to Beaver re-run. And then after that is Mayberrry RFD re-run. And after that was Gunsmoke. And after that was the 8:30 movie — the 1 liner in the TV guide looked preetty good. And after that was the 11 pm movie. And after that was the Test Pattern. Sometimes by that time you hit the Test Pattern you’d be so bonged out you’d be asleep. But some of those Test Patterns were actually sort of geometrically interesting — especially stoned. Stoned test patterns! Those were as good as some of the shows. But you watched anyway. See what I’m saying?
Wow Youtube strkes again! Who can believe what a Gold Mine Youtube is. What a cynical manipulative lie about Youtube being a waste of people’s time and hijacker of minds!
They have old test pattern videos! No lie, here’s one. Can you imagine staring at this at 1 a.m. Stoned. Whoa! You can now!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RC99c0eUIos
I love those old testpatterns and switch signs like that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFRNWou90RI
that kind of handcrafted tv surely is long gone and how you could be sure on monday, that each and everyone had watched the same show saturday evening before.
Sometimes I miss those, but in general I don’t regret to have thrown tv out of the window in ’95.
Test Patterns are valuable works of art that belong in a museum. Maybe a museum of the lived experience.
One exhibit could be a dude laying on a bed in Levi’s and Frye boots with pizza crumbs on his chest and a bong on the floor with the room dark expect for the test patterns on the old black & white TV. Maybe a few groovy Wall posters of Led Zepplin and Jimi Hendrix along with a shag rug.
You could also have fine art reproductions of test patterns framed as wall exhibits and a coffee table test pattern book! That would be awesome. A coffee table book of test patterns from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Maybe there is one already — it’s such an obvious idea.
Test patterns were just a start. Then, as usual, they innovated!
Check out this early Top Secret Leak!
Talk about True Art – Digital too!
Time Tunnel !!!
This is how kids first discovered science is interesting. But it was mostly kids, and teachers.
Parents stayed tuned to “Leave It To Beaver”, because they thought the name sounded funny.
Plus they could say the name at work without getting in trouble with HR.
Also, the Democrat Party was serious back then.
Now all we got is really, really good porn :(
https://youtu.be/vVxx50xr0Qo
This was before they discovered Russians are terrifying and do horrific things, too!
Then, check this out. The Outer Limits!
https://youtu.be/5nhcjFycFnc
woowooowooo. Terrifying.
Yah! Try the original show, the favourite one for me being “The Zanti Misfits.”
Wiki on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zanti_Misfits
One show, named “The Inheritors” if I remember correctly had the protagonists amass the requisite funds to carry out their scheme by playing the commodities markets using pure number theory! That’s how powerful were the beliefs in Science and Technology back then.
“The Zanti Misfits” …
Ant-like aliens land on Earth, hefting around a bad attitude, while sporting beatnik goatees !!
I swear I saw one as late as 1988 while staying at a hotel in Sioux Falls, SD—while moving across the country. And it used the face of a Native American, which doesn’t surprise me considering that the town was full of the.
Ah yes, test patterns – I remember ’em well – as well as (in the UK back in early days of TV – 1950s) the “interlude” treats which would fill spare time between shows. A popular one was of a potter’s wheel. (The narration now at YouTube was not included, at the time!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hRNVZbOCuc
So, yes, agreed that YouTube is much less of a pain in the rear than some other social media sites.
Curate the show CM. The Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of TV and Radio) might be interested in a show of test patterns.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=TV+test+patterns+museum&rlz=1CATAAA_enUS576US577&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwje5NDBpsPVAhVm6YMKHWhwAFsQsAQIJw&biw=1366&bih=630
Actually you were missing the best TV. That started when the test pattern went off the air around 3am and the static broadcast of the big bang background radiation show began. In colour on a black and white TV.
that’s a good point. After the test pattern the TV broke free of all formal constraints and you could just stare there in the room, drunk and stone, at pure random light energy.It must have been how Rimbaud felt in Drunken Boat!
As I was stoned, staring at impassive patterns,
I no longer felt myself guided by symbols:
Engineers had taken them after midnight
And replaced them with snowy screens
buzzed and drunken I was indifferent to all order
chafed by the constraints of circles and frames
and when with these symbols my prisons were done with
The TV let my mind drift where I pleased.
Into the furious sparkling of the luminous screen
sunk in the langours of bong hits and pizza crumbs
I was immobile! And yet the mind-fried and transcendent ideations
Have not undergone a more triumphant symphony
The blank screen blessed my liberations
Lighter than a cork I danced in the light waves
That are called eternal rollers of stoners,
I spent ten nights (with pizza), without missing the stupid eyes of circles!
lovely segue from prose to poetry, thanks
Rimbaud wrote Drunken Boat at 17 and was done with poetry by 21 preferring to occupy himself with gun running and slave trading. Other than Verlaine, who would believe much of anything a 17 year old had to say about much of anything?
Could possibly be lighter than an electron I danced …
lighter than an electron I danced …
Or a photon.
Artists like Frank Stella, geometric artists, might have been heavily influenced by those TV sign-off test patterns. who knows?
http://www.artnet.com/artists/frank-stella/sinjerli-variation-iv-a-bOOkj2ObVS6yYXcRWqMuew2
or
https://jewishphilosophyplace.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/052.jpg?w=640
I’m using You Tube instructional videos to show me how to replace a starter motor on a 1985 diesel engine. Only after I’m done will I get stoned and watch test patterns.
Discipline is a life skill.
And a deep held pleasure for some.
I’m working on another song!
This one is about Yoko Ono. She’s been out of the news lately, but I think it’s cause she is distraught over no one giving Reese’s peanut butter cups a chance, anymore.
She’s hiding on top of Mt. Fuji.
The name of the song is “Going Craazy On You”, by the senile members of ’80s hottie girl band, Heart.
I won’t say anymore ’cause the poetic and artfully playfull prose will be a surprise, then.
Boy, you mean that Yoko is a Kilaak, intent on conquering the earth? They hid under Mt Fuji.
Kilaaks: http://wikizilla.org/wiki/Kilaaks
As for “…by the senile members of the ’80s hottie girl band, Heart.” Well, there are so many ways to “unpack” that phrase that I goggle at your ability to inject so much snark into such a small utterance. Kudos!
Thankyou.
> Stark Trek
I prefer Lannister Trek.
“Starkers Trek.”
Otherwise known as “The Naked Prey,” from 1966, starring Cornell Wilde. A good film, well worth watching.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Prey
Italy #1 for Health according to WEF. America #34. Three slots BELOW Cuba. Castro laughing in his grave. Seriously why are Cubans (not the ones in Miami) marginally healthier than Americans?
Caloric restrictions? No American junk food?
Surely not free medical care?
By this logic North Koreans should be damn near immortal.
Monsanto-free. IIRC cuban bees for example have remained healthy during the bee crisis in other countries.
Comments on the Nation article on single payer run the gamut – knee-jerk cheers and jeers as well as quite thoughtful responses pro and con.
This is good on why the missing health-care policy specifics are lagging behind the politics:
https://newrepublic.com/article/144180/single-payer-wonks
As the article points out, these private companies are also largely (Germany) or fully not-for-profit. No country that has successfully implemented universal healthcare, whether a public health system, public insurance, or private insurance, has for-profit insurance as a basis.
Now that there’s bipartisan-y talk of pouring more money into the current system, the Aetna CEO is demanding stable markets as a condition for participation. During the recent Republican push to repeal and demolish, he was open to what he called “a debate about what a “single-payer” healthcare system in the United States would look like, but said he does not think the federal government should run it.” (Link)
> stable markets
And here I thought being an entrepreneur was all about heroic risk-taking and all that. Silly me.
I thought he was talking about the health of his horses. He probably was. Either way, it was horses**t.
Non Profit corp. is only an accounting gimmick to keep from paying taxes on income. It does not mean that they won’t gouge you like the rest of the health “uncare” corps. Look at Kaiser, a non profit that had record earnings last year and lobbied against Colorado Health Care for all. The only non profit that really counts is the one that’s run by the Federal Government,
Exactly. And they ensure universal coverage by having Obamacare subsidies on steroids, premiums for the same policy are paid for the unemployed, the insurer can’t cancel or deny a policy, the individual mandate is harsher, as well as the govt standing on their throats for cost control.
The Dems didn’t think the insurance, hospital and pharma industry would accept these conditions in 2008. Will they have the courage and unity to impose them in future? Nah.
Decapitate the vested interests and go straight to single payer.
Howard Dean sez, “If we’re gonna have a single-payer or Medicare for all or whatever we’re gonna have in health care… then we all have to pull together.”
Can someone please explain to me how we get Medicare for All by electing people who don’t support it?
I can’t imagine why anyone is still listening to this idiot. But then again, he’s just one of a large number of idiots who still pontificate on the MSM, which, apparently has no memory when it comes to idiots who screw things up royally (hey, John Bolton!). Just collect some credentials, and you’re good to go.
As always, any of us over-idealistic Dems are expected to hold our noses and vote for the lesser of two evils, usually the electoral equivalent of regurgitated thin gruel. How dare us expect any more than what the DNC decides to give us? I can feel the winning already!
Jim Plunkett’s painful journey: ‘My life sucks’ The Mercury News
I anxiously await the “billion dollar lawsuit” waiting to be filed by the poor dumb schmucks who got battered bodies and live in chronic pain from working 12 hour shifts at the dollar store for $7.35 an hour,
At least Plunkett has health insurance and a legal prescription for that opiate he takes everyday.
Agreed. And its not just dollar stores. Where I work – with a union contract – two coworkers in their 50s had to hang it up this year. Their bodies couldn’t take the physical labor any more. They put a good face on it when leaving. But six months on they’re both struggling with depression.
Meanwhile they just finished training the first replacement who will start work for about 35 percent less than the person they’re replacing. She’s very dubious about the job. The other position remains open. Wonder why?
While I’m sad for Jim Plunkett my first thought when this story came out the other day was I wonder what he’d choose if he had it to do over.
I wonder about the young men, or children, who were conned by the combination of parent push, coaching sweet talk, and community pressure, into playing football as a blood sport at the elementary and high school level (I’m thinking of Texas and Florida in particular). The brain and other bodily damage it may have caused would have been 1)unreported; 2) typical childish whining; 3)collateral damage in the local bluster of “my town is better than your town.”
After a little brain damage, the kids would be ready for recruitment into the military where, if not dead, would be suitably recompensed for their military service–free opiates, free flophouse care, and free food at the soup kitchen.
No doubt transitioning to single payer would be a royal crapton of work, but that Nation article brought up a point too often overlooked in analysis of US gov’t: back when the gov’t could do stuff, bills were short, and that’s how it must be if a governmental system with separate Executive and Legislative branches is going to function effectively.
People who study organizational dynamics have long known that excessive proceduralization of complex and often unpredictable tasks usually winds up exacerbating the problems it seeks to solve. Holland is right that there will be a bazillion details and challenges, but IMNSHO, dead wrong that the solution is legislation that is heavy on the details. What he’s calling for is roughly equivalent to Congress legislating the next five years’ battle plans to a General in the field.
Here’s my alternative: amend the constitution to guarantee unfettered access to high quality healthcare as a fundamental right. That’s it. Then lets sweat the details without needing to run to Congress and wait a year every time it turns out there’s a better way to do stuff.
Why not give every citizen the same healthcare that politicians get when they are elected, under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program: Treat each citizen as an employee of the Federal government.
Members of Congress and senior staff who buy insurance on an ACA exchange and federal employees who participate the FEHB all purchase private for-profit insurance. I believe the employer (taxpayer) subsidy is about 70% of the premium.
No universal healthcare system in the world has been designed using for-profit insurance as a basis.
+100
Will a 70%-subsidy-for-all work for the rest of the us not in our (elect people more like us voters) congress?
I could be looking at paying about $150 a month, instead of $500 per on my premium.
Under current law only 85% (PDF) of that 70% (and of your 30%) would “work for you.”
This is why other countries don’t choose private for-profit insurance as a basis for a universal healthcare system.
Does it work for members of congress and their senior staff?
If not, that would be impetus for change, for all of us.
Actuarial value of gold (mandatory to receive employer contribution) SHOP exchange plans for Congress and senior staff 80% (PDF)
Actuarial value of FEHB plans “meets or exceeds” ACA silver 70% (PDF)
By comparison the actuarial value of HR 676 would be 100% and the MLR (based on Canadian and original US Medicare) about 2 or 3%.
Why don’t they want 100%, for themselves, and why are they willing to live with just 70% or 80%?
Simple. They get to keep millions from lobbyists and that far exceeds any extra subsidy for health insurance during their lifetime.
Could easily have made themselves look good with 0% subsidy, with those millions.
As Medicare is not premium free, perhaps 90% subsidy for all of us will work just as good, or better.
If not 100% subsidy for all. That’s better than Medicare-For-All (you still have to pay a monthly premium).
No premium in HR 676 Expanded and Improved Medicare for All
Should read, If not, then, 100% subsidy for all.
No premium, several way.
The current congressional plan, with 70% subsidy, can be offered to all of us, with 100% subsidy.
That’s one way, supplemented with cost control.
Medicare for all, with zero premium is another, again, with supplemental laws to contain drug and provider costs.
Back to JEHR’s comment – yes, why not?
Just make it 100% subsidy. Call it ‘Enhanced Congressional Plan.’
It’s about time all of us benefit as much (or more) as our politicians.
Sorry but elected Federal politicians DO NOT get coverage under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. They can use DC SHOP or any other exchange they want, just not FEHB until they retire…..
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43194.pdf
and they are allowed to make use of military hospitals and the Office of the Attending Physician, things other Federal, non-military employees are not allowed to do……….
Original Medicare was implemented one year after it became law. It’s an inspiring story of the country pulling together to make something happen.
https://www.ssa.gov/history/ssa/lbjmedicare3.html
http://www.singlepayernewyork.org/2016/02/17/medicares-history-belies-claim-that-medicare-for-all-would-disrupt-care/
I don’t have a link, but I’ve read about implementation discussions and planning done before that. Let’s say for the sake of argument that it was fairly substantial, and that nothing like that has occurred for a potential Medicare for All plan.
However, HR 676 is 30 pages. The administrative infrastructure for a national public insurance program already exists. Healthcare providers already know how to interact with the system. HR 676 sets “the current prevailing fees or reimbursement [as] the basis for the fee negotiation for all professional services” – whether that’s the right path longer-term, it would be a strong first start for the potentially huge task of negotiating reimbursement rates.
That Jacobin piece was really interesting. They have identified the problem and have concrete ideas to fix it.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/05/democrats-trump-russia-blowback-241346
Per the above, even members of the dem consultant class are getting squeamish about all the russia-hype.
Of course…there was that time a president really did act like a traitor…
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/06/nixon-vietnam-candidate-conspired-with-foreign-power-win-election-215461
Also, consortiumnews has stuff about how reagan got the ayatollahs in iran to hold the hostages until inaugeration day.
Re Nixon negotiating with foreign powers to win the election. Didn’t Ronald Reagan negotiate with Iran NOT to release the US Embassy hostages until after Carter was no longer President to make Reagan look better? Tough luck for the hostages having to wait longer to be freed though.
When I was a kid we had a word to describe the behaviour of what Nixon and Reagan did. We called it treason. Accusations like that back then though would have been called ‘fake news’. We didn’t have Google then but what newspapers would do was to bury such stories on the back pages or not run the story at all. Of course the trouble was there were more investigative reporters ‘back in the day’ who actually, you know, investigated stuff and who got results. Just ask Nixon.
“Didn’t Ronald Reagan negotiate with Iran NOT to release the US Embassy hostages until after Carter was no longer President to make Reagan look better? ”
No he didn’t.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/17/marco-rubio/rubio-wrongly-credits-reagan-1981-release-hostages/
Yup, whatever Politifact says is the truth – right?
Yes, getting Medicare up and running for those 65 and older was a great achievement. But I’ve wondered if partly it went so smoothly is because, among other things, the entire population did not sign up all at once. Those over 65 and then those turning 65 were able to sign up.
I don’t know how Medicaid was rolled out.
Also, I don’t know for sure how the payments were managed. Was the work done by existing insurance companies? Or was CMS there from the git go?
I still think kind thoughts about all those who did the prep work to get Medicare passed. FDR felt he had to back off senior health coverage to ensure passage of Social Security. Truman tried and failed. JFK made Medicare a goal, but was assassinated. LBJ, bless his manipulative skills, got it done. But pols and citizens had been working toward this since the late 19th Century. Can’t forget Teddy Roosevelt’s working the political soil. Deep appreciation to all.
Still the best birthday present EVAH, both SocSec and Medicare.
I thought Bush the Elder did the negotiating for St. Ronnie….
Errr, yes he did.
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/15/world/new-reports-say-1980-reagan-campaign-tried-to-delay-hostage-release.html
Criticising Reagan seems to be a bit of a hot button in the US but the truth is that his policies ended up gutting America for decades to come. He mellowed in his second term but by then the long term damage had been done.
Wow, they danced around the allegations that the Reagan administration met with representatives from Iran in Madrid prior to the election asking them to delay the release until after the election. It avoids discussing the arms for hostage deal, better known as Iran-contra. Yeah, that whole article was just lying by omission. You should check out Robert Parry’s website. He did a whole breakdown of the October surprise right through Iran Contra.
Eager Beavers: Great Summer read: Three Against the Wilderness, by Eric Collier. Homesteading in central BC , with beavers as allies. The beavers have helped bring water back in lots of spots in the arid west.
RE:Slate unionization article
Wouldn’t call Slate liberal.. neoliberal or limosine liberal but not exactly the bastion of leftist thinkers. Again a corporation shows it’s true colors when people try to unionize. My fav comment from the article:
To be exposed to anyone poor actually.. unless they are cleaning the house or landscaping.
On Baidu (www.baidu.com), if you type in “World Socialist Website” you get the World Socialist Website on the first hit. The site doesn’t come up on a search for “Trotsky” ten pages in.
Nor 15, if it comes to that. Good thought, Baidu.
http://www.sohu.com is another mainland Chinese search engine. Interesting that Trotsky was searchable at all in a PRC based engine, Mao and the Party being very strictly nationalist (pro-Stalinist), even before communist.
Finally on PRC search engines, In the past both Baidu and Sohu put/attempted to put browser add-ins that would inject adverts and block accessing certain sites. I think they have cleaned up their act, but users, particularly those not literate in Chinese, should be careful about what they click on from either site.
Separately, on Class Warfare: Co-opting the Union/Why Nissan Mississippi rejected UAW
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/03/holi-a03.html
With the corruption scandal threatening to ensnare wider layers of the UAW bureaucracy, union president Dennis Williams is trying to contain the growing anger of autoworkers.
RE: Google blocked every one of the WSWS’s 45 top search terms
I don’t know why the WSWS should show up on the first page of a Google search for a general term like “Trotsky.” I’m similarly puzzled that “top search terms” for a website don’t contain the word “website.” But if the WSWS says those are…or used to be…it’s top search terms I guess we just have to take their word for it. Like we must on most of the other assertions they make.
I did try searching for “socialist websites.” WSWS at the top of the first page. Including a link to its Twitter feed.
“Socialist healthcare”? Page two.
“Trotskyist websites”? Page two.
“Trotsky perspective”? Page one.
“Grenfell fire socialist response”? Bottom of page one.
“Democrat healthcare compromise”? #4 on page one.
“Amazon chinese government censors internet”? Number one on page one. Beating out the Grey Lady.
I was disappointed with a search for ICFI, which returned nothing but links to a company named ICF International. “Socialist ICFI” put the WSWS near the top of page one. Like wise disappointed with the “Trotskyist website” search. Page three. After an IMDB link!
It should be obvious that if one is searching Google, or any search engine, for socialist perspective or websites, the best thing to do is to be specific and include the word “socialist” in the search term. But be sure to use a private browsing option if it’s available, though. Keep that discoverable history nice and tidy. Just sayin’.
Page 2 = not existing. From the EU Competition Minsiter:
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-17-1785_en.htm
“In the near future, the U.S. electric grid will be able to digitally manage the vast Northwest hydroelectric network in a way unimaginable just a few years ago. With consent from customers, it will be able to adjust the heaters and air conditioners of millions of homes and buildings, or tap into the batteries of electric cars or other smart appliances.
Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/environment/article165452982.html#storylink=cpy”
We are one thru the Internet.
“We are one thru the Internet.”
Techno-fascism defined- We are not you, we have jets, and lesser people who bathe in and propagate our bullshit.
RE: Google blocked every one of the WSWS’s 45 top search terms.
Naturally, what would anybody expect from slimy ***** GIGGLE! Expecting truth from them is just telling lies to oneself.
Please don’t forget that they are in the ad business; lies and deception are normal. Turn on any TV for verification!
“The thrifty among us may try to clean a sponge that starts to stink, but it’s probably time to let it go.”
What degenerate things are people doing with their sponges? All mine disintegrate long before they are uncleanable stink generators. They get thoroughly rinsed after each use, the water squeezed out of them, and left on an open rack to air dry. I’ve never had a problem with stinky sponges, and they last around 6 months.
You can microwave them wet, (20 seconds abouts) and it seems to help the smell. I prefer to live thrifty.
In fact, I no longer use dish soap… watch their commercials and branding to see why… “Dove is what wild life rescuers choose to clean oil spills.” The moment of truth for me on the matter came when they put a duckling on their bottle, and promised to donate money per sale (only to a set amount…) to the ‘environment’
The chemistry says that dish soap (which I’ll use on a greasy table in a pinch) is designed to break down fats… … Fat is the lining of the cell membrane of any organism. It’s a convenience but a poison.
I use more water to avoid the need for soap, which is an imperfect solution, but we are imperfect beings.
*edit* the lie is in the headline
I once microwaved a dish sponge for 1.3 minutes, about one minute too long ! It resulted in a very toasty, carbonized smoke generator …
Learned my lesson ..
wet it first and it will go for two.
Guess I wrung it out too dry !! Oh well. The smoke alarms had a bast though …
Sigh…. ‘had a bLAst !
Dawn soap.
+1
“What degenerate things are people doing with their sponges?”
We’ll never tell you if you ask us like that! Try being more sly and conversational: “Say everyone, I heard about this guy who married a sponge! How crazy is that?”
Then wait for the madness to stop by. Salud!
Just brushing up on my history today. Not taking things too seriously, but an old thought came back and here it is.
The Clintons fought for the British in the Independence War back in 1776, and in fact, so did the Gates Parkers and Harrises.
Not too clear on the Harrises honestly. Even Morgan made his profit privateering in the Carribeans.
Don’t (get caught) be(ing) evil…alphabyte gargoyle is having fun with some manly-festo burped out by some “stud” who imagines paying for a different dominatrix from backpage every weekend makes him an expert on women…
This will end well with the current guvmynt investigation on pay disparity at the aplhabyte city temple of public opinionating…
Motherbee has the story but gizmo has the document…
His mom probably makes a mean grilled cheese and has left his basement lair exactly as it was the day he went off to college…except she resumed using it for her monthly rendezvous with the meter reader…
Classism doesn’t suit you.
Sexual politics is local politics.
We open with a takedown of the elites, and devolve into a slam to the illiterates who outnumber us (and no wonder, per Idiocracy by Mike Judge)
What’s the real grudge?
Anger is only useful to the extent it makes you change yourself. Other’s people’s anger is of no use to others.
To be fair, maybe I missed that your post is designed for a feminist bent.
No however, but I am not focused on women in the workplace as an issue. I prefer to see the workplace as the issue.
Nice to see a missed point promptly acknowledged, but although I may be missing something in turn, I don’t get the “classism” part either. If you mean Alex was disparaging the Gurgle manifesto writer as some sort of lowly prole, that’s the first time I heard those people described that way. Or if “classism”: means it’s bad manners to vent against the class who own the greater part of our lives, I respectfully disagree. That’s why the “-ism” doesn’t really fit as a suffix on “class”: because class isn’t some innate personal characteristic to be “respected” because the afflicted can’t help it. Class hatred is hatred of a social structure, not of individual “difference”, and as such it does, or at least can, contribute to changing that structure, which is indeed more important than “changing yourself”, even if the latter might happen in the process.
Anyway, the stereotype of Disrupter types as socially dyspraxic basement-dwellers is inaccurate (no, I don’t know any Gurglers, but you can’t escape Start-up zealots in certain parts of London, and they are hypersocial to a (usually — still!) man) and above all unfair to the socially dyspraxic, who more often than not are more acutely aware of / sensitive to other people than almost anyone else.
> Class hatred is hatred of a social structure, not of individual “difference”
I’m not so sure about that. Don’t class markers count for something?
So, we can start calling Chelsea C “Little Mrs. Marker,” can we?
The Clintons do seem a lot like Damon Runyon characters.
With “class markers” you may mean Weber’s “status groups”.
The class and status group ideas come together in an interesting way in Wolfgang Streek’s work. I believe you had his recent essay “Trump and the Trumpists” up recently (if not: http://inference-review.com/article/trump-and-the-trumpists); really interesting and to the point is the subsequent exchange betweem him and Christopher Prendergast: http://inference-review.com/article/on-class-nationalism-and-labor)
To further clarify…we live in a hilarious world where everyone has this thought they understand the opposite gender since they’ve read books and watched dr shrill and ocrah…yet most people can count on their fingers the number of actual partners of carnal experiences they have actually had…paying for the company of someone does not count as dating…
The writer of the manly-festo is someone who would be escorted out the door if some female family member brought the misanthrope home…
And the reference to gargoyle is the company formerly known as googles paisan…
Nonsense one might have expected to be heard at some junior high school cafeteria burped out by presumably adult individuals about “how women are”…rather amusingly pathetic…and anyone espousing ideas about women based on some imagined place infused by their upbringing…needs to find some monastery to enrapture themselves…
That this “genius” was not summarily dismissed is sad…
The world seems lost in its illusions and memes…
Sex is mercantilized, in my view.
I speak from my anger, something I try and recongize.
Partner pairing is a marketplace, and as a child of divorce in the third generation, I can speak to the bitterness and absurdity of marriage. I wish I could afford to make that mistake.
—
I know some employed google-ites, and it is an employment suitable for the pais-cognoscenti among us. Again to mercantilism, life is a marketplace, and philosophically, a man (or woman’s) value is the worth accorded them in dollars… Religion aside. I am both a sceptic and a believer. I am also angry and a good question is why.
I cherish my cheese sandwiches. I don’t mind work in the least, and cherish it too. The marketplace leaves me apathetic though. The posts here have highlighted the ephasis on quiting as the new hall-mark of the American (classist) worker. I say it is also the mark of the new breed of family. Yes I am bitter, but I try to aim high.
Oprah is a great ‘example’ A propogator of false news.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/30/fashion/thursdaystyles/are-these-parties-for-real.html
No, NYT. They aren’t but the hysteria is an industry. Amber alerts and terrorism. A classical reference is that Ares, the Roman war-god, had the hounds phobos and demos. Meaning fear and terror.
The family construct is artificial, if effective. Clearly I am over my head, dealing (perhaps hyper-sensitively) with a longing for the absurd moralism and duty and the eminently sensical casting aside of these heirarchies.
The term agoraphobia I’ve come to understand not as a fear of open spaces, but in the original Greek concept. A fear of the marketplace. Not to fear the marketplace and it’s mercenary status is insanity.
Gender politics is not a construct of the government as you point out, but an independent consequence of our animal opinions… and a hoped-for shelter from them.
Duty. The metamorphasis is a tale of a moral man who finds himself useless in his family economy. Women face a different trial.
A songster (Stone Temple Pilots) once mused what is real and what’s for sale.
To meme- (and abscond) Why not both?
> Ares, the Roman war-god, had the hounds phobos and demos. Meaning fear and terror.
+100
> The term agoraphobia I’ve come to understand not as a fear of open spaces, but in the original Greek concept. A fear of the marketplace
There’s a whole post there.
Don’t tell anyone but if I don’t have my grilled cheese at the store losing the donut name at least once a month…
Its not on the menu on the wall…but it is in their computer…
Howard Dean has a record of failure, so why should anyone care what he says?
Dean took one for the (dem) team when he was destroyed by the media for his “Dean Scream”… which means winning without permission.
Much like Bernie. He then horse-traded himself, not that I think he got anything for it but personal financing and the mild prestige of not being dismissed from ‘public life.’
He got votes, Kerry be damned (another loser… from the State Department.)
We would do well to listen.
Is it snark I hear, meaning we’re being professionaly trolled in the comments, or are you a purist?
Purism isn’t an offense on it’s own, but it is a limitation. If not Dean, then who? I don’t trust Warren either.
Because his Fifty State strategy was working until the DNC dismantled it.
Here’s something from 2004 about Deans travails: https://www.thenation.com/article/deans-fifty-state-strategy/
More recently, although I know that it’s The Washington Times, still worth reading:http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/23/dnc-chair-hopefuls-aim-to-apply-howard-deans-50-st/
And I give him full credit for that. I also have bothered to watch what he has done since he was summarily dismissed from the DNC for Tim Kaine. Which is why I can state with no reluctance whatsoever that “That was then, this is now.” Now Dean is a fully owned subsidiary of the Clinton Zombies all of which need to be killed with fire.
Look Dean was always far more conservative in the traditional sense than most liberals realized. Of course since the center has moved so much off axis, Nixon would be pretty liberal lefty in today’s climate. But since he was replaced he has toed the Obama/Clinton party line even in areas where he was previously closer to the traditional Democratic policy stance than they were. He figured out that to be successful in that cesspool, to the point of being bullet proof you had to be a ‘good soldier’. In the 2016 election season, he stood on the front lines and carried a whole lot of water for Wasserman Schultz and Clinton. And that has continued even after they crashed and burned. He deserves the same respect and consideration for his views as DWS, Kaine, Clinton, Pelosi and/or Obama. If you don’t give them the benefit of the doubt, don’t bother giving it to Dean.
Feel free to check out everything Dean has said in the last year if you think I’m being unfair.
Re Dean:
> That was then, this is now
Indeed.
“Lo how the mighty have fallen” is it?
Then, are the Heirs of Bernie the ‘new’ Deanites? To suffer the same fate? Heaven forfend!
I would give Dean more credit for his past ‘positive’ actions than any of the other “usual suspects” you name. That he has folded into Clive Barkers’, sorry, The Clintons’ “Dimension of Pain” is a real disappointment.
I can imagine an organizational chart of the various factions and cliques in the Democrat Party, looking something like a ‘Family Tree’ in an infernal genealogy tome, with Dean as one of those branches that suddenly veers off to the left and ends.
Bizarre life forms may be at risk:
Sometimes, mere observing changes the observed.
That is, sending a scientific submersible to a vent might put life forms there at risk.
Mining for research gold should be monitored just like mining for physical gold.
Who is to say what is bizarre and what is not? We grapple with the concept of “The Wheel of Life.” The savants from Magonia wrestle with the meta concept of “The Sphere of Being.” What do the Zeta Reticulans struggle with, “The Tesseract of the Tao Squared?”
I sit and try to grok the bees in their endless circling.
If the character Spock from Star Trek were a Bodhidharma, wouldn’t he say; “Live long and suffer?”
Bizarre for an anthropocentric chauvinist, perhaps.
Are the bees drawing circles or zeroes? More anthropo-projecting?
Wild dog hunting rabbits:
“No rabbit….no dinner…zero.”
“Yes, rabbit…dinner…not-zero.”
It appears to me, all animals experience binarily…they experience zero, and they experience not-zero…or hungry vs. not-hungry, thirsty vs. not-thirsty…not just bees
“Are the bees drawing circle or zeroes?”
‘Spirals’
Perhaps hinting at the yin-yang tao symbol?
Perhaps … but they’re being preaty tight-lipped .. er .. ‘probosced’ ! ‘;]
As long as we’re strolling along the Wheel of Life, we’re chauvinists. When we step off of the Path, we ascend.
When the dog catches the rabbit, he, or she, attains “Onehood.” When caught, the rabbit experiences death, the “Zero State.” The two cancel each other out. Harmony is restored to the phenomenal world.
We are squarely within the realm of the animals. It’s when we aspire to something ‘more’ that we approach the Big Empty Sphere. When bees fly, they enter the three dimensional world more fully than we earthbound clods. Those circles and spirals are part of larger ‘spheres’ than we can know. Guess, we can.
“See how the minnows are happy, swimming in the river, and how the butterflies are content, flitting about geometrically.”
More Boeing p0rn:
Boeing-Spirit pricing deadlock broken by CEOs who were former GE teammates [Seattle Times]
So, a large part of Boeing was split off because financial engineering.
Then, due to the 787 overruns, Being tries to offload some of the losses
in order to avoid
realityan earnings write down.If the former subsidiary is willing to go along, it will lead to “even closer tie between the companies”, which used to be one and the same.
Is this a great country or what?
Three dimensional stress cracking, first identified on welded Liberty Ships in WW II. All it needs is a small crack, and then under stress the crack propagates at over the speed of sound, 1,100 ft/sec.
Beaching the tanker, or pulling it off could easily has caused a crack, Tankers are effectively beams, and must be loaded with care, balancing out the load in the compartments, so as not to over stress (bend) the ship.
Detecting a crack would require an expensive set of X-Ray photographs.
Coincidence is not correlation.
I have an image of the D party being seen by people as that dirty, stinking sponge.
Love the metaphor……seeing an image of a dirty SpongeBob SquarePants with a blue picket sign saying “Have you seen the other guys?”…
Cleaning a dirty sponge is easy. Just expose it to sunlight and let it dry out, then beat off the dirt.
Time is of the essence.
Tardiness might floor the sponge dependent person.
Boil it for 5 minutes or so. That should kill off a fair bit.
Yeah … but unlike bacteria, the Demcrats refuse to ‘evolve’ !
Those were my thoughts exactly!
FWIW
Always looking for a better search engine so I searched Unbubble for the following “poverty and judaism in the talmudic period” a subject I’m interested in from a Bible study perspective.
I got these first results:
– Jewerys plan to blackball Russia, Real Jew News
– 921 quotes by and about Jews, Jewwatch
Seems a little odd.
Try Google Scholar:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=poverty+and+judaism+in+the+talmudic+period&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C3
The Washington Monthly article captures something like the state of play in California.
The default position of the California dems is to agree with single payer in principle, but to question how to pay for it — Governor Brown, Senator Harris, and Assembly Speaker Rendon (when he sent a single-payer bill back to committee for exactly that reason) have all done it. They need to buy the time to figure out how to keep the left from walking out or running their own candidates; perhaps they may try to convince the large-donors that single payer will be required to keep social peace and other goodies coming. The left wing of the party has historically been stronger than in other states; the 1934 “Contest Of The Century” when socialist Democratic gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair’s run was sabotaged by the centrists has not been forgotten, nor has the political damage to the party been forgotten.
Harris has also said that health care is a right of every individual. I can’t remember Obama ever having said that. There aren’t many ways that universal health care can be delivered — Harris has effectively written out a political check and asked us to cash it, unless she can make us forget it. Everybody is waiting for the dem leaders in California to take some kind of action on single payer, and Harris’s political future may depend on it.
Will California single payer be hitched to Calexit, for, as an independent monetary sovereign, there is more room to maneuver?
Hopefully, the new nation will be neutral like Switzerland, and ban all arms production and research.
And public campaign financing, so there is no foreign money interference, from China, the UK, the US, the Saudis or anyone else.
Calexit seems about as likely as Ecotopia. But I live in a thinly-populated rural area — nobody talks about it here, and Calexit seems more like an elite political hobby group than serious initiative — but it is hard to tell from out here.
@ Cat Burglar
I live in Los Angeles. It seems the same here. If I do run into anyone talking about it, I inwardly roll my eyes and move away.
I think it is just talk. Gavin Newsome had a recent interview where he said he is in favor of single payer, but since there is no clear way to pay for it (in his opinion) then the state should figure out how to provide universal insurance. It is a logically inconsistent position because there is also no clear way to pay for universal insurance. The California dems talk big. But it is just another example of public versus private positions — no different than the republicans and Obamacare. California dems passed single payer legislation multiple times for Governor Arnold to veto, and now will not pass anything with a supermajority and dem governor.
True enough! It is talk. And even Obama did say once — I remember now! — that he supported it, and look what we got.
Still, after the fractious state Democratic convention, some of the apparatchiki said they were afraid the Sanders wing would just refuse to vote for single-payer opponents. So what we get from them is support “in principle” — but we should recognize that is because the power of the single-payer movement has the leadership scared. At least in California (I haven’t seen it in Oregon or Washington) the Overton Window shifted just a little.
As you point out, with a dem supermajority and governor, they have nowhere to hide except “gosh, how do we figure this out?” When I write them I tell them, in politer terms, “It’s what we pay you for, dumbo — do the heavy lifting like the rest of do at work! Or maybe you’d like a different job?”
My guess is they will try to back off and see if we forget about single-payer, or try a distraction. We need to keep the clamps on and press the advantage: remind them at every turn you want single-payer, or else.
The “how to pay for it” thing is a strawman. The American Conservative article a while back made this point. It would actually save an enormous amount of money. The (explicit or implicit) argument that it will cost more only makes sense if you completely ignore individual (i.e., non-government) expenditures on healthcare. Accountants who try to make costs vanish by shuffling them around like this get thrown in jail. We should hold politicians to the same standard.
I would suggest that single payer advocates:
– propose it in revenue neutral form via an across the board tax increase
– do some work to quantify the average cost of healthcare to individuals in the current system, both in actual spending and negative consequences e.g. from skipping doctor visits
– subtract the tax increase required from that number, then describe the leftover amount (which should be substantial) as a net financial benefit to taxpayers.
This would immediately torpedo the “how to pay for it” argument and could also be spun to attract fiscal conservatives, as it would have the same net effect as tax cuts (i.e., putting more money back in people’s pockets).
If you believe health care is a human right, you cannot support a market based solution. If you believe in market based solutions, you do not truly believe health care is a human right.
As I remind my congress critter Annie Kuster whenever she yaps about bipartisan solutions.
Lao Tzu…further said, ‘The soft and weak can overcome the hard
Water is yielding, soft, goes to low places, and yet is also able to carve mountains over time.
Wind is soft but blows over the strongest tree.
How, then, do we response to money that is soft?
By being as soft or softer…as one wave after another, repeated billions and trillions of times, water pounds that soft, gentle sandy beach.
No one savior-wave or savior-tsunami.
Can I ask a question of forum members? What are some of the ways clever C suite types can use procurement for self gain?
Steering procurement (orders) to friends and family.
It helps to have the whole buying department in on the scam, and let them have a piece of the take.
1. Buy a product for the company from a company in which they hold stock. Most effective when the purchase is a big one. (I’ve seen this in software when inferior components were purchased just because the guy doing the purchasing held stock in the component company)
2. Buy a product that gives them a kickback.
3. Borrow money to repurchase company stock, raising the price, which in turn raises their stock-price-based compensation.
This isn’t really a forum, in the sense that we don’t have a topical, tree-like structure. We also distinguish between posts and comments, since this is a blog. Posters and commenters are not the same.
Apologies!
I guess I was inspired by the bezzle to ask.
Ironic, that AC makes the planet hotter.
Should we and those before us, say in the last 100 years, have just ‘toughed it out?’
Do we have a case of penny-wise, pound-foolish?
Yes generally . AC makes people need it and they become useless in its absence. AS I got older I succumbed to have one where I sleep for 2 months out of the year.
There are places in the US where people should never have moved to in the first place , without AC would people retire to Phoenix or Florida? The 2 armpits of america , Florida at least has drinking water I guess. . A good long power outage and Arizona will be a graveyard
I don’t know what it’s like these days but when the air conditioned A train pulled into Union Station in July pumping more heat into a torrid tunnel crammed with people there was little doubt that AC was both heating and cooling.
I recall a day so hot that a large, sweaty rat took a stroll down a busy platform, damp fur spiked, parting the crowd, not taking sh#t from anyone and none offered.
Must have been the L train, wrong side of town for the A.
Over near Augusta, ME for the weekend. This morning it was around 58 degrees when I got up. Took my dogs out for an early morning walk and about half of the houses I walked past had the AC humming. With the windows open, I had to pull a blanket on during the night.
Re “Google blocked every one of the WSWS’s 45 top search terms WSWS (MT).”
No, Google is not censoring search results
He says it’s happening because websites don’t have their sh** together. To read his more technical explanation: https://polizeros.com/2017/08/03/no-google-is-not-censoring-search-results/
I’d hardly regard that article as technical; if it were, there would be some discussion of what the changing algos were, and how the changes affected traffic.
In any case, as the sample search results show, Google is an extreme outlier with regard to WSWS. I find it hard to believe there’s any other explanation than something internal to Google. Whether that’s censorship in the form of a blacklist, or a happy accident from algorithmic (or algorithmic parameter) change is impossible to know, since Google is completely opaque. (Although at this point we note the political involvement of Eric Schmidt.)
Here’s what passes for technical analysis from this guy. Pasting Google’s webmaster guidelines (I’ve numbered them):
In my view, WSWS is clearly following Webmaster guidelines [1], [2], and [4] (and especially four). The only remaining question is [3].
Is WSWS, then, employing “tricks” “to improve search engine rankings”?
First, that seems unlikely to me, if only because the WSWS site is about as 90s-style and unclickbait-y as it’s possible for a website to be.
Second, all search engines have the incentive to avoid being gamed, so blaming WSWS’s deranking on “tricks” can’t give an account of the different results between Google and the other search engines. (No hits in ten pages. Really?)
Third, I think the differential search results, as I have said, create a prima facie case that Google is doing something unique. But the only webmaster rule that WSWS can be violating is [3], “tricks.” The onus on Google’s defenders, then, is to show those tricks, and show what WSWS is doing. If anyone has done this, I’d be very glad to see a link, as opposed to this guy’s vague handwaving.
OK, I’ll ask him. It’s more technical than “doesn’t have sh** together,” which is how much I care about this topic, other than passing it along to those that know more than I do.
But also, it doesn’t appear to be an attack on only left wing websites either.
I’m a little skeptical of their analysis. I randomly checked two of their pages (sorry I don’t have time to consult for free,)
This link comes up (search term Trotsky) with more than 100 broken link errors. Google will kill you for that:
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/07/29/goog-j29.html
This article (search term Russian Revolution) is way too short to rank on google, which has started favoring longer articles;
http://www.wsws.org/en/special/1917/lecture03.html
Not saying google hasn’t hurt them somehow, but those are very basic errors. I’d want to have my site properly optimized before I’d blame Google.
Natural News was a completely different case and was actually briefly delisted for some sort of technical violation that Google saw as a very big deal. They did claim censorship, however, and they had been one of two sites singled out for an in-depth treatment as Russian stooges in the PropOrNot report (they actually did have a BS report which it appears just about no one read, including Craig Timberg at the Washington Post, who nevertheless reported on its existence). So people who didn’t know better believed Natural News’ crying wolf.
Kim, it does not appear you read the WSWS article you are criticizing carefully. Alternet lost nearly as much Google search traffic as WSWS did. Popular Resistance has also seen a more than 60% drop in traffic since the algo change. Google specifically said change was to elevate the standing of sites with ‘authoritative content”. That means the MSM. The fact that right wing sites were hurt supports rather than disproves the contention that this change had a significant, if not driving, political motivation.
And you appear unaware of the fact that there has been a crowdsourced effort, led by Eli Pariser, to tackle “fake news” that was INTENDED to inform Google and others:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OPghC4ra6QLhaHhW8QvPJRMKGEXT7KaZtG_7s5-UQrw/edit#heading=h.l4uvrs8m75xh
As described by the Financial Times
That document includes the PropOrNot report as a source document. A site writer who knows Pariser personally tried to get Pariser to remove it and he refused. So the underlying work is all based on guilty by association.
A parallel effort (and I can’t recall key terms to find it in my search engine and I need to run out now) is led by a journalism prof at a third tier school. The way they categorize sites is appalling and they have no backup for how they are listed, which strongly indicates that despite having an appearance of rigor, the methods are arbitrary (as in single people make the decisions in isolation with no controls). For instance, when I looked at it, Intercept was “unknown” and we were “political” which to them = “bad”. IIRC, Consortium News was listed as “conspiracy theory”.
Look, I’m totally sorry I posted the link. I thought I was just posting an alternate point of view about something I know little about – the technicalities of websites getting listed on Google. From a blogger I follow, who does this stuff for a living.
I also know that Google jacks stuff around but the point of the post is that it might not be an attack on lefties only. I apologize!
I thought the link was pretty interesting as an example of google-ish PR claiming the changes were wholly innocuous and reasonable. The NC commentariate seems pretty adept at debunking fake PR “reasoning”, which I think this link was. imo.
adding: posting the link allowed the debunking. very useful. thanks.
Thank you for the antidote du jour. Eles are my favorite of all mammalian species. Have been doing brush paintings (Sumi-E) of them for years. They are incredibly sentient beings.
I posted about this a long time ago. will repeat b/c of how extraordinary it was
Read more at http://www.beliefnet.com/inspiration/home-page-news-and-views/wild-elephants-mourn-death-of-famed-elephant-whisperer.aspx?p=3#ZQggU6U9fMDHrmW7.99
I remember this. I also seem to remember that elephants have incredibly sensitive hearing, so I can’t imagine what being in a city is like for them.
Here’s King Crimson Elephant Talk.
Elephants would like this!
Has some interesting bass and guitar playing too. Guitar can be made to sound like a violin. (I tried it – it’s hard.) Tony Levin is a great bass player.
https://youtu.be/yrdvvGQtKDw
Found another – Starless!
John Wetton on vocals, here.
https://youtu.be/FhKJgqxNDD8
OMG! The Evil Pot Plant Has Stricken Back!
Fake news has floated up to new “highs”.
What a bunch of BS!
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/toxic-waste-from-us-pot-farms-alarms-experts/ar-AApwncq?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartanntp
What are they thinking…what are they smoking?
Gettin’ off really, really good on fertilizer and pesticides, sounds like.
Adjuncts!
And another comments disabled story.
“MSN has temporarily removed commenting on our websites while we explore better ways for you to engage in discussion on the issues you care about”
I am guessing some of those better ways are:
*Stand way over there and mumble to yourself
* Hold this script and begin speaking
* If you want to indulge in some media criticism, it must be wrapped just so. “I know Putin is evil, but…”
Why relying vices backfires:
The question is an old one, as the author details further into the article…Christianity, Mencius, Machiavelli.
People who take a different view than us are not necessarily ‘evil,’ as there is no definitive answer to that question.
Should the banksters be pitchforked? Obama thought not.
Should they be treated well (say, according to the newest medical theories, with the best psychiatric treatments, etc, on, say, Greed Rehab Colony on Mars), instead of imprisonment or being pitchforked?
Thanks for the antidote du jour. What a nice family!
o “Cleaning a Dirty Sponge Only Helps Its Worst Bacteria, Study Says | NYT” — I just pour a bit of bleach into the toilet to produce a roughly 10:1 dilution, and soak my dirty-but-not-yet-falling-apart sponges in that overnight, perhaps once a week. I guarantee you even the hardiest bacteria are killed, and I get a roughly 3-4-fold increase in lifetime of my sponges before I finally toss ’em. Same diluted bleach mixture also works great for mopping floors, cleaning tub & sinks, and for getting stains/smells out of plastic containers one wishes to reuse.
Re: Italians being the healthier, Italy has more doctors per head than most other wealthy countries while the United States has a shortage thanks to the lobbying efforts of the AMA.
See: http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/rewriting-history-on-doctor-shortages-protectionists-bury-the-bodies
One of the problems with the liberal and even leftist narrative on health care is that almost all of the blame is being loaded onto the insurance companies while ignoring other bad actors like the physician’s lobby. How would the AMA react to a major Federal effort to increase the number of doctors in the United States? I doubt they would support it.
I don’t agree with Dean Baker’s policy prescription of bringing in more foreign doctors. We should train more Americans and lower medical school costs instead of poaching doctors from countries than need them, despite Baker’s idea of paying for foreign training to reduce brain drain. But Baker is right to target the physician’s lobby as a major part of the health care problem in the United States.
Or barefoot AI robot doctors.
Sometimes, a patient just needs to be told everything is OK…the psychological aspect of healing; the tests can be read routinely, unless there are problems.
“Hey, I’m robot M2D2, here to check if you and your family have been exercising and eating organic vegetables in the most recent 7 days.”
I like your idea. Let’s first start by first forgiving the existing loans for doctors’ education with the stipulation that they pay a portion of the forgiven loan payment towards universal healthcare.
And by cutting hair for free, for a stipulated period, beauty school loans should be forgiven as well.
What can we do for real estate licence school loans?
Or contractor license school loans.
Contractors are easy: have them build housing for homeless people.
Time to nit-pick: does Dean Baker think America should import doctors from other countries, or is he simply using that as an example of protectionism in action?
I think it is both. Baker often points out that production workers like those in manufacturing have had their wages reduced through trade agreements but that professionals like doctors, dentists and lawyers have been protected from the same forces. Baker calls this “selective protectionism.”
I think Baker is serious about his doctor importation idea because he mentions it often and seems to see it as a way to address the unfairness of subjecting some workers to foreign competition but not others, especially since those being protected are affluent and influential which worsens inequality.
Italians as the healthiest people in the world. As someone of Sicilian descent, my goal in life is to become a flinty old dago. My model is my mother’s godmother, who was originally from near Sulmona (Ovid’s home town) in the Abruzzi. She was sent home from a hospice at the age of 92 because she wasn’t dying within time limits.
First, I recall that Yves Smith posted that article about the epidemiological puzzle in the Molise region (which is next to the Abruzzi). The Mediterranean diet may have unevenly distributed benefits, and it appears that poorer and less educated Molisani don’t benefit as much. At the same time, the Italian health-care system is widely considered second best in the world, after the French. Further, it isn’t hard to turn up figures that the distribution of income in Italy is much less skewed toward the top as it is in the U S of A. At the same time, Italian hourly wages and salaries are low.
So the questions that Yves brought up are still hanging out there: Can we improve U.S. outcomes with better diet, better health care (more options, more access), a better distribution of the national wealth, and greater social guarantees?
There is, though, a genetic and cultural aspect that is extremely strong: Like Japanese-Americans, Italian-Americans don’t benefit from the American diet. I’ve seen it in my own family with some premature deaths. So unless Americans want to live the way Japanese and Italians do, we won’t see certain benefits here.
Anecdotally and observationally, I note:
–Italians are simply more active than Americans. Everyone walks. Americans are always shocked at the staircases in museums in Italy, for instance. The Italian attitude is, Walk up the stairs.
–Italians are more enmeshed in community life and get real benefits from the community. I tend to tease my Italian friends that everyone in Italy is a busybody. After two days, the barista knows how you like your coffee and the cashier wants to know who your friends are and why you can speak (or not speak) Italian.
–Older Italians are engaged (but they don’t “dress young” and get their skin surgically rearranged). There is less of the generational segregation that you see in the U S of A.
–Genetics: How else do you explain towns with lots of people in the nineties? Bologna has a reputation for producing nonagenarians, and it can’t just be the substantial Bolognese cookery.
–Moderation: The Italians are remarkably careful and reserved. You don’t put ice in a drink because it would become too cold, affect your digestion, and kill you. Or it would ruin your digestion, which is a fate worse than death.
–Not as much consumption of alcohol as it seems. I have been at dinners with three or four friends at which one whole bottle of wine was consumed. Also, there is very little consumption of strong drinks–the white alcohols or the brown alcohols. The fad for grappa often elicits crooked smiles among Italians. And the notorious Italian digestivi don’t have much alcohol. They look like something from the weird sisters of Macbeth, but they don’t pack a punch.
–A certain stoicisim: Who else sits in their overcoats in January outside in cafes drinking espresso? Or even better, standing outside in one’s overcoat.
–A strong emphasis on the care of the body: Cleanliness is paramount. You don’t see bed-head and fads for not washing. The crowds in the subway cars in Rome and Turin smell of bath soap. And you don’t see many tattoos, either.
–Fussiness about ingredients. This may be central. Italians just won’t eat crap, even if they increasingly snack and increasingly are exposed to “pop-i-corn” and “marshmallo.”
–A certain hesitance about predictions: I recall an Italian friend mentioning that American doctors and their predictions, You have six months to live, are counterproductive. Who knows how long? And why be so mean to the patient?
I note that the Cypriots and Greeks come in at 18 and 20: Now if they would only stop smoking, they’d move up several slots, because their habits are similiar to Italians. But no one in Europe smokes quite like the Greeks.
All in all, a knotty problem: What would be best in the U S of A? Better health care, with more G.P.s, more nurse practioners, more community health, more vaccination (yes). Less tolerance for using the U.S. food system as a way for companies to experiment on us through the “market” for the newest twist on potato chips or the newest pesticide. More stress on taking vacations. Less consumption of the brown and white liquors. And thinking in the Italian way–less overheating of our houses in the winter and less use of air conditioning in the summer. (Air conditioning is like ice cubes–potentially fatal.)
Opioid consumption and the charts in the 538 article: Can anyone explain why four neighboring states (Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota) and most of Texas are relatively unscathed? As a resident of Illinois, I’d say that the sense of community still exists in those four states in the upper midwest. Access to farms means that produce is good, and maybe all that dairy from northern Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota has benefits.
These four states are heavily Catholic, and they are also the center for Lutherans in the U S of A. There is a long tradition of migration from Upstate New York and New England as well as Scandinavia, Germany (lots of Germans), and Poland. Maybe people here are using beer rather than opioids, hmmm.
I’m relieved that Illinois, for once, isn’t in the apocalyptic category. I just can’t quite explain it.
In Wisconsin, in the hinterlands, it’s “a beer and a bump,” which for my ex-wife’s hardscrabble farmer/disability family, means going to the Five Corners, to one of the four establishments there, for a PBR and a peppermint schnapps. Not that the younger ones were averse to growing a little weed and using it semi-discretely.
See, e.g., “The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/263862.The_Beans_of_Egypt_Maine, and “Tobacco Road,” and “Jerry Springer…”
A place where the last words of more than one rustic bravo were “HOLD MUH BEER AND WATCH THIS!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oXjmllTYAc
Where the sweet dreams of dark nights feature THIS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkuiHyLCrws
:
REAL Flyove: rhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DzsMnCOq_Q
Smell of bath soap.
That’s a 2,000 + year-old tradition, witnessing the Baths of Caracalla, and the heated Roman bath buildings wherever they went.
That sounds like a Rodney Dangerfield joke. “Hey, I get no respect! The hospice kicked me out for being too healthy!”
I was disappointed that the study didn’t seem to discuss anything about community life. For example, it is not considered weird for Italians to live in multigenerational households like it is in the United States. I think multigenerational living is especially good for the elderly because it keeps them from becoming isolated and unhappy but also because it means there are people around to help them stay healthy, for example helping them manage medication and keep up with medical appointments.