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Links 9/8/17

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Conserve elephants. They hold a scientific mirror up to humans The Economist

Watch and learn: The adorable moment a mother teaches her two cubs how to sneak INTO a bird feeder and snack on some of its food Daily Mail

Equifax shares plunge after data breach potentially impacting 143 million Americans MarketWatch. @zerobeta: “Equifax: you missed a cc payment 3 yrs ago. How irresponsible. Good luck buying a home. Also, Equifax: Your SSN’s were hacked. Sh*t happens.”

Cybersecurity Incident & Important Consumer Information Equifax but I called Equifax to find out if I’d been affected but it just hung up on me, three times TechCrunch. Shocker.

Equifax says 3 top execs ‘had no knowledge’ of a massive security breach when they sold nearly $2 million in shares after the hack was discovered Business Insider

Report: Drug company faked cancer patients to sell drug CNN

VW eyes sale of assets accounting for 20 percent of revenues: WSJ Reuters

NZ’s Jetfield Networks & Larkstone Ltd, the US$142.5 mln tipped into the alleged Azerbaijani Laundromat, and their formally warned NZ company agent Equity Trust International Interest.co.nz (Richard Smith). Richard Smith: “All the usual suspects.”

Monsanto fights to sell Arkansas farmers herbicide linked to crop damage Reuters

Can NAFTA Protect Big Oil From Mexico’s Populist Movement? Oilprice.com

Hurricane Irma

Triple Trouble: Cat 5 Irma, Cat 3 Jose, Cat 1 Katia Weather Underground

Hurricane Irma Attacks Tortola Marine Industry News

Hurricane Irma Skirts Puerto Rico, Leaves 1 Million Without Power NBC

Delta flight beats Hurricane Irma Jason Rabinowitz‏. Putting the “storm” on “Tweet Storm.”

Latest Hurricane Irma tracks point straight at Miami but that could still change Miami Herald

Thousands of cruise ship passengers dropped off in Miami ahead of Hurricane Irma LA Times

Hurricane Irma track: Which forecasting model is most accurate? USA Today

Irma could test strength of Florida’s strict building codes AP

See how Miami’s growth since 1992 puts thousands of new homes in Irma’s path CNN

Harvey’s floodwaters give way to festering piles of garbage AP. Go long landfills!

Texas Chemical Plant Sued For Millions, First Responders Charge Gross Negligence International Business Times

They Thought the Monsoons Were Calm. Then Came the Deadly Floods. NYT

North Korea

Pyongyang parties in celebration of nuclear scientists Asian Correspondent

Trump says hopes to avoid use of military action on North Korea Reuters

A Sneak Peak at America’s War Plans for North Korea Foreign Policy

A Murderous History of Korea LRB (SS).

Where the world goes to talk it over Le Monde Diplomatique

China?

Tillerson is working with China and Russia — very, very quietly WaPo

Massive Chinese investment is a boon for Pakistan The Economist

Showdown at Chinese University campus over posters and politics South China Morning Post

The Rohingya: A People Without A Home The Diplomat

Duterte’s Son Denies Meth Smuggling Claims as Case Rivets Manila Bloomberg

Brexit

This is why ‘The Great Repeal Bill’ is such a big threat to British democracy The Independent

Theresa May Accused Of ‘Rigging Parliament’ With New Move To Give Tories Majority On Legislation HuffPo

Britain warned off using Ireland as ‘test case’ for how Brexit will work with the EU The Journal

French kick up stink over American supermarket’s clueless cheese map Telegraph

‘In Everything I Do, I Aim to Strengthen Democracy’ Der Spiegel

Spain’s constitutional court suspends Catalan referendum law Telegraph

Syraqistan

Saudi dispute with Qatar could be solved ‘fairly easily’: Trump PressTV

Saudi Arabia redrafts crown prince’s transformation plan FT

Imperial Collapse Watch

Pay Up, Europe Foreign Affairs

The Slow Poisoning of Our Soldiers, Families on U.S. Bases The American Conservative

New Cold War

Google says it hasn’t found any evidence of Russian ads about US election Reuters

Fake Russian Facebook Accounts Bought $100,000 in Political Ads NYT. $100K.

Facebook Blames Russia To Deflect From Fraudulent Ad-Sales Moon of Alabama

Facebook’s Global Data: A Parallel Intelligence Source Rivaling NSA emptywheel

Here’s How Trump Can Reshape the Fed Bloomberg (Furzy Mouse).

Stanley Fischer’s departure reveals weakness at the Fed FT

Trump Transition

Trump Backs Democrats’ Debt Limit Proposal Against GOP Urging Roll Call

Upbeat Trump raves to Schumer, Pelosi about news coverage of their deal Politico. Trump discovers the Acela class loves them their bipartisanship. And so much for the argument that Trump is a fascist. Unless they’re all fascists, of course.

OnPolitics Today: Is this the art of the deal? USA Today

Ryan’s already-shaky status with GOP colleagues takes another hit McClatchy

Trump’s DACA decision followed months of meetings involving senior Democrats Reuters

Ending DACA could royally screw up the Census. That’s a problem for the GOP. The Week

Trump Wants to Eliminate the Debt Ceiling. He’s Right. New York Magazine

Health Care

Elizabeth Warren Co-Sponsoring Bernie Sanders’s ‘Medicare for All’ Bill Newsweek

Chris Murphy’s stealthy single-payer pitch Politico. No, no, no, Medicare buy-in is yet another attempt to stave off #MedicareForAll.

Market Concentration Health Affairs

Failing or Doing Fine? How Obamacare’s Marketplaces Are Shaping Up for 2018 Bloomberg

Big Brother Is Watching You Watch

Against the Law: Countering Lawful Abuses of Digital Surveillance Bunnie Huang, Edward Snowden, Journal of Open Engineering

Guerilla signage:

Guillotine Watch

New York’s wealthy plagued by self-doubt FT. And so they ought to be.

Class Warfare

With All Eyes on DACA, the Trump Administration Is Quietly Killing Overtime Protections In These Times (MT). Nice to see the Democrats all in on that, though. Oh, wait….

new adventures in ubercapital scatterplot. Terrible label, interesting concept.

What Does an Innocent Man Have to Do to Go Free? Plead Guilty. ProPublica (JM).

Ghost Malls The Outline

Arrival of big ships to reshape flow of goods in US FT

Ship exhaust makes oceanic thunderstorms more intense Phys.org. Ships are growing larger as the shipping industry becomes more concentrated. But shipping emisions are not covered by the Paris Agreement.

Climate Change is Turning Dehydration into a Deadly Epidemic JSTOR Daily (MT).

Massive genetic study shows how humans are evolving Nature

Antidote du jour:

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.